Inside Vancouver
Tent City
By Dee Hon published Mar 1, 2009
In Seattle, a roving experiment in housing the homeless divides the neighbourhoods where it touches down
Mercer Island is an enclave of the ultrarich, a lush Seattle suburb where waterfront homes can list for more than $35 million and come with moorage for 140-foot yachts. Microsoft multibillionaire Paul Allen—No. 41 on the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest men—lives here. But tucked in the gravel back lot of the tiny clapboard Mercer Island United Methodist Church live 100 men and women of considerably fewer resources: the residents of Tent City 4. Blue polyethylene tarps drape over the nylon domes where people bed down. The tents line up tightly in neat rows, resting atop wooden shipping palettes for insulation. More tarps stretch over a common area of tables and chairs. A fence and a few small trees separate these two worlds, and you would be hard-pressed to find a starker, more immediate contrast between luxury and destitution.
If a billionaire is the most famous face of the former, the other side of the divide is represented here by a talkative sumo-shaped Native American named Leo Rhodes. Rhodes is one of the tent city’s original inhabitants and has been organizing and fighting for it since its inception in 2004. This community, its urban Seattle counterpart called Tent City 3, and an unrelated Portland facility are the only homeless camps on the continent to receive government blessing. (Tent Cities 1 and 2 were torn down years ago.) Tent City 4 is a roving community, packing up and moving to the yard of a different sponsoring church every 90 days. Each time it does, Rhodes and his fellow tent dwellers face another salvo of opposition from neighbours and more legal attacks from municipal governments. As the most visible face of the community, Rhodes, who has been homeless half of his 40-odd years, personally absorbs much of the venom. Tent City 4 is, after all, more than just a way to shelter some of the 2,000 people officially living on Seattle/King County’s streets. It’s a social experiment that’s challenging the most deeply held assumptions about who homeless people are and how best to help them. The community forces the homelessness issue into the backyards of every neighbourhood it touches.
