All options on the table for Tacoma’s homelessness state of emergency

While the economy in the Puget Sound region soars and housing prices ascend to record highs, tents and homeless encampments are seemingly sprouting up faster than construction cranes and condos. The blight of the booms in construction and homelessness aren’t limited to Seattle.

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On Tuesday, Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland is expected to declare a state of emergency over homelessness in her city. All options are on the table under Strickland’s direction, beginning with allocating funds to construct new temporary emergency shelters and even extending consideration for sanctioned tent cities.

Mayor Strickland’s solutions to the crisis also echo Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s response in 2015, even though those efforts failed or faced massive community backlash.

However, in speaking with KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross, Tacoma’s mayor said she believes it’s time to send strong messages and make visible changes immediately.

“Number one: No one should have to sleep on the streets of Tacoma,” Strickland said. “Number two: we recognize that some of these encampments in areas actually have created a public health crisis. And then finally, trying to transition as many folks as we can into some kind of emergency-type shelter so that we can get them on the path to becoming permanently housed.”

Creating more temporary shelter space and allowing for tent cities are strategies Seattle abandoned under the direction of Barbara Poppe, the consultant hired by Mayor Murray to spearhead a coordinated strategy on combating homelessness.

“I want to make it clear that building more emergency shelter, whether you make it 24/7 or not, is not going to solve your problem,” Poppe said during a March forum.

Tacoma’s homelessness

Strickland said as the visibility of the homeless population has increased, citizens and business owners have demanded solutions. The latest point-in-time count found 1,300-1,600 homeless people living on Tacoma’s streets.

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Tacoma, like Seattle, has tried closing encampments. Strickland said simply forcing people to move along without providing shelter capacity produced predictable results when they cleared out their own ‘Jungle’ in April.

“We had a situation where there were a hundred people who were part of an encampment under a freeway overpass and we cleared it out….” Strickland said. “Big surprise, they simply moved a few blocks away or dispersed in some form.”

There is also a perception that Seattle’s efforts to shut down encampments and clear out tents under I-5 has created a Seattle-to-Tacoma homelessness pipeline. Data provided by Strickland shows that only 7 percent of her city’s homeless population listed King County as their most recent zip code (44 percent of the point-in-time survey respondents were from Tacoma; 18 percent were from Parkland and Lakewood; 7 percent declared out-of-state origins).

Strickland believes it’s time to get tough and clean up her city, even if many homeless people refuse to move out of encampments and into shelters.

“Some folks say, ‘I don’t want someone telling me what time I need to go to bed and to come home,’” Strickland said. “And of course, the answer to that is, ‘Well then, we have rules in a society for a reason.’”

For now, Mayor Strickland said the city has three main goals: 1. To deal with the public health issue that some of these encampments are creating. 2. Try and offer help to people that want it. 3. House those who say they want to live off the grid.

“I don’t even know what that means just yet,” she said of the off-the-grid goal. “But we’re, I think, having to look at this differently.”