Olympia’s embattled tent city will leave downtown in 2022
Nearly three years ago, Olympia made headlines by opening a legal tent camping site for homeless people in a downtown parking lot.
Now the city is preparing to move the site — which started as a tent encampment but now hosts “microhouses” — to a property the city is acquiring just outside downtown at 1211 Quince St. SE, near the on-ramp to Interstate 5.
City officials confirmed the plans in an interview with The Olympian on Thursday.
“When we established the mitigation site back in 2018, we said that it was going to be a temporary facility,” said Assistant City Manager Keith Stahley. “But as we’ve gotten into this and continued to operate the facility and continued to see the impacts of the facility, we’ve decided that three years is long enough.”
The move is planned for six months from now, by the end of March 2022, Stahley said.
That is welcome news to some nearby business owners, who opposed the site from the beginning and have continued to pressure the city to move it away from downtown.
“It’s an ongoing battle down here,” said Pete Lea, who owns a mechanic shop on the next block over that his father started in 1971, as well as a lot directly adjacent to the mitigation site. “Every day you never know what you’re up against. ... We are very, very excited to have them moving out of here.”
Lea was one of the “John Does” who anonymously sued the city in 2018 seeking to stop the site from opening. He pulled out of the lawsuit after the lawyer, who he thought was working pro-bono, started charging him fees, but has continued his advocacy at monthly meetings with the mayor and city officials.
Lea listed a series of negative impacts, from people pitching tents and starting bonfires on his property, to having his shop broken into and a car motor stolen. An artesian well on his property was broken.
Stahley acknowledged that the concerns of nearby businesses and property owners factored into the decision to move the mitigation site.
“We understand that a facility like this is going to have impacts,” he said.
Where the site will move
Last month, the Olympia City Council voted to pay $2.175 million to acquire a 1.4-acre parcel where a Quality Inn hotel burned, not once but twice — first in May 2020, and then again a year later.
The purchase agreement specifies that the deal won’t be closed until the seller, Chandra Holdings LLC, demolishes the existing charred structure, which Stahley said is nearly finished. After that follows a 30-day period before the sale is closed.
The plan to move the mitigation site comes just three months after the city spent $172,000 to replace the tents at the current mitigation site with 70 “microhouses,” which are similar to tiny houses.
Stahley didn’t know how much it would cost to move the microhouses, along with the 74 people currently living there, but offered nearby Plum Street Village — which cost $405,000 to construct 29 tiny homes — as a point of comparison.
As for the existing mitigation site at Franklin and Olympia Avenue, Stahley said the city is looking at partnering with a nonprofit to redevelop it into permanent supportive housing or workforce housing.
Remembering the downtown mitigation site
The experiment of operating a tent village in the middle of Olympia’s downtown was fraught from the beginning.
Conceived as a response to a rapid increase in the number of tent encampments pitched downtown over a short timeframe in late 2018, it was at once heralded as forward-thinking by some and vilified by others.
As the city prepared to open the site in December 2018, a group of 10 anonymous downtown business owners filed a lawsuit to stop it, in which they described homeless camps as “sources of disease and refuges for dissolute behavior.” A Thurston County Superior Court judge temporarily halted people from moving in for two weeks, but ultimately denied the business owners’ attempt to seek a longer-term injunction to stop the site from operating.
Doug Heay, who owns a construction company and purchased a property directly adjacent to the mitigation site just months before it opened, was one of the few people willing to list his name on the lawsuit, which he ultimately dropped in February 2021.
The city’s plans to move the site were news to him when The Olympian spoke with him on Friday, but he reiterated concerns about people pitching tents and leaving needles outside his property, which he now uses as vehicle storage.
“There was no way we could open a storefront business down there in that neighborhood,” Heay said. “People just wouldn’t come. ... Of course everybody wants it not in their neighborhood I’m sure, but it’s where businesses are being drastically affected as to be able to make a living.”
What the new mitigation site will look like
The Quality Inn site is roughly four times larger than the existing mitigation site and could accommodate more tiny houses, Stahley said, making for a “more relaxed and comfortable living environment, maybe lowering the overall stress level there.”
Skip Steffen, executive director of Union Gospel Mission, a nearby shelter that managed the mitigation site from its opening until March 2020, said that one of the big challenges was trying to fit so many people into a small space in a dense downtown neighborhood.
“The goal was to try and get as many people as possible off the street, which is a laudable goal, but the downside to that is you’ve really compressed them into a small space,” Steffen said. “It exacerbates tensions that might exist.”
Catholic Community Services (CCS), which employs 11 people to manage the mitigation site, recently received a $1.15 million contract extension from the city, which runs through the end of 2022. Gabe Ash, a program manager for CCS who oversees the mitigation site, declined to comment for this story, citing the fact that the city has not completed the purchase of the new property.
Although moving the site from downtown would benefit him, Heay was not optimistic about the mitigation site’s long-term prospects.
“I don’t know the answers to this whole thing and I don’t claim to, but it just seems like there is lots of money spent and not much help for those people,” Heay said.
“They just seem to want to do the same thing over again.”
This story was originally published August 23, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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