An App for Ejecting the Homeless
Surrounded by the vibrant, emerald trees that give the city its nickname, Seattle’s Ravenna Woods seem like the perfect place for homeless people to build shelter without disrupting metropolitan life. If not for a large, homemade banner at the entrance of the encampment that read, “Do Homeless Lives Matter?” you might not even have noticed they were there.
But someone did notice eventually, initiating months of cat-and-mouse between the City of Seattle and the unsheltered community living here. Residents of the camp received a notice of removal from the city in December 2017, swiftly diminishing the community. The city would spend over $10 million on this and similar homeless sweeps in 2017 alone.
Encampments like the one in Ravenna Woods are reported to the city regularly. The City of Seattle even offers an app to make the process easier. The Find It, Fix It app was originally designed to allow community members to report potholes, dumping, signal issues, and other neighborhood problems. But the app has warped into a powerful instrument for high-tech community patrolling, enabling individuals to report abandoned vehicles and homeless encampments.
The is a major cause of homelessness here, where a tech boom led by Amazon has helped by 19 percent a year. But homelessness also disproportionately impacts people of color. of King County’s homeless population is black, yet black residents only make up 6 percent of the county’s overall population. This year, of the people who died as a result of living outside in King County were black. These figures make Seattle’s approach to homelessness an issue of race as much as affordability. That connects an app-based “solution” to the problem of homelessness to a of American self-policing, in which public order is delivered at the cost of the most vulnerable.
