Johnston Park Campground has a snag

This morning after gathering a heap of information about a homeless campground planned for Johnston Park in Councilman Allan Warren's District 2, I got an email about a snag in the plan.

Seems that despite a yeoman effort to find and secure a mighty swell and seemingly-appropriate place to have the campground, there is a quiet organization nearby to Johnston Park that should never be proximate to something such as a 50+ resident homeless campground.

So ... back to the drawing board.

Meantime, other efforts to get street people into better situations are being floated.

I'm advised that "Mayor Steinberg announced he is working with Loaves and Fishes to set up rotating micro houses at various churches to house some homeless folk." This sounds like a close variant of an idea floated by Marx & Cat some years ago which was first sparked by goings-on in Seattle that I posted something about on the day before Christmas in 2015, "Tiny-house village to open on church property in Seattle."

Thus, there are moves afoot to have SOMETHING happen such that the woeful circumstance such that homeless people are left sitting on the curbside watching themselves just getting older gets addressed.

Tiny houses under construction in Seattle.

Now, I confess that my take on a lot of this stuff is complicated by the record of failure over the years in getting a campground or tiny-houses community REALLY getting set up and functioning. Plus, I have GREAT concerns about how these stopgap measures can undermine a full-bore "Housing First" approach to giving homeless people REAL HONEST-TO-GOD LIVES.

But the good news is that, finally, thanks to Alan Warren and Darrell Steinberg, things are in motion such that I have to suppose that SOMETHING will happen to undermine the very long period of "Same, Ol. Same, Ol." that has gotten tiresome in the extreme.

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