WSDOT will pay to remove Wheeler homeless camp near I-5
People living at the homeless encampment along Wheeler Avenue next to Interstate 5 will have to relocate within the next six months.
The Olympia City Council approved an agreement last week with the Washington state Department of Transportation (WSDOT), which owns the land where the encampment sits. WSDOT will pay the city $200,000 to help remove and clean the camp and transition residents to alternative shelter, but it’s not clear where.
Although the contract does not specify a time frame, Assistant City Manager Keith Stahley told The Olympian that six months “would be ideal.” Discussions with the DOT about the Wheeler camp have been ongoing for roughly three years, said Stahley, who described the Wheeler camp as “the most problematic right now.”
“Obviously it’s highly visible, there are streams and wetlands in the area that are directly out-falling into Budd Inlet, there are issues in regards to encroachment into the right-of-way from a transportation perspective, interfering with people entering the I-5 corridor at speed,” Stahley said. “When you put all those things together, it isn’t an ideal place for people to live.”
The homeless encampment on the other side of Wheeler Avenue, known as Nickerson, will not be affected, Stahley said.
After the Wheeler camp is removed, the contract specifies that WSDOT will make the area less hospitable to camping by adding fencing, cutting down brush or trees, or adding debris, a process referred to in the contract as “hardening.”
In a statement released on Wednesday, the city referred to the project as a “clean-up” and emphasized the city’s goal of using case managers to transition camp residents into “sanctioned camping, shelter, or housing.”
The city’s sanctioned camping site is typically full, although a planned relocation scheduled for this March may open up some extra spots. Stahley said there is “not necessarily” any additional capacity in the shelter or permanent supportive housing system that would open up new spots, but he is optimistic about the possibilities afforded by a countywide Home Fund, which the county commissioners are set to vote on next week.
Thurston County’s shelter system contains 347 beds, if you include Olympia’s downtown homeless mitigation site (which began as a tent encampment but now hosts microhouses). That’s not nearly enough to accommodate the need: at least 639 unsheltered people were located by the 2021 Point-in-Time count, an annual tally that is widely understood to be an undercount.
Stahley did not say whether the city was under pressure from the DOT to remove the camp, but added that DOT is “not structured to be a homeless response agency, so their interest is to, whenever possible, to move people out of the right-of-way.”
Last October, someone exploded a portable toilet at a homeless encampment near Wheeler Avenue.
This story was originally published January 19, 2022 at 2:22 PM.
.jpg)