The chain-link fence blocked a sign at Seven Hills Park on Capitol Hill. “WELCOME TO SEATTLE PARKS,” it reads. “This park is yours to enjoy.”
But not today, or tomorrow. For the next 53 days, this park is supermax. By the time the fence comes down, all sales at Spirit Halloween will be final.
The city put up the fence without notice on August 28, a response to “bouts of negative park activity,” writes Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation spokesperson Rachel Schulkin. The park, which is next to the “Santuary” condominiums in the former First Church of Christ Scientist, is getting “possible amenity changes,” she says. They “could include: removal of various park elements, adding surrounding park fencing, addition of new amenities such as lighting, garden beds, or new planters.”
To translate, “bouts of negative park activity” is spokesperson slang for encampments, and “possible amenities” possibly means infrastructure hostile to sleeping, sitting, and being. It’s a typical anti-homeless policy. To celebrate Labor Day weekend, the city also placed fences in Lake City Mini Park and around the pavilion at Dr. Blanche Lavizzo Park in the Central District, and it might not stop there. Depending how community meetings shake out, Parks might close Broadway Hill and Tashkent Parks for similar modifications, Schulkin says.
The city didn’t say more than that, though The Stranger asked whose idea this was and why residents didn’t know about it. City Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth’s office told The Stranger to reach out to parks for answers to our questions, which included if she, as an elected official, thought this strategy addressed homelessness in a meaningful way, and what it would even solve. So we went to the people, the streets, for answers.
The corner of 16th and Howell St. is busy, even at 10 a.m. Five tourists pass by. One of them, Leah, didn’t care for the fence.
“Tell them Atlanta, Georgia said ‘fuck that!’” she says, and whips out her middle finger.
The shout grabs Liz McCarty’s attention, who met us on the street. She’s rented here for 10 years. She wanted to talk; so did her cat Leaf, who meowed loudly from an open window. Her partner soon brought him out, cradled in his arms, manipulating Leaf like a balloon animal. They balked at the city’s improvement plan.
“They’re talking about upgrading the park,” McCarty’s partner says, pointing to a withered tree. “That tree on the corner has been fucking dead for three to five years.”
“We’ll see if they work on that for the reset,” McCarty says. “I’m guessing they won’t.”
Over the weekend, McCarty and her partner planned to walk Leaf to the park. They opened their front door and saw the fence. There was no communication, no signage, only a phone number for the contractor. Her partner immediately reported the fence on the city’s Find It Fix It app.
“Litter in the park,” he shrugged.
The couple is heavily involved in their community, which consists of apartment buildings, several condos, a smattering of mental health facilities, an assisted-living facility, and a retirement home. Everybody uses the park. It’s where bike rides end, seniors play music, and people sit smoking cigarettes. It’s a third place, McCarty says.
And a place where people sleep. There were six tents before the fence went up, where a group of people and two dogs lived. They were “chill,” she says, and clean. They strung their garbage bags in the trees, so animals wouldn’t get into them, and disposed of their waste in cat litter. The neighbors’ habit of “off-leash dogging,” was a bigger nuisance, McCarty’s partner says. (The dog poop outside their building has increased tenfold, they say.)
McCarty says her partner, who works in the medical field, regularly administers narcan when people overdose. He’s also performed CPR. In 2021, a person was stabbed near the encampment, Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reported. In 2022, the city swept the park. McCarty says that once, a gun went off in one of the tents. Cops swarmed the area, but nobody got hurt, or arrested (the Seattle Police Department did not respond to The Stranger’s request for confirmation before publication). Beyond emergencies, the two of them interact with the homeless people across the street like neighbors would. They are neighbors, they say.
“We bring water out, we talk with folks,” she says.
Tents have cropped up in the park regularly over the last few years, peaking during the pandemic. Since then, the city has regularly swept the park, pushing people to grassy medians on nearby blocks, she says.
But she couldn’t remember a fence. (Parks did not say whether it had closed Seven Hills before. Really, they didn’t say much.) McCarty says homeless people in the park have been the talk of the neighborhood. People she’s been friendly with have talked about them like pests.
She is uncomfortable watching people suffer, too, but it’s been “viscerally upsetting to me to see sort of the inhumanity of people that I otherwise have really lovely [interactions with],” she says, her eyes watery.
In a blog post last month featuring We Heart Seattle’s Andrea Suarez, far-right blogger Jonathan Choe described Seven Hills Park as a “human dumping ground.” Suarez called the group “service resistant.” In a text, Suarez said she was last there on August 16 or 17, “engaging with everyone” by offering Payday candy bars and her card.
“Lots of codependency (couples, pets, groups) travelling as a group from sweep to sweep,” she wrote, claiming without proof that many of the people there had tiny homes they hadn’t moved into. As The Stranger reported when Suarez was running for the state Legislature last year, Suarez has numerous far-right connections and rejects evidence-based housing first policy (house people first, then treat mental illnesses and substance use disorders) for less effective treatment first programs (residential drug treatment and housing contingent on sobriety).
Choe was there that morning, sticking a camera in people’s faces, McCarty said.
There’s chatter about the city installing a playground and bright lights to keep people out. Ironically, most of the fervor is coming from the people living at “Sanctuary,” the former church turned luxury condos, who’ve posted photos of the tents on Nextdoor, McCarty and her partner say. It’s brought out the neighborhood’s renter, owner divide. Renters don’t care nearly as much, they say. (Sanctuary’s building association did not return a request for an interview).
“I never see those people in the park,” McCarty says of the luxury condo owners. “They yell at people out the windows of their cars.”
“Owning property is a type of psychosis,” McCarty’s partner says. “It makes you believe the property is part of your body. So it feels like a violation is a direct harm.”
Kaylon is wrapped in a purple blanket and smoking a cigarette. He pitches it and hesitates when asked his age.
“I’m 40,” he says. “I think I’m 40.”
Kaylon says he’s homeless and points to a bench behind the fence. He’d laid down there, hung out and smoked cigarettes. “And done drugs,” he says with a smile.
Seven Hills Park is a decent, beautiful place, he says, and really, even if we disagree, we all have a common goal to “relax in our own spaces.” He says he’ll find somewhere else to hang out.
“Whatever my spirit guide says I try to do,” he says.
A woman shuffles by. Her name is Joann and she’d read about park closures up north that morning in The Seattle Times, but didn’t know about this. The story confused her. At first, she thought “bouts of negative park activity” meant “lack of use, not overuse by the wrong people.”
An older woman texting on the corner says she didn’t like drug use, but obviously, she’d like to use the park.
“Do you think this is a solution?” we ask.
“No,” she says. “Do you?”
