Next year, the University of Washington will host a tent city for the homeless on its campus, UW president Ana Mari Cauce announced today. In her letter to the UW community, Cauce wrote that hosting a tent city will fit with the UW’s mission by helping to alleviate the city’s homelessness crisis.
The encampment on campus will be Tent City 3, a collectively run homeless community. So far, the preferred location for the encampment is a parking lot next to the Fishery Sciences building near the southwest edge of campus. The encampment will stay there for 90 days during winter quarter 2017. Tent City 3 regularly moves location throughout the year -- it’s currently located in a church parking lot across the street from campus.
The UW has never hosted a tent city on its campus before, though in doing so it's following in the footsteps of Seattle University, which hosted one in 2005, and Seattle Pacific University which has hosted twice, in 2012 and 2015. Whenever Tent City 3 came to a university in the past, there was a strong educational component to its stay, the idea being that both students and homeless residents could learn from each other and benefit from the experience. That’s the expectation this year as well, with several classes interested in incorporating the homeless community into their syllabuses.
In the last several months, the UW has been receiving feedback on the proposal, and people have responded positively by a 2-to-1 margin, Cauce noted. Read more of Crosscut’s coverage of the UW tent city proposal here:
