SEATTLE — So dangerous is this city's biggest homeless camp, called the Jungle — three ragged miles stitched along the underbelly of Interstate 5 — that if a fire broke out there today, firefighters would not be allowed in without an armed police escort. State lawmakers are considering a razor-wire fence around the camp, separating it from the city at a cost of $1 million.
This is Darrel Sutton's world. Sutton, 52, a slight, soft-spoken former roofing worker who has struggled for years with heroin addiction, said he had been attacked twice in his five years in the Jungle, once with a pipe, another time with a tent pole — both times for no reason he ever figured out.
"You're always watching your back," Sutton said in an interview outside a methadone clinic on the camp's edge.
Seattle is booming with tech-driven economic growth, an envy of the nation in many regards. But a recent blood-drenched attack in the Jungle that left two people shot to death and three others wounded has thrown open a window onto a kind of parallel city hidden in the shadows under the highway, and sent a paroxysm of shock through people who had long looked the other way.
Police and fire department crews have responded to trouble in the camp more than 820 times in the last five years, including 70 violent incidents, 500 emergency medical calls and 250 fires. Last year was the worst for violence in a decade. The shootings last month led to the arrests of three teenage brothers, who are homeless themselves and now in jail.
"You step in there, and it's like you're not even in the United States anymore," said Harold Scoggins, the chief of the Seattle Fire Department, who went into the Jungle after the shootings with a group of public health and safety officials for two days of study.
Most big cities have a Jungle by some other name — a stretch of woods by the railroad tracks, an industrial property gone to seed, a skid row. And in other big cities with major homeless populations, like Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, the problem is also front and center on the streets.
But Seattle, where Mayor Edward B. Murray declared a state of emergency over homelessness in November, is being looked to as a model by some other cities because of its strategy of setting aside areas for authorized tent camps that are overseen by social service agencies and governed by rules of conduct. On Friday, for example, city councilors from Sacramento paid an official visit to Seattle's designated tent cities to weigh adopting the strategy back home.
The Jungle, however, is not an authorized camp, and the same week the California officials visited, the Washington Legislature began deliberating whether to build an 8,000-foot-long fence to enclose it.
Motorists long drove in traffic lanes above the Jungle every day without noticing the squalor below, but now a place that was out of mind has suddenly become the symbol of a city's failure, some residents say.
Piles of garbage line parts of this barren, dirt-packed world. Expansion joints from the elevated highway clatter like nonstop drums overhead. Neatly tended and zipped tents are interspersed with squalor — shoes, sleeping bags and clothes strewn in chaos.
"What does that say about us as a society?" asked Christopher Goodwin, 52, who lives on a boat in north Seattle and said he had spoken to many of the homeless people in his neighborhood, visiting the Jungle as well.
Goodwin said he believed that some people did choose this lifestyle, and that drugs dashed others' lives into wreckage. But ultimately, he said, Seattle allowed the Jungle to become what it is. "We created their ability to live there," he said.
In a report released last month about conditions in the Jungle, Scoggins and his team said they had found blight, misery and filth beyond anything they had imagined. They described hearing tales from residents of heroin addiction and trafficking, depravity and sexual violence that never make it onto police blotters.
"The human waste, the solid waste, the drugs, the tents — even when you have areas of poverty around the world, you don't see it all in one place," Scoggins said.
More than 10,000 people live without permanent shelter here in King County, which has a total population of just over 2 million. That makes the homeless population of the county — which also declared a state of emergency over homelessness last fall — higher than that of any large metropolitan area other than New York and Los Angeles, according to the federal government. And the latest one-night count, conducted by volunteers last month, only heightened the alarm, with 4,505 homeless people identified in the three-hour survey, up 19 percent since the same count in 2015. Last month's two-day study of the Jungle estimated a population of 400.
As in San Francisco, the boom in technology jobs is transforming Seattle and its economy, pushing up rents and home prices, drawing in newcomers and displacing low-income residents from once-affordable neighborhoods.
At the Jungle, investigators and residents said they were struck by the mix: There were couples living together and people with jobs, but also many hard-core heroin addicts. The three teenagers arrested in last month's shootings — two of whom could face life in prison, charged as adults though the oldest is only 17 — were bent on robbing a Jungle drug dealer of cash and heroin, the police said.
Murray, the mayor, said in an interview that he thought it was a moral and public safety priority to clear out the Jungle — slowly and carefully — and relocate people. Fire concerns alone make the case for action, he said. Scoggins' report cited vast amounts of cooking fuels like propane that could threaten the highway structure itself.
But the city, Murray said, cannot do it alone — both for lack of money and because the Jungle is not on city property. Negotiations with the state, he said, which owns the land beneath the highway, are now underway.
Beyond that, Murray said, the Jungle is really just a mirror of the larger world. Federal money to help build low-income housing has dried up over the years, as have state funds for mental health and addiction treatment. "We as a city have got to come together, so that we can build a movement with other cities and force this on the national agenda," the mayor said.
Jungle residents like Donovan Cates, 43, said there were a lot of misconceptions about life under the highway. The Jungle, he said, is really not one camp but a series of them, divided by the interstate's concrete pillars and supports. His area, he said, with about 20 residents in an industrial zone south of downtown, is better than some.
"Like any neighborhood, people watch out for each other, or they don't," said Cates, who came to Seattle from Montana for a job in a bar in the late 1990s. The bar closed after being damaged in an earthquake, he said, and things went downhill from there. He said that he had no idea where he might go if the camp closed, and that he had "no family to speak of."
But with the Jungle so much in the news since the shootings, he sensed a change in public attitudes every time he stepped out of the camp.
"I get funny looks," he said.