Vehicle residents on Ensign Road given two weeks to vacate
Over the past six months, the shoulder of Ensign Road in East Olympia has become home to a growing community of people living in recreational vehicles – as many as 50 vehicles at its peak, according to Olympia’s homeless response coordinator Teal Russell.
Ensign Road, which makes a r-shaped curve from Martin Way, is also the primary thoroughfare for ambulances coming from Olympia to enter Providence St. Peter Hospital.
Last week, after fielding increasing concerns from paramedics, Providence and other nearby medical offices, the city of Olympia decided that the situation on Ensign had gotten out of hand.
The vehicle residents are now being given until Oct. 27 to vacate the area.
City and county staff have been aware of the settlement for months, but the decisive change came in September, when ambulances began to reroute from Ensign to Lilly Road, adding several minutes to each emergency room trip.
“It’s just the worst possible place in terms of impacting the disaster preparedness but also just the work of St. Pete’s to provide emergency care, of getting people there,” said city spokesperson Kellie Purce Braseth.
Medical responders also have expressed concern about the potential for hitting pedestrians, including RV residents, given the speed of the ambulances.
Braseth noted environmental concerns, too: She says the RV residents are dumping hazardous materials in the forest nearby, which is a Class 1 wetland — a state ecological designation that means a rare, environmentally sensitive area.
“The reality is that there is not an alternative location to direct them to right now,” said Assistant City Manager Keith Stahley at the Regional Housing Council (RHC) meeting on Thursday. “In the short term there simply is not an identified option other than people dispersing and finding other locations, both in Olympia, Tumwater, Lacey and the county.”
Stahley is chairing a RHC subcommittee on siting that is working with elected officials from other cities to identify 4-6 potential spots across the county that could be used for sanctioned camping or safe parking.
Ensign Road will remain closed to all parking through the end of the year, Stahley said, but permitted parking may return in 2021.
Nowhere to go
The settlement on Ensign Road began earlier this year with just a few vehicles, but has grown over the past six months to fill most of the curbside parking spots between Martin Way and the hospital complex.
Teal Russell, the city’s homeless response coordinator, estimates the number of vehicles has fluctuated between 43-50 in recent weeks; a few months ago, it was closer to 30.
Since then, a number of RV residents moved to Ensign after being displaced from Deschutes Parkway along Capitol Lake. In August, road work undertaken by the Department of Enterprise Services (DES) required the parkway to be cleared, and state workers then uncovered damage to irrigation infrastructure and wetlands near Percival Cove, prompting DES to permanently close the area to parking, as The Olympian has reported.
RV residents on Ensign counter that they’re parked out of the right-of-way and weren’t given any options on how to rectify the situation.
They also have nowhere to go, since the city has no public spaces where it’s legal to permanently park an RV.
Alysia Reeves moved to Washington from Portland in 2006. She and her husband, Jon, live in a 30-foot trailer with Alysia’s mother, Lynda McBee, who suffers from fibromyalgia and uses a wheelchair, along with close friend, and three seizure-alert service dogs.
In the past the family subleased a house from a friend, but the arrangement fell through and they’ve been living out of trailers and, for awhile, the SUV that pulls their trailer, ever since.
“We’re on like 16 different waiting lists, and it never seems to get closer,” Alysia said of their search for housing.
Even though Jon works as a contractor and Alysia’s mother receives income from social security, they still can’t find housing. Jon has a felony conviction on his record, and has been evicted in the past — he’s basically un-housable, he said.
“Without a place like this, we’re cruising parking lots. You get a day, maybe two days before you’re booted out and you’ve got to move again,” Jon said.
Lacking a voice
Alysia and Jon Reeves both testified at Tuesday’s city council meeting to plead for more time. Like many other RV residents on Ensign, they feel like their voices were ignored, and that no one from the city talked to them or proposed alternatives before deciding they had to go.
“It’s not idyllic, no, but it’s certainly not the answer to just make us go on the 27th,” said a woman named Deborah, who asked that her last name be omitted. “This is my home and I don’t want to be shoved aside because I’m poor.”
Deborah, 63, spent the better part of her life raising her disabled son. For the past 5 years, she lived with a friend in Olympia while caring for her son, who was in an assisting living facility in Puyallup, until he passed away earlier this year. When the friend lost the house, she used her stimulus check to purchase a mobile home, but hasn’t been able to find a space she can afford in a mobile home park.
Deborah says she wants the city to help her rather than push her aside.
“I’m capable. Give me a hand up, give me a way out, give me assistance in making everything better for everybody. When I better my life, it betters everybody around me, obviously,” she said
City spokeswoman Braseth said that the residents’ frustrations are understandable, but the needs of emergency vehicles and their patients to access the county’s largest hospital take precedence.
“I certainly understand why they feel that way, but we have a responsibility to the greater community to make sure that we can keep that road safe for emergency response, around public safety and public health,” she told The Olympian.
McBee and other RV residents drew up a letter they shared with The Olympian, which proposes working with the city and hospital to create a code of conduct and asks for help to enforce those rules and remove those who don’t comply. Residents stressed that they’d be willing to abide by whatever rules the city wanted to put in place.
However, Braseth replied that the public safety risks posed by the settlement could not be solved by simply cleaning the area or limiting the number of residents.
“I struggle to see how we can mitigate the public safety and public health issues because of where it is, on the edge of the largest hospital in Thurston County, where emergency vehicles are going all the time, next to a Class 1 wetland,” Braseth said. “It’s just too big of a problem, and it just can’t be there. That area particularly is just not a place for people to be living in such concentrations on the right-of-way.
“There are no places to appropriately dispose of human waste from RVs on that road,” Braseth added.
No safe parking sites
All of the residents that spoke with The Olympian said they’d be happy to relocate to a different site if given the option.
“We specially asked that, if it comes down to we absolutely cannot be here, then all we ask in exchange is, help us find somewhere else that we can legally be at,” said Micky Nelson, who shares an RV with two friends.
Nelson has been homeless since he was 17. He’s bounced around tent encampments in Olympia and stayed in a friend’s house for a few months, until the friend was evicted. Now he’s living in an RV on Ensign and on a waiting list for a housing voucher.
Nelson says he’d be willing to move just about anywhere, if given any options.
“Even an unused parking lot somewhere, we’re okay with that,” Nelson said. “We just want somewhere where we don’t have to worry every day that somebody’s going to come down and tell us that we have to move or not.
“It’s a fact of life, you have to have stability for your life to function at all,” Nelson said.
Nelson wants people to understand that he doesn’t want to be here either. He certainly doesn’t want to stay forever. Like the others here, he wants help getting into real housing.
“There are a lot of misconceptions about homelessness. Two of the biggest ones are that we want to stay here, we want to stay homeless, and that we’re all drug addicts,” Nelson said. “We know this is not a permanent thing no matter what. All of our goals are to move into permanent housing.”
Braseth said the city is prepared to offer a few nights in a hotel and spaces at the mitigation site downtown.
On Thursday, Russell and other city staff, including Downtown Ambassadors and staff from the Familiar Faces program, set up a tent at Ensign to talk with residents and try to connect them with services.
Russell said she’s hoping to make sure residents have identification and get looped into Coordinated Entry, the county-wide system that assesses individuals’ housing options based on their level of need.
“We’ve worked really hard to try and do our part and do our best around homelessness, to show care for folks experiencing homelessness and to put our money where our mouth is on these things, but the problem is bigger than us,” Braseth said.
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