SEATTLE – This winter, 68 homeless men and women settled into an organized camp in a leafy hillside neighborhood of this city. The flaps of their colorful tents were mere feet from five-bedroom homes worth more than $700,000.

Not far away, another camp set up in and around an old city firehouse, was two blocks from the rush-hour buzz of an avenue packed with restaurants and yoga studios. A third took shape across the street from City Hall in Kirkland, a lakeside enclave east of Seattle that is one of Washington's more affluent communities.

It took years to get here, but tent cities for the homeless are now enmeshed in the fabric of the greater Seattle community. Nearly 300 men and women are living in the region's three tent cities under the gray winter skies of the Pacific Northwest. The camps, which rely on food donated by churches, relocate every three months or so. And with each rotation, the protests to their existence fade.

Could this be Sacramento's future?

After years of debate, Sacramento homeless advocates and City Hall are closing in on a proposal for a sanctioned tent city.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson said last week that he is frustrated that a plan has not materialized. He said a tent city could provide a place for the homeless to transition into permanent housing and "integrate back into mainstream society."

The biggest hurdle so far has been concerns over where the camp would be located. Critics also warn that creating a sanctioned camp would attract and enable the homeless.

The tent city movement in Seattle was launched amid similar division. And while resistance has dimmed, it wasn't always easy.

The first tent city sprouted in Seattle in 1990, but faced with opposition, it morphed into a church-run shelter. Another camp followed but was flattened by bulldozers in 1998.

Eventually, advocates cut deals with local officials that allowed two camps to operate on a rotating basis – but that was more than a decade into the debate.

Now, two decades into the effort, city officials – and many residents – see the camps as a sign of progress rather than a source of problems.

"We are a more compassionate city because of this," said Kirkland Mayor Joan McBride, "and we have a better idea of what the downturn in our economy has meant because it's right in front of us."

A community of homeless

The tent cities around Seattle run on a system of self-governance, where residents elect leadership councils and vote weekly on matters such as whether to require hand sanitizer in the kitchen tent and who should take charge of cleaning blankets.

There is zero tolerance toward drug and alcohol use; profanity and spitting are discouraged. No more than 100 campers are allowed at each site.

The encampments are managed by nonprofit organizations, and nearly all financial support comes through fundraising. Residents work security shifts, screening visitors for arrest warrants and patrolling the cramped aisles between tents.

Just as the tent city movement in Sacramento involves only a subgroup of the county's 2,900 homeless, those living in Seattle's camps represent only one segment of the 6,000 people in the region without permanent shelter. A recent one-night count found more than 1,000 people living in cars or on the streets in Seattle.

Still, in both cities, the groups are led by vocal advocates who have the attention of city leaders.

Some residents of Seattle's tent cities said they live there by choice and always will. They see themselves as part of a social justice movement.

"Everything here is a community of homeless men and women who got together for safety," Monty Smith, 34, a resident of Tent City 3 in Seattle, said on a recent afternoon as quarter-sized snowflakes fell on his camp. "And when a man has shelter and is part of a community, he's going to do better."

'Nothing is perfect'

Smith's storyline is one heard often in the camps.

The economy took a lot from him, driving him from a job as a machinist in Detroit. A relapse into his crack addiction took care of the rest.

He ended up on the streets of Seattle, though he had gone there chasing better prospects. After several weeks, he found his way to the tent city in the Meadowbrook neighborhood, in the parking lot of a church surrounded by spacious homes and tree-lined blocks.

Now, with the tone of an evangelist and the persistence of a car salesman, he extols the virtues of a system he said gives much-needed stability to dozens of people.

"If you live on the streets, you're more likely not to wake up in the morning," he said.

Many residents said the tent cities give them the footing they need to get into transitional housing and, eventually, a permanent home. Drugs and violence are rampant in city shelters, which kick the homeless out by 7 a.m., requiring them to take their belongings with them.

On a recent afternoon, roughly a dozen of Smith's fellow residents were at the camp. The rest, campers said, were seeking work or services.

At night, the camp community comes together. An orderly line formed at Tent City 3 when women from a local church came by with vegetable casserole.

As the residents watched the movie "Bad Boys II" in a large open tent, their dinners gave off an aromatic steam in the cold night air. Many spoke excitedly about that evening's camp council meeting.

Being part of that secure community is what drove Wade Graham, 48, and Susan Smith, 43, to Tent City 3. The couple met last year and followed a common path: house, apartment, car, streets. They had been homeless since last summer before finding the tent city in January.

"Nothing is perfect," said Smith, a recovering alcoholic, "but it's organized and they don't tolerate a lot."

Graham, a recovering drug addict, describes many of his fellow residents as "people who would be one step away from pushing shopping carts." When the couple arrived at the tent city, said Graham, "We were wet and had nothing but the clothes on our backs."

Now they share a large mattress in a neatly packed tent, where they keep dry clothes and clean shoes in milk crates. They have both seen doctors and are on a list for low-income housing.

"Maybe we can get our lives back," Graham said.

Push for a permanent site

Tent City 3 started in 2000 and has relocated more than 60 times. Tent City 4, now in Kirkland, followed in 2004 and rotates mostly through the upscale towns on the eastern shores of Lake Washington, a few miles from downtown Seattle.

Both have withstood lawsuits and operate almost exclusively in the parking lots of houses of worship.

"When we started, people were afraid we'd eat their children and rob their homes," said Bruce Thomas, 60, a resident of Tent City 4. "But just because someone is homeless, it doesn't mean they're a criminal and it doesn't mean they're stupid."

Local officials said the camps have proved to be good neighbors, which has defused resistance. Residents in both camps, for example, do daily trash cleanups in the surrounding neighborhoods.

The camps' self-policing model is also lauded. McBride, the mayor of Kirkland, said camp leaders strictly enforce the laws, prohibiting campers even to jaywalk. Crime has not increased around the site, she said.

Police in Kirkland conduct daily patrols inside the camp, and the department "has become one of the main groups that talks about the tent city and how good it is," McBride said.

The rotating camps are considered so successful that Seattle city leaders are looking to take the concept to a new level: creating a permanent city-sanctioned tent city in an industrial area south of downtown.

Deputy Mayor Darryl Smith said the city envisions "a place where community residents would be able to have a soft landing," with on-site job and health services.

Smith said the camp would cost around $265,000 a year to operate. Much like the rotating tent cities, it would be run by a third-party organization and limited to 100 residents.

Mayor Mike McGinn wants the camp open by next winter, but there has been some push-back.

Four members of the City Council last week held up the plan on procedural issues. The local business association opposes the location, saying it's too far from services and too close to other areas where many homeless camp illegally. A lawsuit appears likely.

But the mayor's office is confident the proposal will move forward.

"We're not going into this with rose-colored glasses thinking we're going to solve the issue or, frankly, that we're going to have wildly huge numbers," Smith said. "But we do believe we can help at some level."

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