After a homeless man’s death, a Seattle neighborhood confronts the limits of helping 

My neighborhood in Seattle, Madrona, has for the better part of the past decade been home to one homeless person.

That isn’t the case all the time of course — there have been temporary tents in the greenbelts, and scattered car-camping on some blocks. Homelessness can be everywhere, often hidden. What I mean is that Madrona and its small business district has had just one person who regularly has slept outside, on the streets, for years.

His name was James Gaines. He was found dead earlier this month in one of his regular crash spots, a bus shelter on East Cherry Street near 32nd Avenue. He was 61.

I’d guess that everybody in Madrona knew of him, in the sense that he was so familiar. A tall, heavyset, soft-spoken Black man, always in a black winter coat no matter the season, he lived under the public gaze for years with no address, shifting from one bus shelter to another.

What’s troubling about the story of James Gaines — or maybe inspiring, depending on how you look at it — is that this whole neighborhood tried for years to help him get housing. But repeatedly failed.

“He just wouldn’t go in,” says Janna Pekaar, a nurse and Madrona neighbor who periodically made Gaines breakfast or gave him impromptu street checkups. “We could have gotten him a place so many times. But he’d say ‘No, no, I’m not allowed.’ He had delusions in his head.”

Joe Martin, who worked with the homeless for decades at the Pike Market Medical Clinic, also tried to get Gaines into shelter.

“He was unfailingly respectful as he would turn you down,” Martin says. “He’d say ‘Thank you’ and ‘God bless you,’ but also, firmly, ‘No.’ ”

Others who offered him help said he would counter by instead offering them money — which he called “revenue.”

“He was the kindest human; he would always try to give me ‘revenue’ when I would pick him up a meal from the Mexican food truck,” one recalled, on the website Nextdoor.

“James was a regular at our East Cherry Food Bank,” wrote another. “He would ask us too if we could use any ‘revenue’ … such a gentle soul.”

What put him on the streets isn’t clear. In 2014 he was found lying on the ground at a Seattle bus stop and taken to Harborview, where he spent five months. Doctors there found he had serious hypertension, but also that he was mentally incompetent. They petitioned the court to assign him a legal guardian and place him in a long-term care facility.

“The patient has a concerning affect with paranoia,” one doctor wrote. “He is unable to manage his personal care, or to understand complex questions or basic math. … There is no evidence that his significant cognitive impairment will improve.”

Next came the saddest paragraph you’ll see in a court document: “We have not been able to discuss this patient with friends, family members or significant others. The patient has no known contacts.”

But Gaines told court-appointed officials the same thing he would later tell Madrona: No thank you. I don’t wish to have a guardian. I don’t want to go to a nursing home. God bless you, but no.

Officials also admit in court documents that they could find no spots for Gaines at any facility anyway.

So in the fall of 2014, Gaines was discharged alone into the city. Martin said he learned that Gaines did stay for a time at a homeless hotel in Pioneer Square, but then wandered away from there, too.

Since then, he’s been a fixture in Madrona, overnighting on metal bus benches that were impossibly small for his big frame, then lugging his bags up and down the hills. Picture spending even one night like this.

“He was out there winter, spring, summer and fall,” Martin said. “I don’t know how he did it.”

“At one point we offered to build him his own restroom, to add a little bit to his comfort,” Pekaar said. “He said no thank you to that, too.”

Gaines’ death, of heart disease according to the King County medical examiner, has prompted an outpouring of affection and sadness — but also reflection. How could an entire neighborhood try, yet fail, to help a single homeless person? How is Seattle going to succeed with thousands?

Several neighbors were discussing the prospect of “involuntary commitment,” a course of action that some big-city mayors have been mulling lately for scores of people on the streets with mental health or drug addiction problems. Gaines wasn’t harming anyone or committing crimes, though. But was he a threat to himself?

“You can’t make somebody do whatever you think they should do,” counters Pekaar, who doesn’t want Seattle to go down the involuntary commitment path.

Another neighbor, Jessica Kiessel, who led an online wake for Gaines, said she felt he understood the limits of whatever help he might receive. He consciously traded comfort for an autonomy he found priceless.

“Our angst about what to do or not to do, seems to be mostly due to our own egos,” she said. “In the end, James was free to live his life the way he could. He chose to be independent. And he chose to be kind.”

Imagine being dealt this terrible hand, and still having that be your epitaph.

Homeless? Definitely. Cognitively impaired? Technically so. Yet somehow he fashioned his surroundings into a home of sorts, in ways that elude plenty of people in the houses.