Olympia mayor says cities need to take care of their own amid influx of camping downtown
Olympia officials say they’re seeing an influx of people coming to Olympia in search of shelter after the ruling in Martin v. Boise was overturned.
At the Dec. 10 City Council meeting, council member Clark Gilman said he’s noticed a difference in who is sleeping downtown and where people are on the streets in Olympia. He wonders if continuing the city’s state of emergency declaration around homelessness is affecting the resurgence of people camping on the sidewalk at night.
Kim Kondrat, the city’s homeless response coordinator, asked the council to extend the emergency declaration. She said there has been an influx of folks into Olympia. She said it started after the overturning of Martin v. Boise, which originally held that cities could not enforce anti-camping ordinances if they do not have enough homeless shelter beds available for their homeless population.
“We’re noticing there are people from Aberdeen and Tacoma, they are really enforcing homelessness in their cities and pushing them out,” Kondrat said.
She said the city lacks shelters that people can walk into and find a bed for the night. Instead, the city is working on getting its shelter system connected to the countywide coordinated entry system, and providing shelter to specific people through Gov. Jay Inslee’s Rights-of-Way initiative that has helped expand the city’s shelter system.
But it’s not even enough to address the population already in Olympia, without the influx of new people, Kondrat said.
“There are a lot of vulnerable folks out there,” Kondrat said. “We have not had a women’s shelter at all in the city for many, many years, and so ongoing conversations with different faith communities — there’s a lot of barriers for them to overcome, to even incentivize them to even be open to setting up another shelter.”
Then there are issues of staffing and workload. Kondrat said there’s a high burnout rate among folks working with the unhoused population. Many don’t stay for more than a year.
“We’ve all experienced a secondary trauma along with that. And then we have people having very high trauma, serving other traumatized people,” she said. “And most of the people who are serving have also had lived experience.”
Kondrat said she’s constantly talking with people to see if they would open new beds, and there’s a lot of hesitation because of the previous impacts on downtown. She said the question then is: Where can shelters be built?
A state issue?
Council member Lisa Parshley said because it’s the result of a Supreme Court ruling, she thinks the state should step up and help the cities that are bearing the weight of other jurisdictions’ stricter policies on camping.
Kondrat said she’s already started conversations about whether there could be more financial support from the state for those cities that aren’t actively pushing out people who are homeless.
“What we have already found in the city is that when we just do a sweep, they just set up somewhere else for someone to deal with, and we have done a great job taking on the challenge and said, ‘Hey, we as a community are not going to sweep you, we’re not going to make you leave — unless it’s private property — until we have either had an opportunity to offer you shelter or some other better kind of place than where you are now,’” Kondrat said. “And it would be great if the state embraced that as a constant.”
Mayor Dontae Payne related the issue to an image of 100 people trying to get onto a small sailboat. He said eventually that boat’s going to sink.
“When I think about the City of Olympia trying to help everyone, that’s what comes to mind,” he said. “As compassionate as we want to be, we also have to be realistic, and so I hope we’re tracking and monitoring how many folks are coming from outside of the community.”
Payne said he also wants to make sure Olympia is sending a message to other communities that “the City of Olympia is not your way out of passing your regressive policies, and then we pick up the slack for you. That’s not what this is about. And we’re certainly not going to be supportive of those efforts. They need to take care of their own people.”
No magic potion
Mayor Pro Tem Yến Huỳnh said she is challenged by the thought of Olympia taking on other communities, and she wants to fight the magnet theory, that everyone is flocking to Olympia because it’s such a compassionate city.
She said she doesn’t think housing and housing insecurity is an Olympia issue, or uniquely Olympia.
“It’s, you know, we want to help people. And also when I hear you say that people from other communities are coming here, and you (Kondrat) and your team are the folks on the ground working it, I can’t say I don’t have concerns about that,” Huỳnh said.
Huỳnh said she’s not suggesting that staff start checking people’s IDs, but there aren’t endless resources in Olympia.
“I would love to just say, ‘Hey, come one, come all,’” she said. “And also, is this the City of Olympia? I want to think about the broad Olympia community and how are we balancing that? I don’t think that anyone really has that magic potion.”
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