Boze: Good job Puyallup, Auburn for using tough love on homeless camps

Earlier this week we heard about the City of Puyallup cleaning up homeless camps. The City of Auburn is taking a different approach from Puyallup that is little less confrontational. People receiving services at the Ray of Hope homeless shelter in Auburn are expected to help clean up and perform chores in return. Basically, behave yourself, clean up after yourself, and help out. It’s kind of like when you lived with your parents.

This is exactly right — if you’re taking advantages of other services, and you’re asked to give back, that’s perfectly appropriate, even healthy. You have people who are clearly incapable of taking care of themselves at this point in time. They’re getting extra services and they’re being asked to give back — there’s a dignity to that. “You’re an adult, you’re capable of doing certain things on your own, of providing certain benefits for the services that you’re getting, so we’re going to treat you like a capable adult, like someone we respect, the way that we would treat anyone else.”

Cheers to Auburn for taking that approach. Cheers to the homeless shelter there for giving people the dignity of work. When it comes to treating the homeless appropriately, having some chores lined up and giving them some work to do is healthy because it reminds them that they are members of a community, it reminds them that there are certain expectations of behavior for them. It reconnects them to their own environment and to someone who has expectations for them.

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The opposite approach — that of allowing them to set up tents and inject drugs and drop needles and defecate all over public areas — is degrading. It’s not fair to the community. It’s not fair to the people who want a civil society. And it’s not fair to the people engaging in that behavior because it dehumanizes them and it devalues them.

A column by Matt Driscoll in the Tacoma News Tribune this week accused the City of Puyallup of treating the people in the homeless camps with cruelty. The part that I found strange was that all of his compassion was based on this idea that only the homeless people deserve compassion. Not the people who don’t feel safe because there are homeless camps in public spaces, and strange tents and tarps showing up in places where it’s illegal. Not the people who are picking up trash, and living in fear that their kids will find a needle on a playground. Not the people who are constantly harassed and being asked to contribute to drug habits every time they walk into a store or down a sidewalk. There was no compassion for what cities and communities are going through in the midst of an epidemic where people don’t have to conform to any kind of civil behavior. I look at this column claiming that Puyallup is “delusional,” but I think it’s actually the columnist who is delusional.

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What makes it compassionate to let people stay in a condition that inevitably leads to an early death, forever broken family connections, various diseases, and a life among trash and rats? A little bit of tough love as seen in the Puyallup and Auburn approaches to homeless camps is far more compassionate than the approach of the various Seattle groups that are enabling people to camp out illegally in public places.

Businesses in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood have described a “minefield” of needles outside of their doors. This is not a third-world country. This is not an economically depressed area. This is the Emerald City, the envy of most of the nation — Seattle. This city used to be crystal-clean, a place where people would come from out of town and point out how there was no graffiti or trash. Now people point to Seattle as the city of graffiti and trash — even while the city is getting bigger with skyscrapers and new technologies and new hopes. The city provides a place where dreams are made as immigrants come to work for tech companies. Yet here we are, allowing for the degradation of a large block of people who have exited society. They need to be pushed to get back into society.

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The approach that we need should not be called a war on drugs, but a war for civilization. We have a lot of people on the street who are not capable of taking care of themselves. In a society where we’re supposed to care for the most vulnerable among us, doesn’t it make sense to use our growing tax revenue to make sure we have facilities to care for the mentally ill so that they’re not victimized on the streets? It seems to me that we should be crafting that priority, and it’s bizarre to me that we don’t hear more about it.