June 17

A homeless camp in Maple Leaf?

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6  comments


Rainbow Point park. Signs on Interstate 5 are visible through the trees.

Update: Thor has also notified the police and posted the camp on the Maple Leaf Community Council’s issue reporting map. He encourages others to call police if they have concerns. You can view the map here.

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A regular reader e-mailed both us and the state Department of Transportation to say he and his family walked to a Maple Leaf park earlier this week and found what appeared to be a homeless camp alongside Interstate 5 at Northeast 75th Street.

“The other day my family walked to Rainbow Point park and noticed a homeless camp right next to the park, on the slope above I-5,” Thor writes. “The location is near the top of a slope southwest of the intersection of NE 75th St and NE Banner Place.”

In fact, Rainbow Point is a little-known park of a little over three-quarters of an acre, and just north of it, above the freeway, is the camp. Nobody was home when we went by this morning, but clearly one or more people had been there, as there were clothes, make-shift tables and dishes around.

The Transportation Department told Thor that they do clean out homeless camps on state property, with police present in case of disturbance, and would check out the one in Maple Leaf. “With a month left in the budget year, we have spent just short of $190,000 on cleaning up garbage from camps in Seattle,” the department wrote.

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Sara W

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  1. Wow Thor, really? Were any of these folks actually bothering you? Were you being assaulted in any way?

    Seattle clearly has a problem with homelessness and perhaps the one thing most of us can agree on is that it is a complex issue.

    Some neighborhoods experience the homeless population more than others and Maple Leaf is fairly well insulated.

    I hope all of us are lucky enough never to be homeless. It seems that all too often those of us that “have” are afraid of those that “don’t have” simply because we have to separate ourselves from these folks in some way. Realizing that we all have more in common than we might think is just too unsettling.

    Perhaps we don’t all have a backyard in which to extend a hand to those who have absolutely nothing, but maybe we can try to have a bit more understanding. Spend a few moments and actually communicate with some of these folks. They are, after all, human beings, just like the rest of us.

  2. Say Sqvarehead, Why don’t you invite the campers to come live in your backyard and really show them how much you care. A little too ghetto for ya?

  3. I walk the woods next to NSCC almost daily and there’s at least 4 people living between the freeway and the school. Seems like an odd place to hole up since the police station is a stones throw away along with the recent arrest in the park for some kid shooting a firearm.

    The biggest issue for me is garbage and human poop. Not that someone is homeless and living in the woods.

  4. Funny,I thought this area was part of wa.state,not nazi germany.
    so:”Zeig Heil,O’Bama?”
    Nice of these whitebread lumpen-proletarians to complain about peasant infestation spoiling their loveley ghetto.
    Sqvarehead

  5. That’s the “homeless bike dude” … he’s been there for years, but used to live a little further north on the other side of I-5. He is a fixture in Maple Leaf/Roosevelt/GreenLake trolling local arterials for cig. butts.

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