How to Lie to the Homeless, part I

Dear Diary,

The first thing I did for you while at the Travelodge was make a list of park restrooms or restroom pairs in North Seattle.  Well, that proved a bit complicated.  I included all those whose doors open to the outside, but then realised that most of Jackson Park's, which I'd listed, actually open inside, and I still hadn't (and haven't) seen the restrooms inside Woodland Park Zoo.  But anyway, I ended up with a list.

Then I ran it against what I remembered, and what my paper notes documented, of last year's list of park restrooms staying open.  Curiously, nearly all the restrooms I'd found open were on that list, and nearly all the restrooms I'd found closed weren't on that list.

I wasn't as confident of my memory of this year's map of open restrooms.  And when I finally felt it was safe to turn my phone back on, I didn't feel confident of working with it right away.  But once I did, it turned out my memory had been fine.  And for some reason, this year's map was much less consistent with this year's reality than last year's list was.

Here's a list of what I knew then:

Closed but on the list:  Woodland Park "Rio"; Loyal Heights Community Center; and sometimes, arguably, Green Lake Community Center.  2 or 3.

Open but not on the list:  Woodland Park "cloverleaf"; Woodland Park "lawn bowling".  2.

Closed but on the map:  Magnuson Park "tower"; Magnuson Park "sport"; Sandel Playground; Greenwood Park; Licton Springs Park; Loyal Heights Community Center; Bitter Lake Playfield (though I haven't yet told you about it, dear Diary); and sometimes, arguably, Green Lake Community Center.  7 or 8.

Open but not on the map:  Woodland Park "lawn bowling".  1.

Since then, Sandel Playground and Loyal Heights Community Center have been taken off the map, as has Golden Gardens "off leash area", which I found closed on a Sunday but open on a Wednesday.

Here's a screenshot of the map as of January 25, after those three removals:

Now, that first, immediately visible, layer of the map is what I'd largely concentrated on.  As I've told you before, dear Diary, I was only briefly a geography major; it was also over 35 years ago, long before GIS became central to geography.  But I'm not wholly ignorant of that topic, and the particular setup of this ArcGIS map is, as I said from getgo, similar to that of the street end map.  So I'd also glanced at the pages of information linked to each symbol, as in the other map.

Here's a simple example, from Pinehurst Playground, which has no restroom but does have a "sanican".

Now, as it happens, this page is probably incorrect; at least as of January 14, Pinehurst Playground had only a regular "sanican", not an ADA-compliant one, and it was tightly squeezed into a space that wouldn't hold a larger model.  But my point for the moment is the lines that announce, correctly, that it's open 24 hours.

Now here's a park restroom building by itself, Maple Leaf Reservoir Park:

Notice how the lines now say different things.  "Open" and "7 am - 7:00/9:00pm".  The latter is the standard format for reporting most park restrooms' hours, though often with an addendum:  "(peak season only)" which means, in English, that most park restrooms are supposed to be open from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M., except that during peak season (summer), if there isn't a hiring freeze, they might stay open until sometime around 9 P.M.

Now, let's get more challenging.  I took the last two screenshots while writing this tonight, but this one here, for Magnuson Park's "beach" restrooms, dates to January 30:

Those restrooms have "sanican"s next door.  These pages are how I got the numbers of "sanican"s I've been comparing to reality all along, though the map has been far more reliable about them than about park restrooms.  So we're back to "24 hours" for status, and have a new line combining the two previous ones for hours.

Finally, the crucial step:  a closed restroom building with "sanican"s next to it.  This is the extremely closed, since 2016, Magnuson Park "tower" restrooms, also as of January 30:

Notice the line above the operational status line.  "Type:  Restroom building and portable restroom".  Now notice the hours line:  "24 hours (Sanican Only)".

Now, the screenshot above of the map doesn't show Magnuson Park, but this one, also from January 25, does:

But let's make it a little clearer.  As of tonight, here's a more detailed screenshot of Greenwood and Pinehurst:

Notice how Northacres Park, which has open restrooms, looks exactly the same as Licton Springs and Greenwood Parks, which do not.  Those parks do have open "sanican"s, like Pinehurst Playground, but look unlike it.  The only person who will find out what's really going on is the one who clicks through to the info page, and can decode "(Sanican Only)".

In other words, the map on its face is an unreliable guide to hygienic places to do Number Two.  By this I don't mean my usual hostility to "sanican"s, but the fact that few of them are located near hand-washing stations, open restrooms, SPU sinks, or even running water fountains.  And at any given time, some, presumably thanks to thieves, even lack sanitiser.

Why would Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation choose to lie about how many restrooms it has open this winter?  Well, for one thing, there was pressure to open more than usual; lying helped them neutralise that pressure without actually opening more.  I think I've found another reason, but that one needs a page to itself.

And then there's one more thing.  The homeless and parks staffers are natural enemies.  Many of us have repeatedly sought to camp in parks.  There we might damage the land, like the slobs at Licton Springs Park who strewed trash over wetlands.  We might interfere with income, like the people park staffers have genuinely done a great deal for at Woodland Park, but who will prevent shelter rentals as long as they're there.  Even the fear many of the housed feel towards us is a factor; one staffer, friendly to me personally, bemoaned to me how several elementary schools used to bring their kids to University Playground until our tents went up there.

So it's no wonder Parks and Recreation sought to lie to us, in particular.  It is a wonder that the "Homeless Strategy and Investment Division" of the Department of Human Services helped them do it, but that, too, is a story for another page.

I'll have to learn some things in order to write the page I want to put next, so I'm not really sure, dear Diary, what actually is next, or when.  Good night.