Olympia’s hotel stays for the homeless helped few gain housing. Most are back on the streets
This winter, after the city of Olympia conducted sweeps of homeless encampments following increased pressure from the community, about 76 households were put up in hotels to wait out the cold weather.
Now, only seven households remain in the hotel stay program supported by Olympia Mutual Aid Partners. Though there was success with getting some houseless residents into programs or shelters, the majority of people who gave up their things for a warm bed are back on the streets with little to no connection to case workers.
Officials with the city, Thurston County and OlyMAP point to an amalgam of reasons why so many people fell through the cracks. The main culprit? Poor planning. And now, they’re pushing for a more collaborative effort to confront homelessness as a housing crisis.
The original hotel plan
The city’s original idea for moving houseless residents into hotels in Lacey and Olympia was for them to stay for only two weeks. But with the move taking place in the middle of December, the weather continued to get worse and it made no sense to put people back on the streets, assistant city manager Keith Stahley said. Those two weeks quickly turned into two months.
Dozens of households were initially moved into the La Quinta Inn and the Super 8 motel in Lacey. All of the residents were soon moved to the Super 8 following increased concerns from the Northwest Christian Academy next door.
At the same time, houseless residents were living at the Olympia Inn on Capitol Way South, funded by a community group’s gofundme before it ran out of money and was picked up by the county.
At this point the city had run out of resources to continue housing people in hotels and Thurston County’s homeless response team stepped in with extra emergency solutions grant money from the state Department of Commerce.
“We decided we’d use funds to extend hotel stays to hopefully enable people to get into some kind of housing and not back to the street,” said Keylee Marineau from the county’s Office of Housing and Homeless Prevention.
Marineau said that despite the extra funds, the money ran out about a month later. She said the county was hoping they’d be able to incrementally move people out of hotels into more permanent housing solutions as shelter space came available, but the sheer number of people in the hotels made it impossible to keep up.
By mid-February, Olympia Mutual Aid Partners took over the transition process for the county to help get more houseless residents paired with case managers and into housing.
Stahley said city and county staff were outmanned and had a difficult time keeping up with caseloads, staffing of hotels and even feeding people.
“We didn’t anticipate the level of complexity associated with it,” Stahley said. “When you pick people up and move them from a place like Deschutes Parkway where there was a lot of conflict, untreated mental health issues and drug use, we picked that up and put it into the hotel.”
Stahley said the city had to lean heavily on OlyMAP as well as other outreach programs the city has partnered with to keep things as organized as they could be. He said the city of Lacey’s Mobile Outreach team and police department also were instrumental in helping people get access to some services in hotels.
“It was a community effort to say the least, and one that was very reactive and responsive to the realities of the situation,” Stahley said.
A collaborative approach
Kim Kondrat, Olympia’s homeless response coordinator, said she’s in the process of developing a procedure that helps keep track of and consolidate houseless community members to better ensure they reach permanent supportive housing. But that also relies on there being enough shelter space available.
“You need to have basic shelter,” Kondrat said. “Everyone regardless of what they’re going through deserves basic shelter, to be able to get out of the elements, where they can try and feel safe.”
Kondrat, who comes from a homeless service provider background, said she knows the best thing to give houseless people is stability. She said it’s hard to go from living on the streets to getting into supportive housing, and that can take a year at the minimum even with intensive case management.
Kondrat believes a step in the right direction is to centralize and give houseless community members a place to go, so it’s easier to stick with case management and keep up with people’s progress. But that comes with balancing complaints and concerns from neighbors if conflicts arise between residents.
“There’s definitely a tension there between trying to be compassionate and trauma informed and also trying to minimize the impact on the community,” said assistant city manager Stahley.
Stahley said the city’s homeless response plan was adopted in February 2020 under the name, “One Community Plan.” He said under this plan, the city has chosen to take a “balanced approach to homelessness,” working closely with houseless people sometimes through case management and peer mentorships, and then conducting sweeps on occasion in response to community concerns.
A trend of sweeps
Robert Bruce and Tye Gundel from Olympia Mutual Aid Partners said they and other nonprofit groups continued to work as closely as they could with houseless residents as they transitioned to hotels and back out of them. But they said the sweeps of the Wheeler, Ensign and Deschutes encampments felt unplanned and harmful.
Bruce said the nonprofit has been piloting its scattered site project from Thurston County since June, focused on meeting houseless residents where they are rather than having them seek out services.
But that model is at odds with a political reality, he said — that camps have a temporary nature to them and can be swept away if community members put enough pressure on the city.
As Stahley said, the move is a reactionary one from the city, one Bruce said could be avoided by more planning.
“It’s not as simple as putting people indoors,” Bruce said. “The sort of supportive services that are important to provide to folks, that infrastructure wasn’t in place when they were moved into the hotels.”
Bruce said they’ve heard from people who were in the hotels voice concerns over not having enough support or not being able to get connected to a case manager, despite wanting the help.
“This situation is something the city of Olympia was very aware of, when they were doing all of this,” he said. “There were certainly voices from us, other community members, saying putting people into hotels without the support you’d have in a normal shelter situation is going to cause a lot of harm and trauma.”
He said some people were quickly kicked out of hotels because staff weren’t prepared to work with and handle people who weren’t used to living indoors.
Bruce said there were benefits with the city’s hotel stay program, compared to displacing people to another area of the city to face the winter cold alone. But those benefits feel marginal compared to what could have been done if a little more planning had gone into it.
“I would have liked to have seen that money paired with a little more so we could have done things right to have supportive services paired with the hotel stay,” Bruce said. “Hotels aren’t cheap. But if we’re going to be spending the money, we should be pairing it with the support people need.”
Bruce said providers continued to do case management as they could, but only eight people have ended up in a shelter or permanent supportive housing so far.
Tye Gundel said in the future they believe people shouldn’t be displaced without there being an alternative long-term place for them.
“If we’re just going back to the same patterns, we’re going to see the same things happen over and over again like we have been,” she said.
Hope on the horizon
Stahley said he knows the winter hotel stays didn’t end up housing a lot of people long term, but that it at least gave people a safe and warm place to be for a few months. He said if anything, it highlights the need for more emergency housing, shelter space and permanent supportive housing.
Interfaith Works’ Unity Commons opened off Martin Way in December, making space for a 58-bed shelter and 65 units of permanent supportive housing above, which will hopefully be filled in the next year or so.
Stahley said the Family Support Center is starting its construction of an 85-unit facility in west Olympia that will be permanent supportive housing for families and victims of domestic violence. It is expected to be operational by early 2024.
He said the city is continuing to pursue long-term action by buying land around Thurston County to facilitate the construction of permanent supportive housing.
He said there are a few projects that are first going to be used for emergency housing purposes until the city has the money and backing for construction of future housing. The city just closed on property off Franz Anderson Road that will carry a tiny house village and a safe parking facility for the next three to four years before it’s turned into a housing structure.
Another example is the Quince Street mitigation site, which will replace the city’s current encampment near the Intercity Transit Center in Olympia. Once it’s been moved and services have been expanded, the idea is to turn it into permanent supportive housing within the next three to five years.
However, even with all these projects, Stahley said it only makes up about half of the real need for permanent housing.
This story was originally published April 17, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
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