Liberty
Bruce Ramsey
May 10, 2018
In Seattle, where I have spent most of my life, I often walk around a lake near where I live — Green Lake, which is bordered by a strip of public park. It is the most popular park in the city, hosting walkers, runners, skaters, and bicyclists on the paved path around the water. In this urban idyll a coven of campers lives year-round in RVs and tents or, in good weather, sleeps in the open on the ground. If I drive to the University of Washington, I go past another encampment near the freeway exit. Under an overpass by the University Bridge is a rag-and-cardboard hovel surrounded by stolen Safeway carts and piles of garbage.
We didn’t have this when I was growing up here in the 1960s, or many years afterward. Then you could see alcoholics in downtown Seattle, where they sat on park benches and drank. We called them bums. They were male, and mostly white or Native American. They lived in missions and flophouses. They didn’t pitch tents under overpasses and in city parks, because the city didn’t allow it. Legally it still doesn’t, but legality alone doesn’t matter. Seattle does allow it, which is why people do it.
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http://libertyunbound.com/node/1848
