DECAMPING

Takoma Encampment (Before)

Tacoma's new outdoor shelter is similar to this fabric tent. It will hold private tents, showers and other services for more than 65 residents. (After)

TACOMA - Visit any city these days and likely you'll see tents. Lots of them. On sidewalks, in parks, underneath overpasses. Everywhere.

They're proof, Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland told KUOW (http://kuow.org/post/homeless-tacoma-what-we-ve-been-doing-has-not-been-working), that "what we've been doing" for the homeless "has not been working." Like other cities initially Tacoma addressed them with sweeps that tore them down. Within days the encampments would spring-up someplace else. The issue wasn't resolved, just relocated. Time, the Mayor decided, for a "more hands-on approach."

Which is why, in May, 2017, the City Council's approved a resolution (cms.cityoftacoma.org/cityclerk/Files/CityCouncil/Agendas/2017-VotingRecord/39716.pdf) declaring a public health emergency enabling the city to respond more quickly and nimbly to the fact that on "any given night large numbers of people, including families, experience homelessness and can be found sleeping on the streets and in parks, cars, abandoned buildings, steep slopes, under highway overpasses, and in other places not meant for human habitation."

Lacking "appropriate sanitation facilities or proper trash receptacles," it noted, the camps "often become contaminated with garbage, human waste, used needles, and dirty dressings, resulting in occupants facing serious health and sanitation issues," creating an "ongoing threat of significant harm to human health and life." People, the Mayor said, are "literally living in filth."

The resolution also authorized a three-phase Emergency Temporary Aid and Shelter (https://associatedministries.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Tacoma-ETAS.pdf) plan. Phase one - mitigation - was a surprise. "Instead of clearing-out tent cities," KUOW reported, "the city is providing portable toilets, hand-washing stations, drinking water and 24-hour security" at homeless encampments.

"We're not delivering these services because we want these encampments to be permanent," Mayor Strickland added. But "instead of just going in there, coming in there and just sweeping it out let's go in there and offer the inhabitants the ability to get their basic needs met."

That, she's said, will start a dialogue that may persuade them to get off the streets and take advantage of the plan's second phase, transitional housing. It's nothing fancy, just a newly-acquired, 100'x70'x28' tent (http://kuow.org/post/tents-within-tent-tacomas-new-outdoor-homeless-shelter) on city land across from the most notorious encampment, the "Compound.' It'll be warmed in the winter, cooled in the summer, dry and safe year-round.

Most importantly, it's service-rich. Once out of the tens and off the streets, the point was to prevent them from returning by addressing what put them there in the first place - drugs, mental illness, unemployment, domestic violence. "Our job here," the Mayor explained, is to "start a dialogue" between them and on-site social and health care workers "find a way to transition" them, to "hopefully, short-term housing and long-term housing."

And if they don't accept the city's "hospitality"? Well, encampments like the Compound will be demolished and, as part of the City's plan, the City Council also enacted a ban on camping (www.cityoftacoma.org/cms/One.aspx?portalId=169&pageId=133455) on public property. They're free to refuse, free to pitch a tent anywhere they want. Just not within Tacoma city limits.

News Tribune (www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/matt-driscoll/article154961974.html) columnist Matt Driscoll has called the City's plan "visionary and pragmatic," but he's also argued that the its third phase - providing long-term housing for the homeless - will be the "hardest part of all" to accomplish. Tacoma and surrounding Pierce County have more than 10,000 units of HUD-subsidized rental housing. Even so, he's said, "we'll need a lot more of what's currently in very short supply."

It's unlikely Mayor Strickland disagrees. "Be realistic," she's said, about what the city's plan will - and won't - accomplish. "Housing affordability is an issue, but every person isn't homeless because they can't afford to find a place to live. There's so many other determinants whether it's escaping domestic violence, not having access to identification, chronic health issues, so we just have to make sure we take a holistic approach. I do not sit here and say that I'm going to eradicate homelessness because for every person we help to get housed there's probably someone else coming right into the system."

Some people, she noted on KNKX (http://knkx.org/post/tent-city-tacoma-city-leaders-signal-shift-strategy), "will be really unhappy with what we're doing. Some will say we went too far and some will say we didn't go far enough. . .But at the end of the day, we have a responsibility to make sure that we do not have a city where people are sleeping on the streets."

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