Mayor Ed Murray today announced a plan to permit up to three new homeless encampments in the city.
  • Heidi Groover
  • Mayor Ed Murray today announced a plan to permit up to three new homeless encampments in the city.

It was a good day at City Hall, guys! Mayor Ed Murray—who has, along with leaders on the city council, long been unwilling to legitimize tent cities—now says the city should permit three new tent encampments on private or city-owned land.

In response to a growing homeless population throughout the county, Murray says he’ll send a bill down to the city council this week that will create a new one-year permit for these camps, allowing them to operate on private or public land (like abandoned lots; no parks) in non-residential areas of the city. The bill will also include a few requirements for those camps: that they be within a half-mile of a transit stop and at least one mile from each other, that the people living in them have access to social services, and that the agencies running them have insurance and collect general demographic data on the people living there. (Currently, religious organizations can set up tent cities without a city permit—and a handful have—but any other tent encampment is supposed to get a permit that lasts only 3 months and can be extended to 6 months. Not exactly a stable situation.)

Over the next few months, the city will identify available public and private lands, but it won’t be running the camps. Social service agencies will be the ones applying for the permits and complying with the city’s rules, and the city will spend about $75,000 to help provide case managers to visit the encampments.

Murray also announced a small but immediate addition to indoor shelter space in the city. Starting Thursday, the city will pay for 50 additional beds inside the King County Administration Building, which turns into an emergency shelter on winter nights and currently has 50 beds. By the end of the month, the city will also pay for another 15 beds for young adults at a location (possibly PSKS) on Capitol Hill. Those two expansions will cost $182,000.

Basically everyone agrees tent cities aren’t a long-term fix to homelessness and we have to keep working toward permanent solutions to problems like the city’s lack of affordable housing. But there’s been a disagreement about whether government should allow tent cities in the meantime since, you know, homeless people are still out there sleeping on the streets while we have task force meetings about how to fix all the big-picture, systematic stuff.

As Council Member Mike O’Brien put it when a bill legalizing encampments narrowly lost a council vote in 2013: “These folks still exist. They will be sleeping somewhere.”

Today, Murray said: “Permitted encampments are not, in my view, a long-term strategy to end homelessness. But planned, organized encampments have less of an impact on our neighborhoods and they provide a safer environment than we see when people sleep on our streets.”

Council Member Nick Licata, who introduced the 2013 bill, had planned to bring it back last year, but decided to wait for the mayor’s actions. At a press conference today, he praised the mayor’s efforts and thanked him for "acknowledging that encampments do support community" among homeless people.

But remember, this is government, so actually seeing tent encampments on government-owned land is going to take a while. (Ack! Public process!) Council staff still haven’t seen the exact wording of the mayor’s legislation, but they expect that this week. Then, in early February council members will start discussing it in committee and post a 30-day notice of a public hearing. After the hearing, it’ll go back to committee and then to the full council for a vote in March at the earliest.

“Obviously, I wish we had passed this when Nick [Licata] had his bill up a year and a half ago," O’Brien told me this afternoon. "I wish we had done this four months ago so we had them through the winter.” But, considering the “constraints within which we work,” O'Brien said, “this action certainly makes me feel good about where we’re going.”