City of Olympia did the best it could in tearing down Deschutes Parkway camp

The Deschutes Parkway tent camp is gone. By last Tuesday, all but about 25 people had already left. Wednesday at 8 a.m., the day of the sweep scheduled by the city of Olympia, only 15 remained. They were outnumbered by volunteers who showed up to help them move. By 8:35 Wednesday morning, heavy equipment was scooping abandoned tents and garbage off the mud.

The sweep was inevitable. At a camp of 80 people, there had been three shootings and a murder in October. The roadside location made drive-up drug dealing much too convenient. There were persistent rumors of human trafficking. The turnover of residents was high — an indication that many people felt so unsafe they moved to other, smaller camps.

Some homeless advocates decried the sweep as simply displacing homeless people rather than housing them, thus creating more suffering. Other Olympia residents — especially those who live nearby or walk around Capitol Lake — grumbled the city should have done this long ago.

Jay Burney, Olympia’s city manager, made the decision to sweep the camp following the shootings and murder. The City Council backed him up. Planning began in early November. By mid-November, people in the camp were being notified of the date. Olympia Mutual Aid Partners, a county-contracted group that provides outreach, connections to services, and help with tasks such as getting ID documents and filling out housing applications, worked with camp residents to prepare. Funding was marshaled to provide 3-1/2-week motel stays for about 50 people.

There’s no plan for where those motel-housed people will go when the motel stays end, but city staff will check in on them daily, and hope that something warmer, drier and safer than a return to camping can be found.

Another 30 or more people who left the camp on their own before Dec. 8 are likely already camping somewhere else.

The chances of finding longer-term housing for those in motels are slim. There aren’t enough shelter beds, or enough places in the city’s mitigation site, or its Plum Street tiny house village. There aren’t enough affordable apartments to serve even the mostly disabled people who have housing vouchers that would subsidize their rent. Moving back into a tent in January after nearly a month of being warm and dry will be traumatic.

The camp clearing was a grim reminder that our community is beset by the ravages of growing homelessness, a persistent affordable housing shortage, twin opioid and meth epidemics, an inadequate mental health system, and a pandemic.

Still, watching the heavy equipment chew up the tents so many people called home made us wonder what country we are in, and how we fell so low. At such a moment, the road back from this national disgrace was hidden in a cold fog.

Yet in spite of all that, the Deschutes Parkway camp sweep was an incremental improvement. Even those who oppose camp sweeps altogether acknowledge that this one was better planned, more humane, and better executed than ever before. It was also more clearly justified as necessary for the safety of passersby and most of its residents.

As we’ve said before, local governments can’t solve homelessness without a major infusion of funding for housing from our federal and state governments. City and county governments have two jobs: To lobby for and attract more federal and state funding, and to manage and mitigate homelessness the best they can with the limited resources they have.

That’s what the city of Olympia and its partners did this week.

The rest of us have a job too: It’s to help push federal and state lawmakers to provide more funding, to give our time and money to the nonprofits that provide shelter and housing. It’s to support the nonprofits that protect children from poverty and trauma, and help them succeed in school and in life.

And it’s to show appreciation for the city and its partners for doing a hard thing well.

This story was originally published December 12, 2021 at 5:00 AM.