Volunteers are hard at work at the new Nickelsville site in Northlake today, painting the tiny houses and preparing the grounds for Ballard Nickelsville residents to move in on Tuesday.
The new site on 4th Ave. NE is now home to this 14-foot dome, which may be used as a computer lab or community space, organizers say.
“It may look like a Hobbit house but is quite spacious inside,” said Sharon Lee, executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI). “We thank Rebecca and Eli Almo for donating the dome and many other tiny houses. They have contributed $350,000 to LIHI to help build tiny houses villages.”
The Ballard Nickelsville camp will move on Tuesday, and volunteers will return to the Market St. lot to clean up on Wednesday. The city said the plan is to return the site to Seattle City Light, which owns the property.
The Nickelsville move was originally planned for November but was delayed because the Northlake site was not ready. The new camp is a bit larger and has electricity, water and sewer.
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Oh wow they are moving after breaking their word with the community? This was supposed to move like four months ago…doesn’t a contract or your word mean anything?
Seattle is the culprit here. I believe that Seattle was to provide the space to move into. The camp said they would disperse/move once their contract was up but Seattle let them stay. I think having them move without the new space would have been detrimental. If we are to believe that the application process to get into these camps actually do weed out those who won’t go into housing in the future, then having those people displaced and possibly not get into the new location would be worse for everyone. I don’t know if there would have been a new application process or if they would have invited those in the camp back though. The camp is not free from fault though. The camp stopped applying for month long extensions in January. They applied for extensions in November and December. The current law states that any official camps must be vacant for a full year before another camp can go in. Since they stopped applying for extensions they could potentially have applied for new camp in January of 2019.
It’s a shame to keep bouncing people around. They have been good neighbors. Each community should put it’s best foot forward and take pride in offering permanent encampment sites.
“It’s a shame to keep bouncing people around. They have been good neighbors. Each community should put it’s best foot forward and take pride in offering permanent encampment sites.”
We know now that one of your so-called “good-neighbors” had an outstanding warrant and just raped a woman in the bathroom of a Ballard car dealership.
@Paul. While this is sad, at least Nickelsville doesn’t allow sexual offenders to reside there and they actually do check. Anyone who is in Nicklesville hasn’t been convicted of rape before joining so this is his first (known) offense of this nature.
You can’t blame a person’s residence for his crimes and you can’t rightly generalize a town based on the misdeeds of one or two individuals
Paul, what you describe is true of thousands of King County residents who have homes – vast majority of defendants I see in criminal court are locals with addresses and are not homeless.
Homelessness has nothing to do with the crime. Nor does the fact someone lived in an encampment, as opposed to on the streets.