TACOMA, Wash. — Editor's note: The above video on Tacoma's public camping ban taking effect originally aired Nov. 14, 2022.
It's been six months since Tacoma’s controversial camping ban took effect. In that time, what’s changed?
Providers and advocates are saying people who are unhoused are less receptive to outreach personnel and are moving to more isolated areas, where it may be harder to reach them.
The Tacoma City Council passed the ban on camping or storing public property within 10 blocks of the city’s temporary shelters last October, and it went into effect on Nov. 14.
Councilmember John Hines, who introduced the ordinance, said the ban was intended to “respond to the impacts of encampments” across Tacoma.
Caleb Carbone, homeless services and strategy manager for the City of Tacoma said in that regard there has been some impact.
“One of the things that we have seen is that those bigger encampments have actually started to decrease and become smaller encampments,” Carbone said.
With smaller groups of people, Carbone said it’s easier to provide outreach and the city is not seeing the types of negative impacts that can result from a larger encampment.
However, Rob Huff with the Tacoma Pierce County Coalition to End Homelessness said the sweeps have made people harder to find to offer services. Instead of gathering in larger groups, people may be camping by themselves or with one other person, and they’re choosing places that are more out of the way, and potentially more unsafe.
“(People) go to places that are more hidden, and it’s made it harder for outreach teams to maintain connections with people who they’ve been trying to maintain relationships with, to bring them into any kind of appropriate shelter or next housing option for them,” Huff said.
In the six months since the ban was enacted, the city has ramped up sweeps of encampments considerably. There have been 27 encampment sweeps so far this year with two more in progress. Last year there were 27 sweeps total, according to the city’s dashboard.
When sweeping an encampment, by law the city provides a two-week notice to give outreach providers time to offer services. Carbone said the city still tries to support people as they move out of prohibited areas, regardless of whether they’ve accepted help.
The city’s ordinance prioritizes using the “least restrictive voluntary enforcement methods possible” before resorting to enforcement, which includes up to a $250 fine or 30 days in jail. To date, the city has not fined or arrested anyone for noncompliance with the ordinance.
Huff said the sweeps have been “pretty constant” since the ban went into effect. Huff said providers are not seeing a greater number of unhoused people accept shelter; instead, they’re moving around the city more often.
“They just can’t settle down in any way, so there’s no way to get any stability,” Huff said.
Since Tacoma enacted the camping ban, Carbone said the city has increased its outreach capacity by adding four new employees and prioritizing hiring applicants who may be better able to build trust with people who are unhoused, like women and people who are bilingual.
Carbone said the expansion is still in its early stages, and it’s not yet possible to tell whether the outreach team’s increased capacity will result in a greater proportion of unhoused people accepting offers for shelter or services, but that the city is working to make outreach more effective, whether through its own HEAL Team or through organizations who are contracted by the city.
“We're always mindful of that, is that some people may not want to work with the city directly,” Carbone said. “But our contracted outreach providers might have a better ability to build rapport with them, and so we understand that and just want to be able to reduce any of those barriers.”
However, Myron Bernard, senior director of community engagement for the Tacoma Rescue Mission, said outreach from his organization is being met with a greater degree of distrust since the ordinance went into effect.
“Establishing trust is much more difficult in the days past since the camping ban,” said Bernard. “I think people are just more skeptical that if they provide information then the government will somehow use that against them, and we certainly don’t believe that’s the case, but, yeah there is a degree of skepticism and distrust there as well.”
Paired with that distrust is the fact that people who are unhoused may not find offers for shelter preferable to living on the street, for a variety of reasons. Shelter models that unhoused people are more willing to accept, that offer better privacy and more personal space like a tiny home village or a repurposed hotel are more often unavailable.
Congregate shelter settings that don’t fill up as often may involve sleeping near people they don’t know, being subject to rules around when people are allowed to come and go or facing difficult choices like separating from a partner or a pet.
“I think in so many ways when we offer these kind of like one size fits all solutions for homelessness, we don’t realize that in many ways we just remove choice, and that power of choice is so core to being a human, and it’s so core to really experiencing dignity and having that identity of self,” Bernard said.
Since the ban went into effect, the city has opened a new low-barrier shelter at 35th and Pacific, a safe parking site at Holy Rosary Church and is working on a new micro village with Brotherhood Rise. Carbone said the city is hoping to add more appealing models of shelter, both by adding relationships with contracted providers and increasing the variety of models the city has available.
Still, the number of people needing shelter far outnumbers the available capacity. According to Pierce County’s last Point in Time count, there were an estimated 4,300 unhoused people in the entire county, while there are roughly 1,300 shelter spaces.
The City of Tacoma is expected to get an update in June on whether 311 requests and 911 calls related to encampments have decreased in the months since the ban took effect. Carbone said the city is continuing to look at the trends to better understand the camping ban’s impact.