As notice to vacate looms for Deschutes Parkway campers, residents have nowhere to go
Last month, landowners distributed a three-day notice to vacate to residents camped on private property along Deschutes Parkway in Olympia. That deadline was delayed for a month, until Thursday, July 23.
The land where the encampment sits is a patchwork owned by at least 11 individual landowners, eight of whom live in homes at the top of the hill.
Reached Tuesday, Olympia Police Lt. Paul Lower said they have no plans to enforce the notice, because it is a civil matter between the landowners and residents. But after discussions with the landowners, volunteers will help campers move Thursday — although there is nowhere for them to go.
The homeowners have been concerned with open fires, finding human feces and used syringes on the property, and damage to the wetlands, according to a July 13 letter sent to the Thurston County Board of Commissioners from Just Housing Olympia and co-signed by the property owners and several faith communities.
Multiple homeowners have been contacted by Olympic Regional Clean Air Agency (ORCAA) about open fires at the encampment, as The Olympian previously reported.
According to Assistant Fire Chief Mike Buchanan, the Olympia Fire Department responded to four calls about “unauthorized burning” at the encampment since January and several more “smoke scares,” but he wasn’t aware of any uncontrolled fires specifically related to the encampment that threatened nearby properties.
The Just Housing/homeowner letter asked the County Commissioners to step in and “create sanctioned, safe, and sanitary shelter” for the encampment residents.
“After over 10 months of tolerating the growing health and safety concerns associated with the encampment, the property owners have decided that they can no longer allow for the encampment to remain on their property,” the letter reads.
The camp began with just a few tents, but has grown rapidly in the past few months to about 70 people.
The letter says that landowners will now face thousands of dollars of environmental remediation costs.
It also argues that it is unfair to rely on private individuals and faith communities to shoulder the burden of the regional homelessness crisis.
“The decision to sweep this camp only lies in the hands of these property owners because we, as a region, have failed to take responsibility for our collective issues,” the letter reads in part.
Tye Gundel, an organizer with Just Housing says that without action, the 70 residents will likely end up on other private property or “dispersed across the streets of downtown.”
“The most realistic thing that they can do is designate an area right now for people to move to, even if that’s not the space they want people to be in long-term, but just designate, this is where you can move to while we work on this other solution,” said Gundel.
Just Housing has been assisting residents with cleanup and is soliciting donations for cleaning supplies and help with moving residents out on Thursday.
According to Thurston County Homeless Prevention Coordinator Keylee Marineau, one major challenge with designating county land for sanctioned camping is that most county-owned parcels are located within city limits of another jurisdiction.
One site proposed by Just Housing is a gravel lot at Martin Way and Carpenter Road that was considered, then tabled as a mitigation site by the Lacey City Council last year.
That property is owned by the county but is within the Lacey urban growth area.
Marineau said that getting a site like that online would require the approval of both Thurston County and Lacey City Council, which have shown different degrees of “political will” on tackling homelessness.
Lacey City Council recently launched a citizen-led committee on homelessness response, which will take one year to generate suggestions for council to then consider.
Gundel urged quicker action, saying that even having a temporary site would help.
“Sure, maybe any of those options would be seen as high risk, [but] it’s high-risk to just let people go without anywhere for people to go,” Gundel said. “It’s a risky move to just allow people to leave this place without designating another place. That’s not any good either.”
Gundel added that a number of faith communities have taken people in after previous sweeps, but many are tight on space and few are keen to take on the large number of encampment residents indefinitely.
“The [faith communities] who are willing to consider putting folks on their property are much more willing to do so when they can see a clear timeline,” Gundel said. “It’s a very different question to be asking faith communities to take on hosting 20 people indefinitely versus saying that they’ll only be hosting them for 3-6 months. So we feel pretty strongly that if faith communities had more certainty that the county or the city were actively planning to create an alternative shelter for folks to move to eventually, that the faith communities would be more likely to consider taking people in temporarily.”
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 July 22, 2020 at 2:29 PM.
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