Late last summer, Terry Bailey (above, center) lost his job driving trucks in Montana. It wasn’t unusual for Bailey to be out of work during the slow winter months, but this time was different. “I’ve worked almost every day of my life until December when I got laid off,” Bailey says. But “when September came around, there was no work. We”—Bailey, his wife, their two teenage sons, and their Labrador puppy Ruger—”were getting kicked out of our house. There was nothing I could do but pack my family up and move to a tent.”
Bailey and his family headed west in their van to Seattle, where they were turned away from shelters—which were all full—and tent cities, which don’t allow children under 18 or dogs. “We ended up staying in a Walmart parking lot for four days,” Bailey says.
In late August, the Baileys moved to Nickelsville, a roving homeless encampment named after Mayor Greg Nickels, which does allwo kids and dogs, but that stay was also short-lived. On September 30, Port of Seattle and Seattle Police Department officers moved in and evicted the encampment, arresting about a dozen people.
As luck would have it, the Baileys were offered a roof over the heads by a startup social service and advocacy group, the People’s Place, which put the Baileys—along with two dozen other former “Nickelodeons”—up in a motel on Aurora. However, in a matter of hours, the Baileys—and a number of other Nickelsville refugees—may be back on the street again.
Three weeks after the city shut down Nickelsville, the commune-like People’s Place moved about 29 former Nickelodeons—including homeless families, women escaping domestic violence, and people with serious medical issues—into 13 rooms at an Aurora Ave. motel. (People’s Place founders and clients did not want us to publish the name of the motel).
Although the owners of the motel—one of several currently facing possible closure by the city because of problems with drugs and prostitution—cut People’s Place a break, floating a hefty portion of their rent, they’ve given them until the end of the day to pay up on more than $6,000 in back rent accrued over the last month.
In that month, People’s Place already has a handful of success stories. The two women behind People’s Place, Christi Stapleton and Melissa Jonas—who have backgrounds in business and social work—have helped get medical treatment, clothes, services, toothbrushes, jobs, and even permanent housing for displaced Nickelsville residents. This, Bailey and other motel residents say, is the fundamental difference between Nickelsville and the tent cities run by the Seattle Housing and Resource Effort (SHARE) and People’s Place.
Huddled around a small, dreary top-floor room at the motel—brightened up by a bed draped in bright orange Harley Davidson sheets on the floor in the middle of the room—a dozen People’s Place participants look grim as the deadline approaches. Everyone in the room appears to have tired of the daily grind at Nickelsville—”[it] was very important in getting out the homeless problem, but a lot of your time was spent surviving,” one man says—and are happy to have found what they thought was a more permanent solution.
“It’s really hard to look for a job when you don’t have clean clothes and an alarm clock and you haven’t slept,” Stapleton says. “It’s very stressful living in a tent. It means that most of your day is eaten up with just plain survival. Where do you do dishes?”
When the topic of SHARE and Nickelsville arises, it’s clear that People’s Place members were frustrated with the groups’ showmanship, which they say yielded few results (a claim that echoes complaints by SHARE clients that they were coerced into participating in recent protests). “SHARE has done a lot of really great things through the years. The program they have in place helps a lot of people,” Bailey says. “But there are a lot of people that aren’t getting that help for one reason or another.”
Another man in the room, Marx, who used to work in cryptography and computer science, pipes up. “You got [to Nickelsville] and they gave you a place to stay,” he says. “But if you [ask] ‘where do I go to get food stamps? Where do I go to get services?’ they don’t know.”
SHARE’s Bruce Thomas told PubliCola, “All we are is a safe place to be. Period. We don’t pretend to be anything more, we don’t pretend to be anything less. There are other shelter systems we refer to as Cadillac shelters that have on-staff counselors and this and that. We choose to take the money we have and put it into shelters.”
Asked where SHARE sends people for food stamps, Thomas said, “the food stamp place.”
Asked for clarification, he had to ask other people around him, who told him the Department of Social and Health Services.
People’s Place’s two founders, Jonas and Stapleton, think they’re in a better position to help people like the Baileys get services and find long-term solutions and permanent housing. But they may not get a chance to do much more work.
After sending out pleas for donations on their Facebook page and Twitter feed, Jonas and Stapleton have received a few calls from people offering to provide housing for two or three People’s Place residents, but not enough to help everyone, and certainly not enough to expand the program. Jonas says the group will meet with Nickels’ office later this week, and is hoping to get from help from the city council. But they’re still facing an end-of-the-day deadline. Jonas says if they can raise $2,000 in the next few hours, they’ll be able to stay, at least for now; otherwise, they’re out.
With Nickelsville now gone, People’s Place members with pets and children will be left with few options, due to rules at Tent City that prohibit both.
“We found a safe place for us to be with our dog and our children,” Bailey says. “If this place closes I don’t know what to do. My van is broke down out there. I have yet to make enough money to be able to repair it. If they ask us to leave here, I get to take my wife and children and go sleep on the street underneath a bridge.”
