I know, you can make all sorts of arguments against this guy staying, that local gov’t does have the authority to police themselves (which I agree with given my Federalist leanings), and on and on…
But who is the guy really hurting?
– LK
(article from Fox News)
Tree House Days Over for Seattle’s Squirrelman
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
David ‘Squirrelman’ Csaky
To his Seattle neighbors, he’s known as “Squirrelman.”
David Csaky has been living in a homemade tree house with million-dollar views of a lake and Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill for the past three years, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
“I was happy as hell,” Csaky, 52, told the paper. But his joy has come to an end as officials kicked him off of his perch, constructed on other people’s property.
Three summers ago, after a failed marriage and business and the loss of his home — a Jeep lost because of unpaid parking tickets — Csaky noticed a linden tree in an unused lot owned by the city’s utility company, City Light, the Post-Intelligencer said.
• Click here to see photos of the Squirrelman’s loft
Csaky stuck a piece of plywood in the lot, creating a platform large enough for him to raise a tent, and began construction on his tree house, the paper said.
“He’s built this amazing tree house in the middle of a city,” Janet Yoder, one of Csaky’s neighbors, told the paper. “I certainly believe he’s not a threat of any kind to anyone.”
Jim Ross, owner of Ross Laboratories and another of Csaky’s neighbors, agrees. “He’s kind of become the neighborhood watchdog,” he told the paper.
But Seattle officials see things differently. Workers with the city Transportation Department have decided Squirrelman must go.
According to a citizen report, Csaky is in violation of a number of longstanding policies regarding encampments, precedents, liability and rights of way, the paper said. A 48-hour eviction notice posted on his hand-cobbled gate means David’s days on the unused City Light-owned lot at 3100 Eastlake Ave. East are over.
Squirrelman has nowhere to go. Officials have approached him with a list of shelters that don’t accept pets — Csaky lives with pet rat “Lucky,” a ferret named “Rainbow” and an off-balance squirrel called “Tilt” — but all Squirrelman really wants is to live it out for a few more years in his handmade home, the paper said.
“How much longer am I going to be able to climb that ladder?” he told the Post-Intelligencer. “Just leave me alone for a few years and I’ll be gone anyway.”
Lemur King's Folly 