Episode 8: A Ticking Clock

title: Episode 8: A Ticking Clock
author: Outsiders
contenttype: podcast
publication: Outsiders
published: 2020-10-07T08:01:00+00:00
sourceurl: https://cpa.ds.npr.org/s148/audio/2021/09/outsiders-episode-8-a-ticking-clock-new.mp3

word_count: 8136

Outsiders is made possible by grants from the Dennis A. Hunt Fund at USC Ann and Berg Center for Health Journalism, Studio to be Seattle and Jim and Beard a Falkener of Seattle. It's December of 2019 and it's pouring. I'm at the front gate of the mitigation site. The tent city that opens in Olympia, Washington exactly one year earlier. I'm waiting for Colin DeForest. He's in charge of Olympia's response to homelessness. The mitigation site was his idea. Picked a good day to see you. Sorry for my delay. You want to stand out here under here. The reason I asked to meet you here in this is exactly one year ago. Yeah. Was the day that you opened this? It's been one year. It's absolutely crazy to think time flies when you're having fun. On this day a year ago, Colin set the events of this series in motion. He spent the entire year trying to make Olympia a model for other cities overwhelmed by visible unsheltered homelessness. This has to be a success. The whole time he had two goals. The first was to soften the impact of homelessness on Olympia to turn chaos into order. When he created this tent city hundreds of people were living in informal camps. They set up in Olympia's downtown. The city couldn't immediately house these folks, but they could at least contain the encampments and provide security, garbage camps, portapoddies. The second goal was to create a system that could serve some of the hardest to reach people living outside. Help them reconnect with society and eventually find a home. All of that depended on the success of this mitigation site, a cluster of tents arranged by the city on a repurposed parking lot. I'm Will James. This is outsiders. In this episode, we try to answer a question we asked at the very start of this series. Did any of this work? Okay, let's begin. Thank you, everyone, for coming today. I am Nicole Mackery, State Representative from the 43rd Legislative District. A mile away from the mitigation site, Democrats in the Washington State Legislature spent much of 2019 working on their own response to homelessness. Democrats in the legislature are offering a bold agenda to create affordable housing and prevent homelessness. The agenda is simple. Build more, build up, build better, and build stability. The crisis in Olympia, the state capital, was one of the catalysts for them to act. After months of legislative wrangling, here's what lawmakers did. Studies in Washington show eviction is one of the most common forces driving people into homelessness. So they reformed state law to make it harder for landlords to evict tenants. And lawmakers created new streams of money to build housing. Millions upon millions of dollars, they hope will ease a statewide housing shortage, though it'll take years. Housing activists celebrate what they call their most successful legislative session in recent memory. But just down the road, at Olympia City Hall, one person isn't celebrating. We're hearing one voice, right? And we're not hearing the voice of the visible homeless. Collins been calling on the state to treat unsheltered homelessness like an emergency. But now he's underwhelmed by the state's response. He had hoped lawmakers would take his vision statewide, managed 10 cities like the mitigation site in city after city. Instead, they landed on these sweeping technocratic fixes, the sort of thing Colin bristles at. As we've reported in this series, there is a lot of evidence. One force is mainly behind the rise in homelessness, a housing shortage that's driving up rents. Pretty much everyone who fights homelessness for a living agrees on this, including Colin. But to him, housing that's years away from being built doesn't do anything for the hundreds of people living in tents right now. So we have some great strategies around affordable housing, right? Which is great. But that is not that is not responding to the emergency. And that is not taking care of the visible, street homelessness that is a problem across the state, right? Is it a housing thing? Sure, there's no doubt. There is no doubt. We have a housing stock shortage for shared housing, for affordable housing. But I think we're fooling ourselves if we think just by creating the housing that this is going to take care of the problem. Before he ever worked in tent cities and encampments, Colin's job was counseling at risk youth. He says he feels like he has a knack for connecting with individual people and coaching them through their individual problems. And that's how he approaches homelessness. The mitigation side holds anywhere from a little under a hundred to 150 people at a time. Colin moves through it like the mayor of a small town. Hey Dale, how you doing, man? That is a cat. Woo, that cat needs a walk. It's kind of like a waiting room. People are hunkered down and Colin hopes, given the space to start dealing with some of the problems in their lives. Legal issues, medical problems, getting a driver's license. Going to treat me, that's so good. Okay. So like I need to be put in somewhere safe from secure for me. Okay. I don't want to go back to prison. So I'm trying to let it all be good. Good. So here's what you need to do. The first step in Colin's system is getting people to move out of illegal camps around the city and into this fenced-in parking lot, which is supposed to be safer. And the mitigation side is always full. Part of what makes it so popular is people finding the site safe and welcoming enough, and there aren't too many rules. Even though drug and alcohol use isn't technically allowed, everyone knows it happens. Another reason the site is always full is the city spent much of 2019 sweeping away many of the unsanctioned camps around town and giving people a choice. Move to the mitigation site or try your luck somewhere else. Bobby. You remember Bobby? Yeah, I've talked to Bobby. Are you here now? How long have you been here? We met Bobby in episode four as the city displaced her from an unsanctioned camp downtown. The city has swept away at least five of her campsites. Colin eventually convinces her to move to the mitigation site. Last time I saw Bobby was fourth-happening bridge. At some point she finally got sick of hearing me talk to her about coming over here so she said fine. No, I was in the same tire as the under bridge. Is your dog here? Yeah. Yeah, I just woke up. She's over at the tent right now. We got big plans for Bobby. Bobby's going to deal with all kinds of good stuff. I got some dog food. I'll bring this in my car by later. Bobby's one of my favorites. She's just she's got a real dry sense of humor. She's quick-witted. I started talking to her on B Avenue and she laughed in my face. I was like FEMA camp. I'm not going in your FEMA camp. I'm not going in there. And then it was over at the smart lot and she's like, oh god, you're back here again. So even when she was telling me to fuck off, we are still having good conversations and she just she engaged me and we we kind of clicked on a level where we could just kind of chat. We just chat about basic stuff. She likes bye. He says Bobby wants to get treatment for heroin use but it's a delicate process. Her mom comes to the mitigation site at least once a week to talk with her. Colin says Bobby keeps talking herself out of treatment. She wonders where she'll go when she's done whether she'll still have friends or be alone. Recovery after all sometimes means breaking ties with people you used to hang out with. Then there are other challenges. We talk about lack of housing. There's a lack of drug and alcohol treatment services. There's lack of mental health but the drug and alcohol treatment ones are tough because when you finally have somebody who's there, if you can't get them like that second, then you lose it, right? So you're saying you could have someone who is at that moment where they're ready to take the next step and go to treatment and then if the treatment's not there at that moment, you lose you lose that. Right and right now just to be honest, I mean, I'm very proud of the mitigation site but if you're someone who's trying to get in a treatment or stay sober or go through detoxing like that, good luck there. Bobby's dealers know who she is and they know where she is and she's a dollar sign to them so they're going to continue. Hey Bobby, you sure? You all right? You need, you know, like, and that's pretty sick but that's pretty real so the hope is you get her out of that. Maybe it's in a hotel or whatever for however many days until that treatment's lined up and then hopefully you can hold on to her to that point and I can tell she's got a tough battle. She's got an uphill battle but I can also tell she's tough. She's just a tough girl and I'm just really rooting for her. The year has its disappointments too. I was going to tell you that I was really excited. We have a guy who's 71 over at the mitigation site. He's been there for... He's talking about Alan who he met in episode three, the guy who got shot in the head and still has the scar. Last week we met and he said, hey man, I need to get out of here. I just got my license. I'm working on getting my license. I'm ready to get back to work. This is 71-year-old guy, right? I'm ready to work. He's already getting either retirement or disability, like $800 a month. He's like, I need to get into the tiny houses. What do you think about it? Can I get into the tiny houses? Convincing someone to move to the mitigation site is just the first step in this plan. Once someone's deemed stable enough, the next step is getting them to move from the mitigation site to a lot full of miniature houses, the city set up a mile across town. If the mitigation site is like a waiting room, the tiny house village is like an exam room, where you finally see the doctor and start getting help. Colin says he got everything set up for Alan to move there. So super pumped. So I go over to the mitigation site to tell him at like one o'clock, right? Hey, guess what? He's like, guess what? I don't want to go in anymore. I want to stay here. This day. Yes. And I'm like, what? No, man. I said, I got you. We're good. You're going, you're moving in on Thursday. No, I don't want to go. I heard that they make you do chores over there, even if you have a job. So I don't want to go. I'm like, man, but you're talking to a 71-year-old, very together, man. So on some level, he's like, trust me. I have a plan in place. That plan is the one Alan told us about in episode three, buying a used car and doing deliveries for Amazon or app services like DoorDash. Plus, Alan has a girlfriend at the time who's recovering from heroin addiction and isn't approved to move in with him at the tiny house village. He doesn't want to go without her. Oh, she needs a place to live. I asked him if she could stay with me, because they got couples over there. They said, no, I should forget it. And it, I guess to me, it's a good reminder of it's not about me. One, and it's not about what I think is right for some of these individuals. It's a path that they kind of make on their own. And even though sometimes I'm looking at it from the outside and going, but this is, this is what you should do. Like, this is your next step. But also he's, you know, so for me, I'm just like, oh, man, Alan, I want to get you in. I mean, he's like six six in that tiny little tent, you know. So it's pretty disappointing. That's how the year passes at the mitigation site and fits and starts. Little victories and little defeats. Olympia's tiny house village called Plum Street Village is hidden from the road tucked behind a Japanese garden. At first, it looks like a home depot display for backyard sheds. 30 of them painted in bright cartoon colors. But when you look closer, you see planters full of flowers, the glow of a TV in a window, a guy walking his dog down the gravel path. Yeah, this door, the locks is pretty cool too. It's been quite a, quite a while. Both stop. I run into Mark who we met in episode three with his dog, Bo. Mark has struggled with homelessness since a brain aneurysm a decade ago left him unable to work. Last time I saw him, he and Bo were living in a tent at the mitigation site. What's the difference between living here and living at the mitigation site? Oh, more peaceful, more, more homing because it's almost, you know, it's one step getting closer to having your own place. But the tent thing is good, but it's so many people there too and a lot of different personalities and stuff. It's one step. It's better than being just on somebody's sidewalk, you know. But what's really changed for Mark is that door he has now, that locks. It sounds so simple, but it means he can move around freely without constantly worrying about someone stealing his stuff. One of Mark's neighbors, Doug, tells me his tiny house allowed him to start working at a McDonald's down the block. I ask if it's because of the showers and the laundry station here. Doug says it's actually mostly because he has a place to charge his phone. Another feature of the tiny house village is that everyone has weekly meetings with a case worker helping them get subsidized apartments and other forms of help. In the past, Mark's tried to do that on his own, but his short-term memory loss has made that really hard. Basically, that's, that's all I've had one is in my housing, get that, get me in. I'm not all the list now and she's got me on some other list that I've never known about for their subsidized housing or whatever, but eventually something's got to pop. It's got to. The people I talk to here are starting to see changes in their lives, but Plum Street Village only has room for about 40 people at a time. One of the radical and controversial parts of Colin's plan is how those people are chosen. In a different city, people with the most problems would go to the front of the line. This is how most homeless service systems work. It's based on something called a vulnerability score. Someone who's a lot worse off than Mark, someone with a severe mental illness or a substance use disorder would probably get a tiny house before him, but in Plum Street Village, it's the opposite. The city and the nonprofit it contracts with, they choose people who are most likely to quickly get what they need and move out to a permanent home. Also, the city doesn't allow drug or alcohol use or any sex offenders in the tiny house village, and that leaps out a lot of people who might benefit from this place. Thai Gondol is with a homeless advocacy group called Just Housing. The city focuses a lot on who's ready, who actually wants to better their life, and focusing on those folks. And that means people who are able to work, people who are able to go to school, people who are likely to get an income that allows them to sustain living in a normal apartment or room for rent in the very near future. You know, that's hard for a lot of us that have been doing homeless advocacy for years, because we have a much more complicated view of what it means for somebody to be ready. Throughout the year, Collins faced criticism from different corners. There are business owners and people who shop and work downtown, who see the mitigation site as just another encampment messing up their city, providing a foothold for drug users, sex offenders, people with criminal records, but Thai represents a different type of skepticism Colin has faced. That his system puts too much on us on individuals to follow rules and solve their own problems. The people that are at the top of the vulnerability index are really never considered to move into the plum street village. It means people with extreme disabilities, people that are dealing with extreme mental health challenges, medical challenges, substance use challenges don't have the opportunity to try to move in there. And does that in itself mean that somebody isn't ready or wanting to take the next step to improve their life? Why shouldn't those folks at least have the chance to try and see if they can get somewhere? But Colin says, why not take the people who need the least help and get them off the streets quickly? Why make them wait until their health declines, until the gaps in their job and rental histories grow wider? This is not set up for the most vulnerable. This is set up for the individuals that fall through the cracks because they are not vulnerable enough. They just need a couple months. They just need a couple months to stabilize. They just need a couple months to get a job. This really diverts people from getting into our homeless services. Colin's plan relies on people flowing through this system, from the streets to the mitigation site to the tiny house village and eventually into their own homes, making room for new people. There's help along the way, but how fast and how far they go, a lot of that depends on their own initiative. From Ty's perspective, this individualistic approach is going to crash up against a fundamental problem, the very force that's behind this era of rising homelessness, a lack of housing. Even for people that are able to work and are interested in going back to school and do have an income, there's no next place for most people who go into the plumb street village to go to. That's not because they're not ready. That's because we don't have the options available for folks. When we continue this narrative that it's based on whether or not people are ready, it keeps the community focused on thinking that the problem is with the individuals. Not that our system doesn't have space for those people. Next, we go back to the place where all this started and check out the results of this year long experiment. That's after the break. Hi, I'm Bethany Denton. I'm the editor and mixed engineer for outsiders. And I work with a lot of complicated tape in the series, both in terms of content and also in terms of sound quality. A lot of interviews were recorded next to bus stations and freeways and under bridges. It's my job to make sure that people's voices come through clearly. It's challenging, but it's worth it to be able to put you, the listener, on the ground with people living unsheltered. Here are a few ways you can help support this kind of long form, sound rich storytelling. First, read and review outsiders on Apple podcasts. Second, subscribe to the Seattle Times and make a monthly donation to KNKX. There are links that will help you do all of this in the episode description. We couldn't do this work without our listeners and readers, so thank you. The day the mitigation site first opened, I watched dozens of people leave unsanctioned camps around downtown and settle here into brand new green and gray tents lined up in neat rows. Some of those people were optimistic something had changed in the way the city was treating them, that the mitigation site could be a turning point, the beginning of something new. On this rainy day a year later, when I meet up with Colin, the mitigation site looks almost like it's transforming back into an unsanctioned camp. Colin shows me where some residents have built elaborate shacks out of scraps of wood to replace tents that have fallen apart. The rats have gotten aggressive to the point where they dig through the pallets, that chew through the press board that's on top of the pallets, and they chew through the tents. So what we're learning is, in the Pacific Northwest, for today being a perfect example, tents are not meant for day-to-day use. Even a nice tent is meant for weekend trips, it's not meant for someone to live out of day after day after day for years at a time. Colin's experimenting with alternatives to tents. In one corner of the site, a guy known as kite man lives in a rounded hut that looks like the back of a pioneer wagon. It's called a conestoga hut. Nearby, a woman named Bianca lives in what looks like a plastic garden shed called a tough shed. She's one of the familiar faces I've seen at the mitigation site from just about the beginning. One of the originals, you're in the second group to move. How are you doing? I'm okay. I'm okay. It's not easy, but it's okay. That's funny. I just got signed up for housing to yesterday, and they're going to fast-track me. So hopefully by the time winter sets in really good, I hope to be off the streets. So like a few more weeks? I hope so. I hope so. I don't know what's available right now, but it's better than it was yesterday. My impairment rating even went up. They had me down as a eight, okay, and I've got cancer, and I'm sick, but they had me down as a eight. She redid it yesterday, and I'm like, I've got a 14 out of 18, so. Is that vulnerability? Yeah, yeah, and that makes me more eligible for housing. Across the mitigation site, Collins shows me an army green shipping container with doors carved into it. We have this new shelter box. This is the first one around. That's the prototype. That has been extremely awesome. It's insulated. You can power them up. The wrap roof, and I really think that potentially could be the future of shelters right there. When Collins set up this mitigation site, he said, in a year, this will be a parking lot again. He saw this as a short-term emergency measure that would give way to something better. But a year later, the exact opposite has happened. The mitigation site has hardened with more permanent fixtures replacing temporary wants. And people like Bianca are heading into their second winter in this outdoor waiting room. So that's where we were at the end of 2019 before any of us knew the world was about to change. A few months and a global pandemic later, I come back to the mitigation site with two people whose voices you've heard throughout this series. Scott Greenstone is a reporter with Project Homeless at the Seattle Times. And Viana Davila is a journalist who spent years covering homelessness here in Washington. All right. So we're back here right outside the mitigation site. And at this point, we are well over a year since we started our reporting, actually close to a year and a half at this point into our project. And we're here to take stock and assess how all of this went, how Olympia's plans to manage unsheltered homelessness have gone over the past year to 18 months. So what's the best way to start? I think we could start where a lot of homeless services started a lot of homeless shelters is how many people used this place stayed here and then were able to get off the streets. How many people got housing? Say let's just look at the first year 2019. We haven't estimated around 250 people stayed here. And so it's 250 people who kind of walked into the front door of this system. Exactly. And they didn't all stay here at the same time. Right. So of those folks, 23 people went straight from the mitigation site into some kind of housing, a rent controlled apartment or just a market rate apartment. 35 people went from here, this mitigation site to the tiny house village on Plum Street. And then of those folks, if you remember, like Colin had this idea of a pipeline, let's get people into the mitigation site and then into the tiny house village and then from the tiny house village, we get them housing. That happened for 12 households, which could be as many as 24 people because some of those folks could be couples. So in total, we're talking around 35 to almost 50 people got a home out of the 250 people who entered the mitigation site. What is more important, I think, is or at least just as important is the number of folks that this didn't work for. Right. And that's around double 70 people in 2019, walked out of the camp or were kicked out of the camp. And that's a lot of people. So those aren't the sorts of numbers that like scream success. Viana, I'm curious what you think, because right from the start, you were kind of a voice of skepticism or maybe the word is realism about how all this would work. I guess I'm not surprised by the numbers that you just told me, which I didn't calculate the percentage, but certainly less than a quarter got into some kind of housing. I think the questions that are occurring to me now are what happens to the people that did make it into a home, right, who made it through column system. What's going to happen to them long term? Are they are they going to maintain the home? How are they going to maintain the home? Are they getting help? Are they getting services to keep maintaining that home or maintain the job or the benefits they need to maintain that home? So you're kind of chipping away at this idea of success even more by pointing out that not everybody who moves into a home actually stays there. We know that lots of people aren't able to maintain a home. They might get a subsidized or a free apartment and not be able to maintain it and end up homeless again. And we have examples of that in our series. What's interesting about that is, you know, it points to this lack of what we call permanent supportive housing, which is a form of housing that comes with round the clock, care and support for people with maybe mental illness or chronic homelessness or long-term health needs. That works for a lot of people. A lot of people right here in the mitigation site at the end of their story are going to need something like that. And the amount of it out there is not even close to the demand. Yeah, it's the most expensive intervention when it comes to how you try and fix someone's homelessness. It's also the one with the best track record of keeping people off the street, but it's so expensive. So it's just really hard to build. But I think we should remember that Colin said that housing was only ever part of his goal. He also wanted to improve downtown. When you're engaging success at a mitigation site, the knee jerk is to say how many people have gotten into housing. But really, what does success look like for this community? Well, hopefully we're seeing less used needles out here on the streets. The other one is the amount of human feces being picked up on our streets as gross as that sounds. That's data. We have data for that. So the hope is we're seeing a trend of the crease of both needles and human feces on the street, which tells you like, are you kidding me? That's how we're measuring success at the mitigation site. And my answer to that is yes. That's what kind of problem that we're actually dealing with. Is there actually data on that? There is. Yeah. It's a little complicated, but the bottom line is essentially the city is finding fewer needles downtown. There are also seem to be on average fewer feces being picked up around downtown, but it's not really a profound change. And you can still see you know needles. There are needles on the ground in a pile behind Viana. You know, so you can still there's still the effects of camping are still visible. So amid all these like kind of mediocre results, I wonder if there is this one thing we can point to as a success, which is the fact that the mitigation site has been packed full for its entire existence. There's been a huge demand among people who are in shelter to live here. What can we attribute that to? If I had to guess, I would say that it's the the fence, the gate, the security booth. I always struggle with how to bring these things up, but you know, living outside is really dangerous. I mean, it feels like every single person I talk to says that they've been robbed at some point outside. It's just so unsafe to live outside. I do think that's a really great illustration of a success of this camp. You just you gave people a place to calm down, gather their things, not be under constant threat potentially of getting told to get up and leave by the police. I go everything Scott said and just to say that, you know, I come from a place with a lot of gated communities, whether I like that or not. This is kind of like that, just like Scott saying, like there's a sense of control over who gets to live here. And when you're homeless often, that's one of the things I see that's consistent. You have zero control over so many things. And here, there's a little bit more of that. And so many of the people that you've talked to, that we've all talked to, have experienced assault, sexual assault. Maybe there's a sense that you're safer here. And certainly there's a built in community, not that I want to apply everyone here knows each other and his friends. I don't think that's true. It's a large community, but there is pretend, you know, a chance of that. It's a different vibe than when you go to an unmanaged camp. To me, there's always a little bit of, I feel safety. The ultimate goal is we're creating a home for these individuals, right? For right now, this is kind of their, their safe place. Are we able to make any kind of definitive statement about whether any of this worked? I think I can say it helped some people and it didn't work for the majority. And I think that's kind of the story of homeless services across the board. Any shelter I walk into, for some people, it's the first step to getting off the streets. But for most people, it's just helps them, you know, survive the next day or the next few hours. And for some folks, it helps them for a little bit, and then they get kicked out and it doesn't help them at all. I haven't seen a system anywhere that's, you know, a permanent solution for a majority of people. I don't know if that exists. I think everyone who works on this issue, right? Everyone in homeless services or government services that deal with homelessness acknowledge how complicated this is. And I know I said that where so many times and I sound repetitive, it's a broken record, but it's true. And so I think people, there's a somewhat realistic sense of, for people who are chronically homeless, getting out of that is very hard because there are so many different factors that contribute to that. When this started out, I thought there was a chance that we might capture some change. I didn't think it was likely, but I thought there was a chance. And I think all this time later, what we ended up capturing was more of like the sameness of this issue, how there are tweaks around the edges, how cities come up with new plans and new interventions, and in the end, the fundamentals always stayed the same. The big macro forces that are driving this poverty stay the same. And what I've thought throughout the course of this project is how crazy it is that we are reporting on homelessness from the perspective of a city. In my mind, cities, especially cities the size of Olympia, are built to pick up trash, to give out parking tickets, to fill potholes. They are not designed to deal with what is essentially a refugee crisis. They're not designed to deal with these huge issues of poverty and mental health and social services. And it's like, where are the other levels of government? Where's like the huge federal response to this? It seems like the level of government we have tasked with dealing with this issue is totally outmatched by the scale of the issue. You know, yeah, we see that the federal government and the state government to some level, the things that disappeared were their things. Their mental health hospitals got closed or defunded. If we look at public housing, we're not building nearly as much or maintaining nearly as much public housing as we were in the 50s and 60s when we didn't have a homelessness crisis. So when those places are gone, there's no space for these folks. Where do these folks go? I mean, to be clear, cities tend to get federal funding and some state funding pass through from the feds to address homelessness and housing, right? So it's not as if there's no federal money. But I think what this raises is that it's not just, oh, the homeless system has been hurt by, you know, a decrease in funding. It's that all of these other systems, just as Scott was pointing out, the mental health system, the public housing system, those have systematically gotten reduced funding over the years. And so it's this braided story of all of these different systems as housing has gotten more expensive. And so the result is that it then falls on cities and counties as well to sort of address these issues and have to learn to become equipped to handle them. I think we have to address this. We are standing here in the middle of 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic that has gone on for months at this point and by all accounts will continue for months into the future. This mitigation site that we're standing next to is now an island of activity in this downtown that is largely dormant. And it's totally, it's turned the economy upside down. It's turned local governments upside down. And at the same time, it has nonprofits and local governments rethinking social services fundamentally. And so like is everything that we've talked about throughout this entire project going to change? I think there is a lot that's changed. I think shelters and governments were terrified that these big congregate shelters were folks sleep six inches away from each other on mats on the ground. We're going to become vectors of disease. And so they moved very quickly to get the most vulnerable people put up in hotels. And we've seen all of a sudden a sort of mass realization or at least I've seen more people talking about it than ever before. This kind of idea that congregate shelters are just inhumane. So there's an effort to say don't let them go back to congregate shelters. We need to put these people up in hotels or buy the hotels or something like that. But for all that talk, there's also the question of where does the money come from? Because it's not clear if it'll come from the federal government at any point. You said a little bit ago what we ended up highlighting was the sameness with this issue. And I think even as we stand here, even with COVID and everything, you know, I think unless there's some big effort to really try and change the levers, the economic and resource levers, we're going to continue to see that sameness. Well, here's the thing. You have a whole swath of the country now who's facing eviction as moratoriums expire, who are now facing homelessness. And I feel like I mean, I'll be curious six months from now if the pandemic has just turned on a tab of more and more people who are maybe on the edge or they didn't even know they were on the edge. And now they too, maybe they won't be chronically homeless, right? Because you have to be homeless for quite some time to qualify as such. But it's just sort of this domino effect down, right? That's what I keep thinking about. Right, this whole story started with this massive influx of people living on sheltered in downtown Olympia. And I guess the fear is that a year from now or six months from now or who knows, we're going to be seeing that kind of situation at a much larger scale. I think all of us in the last six months, those of us who are privileged enough to have sort of a permanent roof of our heads have really come to value what a home means because we can't go outside, we can't go into other places the way we used to be able to do. So that home becomes like such a sanctuary. And if you don't have one, what's your sanctuary? As we walk away from the mitigation site, I meet Bianca near the front gate. She's the woman from earlier who's lived here longer than anyone else I know. At this point, it's been more than a year and a half. She rushes over with a big smile and tells me she won't be here much longer. I'm moving over to the Coyote Village. I've been okay for Coyote Village. You've been okay for Coyote Village. Get a tiny home. When do you move there? As soon as I've got an opening. Coyote Village is a different tiny house village than the one Colin set up. It's been around for about seven years and the big difference is it's permanent. Once you get a spot there, you're in for good. For Bianca, that would mean saying goodbye to the mitigation site. This has been your home basically for a year and a half. How do you feel about maybe leaving this place? I can't wait. I can't wait. I'm going to miss some of the people and I've told them I might come down into my volunteer. So yeah, this has been home and I might have withdrawals I'm sure from just being here and got to learn how to live inside again. Yeah, it's going to be a treat. Well, how do you feel about that about having four walls in the door? I'm probably fine to place to sleep outside for a while, you know, because I'm not going to be used to being inside. I'm asleep with my door open or something for a while so that, you know, I'm actually made to being inside and they're they're tiny homes. It's they're not just a shed. They're calling a tiny home. It's they're tiny homes. So it's my idea. It's my idea of having really. Bianca's in her 50s. She's been homeless for two years. She says it was a case worker from a nonprofit who came to the mitigation site, re-evaluated her vulnerability score and put her on this path to getting a tiny home. You know, one of the things we've been trying to figure out is like, you know, Colin came into the city. Colin DeForest came here. He changed a lot of things around. Was it good or was it bad? It's a stark and you got to start somewhere. It's a learning process. Anytime you do something, it hasn't been done before or, you know, you're trying it for the first time, you're going to make mistakes and that you learn from those mistakes. And this is nobody giving anybody a manual. It says, okay, this is how you deal with the, you know, with the hundred and some on homeless, we're about to drop in your lap all at once, you know, which is what happened. This place was needed and it filled up quick and it's been full, you know, pretty much ever since. So it's just a learning, it's a learning process. Did you feel safer here than you did in the un sanctioned? Um, yeah, it's a safer place because there's more people around. There's staff here. So yeah, without a doubt, feel way more secure than I did over at the smart lot. They were just, you know, we were just there and it was a bunch of random people and we just do can did our own thing. Here, we're trying to become a community. And that's, you know, for as hard as that is, we're doing it. It's just taking a while. I'll be crossing my fingers for you. Just waiting for an opening. In the end, the city of Olympia didn't upend any status quo. It took the status quo and made it a little more humane, a little more controlled, a little more bearable to people like Bianca. While across Washington, plans like the one by the legislature slowly turned dollars into construction sites into the skeletons of buildings into homes. All these months in, Olympia's plan looks less like a solution or like an acknowledgement there might not be a solution for years. I want to talk to Colin about this, but months earlier in the spring, I got an email that caught me by surprise. It was from Colin saying the following day would be his last with the city of Olympia. He was quitting. The email says, there really is no drama or any bridges burned. I am just ready for my next challenge. As I leave Olympia, I walk past the parking lot where a big, unsanctioned camp called the smart lot existed when the series started before the city swept it. And I think about something Scott said about the mitigation site a few minutes earlier. You know, before any of this started, there were unsanctioned camps all over downtown Olympia. And yeah, they were, you know, disorganized and I think many of them were probably very dangerous. But at the same time, people had their sort of like street families and there were places where people were trying to recuperate and survive as best as they could. And there's still like this big question in my mind of, was it better to tear those down and make people move or, you know, would have been better to just let them stay there and work with them to try and get them off the street. In other words, what if the mitigation site never existed? What if the city of Olympia did none of this and just tried to help people where they were at in their unsanctioned camps? In the final months of 2019, that exact experiment started to unfold a half mile from the mitigation site under the 4th Avenue bridge. This is the unsanctioned camp the city had planned to sweep, but it was saved at the last minute when residents of the camp organized and convinced city council members to let them stay. Leaders of local churches try to help residents of the camp write an enforce a code of conduct, but right away power struggles within the camp make that difficult. Elvis is one of the unofficial leaders of the camp. This is close to quick. What's going on? Big struggle. Back and forth with me in the cold. She wants everything her way and I want everything to go like it needs to go. Elvis and his supporters want strict rules against drug dealing and drug use. Others want the camp to be more welcoming and permissive. At one meeting, Elvis and the church leaders go over some proposed rules and Elvis shoots them down one by one. But there's like five or six of these nobody under here is going to do except for my group. Okay, like rule number one, limiting the exposure of the camps, legal action, and respecting other members of the community who might have substance use challenges by not dealing substances on the property. Don't mean they're not going to do that. They're already trying to vote me to get me and him out of here so they don't have to listen to anything at all. Ty, the activist who criticized Colin's system earlier is part of this meeting. She wants this to work. She's seen at work at another unsanctioned camp she helped organize across town. She says tensions like this are normal early on. Anybody that's been a part of a school project where one person feels like they're doing all the work and you know it's a it's a it's a consistent thing but I think it's something we can figure out and I think we can learn to work through it and I have no doubt we can do it. But they never get the chance. For a while the city tolerates the camp under the fourth avenue bridge and the efforts to organize it. City leaders say they're looking for a property where they can move all the residents of this camp, keep them together in a sort of second mitigation site. But those plans fall apart and around Christmas of 2019 people living under the fourth avenue bridge find paper notices in their camp that the city is going to sweep it. One of those people is someone we followed from the very beginning. Jessica. Like I said I'm an outsider there's time to bid in somewhere that doesn't accept me. Coming up in the final episode of outsiders we find out what happens to her. But before that a special episode throughout this project so many of you have reached out with burning questions about homelessness and also looking to process your own feelings about it. So we took some of your questions and we posed them to the people best equipped to answer them. People who are homeless themselves. That's next on outsiders. Outsiders is a collaboration between K and KX public radio and the Seattle Times project homeless team. This episode was reported and written by Viana Davila who's now a reporter with pro publica and the Texas Tribune. Scott Greenstone and me Will James. We got some reporting help from Rob Smith. His podcast is welcome to Olympia. Our editors are Aaron Hennessy and Bethany Denton who's also our mixed engineer. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions. Thanks to Project Homeless's Sydney Brownstone, K and KX's director of Content Matt Martinez, news director Florentia LaDivila, and digital content manager Kari Plogue. Parker Miles Blom took photos for the project Adrian Flores designed our logo. Special thanks to Adiza Egan and Linda Lutton. Two journalists whose work without them even knowing it inspired this project. I'm Will James. Thank you for listening.