National advocates for the homeless say much the same thing. The city of Seattle helps fund some tent camps, they said, through financial or logistical support, but the city also continues practices of sweeps and evictions for unsanctioned camps that it doesn’t want.

“Seattle is doing some things that are fairly innovative,” said Maria Foscarinis, the executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, a nonprofit legal group in Washington, D.C. “But the encampments are there because of the failure to create affordable, decent housing. I absolutely fear that they will be seen as the solution.”

Still, over the 15 years that the Seattle area has allowed some camps — some anchored in one place, others, like TC3, roving from host to host — the arrangement has often affected the permanent residents they wound up living beside. Nowhere was that more true than at Seattle Pacific. The idea of a university hosting the homeless at all, let alone for months, is all but unheard-of around the nation, education experts said.



The university, which was founded by Free Methodist Church members in 1891, has allowed TC3 on campus for three 90-day stays over the last six years. Two other Seattle schools, the University of Washington and Seattle University, have also hosted camps.

“It does change the institutional DNA,” said Nate Mouttet, Seattle Pacific’s vice president for enrollment management and marketing. Prospective students, he said, know right from the time they first tour the campus that “sometime in their experience here, they’re going to encounter what it means to be around homelessness.”

And homeless people, who in some cases come from generations of poverty, can be changed as well.

“The students have become our friends,” Ms. Deserley said. She said that she and her daughter had fled an abusive relationship, and that it made her hopeful seeing Genny explore the campus and understand what education might offer.

But on a religious university campus where discussions of theology and morality are part of the curriculum, interactions across the camp/campus line were complicated, too.