There was no time for breath-catching after the sudden stop to events, for this community-owned-and-maintained facility that relies on them – including rentals – to pay the bills. HPIC quickly found itself filling a void by filling bellies. Even before closed schools got their meal programs up and running, HPIC sprang into action as a food-distribution center for families.
They were serving up to 600 lunches a week. Not just grab-and-go; before long, a local chef was cooking up hot to-go meals. A “community fridge” was in place. And as the weeks and months went by, HPIC became a center for much more.
The
District 1 Community Network – a coalition of West Seattle and South Park groups and organizations – spent this month’s meeting on a collection of ongoing issues.
D1CN has no elected leadership, but rather rotates meeting facilitators month to month. For May’s meeting, held online this past Wednesday,
Randy Wiger from South Park served in that role.
DUWAMISH TRIBE RECOGNITION: Jolene Haas, director of the
Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center, asked D1CN for a letter of support in the tribe’s continuing quest for federal recognition. She recapped the history, including the brief granting of recognition in the waning days of the Clinton Administration, reversed 20 years ago by the Bush Administration. Now they’re trying to take it to federal courts, as Haas said some other tribes have done, successfully. Their lawyers are working on the case and are also working through the U.S. House.
West Seattle Blog editor
West Seattle has no full-time homeless shelters. It has one city-sanctioned tiny-house encampment, usually at capacity with about 50 residents. Just about everyone else living unhoused in West Seattle is in a tent, or a vehicle, or maybe a doorway.
Right now, one group of tent residents on a South Delridge business-district sidewalk has been drawing increasing attention.
The site has grown steadily over this spring, starting on the east side of the building on the northwest corner of Delridge/Roxbury, now extending onto the sidewalk outside businesses on the north half of the block, more than a dozen tents in all, covering most of the sidewalk all the way to the curb.
SDOT is building up to six a day, and sent reps to
HPAC‘s monthly meeting to talk about
Reconnect West Seattle projects meant to tackle bridge-detour cut-through traffic.
SDOT’s
Sara Zora and
A quarterly report is now out, too – here are the key points:
Here’s the list of prioritized projects in HPAC’s jurisdiction:
The 15th/Roxbury project is actually going to be installed as part of the Metro RapidRide H Line work, timeline not yet set. For the 8th/Roxbury project, they’re collecting data right now; the intersection will have to be rechannelized to get the turn pocket in, and they’re hoping that the crews for that can be aligned with upcoming speed-hump work – perhaps within two months. The Highland Park Home Zone has one line on the list but actually involves 27 projects.
“Crow Planet,” it’s not just about crows.
Coyotes are in there too, she says, as are many of the other wild things who are mixing it up with us mere humans, in West Seattle and elsewhere.
Chatting with Lyanda in the garden behind the 1920s-vintage home she shares with her husband and daughter, you might spot some of the wildness – a hummingbird hovering over a hedge, pondering whether to investigate the small bouquet of salvia that the author placed in a glass as a sort of feeder. (She wrote about the makeshift feeder last weekend on her website
“The Tangled Nest: Cultivating an Urban-Earthen Household.”) Or you might hear her stories, like the one about the raccoon that woke her up during a backyard family campout: