For residents of Olympia’s homeless mitigation site, getting housed is a long shot
Brandi Deule remembers the first day she spent at Olympia’s homeless mitigation site. Deule, who grew up in Olympia, was previously unsheltered for the better part of a decade, cycling around encampments and sometimes sleeping on the street.
“I just reached up and locked the door, and I cried for like 15 minutes,” Deule said of her new micro-shelter home. “That sense of security was really heavy on me.”
Over the next six months, however, that enthusiasm waned.
Her partner was permanently evicted from the site, and subsequently she began to feel like the staff was treating her with suspicion. At one point, she was kicked out of the site for three days over a fight she says she wasn’t even present for.
When Deule arrived, she had been eager to use the site as a stepping stone into a tiny house or her own apartment, but found the staff to be more concerned with controlling residents’ behavior then getting them into permanent housing.
“I was like a month in, and I was like, so when do we start talking about getting out of here? Because I was looking around at some of the people, some of those people have been in there since the mitigation started,” Deule said. “I did not want to be one of those people.”
When Olympia first opened a city-run homeless camp in its downtown core in December 2018, city leaders hoped residents like Deule would get a hand up — first to a nearby tiny house village then under construction, and eventually into permanent housing.
That vision has not panned out.
In the three years since the mitigation site opened, 24 people are documented as securing permanent housing after living there, according to data from the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a statewide database that tracks the movement of people into and out of the shelter system.
In 2021, 85 people left Olympia’s homeless mitigation site, but the largest share were headed back to unsheltered homelessness.
More people have been kicked out of the site than housed from it. But city leaders don’t even know what happened to the vast majority of former residents, because that information wasn’t tracked until May 2020, and nearly a third of participants since then did not complete exit interviews.
“The notion of moving from the mitigation site into housing is really, it’s a longshot right now,” admitted Assistant City Manager Keith Stahley.
Still, the city has budgeted at least $500,000 to relocate the site later this year to a less-central location on Quince Street near the Interstate 5-Plum Street on-ramp. The move is a response to pressure from downtown business owners, some of whom previously sued in an attempt to stop the mitigation site from opening in 2018.
Mitigation struggles amid an overburdened shelter system
Most shelter providers struggle to transition people into permanent housing. Countywide, the rate is just 34%, according to HMIS data from 2021.
Low-cost rentals in the private market, as anyone who surfs Craigslist knows, are almost non-existent.
There is a chronic shortage of supportive housing — Thurston County has the least of any region in the state, according to a 2018 study by the state Office of Financial Management. Unity Commons, which opened in December, is the first new permanent supportive housing built in Thurston County since 2017.
Even getting a tiny house is hard: There are 29 at Plum Street Village, and they’re often full.
City leaders now admit that the initial vision — where those who perform well at the mitigation site can get into a tiny house, and then maybe an apartment — was naïve.
“I think any expectation that there was a steady stream of people moving through the mitigation site into housing, particularly over the last two years, is unrealistic and simply not consistent with what’s going on with our housing market,” Stahley said.
But the mitigation site performs poorly even compared to other shelters.
Nearly 40% of residents who left the mitigation site in 2021 went back to the streets, about double the rate of the shelter system at large. Just 10% of participants were housed in 2020, although that number rose to 20% in 2021.
Gabe Ash, a program director at Catholic Community Services (CCS) which oversees the mitigation site, attributed the low housing success rates to multiple factors, including the pandemic and the residents themselves, many of whom struggle with addiction and behavioral health challenges.
For much of the mitigation site’s history, there has been no case worker on staff focused on connecting residents to housing. CCS hired one last summer, and some residents praise her for being a persistent advocate. One resident said she helped him get his section 8 voucher back after losing it years before, although he has yet to find an apartment that will accept him.
Ash acknowledged that one case manager is not enough for the more than 80 residents, and said more support is necessary to achieve better housing outcomes.
“CCS is now working towards garnering increased funding to grow Case Management services at The Mitigation Site,” Ash wrote in an email to The Olympian.
Gaps in monitoring
It’s possible that more than 24 people obtained housing since the site opened, but the city has no information about housing outcomes during the first 15 months of the site’s operation, because that data was not tracked by city staff or Union Gospel Mission (UGM), the organization then contracted to run the site.
“If anyone who exited the mitigation [site] was connected to housing in 2019, we would not have any data to reflect that,” wrote Strategic Projects Manager Amy Buckler, who presented partial mitigation site housing data to the Land Use Committee last November.
UGM Executive Director Skip Steffen acknowledged that tracking data on where residents went was a “missing link,” but it also wasn’t part of their contract, which was limited to staffing and security at the camp and facilitating access to food and showers at the UGM shelter one block away.
Steffen’s memory of UGM’s tenure is consistent with the more recent data: Success stories were the exception, and it was common for people to cycle back and forth from the mitigation site to unsheltered homelessness.
“I didn’t see a whole lot of people exiting the mitigation site into what I’d consider to be a better realm,” Steffen said.
During the time UGM managed the site, Colin Deforrest, the city’s first homeless coordinator, was in charge of helping residents into housing. Deforrest did not use coordinated entry, the countywide system now used by mitigation site staff to ration scarce shelter and housing spots based on vulnerability.
Stahley defended Deforrest’s performance, noting that he was the sole outreach worker for more than 100 people then living at the site.
“[Colin] didn’t have the time to do individual case management,” Stahley said.
Mitigation site staff only began tracking exit destinations in HMIS in May 2020, one month after management was turned over from Union Gospel Mission to Catholic Community Services (CCS).
It’s hard to say much about the first year of CCS’ management, because of the 48 people who left the site between May and December 2020, and the vast majority of them did not complete exit interviews. Just five left for permanent housing, while two went to transitional housing and two went to live with family.
Ash attributed the missing exit interviews to an administrative backup, saying it took several months after CCS’ contract began to get an account set up with the state department that collects data through HMIS. However, the vast majority of participants missing exit interviews in 2020 left the site after that system was setup in June.
Other participants “left without giving consent to allow staff to enter their full information into HMIS,” Ash wrote in an email.
Data collection practices improved somewhat in 2021, but exit destinations were still unknown for nearly a quarter of participants. That rate is in line with other shelters, according to Arielle Benson, Homeless Program Specialist for Thurston County. Across the countywide shelter system, 29% of exit destinations are unknown.
What is the mitigation site’s purpose?
Some at the city argue that housing is not the primary purpose of the mitigation site, and that it shouldn’t be judged by that benchmark.
Opening a legal homeless camp downtown was the city’s response to a sudden surge in unsheltered homelessness in downtown in late 2018, where hundreds of tents appeared over a matter of months. Around the same time, a federal court ruled in Martin v. Boise that municipal governments could not force homeless people off public property unless they offered alternative shelter.
In that context, the mitigation site serves as an alternative to street camping, reducing conflicts between housed and unhoused people downtown and making homelessness, if not less visible, more contained.
“I’m proud of what Mitigation has accomplished,” wrote Cary Retlin, the city’s former housing programs manager, in an email last year. “Mitigation has remained a place where many people are welcome who might not be able to get into housing or may have been asked to leave other shelters. Mitigation now provides a place that’s safer than the street for many folks who previously were in doorways downtown.”
Evictions and staff treatment of residents
Current and former residents who spoke to The Olympian described staff, with a few exceptions, as largely incapable of dealing with residents’ complex interpersonal challenges. They depicted a management style where staff designate certain residents as “troublemakers” and enforce rules selectively based on those biases.
Advocates with Just Housing, an organization that worked with camps to provide survival, self-governance, and advocacy support, say they’ve regularly encountered people who’ve been kicked out of the mitigation site and describe the eviction process as opaque.
“People were getting kicked out for bogus reasons, and they wouldn’t follow their policy, or they ignored the policy,” said Mark Johnson, a retired social worker who got involved with Just Housing through his church, First United Methodist.
Since management was taken over by CCS in May 2020, 42 people have been kicked out of the site, according to Ash. Some were allowed to return if they agreed to a “behavioral contract.”
Throughout 2020 and the first half of 2021, Johnson and other Just Housing volunteers set up a table with coffee and cookies on the street across from the mitigation site. The residents he spoke to were often afraid to advocate for themselves due to fear of retaliation from staff, he said.
“We’d have conversations with people who were in the site, and they would share stories about, ‘Well I got kicked out because I took too long in the shower,’ or ‘This lady got kicked out because one of the staff came in their tent and she fell over and they said she assaulted her.’”
Johnson met with city staff and the site director from CCS to propose a more robust appeals process that would define what are offenses necessitating eviction and give residents a fair hearing. He says they ultimately adopted much of his language.
A copy of the disciplinary process provided by CCS divides offenses into “minor,” “major,” and “zero-tolerance” categories. It states that residents can bring an advocate to help appeal their expulsion from the site at weekly “solutions-focused” meetings.
Stahley defended CCS’ work and said the city is looking at continuing to contract with them when the site moves later this year. They are contracted to operate the site through the end of 2022 at a cost of $637,877.
‘Just a place to put us’
For Johnson, accepting the mitigation site’s bleak housing outcomes is setting the bar too low.
Although he noted an “incremental improvement” since management turned over to CCS, Johnson said the lack of information and poor housing rates should be cause for concern among city leaders.
“I just think it’s poorly managed that you didn’t even have measures about those outcomes, that you’re telling me you don’t even know who got successfully transitioned, it’s just that they left? To me that is a real, maybe I’m saying it too strongly, I think that’s a failure on the contract and the grant.”
Towards the end of 2021, Deule began to notice black mold growing in her micro-shelter, which grew to cover much of the walls. During the three days she was kicked out, some of her belongings were stolen.
This past December, she was afraid to be downtown following a traumatic incident, and got excused by staff for a few weeks. She eventually began to feel like she was better off outside. These days she mostly sleeps at tent encampments with friends, and occasionally at a friend’s apartment. Some nights she rolls up a sleeping bag in doorways.
But the experience hasn’t been all bad: It was while living at the mitigation site is that Deule stopped using heroin, although she says it didn’t have much to do with living at the site, where she described drug use as common.
More than anything, she feels disappointed.
“I had so many more hopes for that place,” Deule said. “It’s basically just a place to put us so we’re not on the street. … It’s a place to put you so everybody doesn’t have to see you.”
This story was originally published February 18, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
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