The next move in our war against homelessness needs to be closing the bridge camp

The tent camp under the Fourth Avenue bridge is set to be closed Jan. 27. Residents will be offered spaces in the city-sponsored tent camp just north of the Intercity Transit station downtown, which is staffed by the Union Gospel Mission.

The Fourth Avenue bridge camp was slated to be closed last September, but in the middle of an election campaign, political shenanigans led the city council to keep it open. The now re-elected Mayor Cheryl Selby was the lone vote for closing it. This was in spite of strong support for its closure from the Squaxin Tribe, whose treaty fishing rights are affected, the Department of Ecology, which shares the tribe’s concerns about water quality, and people who use the nearby trail around Capitol Lake.

The unmanaged camp was and still is a study in the Rashomon effect – that is, wildly different versions of reality based on radically different perspectives. Just Housing, an group of advocates for people who live in tent camps, sees this camp as a persecuted group of poor and traumatized people who find strength in the community they have created. Interim Police Chief Aaron Jelcick believes “the camp environment is not conducive to helping some of the residents who suffer from addiction and the criminal behavior that sometimes comes with it.” City staff see it as an unmanaged, unsustainable hazard to both the natural and civic environment. The Squaxin Tribe writes that it represents “a huge step backwards” in habitat recovery, respect for salmon and for the tribe’s treaty rights.

The city and a group of clergy have worked for several months to find a better site for the camp community and a workable system for governing it. But that effort came to naught for lack of a willing nonprofit or faith community with the capacity to manage it.

So will this year’s city council hold fast to the Jan. 27 closure? We hope so. And we hope there will be an outpouring of support for this action.

There are far more compelling reasons to close the camp than to allow it to continue, and the option of offering its residents space in the city-sponsored camp is as good as it’s going to get right now. That’s not very good, but it’s more than any other local jurisdiction has to offer.

If there were a grand prize for cities’ efforts to help people who are homeless, Olympia should get the trophy. In the last two years, it has opened a temporary tiny house village and the downtown city-sponsored camp. Olympia voters agreed to tax themselves to build more housing and shelter facilities, including a pending 60-bed shelter and 64 units of permanent housing with staff help for people who need it. The city is supporting the work of faith communities – specifically the opening of eight tiny houses on the grounds of Westminster Presbyterian Church. The city also is working with Mike Auderer, a local builder, to turn freight containers into low-cost temporary housing and hygiene facilities.

Olympia also initiated a search for a site for a second managed campsite, a project that has drawn collaboration with the county and other local cities. We hope it succeeds soon.

The hard reality we have to face is that a lot of people will be living in tents for years to come. It will take years to build the housing we need, and years to rebuild our mental health system, to end our opioid epidemic, and to heal the traumas that have been visited on so many. Even if Gov. Inslee succeeds in prying $300 million out of the Legislature for more shelters this year, his estimate is that doing so would reduce unsheltered homelessness by half. That would still leave 5,000 Washington residents living outdoors.

The question is whether people living in tents will be safe, whether they will be connected to the larger community, and whether they will have access to sanitation, social and health services, and hope. The alternative – the proliferation of unmanaged camps under bridges, in greenbelts or along trails and freeways – increases alienation, danger, despair, and environmental damage.

Olympia’s city-run tent camp is far from perfect, but city staff acknowledge that they are learning their way to improvement in how to engage residents in self-governance, how to ensure safety, and how to build a camp culture of support and hope for a better future.

The need for government-sponsored tent camps is a grotesque feature of our 21st century society and economy. We are all challenged to change that. And in the meantime, we need to get our fellow citizens out from under the bridge.

As council member Clark Gilman observed at a last week’s city meeting, “It’s all uphill from here.”