Help us out at great events like the upcoming Seattle Maritime Festival and the MarketShare Campaign Launch Party (thanks for signing up for that one, Dani Rice!) and you’ll get free entry to all kinds of events, an Evergrey tee, some fun swag, first dibs on cool opportunities that come our way, a chance to meet all kinds of people that know how to #livelikeyoulivehere, and, of course, all our ❤

Think you might want to join the Evergrey street team? Our next training is at 6 p.m. on Monday, May 7, and yes, there’ll be doughnuts. 🍩 Got questions? Let’s chat. Hit reply or shoot us a note at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

Grab a seat and a cup of tea, ‘cause we’ve gathered up some of the more engaging, in-depth articles we’ve seen this week for you to sink into this weekend…  

When your mom struggles with homelessness. There’s no shortage of writing and reporting about homelessness in Seattle. We have the third largest unsheltered population in the country, and while everyone from city officials to 77 King County service organizations are trying to do something about it, we haven’t found a lot of answers, and more and more of our neighbors need help.

In this essay, local Melody Clark tells us about her mom, a hard-working woman with a master’s degree and no home to call her own. “Fight that part of you that separates ‘them’ from ‘us,’ and silence that inner judgmental voice that says it’s their fault, that it’s their choice they are homeless, that if they just worked hard enough or pulled their bootstraps up far enough they wouldn’t be in that situation,” Melody writes. “It’s often not true, and it’s never productive.” (Curbed Seattle)

‘There are too many of us to live like that.’ A programmer named Zach Lubarsky is on a mission to change our zoning laws. Why? So that neighborhoods with houses that few people can afford become neighborhoods with multi-family buildings people don’t need a ton of money to buy or rent. Of course, not a ton of locals want to see the places they live and love transform overnight, and Zach’s story says a lot about just how tough it is for all of us to come together on the best ways to grow. (Politico)

Macklemore is the sweetest. Our hometown hip-hop star wrote a love letter to his producer in City Arts this week, and no, it’s not Ryan Lewis. It’s Tyler Dopps, a dude who keeps out of the limelight but has meant the world to Macklemore, a.k.a. Ben Hammond Haggerty. His tribute is full of details about life on the road — it “looks a lot better in 15-second Instagram videos than it does at 5:30 a.m. in a bus bunk when you can’t sleep and have debilitating acid reflux from the pizza you ate three hours earlier” — and the kind of friendship that grows so true you hardly even feel it. (City Arts)

Dig that Macklemore piece? Like supporting local media? Then you might consider giving City Arts some love: “We are running a big campaign right now to support our imminent independence as we leave the nest of Encore and look to grow our platform,” reader and City Arts editor Leah Baltus wrote us. “We’re inviting people to become Founding Members of the NEW City Arts as a way to help us during the transition.” Intrigued? Find out more about the campaign here.

NOT-CREEPY MIXER ROUND 2! ❤

On Tuesday we told you about tonight’s “The Not-Creepy Gathering for People Who Are Single and Want to Fall In Love.” Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur wrote to her readers about the event the same day, and that was that. “It sold out SO QUICKLY (thank you!!!), we’ve added another date, May 17,” organizer Jenna Bean Veatch wrote us. Want to fall in love without getting creeped out? Here’s where you can RSVP for that new Seattle event. But hurry. Jenna was also on KUOW yesterday, so the ticket clock is ticking…

Have a good one, all. We’ll see you Monday. — The Evergrey