Having arrived at work about 5:30 one recent morning, Giovanni di Quattro, owner of the Rainbow Café, found a man asleep at the back door of his restaurant.
Di Quattro woke the man and told him to leave. Cursing, the sleeper got up, stuck his paw in a nearby can and began to scrounge for morning’s first cigarette butts.
“You need to leave; this is private property,” di Quattro pressed.
As the man was walking away, he snarled: “You know, I think I should just come back and pop you.”
Recently, di Quattro continued, another man came in off the street, and for no reason began elbowing patrons. He refused to leave until the police were called in.
“We have a sign up that says, ‘restrooms for customers only,’ but they are constantly coming in and using the restrooms. Just the other day a guy came in, ran by us, and went into the bathroom. I asked him to leave because he was not a customer. About two hours later, I had to call the plumber because he had flushed his underwear down the toilet,” di Quattro said.
Up and down Main Street, business owners have stories to tell.
Of people camped out in the B Street Plaza in blankets made into tents or using a barbecue there.
Here is what ties the accounts together. About a year ago, a new strain of panhandlers began showing up in Auburn. As seen nightly in the Safeway parking lot at 101 Auburn Way S., for example, these new arrivals today amount to about 15 to 20 men in their 20s or 30s. Riding BMX bikes and skateboards, they are aggressive, dogged, and, refusing to take no for an answer, they too often hound people all the way back to their cars.
Given the frequency of car break-ins and the proliferation of discarded needles and drug paraphernalia that began appearing when this set started showing up, the common thinking is to link what’s happening there in some way to the use of illicit drugs.
As owner of Creson’s Barber Shop at 222 E. Main St., Cheryl Creson has seen plenty through her window.
“Customers who ride the bus tell me that just about every day somebody gets off the bus and says, ‘Where’s the library?’ They know to go to the library at Les Gove Park because they know they are going to get food there. And at night they hang out at Safeway and panhandle outside,” Creson said. “They are in our doorways every morning when we come in. There’ll be five to six men in their 20s, some in their 30s. There’s a few women, but I’d have to say by the appearance of the women, most of them have mental problems.”
Creson related another common occurrence.
“A guy comes in a black Chrysler 300, pulls up on this or the other side of Safeway, and these guys all surround the car on the passenger side window, and he’s handing them little packets with white powder in them. I don’t know what it is. Could be a lot of things,” Creson said.
One City official suggested a possible tie between such activity and a recent uptick in gang activity.
Auburn Police Chief Bob Lee said that if what Ms. Creson or others are saying is true, they should call police.
Fairly or not, many lump the recent arrivals in with the homeless populations who are down on their luck or mentally ill, people who drew compassion from all interviewed for this story.
“There are genuinely some people down on their luck,” di Quattro said. “One lady I know comes by, the sweetest lady, and she’s been homeless for three years that I know of, and I will give her a cup of coffee. She almost won’t take it from me, because she’s very proud, but she’s homeless. She needs a place to stay. She needs the community’s help. But then you have those that don’t want the help, they just prefer to do what they’re doing.”
“Every city has a problem with homelessness,” said Doug Lien, director of economic development for the City of Auburn.
And of course, that’s true. According to the annual homeless count conducted by the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness, as of Jan. 23 and 24 of 2015, there were 10,047 homeless people in King County. Auburn accounted for 132 of them, 54 who were found sleeping in cars or trucks, 10 in city parks, 19 in structures of some kind, four under roadways, 31 in bushes and undergrowth, one at a bus stop, 11 walking around, and two whose situations were not identified.
The 2015 count revealed a 21-percent increase in homelessness over 2014.
But to Henry Dehoog owner of the Homeplate Pub at 144 E. Main, that’s not the whole story.
“We’ve had issues with homelessness in the past, and they subsided. What I would suggest is this last year it has re-intensified. As far as the numbers and the types of people we’re seeing now that are homeless, they are much more aggressive,” Dehoog said. “There are issues with safety. They’re lurking around everywhere, and they’re just generally a real nuisance. We want to revitalize downtown, but what’s happening is that people are afraid to come downtown when they see these characters running around. They’re very aggressive asking for money or cigarettes, and if you don’t, they get quite nasty about the whole thing.”
Like other business owners interviewed for this story, Dehoog is bleeding customers.
“We had people that used to stay a lot later, they don’t because the other folks are out late and they just don’t want to deal with it. We have such a wide range of people that come here, young, middle aged, and it’s the women and the elderly mostly who are leaving early,” Dehoog said.
When Mayor Nancy Backus’ new task force on homelessness meets for the first time in the last days of November, Ronnie Robertson, owner of Gosanko Chocolates at 116 A St. SE, will be on it.
“The drug stuff, you don’t see it going on, but I’ll tell you this: we have picked up needles and foil to cook meth. or whatever they’re doing out back,” Robertson said. “I can’t even say for sure that that’s the homeless population as much as it is drug addicts. We see people sleeping out there. I’m concerned with people going through my garbage, and it’s all over the frigging parking lot when I come in.”
Like Dehoog, Robertson drew a sharp distinction between the new arrivals and those whom demographers and statisticians ordinarily class as homeless.
“I’m not sure ‘homeless’ is the right brush to paint them with. There’s people who are homeless who are living out of their cars, and they have kids, and I think we need to try and get them some help. Then there’s the mentally ill, and we should help them, too. Finally, there’s what I call thugs running around on these BMX bikes and stuff with backpacks doing drugs. That’s what people have told me. They almost run people over, and I’m assuming that’s the drug problem,” Robertson said.
Brocc Snyder, a lay minister from Calvary Presbyterian Church in the city of Enumclaw, last April asked the City Council to consider changing a City ordinance to allow a homeless encampment within City limits.
“I think it’s one of the quickest, most efficient, cheapest ways to to provide a safe environment for people who are not criminals, who are not running from the law but are just down and out,” Snyder said. “People who just need somewhere to store their stuff so they can just get on with life. That would be a quickest solution. Of course, what happens when people hear the words ‘tent city,’ is they really get their idea about what that means from the way things were back in the 90s when those just got started. Then it was just a bunch of people who had problems with drugs and alcohol that were sheltered there. Now they are governed so much differently. Our cities now have so much more control over the residents because the residents monitor each other. There are consequences for doing wrong. I’m looking at the demographic of people who want to get on with their lives, who want to improve their lives.”
Perhaps the City in its quest for answers will draw lessons from its recent success dealing with the homeless situation at Les Gove Park.
Di Quattro said he appreciates the difficult task the mayor’s task force faces.
Meanwhile, he has this question for City leaders:
“As a business owner, do I need to start arming myself to come to work? Are they going to wait until someone gets hurt, or something happens?”
