The messy homeless

Seattle Times photo

Seattle in springtime has been beautiful this week, each day warmer until it reached the mid-80s today.  My neighborhood is bursting with flowers -- as is even my own house, the house of a guy who has never planted anything throughout his adult life.  And we are on the edge of the Seattle Arboretum, which has become a paradise of leafy trees and blooming rhododendrons and azaleas.

So it was discouraging a couple of days ago, as I was returning home from a stroll through the Arboretum, to find a decrepit tent erected a half block from my house, with a stolen Safeway grocery cart beside it.  The owner had made no attempt to conceal the tent -- it was perched right beside the arterial leading into the Arboretum, and was sitting right on the property line between the backyard of one of my neighbors and the Arboretum property.

The owner wasn't in residence, but this was clearly not the tent of neighborhood children, the sort of tent we played in as kids.  It was someone's short-term home.  Very short-term, as it was gone today. 

During the last couple of years, around twilight, I've seen a number of men, and a few women, carrying backpacks into the park.  I don't think they were flower lovers or bird watchers.

It's a dilemma.  Seattle is an expensive place to live, and houses are difficult to find, for either purchase or rent, even by people with money.  And we have a lot of people with little or no money roaming the city.  The city needs to provide housing of some sort for those who need housing but can't find it.  And it's struggling to do so.

But there's another problem.  A minority of those without housing don't really want housing.  At least, they don't want to live in a structured environment, the sort of housing the city hopes to provide.  Some are simply individualists who like to live under the stars -- but under the stars in a city, not in the wilderness.  Many are mentally ill.  And many are so drug addled they hardly know what they're doing.

Seattle has been -- and remains -- quite tolerant of homeless encampments.  It shuts them down only when they become unsanitary or overly offensive to others living in the area.  The Seattle Times ran a story a couple of days ago about efforts by volunteers to clean up these camps.  Seattle residents themselves, relative to citizens of many other cities, share this tolerance.  It isn't the camps that drive them nuts, so much, but the mess they generate.  Hence the volunteer efforts to both help the homeless to live in a safe environment, and to calm the nerves of more fastidious neighbors.

Many of the homeless try to keep their areas clean, but are frustrated by the messiness of some of their homeless neighbors.  The Times story reported that many of the homeless have a "hoarding disorder."  Who knew?  I thought I was the only one. 

But the problem is that only a portion of the homeless are capable of acting rationally.  I don't think a rational illegal camper would pitch a tent on a busy, major street, partly on a resident's property.  Many are too confused by mental illness or drug addiction to worry about finding a safe and hidden campsite, let alone living neatly and tidily.  As one such man, whose campsite was being cleaned up by volunteers, admitted -- he was embarrassed.

"This feels really awkward," he said.  "It's my mess.  I'm a drug addict -- I hate to fall back on that -- but I'll just be brutally honest.  I can't get my [expletive] together."

The volunteers are doing wonderful work, both for the community and for the homeless with whom they are working.  But the problem appears intractable.   Even if Seattle built beautiful free housing for those unable to pay rent, that housing would solve only part of the problem.

We have evolved a segment of the population that is unable to function in an organized society.