Clearing of encampment on Deschutes Parkway appears to be postponed
The planned clearance of the Deschutes Parkway houseless encampment appears to be postponed.
A notice distributed by landowners to encampment residents on Tuesday asked them to vacate by Saturday or “face removal” by the Olympia Police Department.
However, reached by phone on Friday, Lt. Paul Lower said OPD had “no plans to escort (the landowners) or be there” on Saturday.
All was quiet at the encampment on Saturday morning, and no police or city officials were visible.
Lower said he not seen the notice but said it sounded like “standard language” that a property owner might use. A representative of the landowners reached out to OPD for “advice” and requested a walking patrol officer accompany them to distribute the notice, but that was the extent of OPD’s involvement, according to Lower.
Multiple calls to the city code enforcement office, who accompanied the landowners on Tuesday, were unreturned as of Saturday.
At the encampment on Friday, residents were cleaning up trash. Many said they hoped they’d be allowed to stay longer, because they don’t know where else to go.
Brandi Deule was one of the first few people to settle here last year.
Deule was born and raised in Olympia but spent some time in a tiny mining town in northern Nevada, where she worked the front desk of a casino and hotel. She remembers coming back home and being struck by how much homelessness had expanded in Olympia. She never thought she’d be one of those people, but after some “bad relationship choices,” she found herself living in a car with her then-boyfriend. It was a “claustrophobic” situation, Deule said.
“One day I woke up and I was sleeping in my Jeep in front of Walmart,” Deule said.
After the relationship ended, she pitched a tent in a downtown Olympia parking lot known as the “Smart Lot,” across the street from the Intercity Transit station. Deule later moved a few blocks north to the city’s mitigation site, and then to the Fourth Avenue bridge encampment.
“I didn’t plan on being homeless and I don’t plan to be homeless forever,” Deule said.
Initially when she moved down by the train tracks, she made a conscious effort to cap the number of tents at ten and enforce screening criteria for who could move in. The goal was to keep the “drama” that comes with bigger groups, like those under the bridge, at bay.
She says at that time she was in touch with one of the landowners and had a “verbal agreement” that they could stay if things were kept orderly and low key.
A few months ago, however, the number of tents started growing seemingly overnight. With more than 50 people here now, it’s become much harder to manage, Deule says.
Mike Stone met Deule in the Smart Lot, and they’ve bounced around encampments and the mitigation site in the years since. Stone grew up in Guam but arrived in Olympia a few years ago because he has some extended family in the area. These days he works five days a week as a line cook at a restaurant he preferred not be named. He’s seen the encampment grow, but says it’s still preferable to the densely packed tent cities they lived in before.
Shaun Glasgow arrived at the encampment just three weeks ago, and has been helping Deule clean the site.
Years ago, Glasgow was married and commuted to an IT job in Redmond. He remembers “basically living” in his car because he couldn’t afford housing in King County and was driving all the time. Eventually he lost his job and got divorced, and that’s when things started unraveling.
In 2015, Glasgow pitched a tent at a weekly campsite in Nisqually Campground and has been living outside around Olympia on and off ever since, including three stints in the mitigation site. He knows many of the other encampment residents from there and other campsites, including the Smart Lot, where he met Duele.
Duele, Stone, and Glasgow are hoping they’ll be able to stay at least in the interim, given that the city’s shelters and the mitigation site are full – though neither would be keen to go back there even if there was space.
“Most of these people have been in and been out (of the mitigation site),” Glasgow said. “For whatever reason people get kicked out, washed out, or just don’t want to be there.”
The group has been trying to address some of the property owners’ concerns, including open fires and loud arguments.
Glasgow says he takes the lessons he learned in marriage counseling and applies them to disputes at the encampment.
“There’s a certain way we can live out here and be at peace with the public and the city and the property owners,” he said.
In the short term, they believe the city has more pressing priorities than kicking them out, especially given the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“In the meantime, there’s a lot of things that we still have to do to ensure that when they do come around and the property owner does get involved, they’ll go, ‘I don’t see all the trash that was once around, and you guys seem like you’re doing alright for yourselves and living civilly,’” Glasgow said.
Brandon Block is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. He is covering housing and homelessness. His position is supported by Report for America and by donations from Olympian readers, the Washington State Employee Credit Union (WSECU), and the Community Foundation of South Puget Sound.
This story was originally published June 27, 2020 at 12:21 PM.
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