The impossible choices of managing Olympia’s homeless crisis

If you’re face to face with a homeless woman in a tent camp who has been traumatized by sexual assault and theft of her belongings, would you pay to put her up in a motel? What if you encountered an older homeless man suffering from dementia?

Their tent camp is about to be demolished, it’s winter, and neither has anywhere to go.

This was the scenario faced by the city of Olympia staff last December as they prepared to sweep the Deschutes Parkway camp. Along with many vulnerable, suffering people, a criminal element living at the camp made the sweep necessary and inevitable.

The city opted for motel stays. But there weren’t enough outreach workers to prevent bad behavior, to care for the disoriented and displaced, or to try to find more lasting solutions for all of them.

The hope that a motel stay would end with admission to a shelter or housing was an impossible dream because there weren’t nearly enough of either.

But the immediate humanitarian emergency of the moment demanded something more than telling extremely vulnerable people to go “somewhere else.” And no one had a better idea than temporary motel stays.

A lot of money was spent on motels, and not enough was spent on planning, effective outreach services or security. Keylee Marineau, the county’s Homeless Response Program Manager, estimates that city, state and county funding for motel stays totaled $600,000 to $700,000, not counting the costs for the limited outreach staffing.

But the fundamental problem was not a failure to plan, or to fund more outreach and security. The fundamental problem was that there simply weren’t — and still aren’t — enough shelter beds or permanent housing.

This is the dilemma at the heart of our homeless response system: The longer we are without enough housing and shelter, the more we will be sucked into spending on emergency response and mitigation measures such as providing portable toilets and garbage services at various camps, removing derelict RVs, and paying for outreach workers to try to get the lucky few into housing or shelter.

For the acutely ill, some amount of funding for motel stays also will be an ongoing cost.

With experience, our local governments and service providers will get better at the emergency response, but getting better at it won’t make it cheaper. It’s likely to cost more if they ramp up the planning and outreach services that fell short after the Deschutes camp clearance. And it’s likely to cost more yet if tent camps continue to proliferate.

There has been limited progress on permanent supportive housing – the staffed housing that helps people get the care they need to deal with mental illness, addiction, trauma, disability and chronic disease.

The city of Olympia’s Home Fund bought the land for Unity Commons, which opened just months ago with a 58-bed shelter and 65 permanent supportive housing apartments. The Home Fund also put in the first $1 million for its construction — the vital “first dollar” that attracted the support of other funders to raise its total $22 million cost.

The city also bought land for the Family Support Center, which will break ground soon on a building that will provide 85 units of permanent supportive housing for families with children and victims of domestic violence.

But to respond to the unmet demand among children, youth, adults and seniors, we will need several times more than this. Six more buildings like Unity Commons — a guesstimate of what’s needed for homeless adults — would cost $132 million.

The longer we wait, the higher that price will be. Housing for children, youth, elders and crime victims — not to mention affordable housing for people who teeter on the edge because of rising rents — are also urgently needed.

Until we solve these problems, the city will be stuck with the frustrating but inevitable need to pay for expensive emergency measures that mitigate but do not end the misery, danger and chaos of homelessness.

This story was originally published May 1, 2022 at 5:00 AM.