Jungle Boogie

Jungle Boogie

February 26, 2016

The Jungle is the unofficial name for a greenbelt that runs spottily for a few miles along Interstate 5 as it exits downtown Seattle headed south. The area has hosted scattered settlements of homeless people for decades. Mostly nobody cared. Until recently, when the homeless population started booming and drug use and crime boomed along with it, culminating in a triple murder on January 26. Now, all of a sudden, the government does care.

The latest bright idea on how to deal with The Jungle is to simply fence it off and patrol it at an estimated cost of a million dollars. As if that would magically vaporize the hundreds of homeless people who have been living there.

I took the photos below two days ago along 8th and King, just three blocks north of where The Jungle fence would begin. There are people on both sides of the street and their tents and furniture (not to mention their trash) often project out into the sidewalk. There are a dozen or more people on this one block alone, and these are the “better off” homeless, if I may use such an absurd term. I dare say that some of these folks arrived here from The Jungle as a result of turf wars.

Query: Does it look to you like putting up a million-dollar fence around the freeway three blocks away from here is going to make these people disappear?