A Seattle business owner has slammed city bureaucrats after he was forced to pay hefty fines when a homeless camp took over his vacant building. 

Sam Hawley criticized city leaders for worsening the challenges he faced after his business, JOANN Fabric and Crafts, went bankrupt earlier this year due to issues with a large homeless population.

He said vagrants quickly took over the property’s parking lot and destroyed the area. 

Before he could upgrade security measures, he received fines for various code violations, including graffiti and the absence of a fence around the empty property.

‘During a week in June, 15 or 20 people moved into the parking lot, and it was kind of chaos,’ Hawley told KOMO. 

He explained that he was in the midst of putting up a $30,000 fence, but while the concrete was still setting, city officials imposed fines on him.

‘That was the first I ever heard from them. There was no forewarning. There was no offering of an attempt to fix it. It just started with fines right away,’ Hawley said. 

‘It’s tough. On one hand, you have the homeless. On the other hand, you have the city coming at you.’ 

Hawley said the response from city officials is all the more frustrating because they refuse to take any action to move the homeless camp from his property, even as locals continually call the cops on the group. 

A Seattle business owner slammed city bureaucrats after he was forced to pay hefty fines when a homeless camp took over his vacant building

Business owner Sam Hawley hit out at Seattle leaders for exacerbating his problems after his business, JOANN Fabric and Crafts (seen before the homeless camp took over), went bankrupt earlier this year

Shocking images showed a number of homeless people have taken over the area, with locals complaining of open-air drug taking opposite a children’s playground

Hawley said the homeless camp has repeatedly had the police called on them for squatting, trespassing and drug taking, but no action is ever taken to permanently keep them from the area. 

He said fury among the community has been growing, particularly due to open drug use across the street from a children’s playground. 

The business owner said he was still reeling from the loss of his firm when the first fines came in June, and he received a fine of $684 from the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) for building code violations. 

Hawley said this meant that he was automatically registered on the city’s ‘Vacant Building Monitoring’ program. 

Stuck in a bureaucratic tailspin, he said that this forced him to shell out another $332 for a follow-up inspection. 

Despite being in compliance with the city’s code after bringing his building within guidelines by that point, Hawley said he was then charged a five percent ‘technology fee’ because of the process he was in. 

‘I understand addressing vacant buildings. I just think this is a little overboard,’ he said. 

The business owner said homeless vagrants quickly started squatting on his lot when it became vacant, while city officials slapped him with fines for code violations almost immediately 

The business owner said the response from city officials is all the more frustrating because they refuse to take any action to move the homeless camp from his property

Washington state owns some of the worst homeless statistics in the nation, with over 16,200 homeless people compared to just 5,600 in New York, a state with over two-and-a-half times its population 

He added that the homeless camp was only able to move in because he was away from the property for one week after Joann Fabric and Crafts closed – which he said was ‘frustrating.’

He said that he began putting up fencing and repairing the squalid conditions almost immediately, but it took some time to line up contractors, in which time the city had already began fining him. 

‘It would just be nice to have a little grace period,’ he concluded to KOMO. 

It comes as Seattle has become one of the hotbeds of homelessness in the US, with recent figures showing the issue is continually growing in the Democrat-led city. 

In the 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment, a report to Congress released in January 2025, analysts found that city leaders are failing to provide even basic shelter to homeless people. 

It comes as Seattle has become one of the hotbeds of homelessness in the US, and has seen an 88 percent surge in homelessness since 2015 

Over 57 percent of the city’s homeless population live without any shelter, compared to just three percent in New York City where officials provide a number of shelters. 

Seattle leaders declared a state of emergency in 2015 over its homelessness crisis, but in the time since the city’s homeless population has surged a staggering 88 percent.  

In Washington state at-large, only the much more populated state of California has a higher homeless population, per the Seattle Times. 

Washington had over 16,200 homeless people in the recent survey, compared to just 5,600 in New York, a state with over two-and-a-half times more people in total. 

Seattle also has six times as many homeless people as Chicago and ten times as many as Philadelphia.