Are Seattle’s Homeless Camps Shelters or a Tax Dodge?
Over at the Quixotic Blog, Dave Preston has been following the homeless camps. Some of what he writes is very disturbing.
1. In an effort to force closing of a camp, the government sent in crew to cut down trees and shrubs .. leaving a an ecological mess.
2. One of the original camps, called Nickelsville after the then mayor, purported to be a democratically run self-sustaining “eco-village.” This unsanitary eyesore was was run by a single man and his girlfriend, neither of whom were poor and neither of whom lived at the camp.
3. When Nickelsville was finally evicted by the City last year, dozens of hard-core “Nickelodeons” fled into the woods, refusing all offers of housing assistance from the City.
4. One camp moved, without a permit or advance notice to the Skyway neighborhood. The site is an empty property owned by a millionaire tax dodger named Peter Sikov, who owes back taxes of more than $73,000 on several properties in the area.
5. “Nickelsville” is now the generic name for Seattle-area squatter camps run by a man named Scott Morrow and his lady friend Peggy Hotes. Morrow and Hotes also run a non-profit shelter organization called SHARE that already gets millions of dollars in funding from various government agencies and is always clamoring for more. Peter Sikov (the property owner above_ is pals with with Scott Morrow.
Although SHARE claims to be providing shelter beds for homeless people in the city of Seattle, the group has been unable to account for how they spend the money they get. Meanwhile, SHARE operates two roving “tent cities” at church properties around King County, in addition to to three roving semi-legal homeless camps they collectively refer to as Nickelsville