UPDATE: Who Is at War with the RVs Parked Near Columbia City?

Charles Mudede

It is, you will agree, a very interesting street. It's 36th Avenue South. On one side, it connects with South Genesee Street. On the other side, it ends with a gate that automatically opens and closes for trucks transporting milk or milk products. Beyond the gate, on which hangs a huge American flag, is a warehouse and plant for Darigold, the marketing and processing company for Northwest Dairy Association—a cooperative of over 500 northwest dairy farmers. Its headquarters is in Georgetown. The cow company appears to be in a battle with RVs for this small stretch of street.

Until very recently, the street was dominated by people living in RVs and cars. This community also parked on Adams Street, which is next to a gated parking lot for Darigold's employees. Two weeks ago, a huge fire destroyed an RV, and, according to Seattle Fire Department, damaged electric wires. It also singed the leaves of trees growing in the Darigold parking lot. I suspect this fire was the final straw. It was time to roll.

This Saturday, I walked down 36th Avenue South and found only two RVs and lots of pallets stacked in parking spaces. There was also a row of stacked pallets on Adams Street. These stacks were backed by an usually large number of trucks, each parked in spaces once occupied by RVs.



Charles Mudede

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I had entered a battlefield in a war that only knows how to escalate in Seattle—the war against the homeless. The intensity of the street combat was only matched by the absurdity of this kind of poverty in a super-rich city. One truck was parked in the same spot where the RV burned to the ground. Another truck directly confronted an RV that was brave enough to park on 36th Avenue South. Who is attacking the RVs? In my original post, I guessed that the pallets and trucks were owned by the marketing and processing wing of the Northwest Dairy Association, Darigold, because there's no other business in the area with that kind of equipment. However, Darigold reached out to us (after missing several attempted calls) and claimed that neither the truck in the picture nor the pallets I mentioned are owned by Darigold. The pallets, they claim, are owned by another organization, Genesee Hall. We called the hall, but the person I spoke with could not confirm ownership (or non-ownership) of the pallets.