A safe place for homeless people to park their Recreational Vehicles was supposed to shut down Friday. It’s a simple gravel lot, near the city pet shelter in the Interbay neighborhood.
But it turns out, Friday wasn’t a hard deadline. The city wants to have another safe parking zone ready for them to move to in SODO.
You may have heard about the RV Safe Lot in Ballard that is costing the city $35,000 a month to run.
This is NOT that lot.
This is a simpler operation. It doesn’t have round the clock staffing, or electricity or running water. All this one has is porta-potties and a dumpster.
For Ken Brooks, it’s enough. He lives here in his motor home.
Brooks: “I mean, it’s nice to be set, at a place like this here was, for, what, four months or so? It’s nice to have that instead of moving around all the time.”
This lot costs the city only about $5,000 a month. Sola Plumacher, with the city of Seattle, says the closure of this lot has nothing to do with money.
Plumacher: “It’s really attributed to the fact that we have construction starting on that site.”
Jakob Ledtje stays in a school bus at the site. He’s planning an act of civil disobedience. Basically, he’ll refuse to leave.
Ledtje: “They just move us all around and they don’t do anything but just keep moving around and around and it’s just a hassle. We just keep getting farther and farther from all the resources and help.”
City officials say they’d love to put inexpensive safe parking zones like this in other parts of the city. But they just can’t find the land.
