The time is now for Thurston County to invest in housing and shelters
For centuries, the United States has grappled with the concept of the homeless individual who travels from place to place, exploiting the goodwill of hard-working residents. The Great Depression exacerbated this notion, as large-scale homelessness and unemployment led to an enormous increase in people seeking opportunities in new areas.
Eighty years later, the magnet theory of homelessness persists across the United States, with Olympia being no exception. Interestingly, research indicates that, in general, people tend to be homeless in the communities they called home when they were housed, they don’t move in droves to new parts of the country in order to be homeless.
Arguably, pushing the magnet theory is a political strategy used to “other” people. A very easy way to dehumanize people is to say they come from some other place. Dehumanizing people allows us to justify not helping them. One need only dip their toe in the local interwebs to see countless accusations of such “others” taking advantage of Olympia’s resources and compassion.
One impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a considerable hit to the homeless services network in Olympia. Due to social distancing requirements, shelters are only able to take in half the number of people they used to accommodate. The Community Care Center has closed, taking with it access to laundry and hygiene services and other resources. Businesses and social service entities have reduced hours or closed.
Yet homelessness is still very prominent in Olympia, and lurking in the shadows is the fact that the state’s eviction moratorium, due to expire Oct. 15, is delicately holding back what will quite possibly be a flood of additional people onto the streets.
The notion of the magnet theory, and the idea that homelessness is somehow Olympia’s problem alone, not the rest of Thurston County’s, distracts from the systemic realities of low wages, high rents, and an affordable housing deficit — the same problems that exist in many cities nationwide.
As the effects of COVID-19 on health and the economy continue to play out, we need to devise a holistic and sustainable strategy for dealing with homelessness and broader housing issues in our community. Public policy struggles to keep up with immediate reality, and the complexity of the housing crisis is often used to justify inaction. Just because a solution requires the participation of multiple entities doesn’t abdicate any individual entity from the responsibility to contribute incremental improvement towards a long-term solution.
Olympia, both the municipal government and the community, have long shouldered an inordinate amount of the burden for addressing the homelessness crisis in Thurston County. Lacey and Tumwater, as well as the county as a whole, need to invest in a solution of the scale and scope needed to not just contain but to resolve the crisis of homelessness and housing insecurity.
All of Thurston County’s communities need to invest in housing, whether it is filling in the missing shelter capacity, building permanent supportive housing, or building low-income housing of adequate scale. The time is now.
Whitney Bowerman is a member of The Olympian’s 2020 Board of Contributors. She can be reached at whitneybowermanboc@gmail.com
This story was originally published October 7, 2020 at 5:45 AM.