Concerns about ‘Jungle’ homeless encampment spur tour with Lacey, Olympia officials
Lacey and Olympia officials and others gathered this week at the homeless encampment known as the “Jungle,” wanting to learn more about the camp and the future of it.
A Lacey City Council member and those he invited raised concerns about the camp and suggested ways in which it might be run differently. City of Olympia officials explained the camp to them during a tour and responded to those concerns.
The Wednesday afternoon gathering at the Jungle, a longtime camp in a forested area near the 3200 block of Martin Way East, was spearheaded by Lacey City Council member Nic Dunning.
He invited friend and Olympia City Council candidate Wendy Carlson, and she invited Ginny Burton, a woman who has experienced homelessness. Also attending: Lacey City Manager Rick Walk, Olympia Community Planning and Economic Development Director Susan McLaughlin, Olympia Homeless Response Coordinator Kim Kondrat and two Olympia police officers.
Dunning also invited The Olympian to the meeting, but there was disagreement amongst the tour group about whether the local news organization should be included. The Olympian ultimately conducted interviews before and after the tour and interviewed city officials on Thursday.
Why meet?
Dunning, who owns a gym in Lacey and whose customers include police officers, became alarmed after learning about a rape on Pacific Avenue in Lacey by a man accused of doing the same at the Jungle, The Olympian reported earlier this year.
“They found the perpetrator in the Jungle, and I had some connections to police officers who were working the case, and they had told me it was the most violent rape they had ever seen, horrific,” Dunning said.
That prompted him to work on setting up Wednesday’s gathering.
“This isn’t about an election to me,” he said. “This isn’t about popularity. This is about getting people off fentanyl, getting people out of these conditions. I do not care about anything else. This is my main goal. It is more important to me than the council. It’s more important to me than anything else right now. I don’t want people to die from fentanyl, and I don’t want people to have to live in these conditions.”
The Jungle
The camp itself stretches from Martin Way to Pacific Avenue and is estimated to be 10-15 years old and home to 60-80 people, although that number can swell to more than 100 during prime summer months, Homeless Response Coordinator Kondrat said.
From the outside looking in, it appears the camp has one big main trail, with makeshift tents nearby, but there are several trails throughout the camp, she said.
Wednesday’s tour lasted about an hour, and then The Olympian caught up with Dunning and Carlson about their impressions.
There was good and bad news, Dunning told The Olympian.
There is a public perception that police do not enter the camp, but that is not the case, he said. In fact, police responded 56 times to the Jungle in the past two months, he said.
But 56 police calls, nearly once a day for two months, is not necessarily a good thing, Dunning said.
“As I said, 56 instances of the police being called to any neighborhood is a problem, so we are kind of resigned to that fact until there’s a long-term solution,” he said.
The city is just as concerned as the public, said Community and Planning Economic Development Director Susan McLaughlin.
“Law enforcement actively visits the site,” she said. “They respond to calls, they go into the Jungle as needed. And so again, yes, we share the concerns. Yes, we are addressing them. And yes, it’s part of addressing it as a holistic area that is part of our long-term strategy,” McLaughlin said.
As for the “bad” news, Dunning feels the future of the camp is unknown.
“There isn’t really a long-term vision, and a lot of that has to do with funding, you know, and what they can do, and how big the project is, so there’s not a clear solution,” he said. “So that could be five years or 10 years or 20 years, there’s just no answer for that.”
Kondrat said there was a proposal to build 50 manufactured homes on the site, as well as a plan to create a connecting road between Pacific Avenue and Martin Way, but the grant funding needed for the project fell through earlier this year.
Over the years the city and region have addressed a number of homeless encampments on Deschutes Parkway, Wheeler Avenue, Ensign Road, Percival Creek and at Sleater Kinney Road at Interstate 5 with new and available housing — and still more housing is needed, Kondrat said.
“The landscape of our available housing is very bleak,” she said. “And it’s because people actually are staying where they’re being placed. There’s not high turnover — they want to stay housed. So, you know, it doesn’t happen as often as we want. Not because they don’t want housing, it’s because there’s not enough housing or shelter available.”
Carlson, though, questioned whether there will ever be enough housing.
“I think we all make assumptions of what’s going on in the Jungle, sure, and I think there’s some people that are, you know, there are addicts in there,” she said. “There’s people that are just down on their luck and need a helping hand up, and I think we as a community need to be helping those people out. I think that’s the most important thing, and not just sitting back and hoping that we’re going to build our way out of this. I’m not a person who believes that we’re going to build our way out of a situation like this.”
A different approach?
Ginny Burton is a former addict, a former convict and previously homeless until she turned her life around and graduated from the University of Washington. She has been clean for more than 12 years, she said. Burton is now the founder and principal of a nonprofit called O-UT — which stands for Overhaul—Unrelenting Transfiguration and is described as a “lived experience change program.”
“O-UT is an intentional accountability program designed to help individuals change their life for good,” the website reads.
Burton was part of Wednesday’s tour until she wasn’t. From a distance, The Olympian could see her become more demonstrative with the group and then she walked away from it. She is not a fan of the current approach to homelessness.
“We’re not solving problems here, nor is there an intention to solve problems,” she said. “The only thing that we’re doing is addressing symptoms and we’ve built an industry on addressing symptoms.”
She used the following analogy about the current approach to homelessness: If 100 men fell into a river, they would be thrown life preservers and hand warmers with no intention of actually rescuing them. Instead, they would simply be kept afloat, she said.
But the city argues that it still begins with housing, and as much as people want more direct solutions to homelessness, it’s not that simple.
Kondrat said that’s why she’s open to taking people out to the Jungle because negative perceptions can change quickly when they learn more about why people are in the camp.
“Housing is the first step, but we all have so many more needs than that,” she said. “It’s more complex than that, and I do think that we do a good job of balancing compassion and accountability, because it’s how we are and where I feel like my job is.”
Dunning thinks the community has to do a better job of trumpeting the homeless success stories.
“We have a blatantly dysfunctional and nontransparent communication process with the public on what we’re actually doing,” he said, admitting that even he doesn’t know enough about Maple Court, the enhanced shelter in Lacey.
“I want to be able to tell people the good things that we’re doing.”
Delivering food
As the tour group formed, life went on at the camp, which meant another delivery of food from Tacoma resident Peggy Smith.
Smith dropped off about 10 bags of food and has done so once a week for the past six months, she said.
Why does she do it? Because she was homeless for about 18 months when she was 16 and still living in the Midwest.
“I keep their bellies full, so they can work on other things,” she said. “They seem to like cereal more than most things, but they’ve told me they are able to cook here, so I also bring the pastas and the sauces and stuff.”
Smith was asked how many people she thinks she helps.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I see different ones.”
And within minutes, those bags of food were picked up.
This story was originally published July 11, 2025 at 1:27 PM.
