by Jack Stroud
In early October, the City of Olympia made the decision (it was ultimately City Manager Jay Burney’s decision) to clear the camp of houseless people parked along Ensign Rd, the main justification thereto being that Ensign residents impeded emergency vehicle traffic to Providence St. Peter’s Hospital. On Oct. 20th, Code Enforcement posted bright orange slips on every suspiciously lived-in vehicle along Ensign Rd, officially notifying residents of the planned sweep. On the afternoon of Oct. 26th, less than 24 hours before the planned sweep, the Attorney General’s office sent a letter to the Deputy City Attorney of Olympia, Micheal Young, advising that Olympia’s sweep of the Ensign encampment would likely be illegal for at least three reasons, one being Proclamation 20-19.
Issued by Gov. Inslee in March 2020 in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the proclamation prohibits “residential evictions by all residential landlords operating residential property in Washington State.” As the Attorney General’s letter states, “The Proclamation applies to residents who have resided with permission in their current location for 14 days or more.” Some residents on Ensign have been there since January. Disempowered, the City, in the form of too many police officers, code enforcement employees, and other government staff, would still occupy Ensign on the morning of Oct. 27th to ask residents to leave voluntarily, but they could no longer compel people to leave.
Or so we hoped. As the Olympian has reported, and Just Housing articulated in an open letter to Mayor Selby and the City Council, the situation on Ensign on Oct. 27th was confusing at best. The city barricaded off the whole road for hours with police cars and tow trucks with flashing lights at either end; advocates for the residents were not allowed in. Quoting Just Housing: “Residents sought us out beyond the barricades because they were being threatened with tickets if they stayed. They were then told that only those who left could not come back without risking a ticket. Then the information changed again—everyone would be at-risk of receiving a ticket. Finally, residents were told that the City actually doesn’t know yet. In effect, the subtext of a continually changing message was the real message.”
Amidst all of the confusion, a few residents left and will not be allowed to return, as the city has now erected “no parking” signs along Ensign, and leaving invalidates their 14-day tenure.
It is also possible that the way the City made parking illegal along Ensign was an illegal act itself. According to section 10.16.020 of Olympia’s Municipal Code, when signs are erected giving notice of prohibited parking, the “area shall be so designated after an engineering analysis is conducted by the City of Olympia and deemed necessary.” On Oct. 23rd, I asked Kieth Stahley, the Interim Assistant City Manager, if the City had conducted an engineering analysis to deem prohibited parking along Ensign Rd necessary. He said, “We don’t need an engineering analysis to close areas to parking. We’ve frequently opened and closed parking based on how the parking is being used, or misused.” I brought up the point again later in our conversation, with Stahley responding, “I’m not familiar with what section you’re referring to. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t have a response to that.”
On the same day as the “non-sweep”, Thurston County approved $530,000 in funding for a safe parking lot in Olympia where RV and van residents could stay. The City of Olympia had put in the request for funding a few weeks prior. The money from the county comes partly from annual state funding for homeless prevention and partly from federal coronavirus relief funds.
The City has identified a vacant parking lot in Lacey’s Urban Growth Area, abutting the Olympia Police Department’s pistol shooting range. Kieth Stahely plans on presenting the full proposal for the safe lot to the Regional Housing Council in November, as the Olympian has reported.
At its peak, there were 51 vehicles parked along Ensign Rd. The new safe lot will likely not be large enough to accommodate that many vehicles.
What follows is two profiles of two former Ensign Rd Residents. I spoke with them in the days leading up to the planned sweep and in the days after it.
T.J. N.
T.J. has had 35 surgeries in his life. In 2014, he was crossing the crosswalk and got hit by a state employee driving through. They put three titanium plates and a lot of screws in him. But his neck kept leaning forward, they couldn’t figure out why his neck kept leaning forward. Doctors took an MRI and found out the whole back of his neck is shattered. So in 2018, he underwent another surgery, the first of its kind because of the robots they used. He went into the hospital with $398k in his account, enough to buy a house, and came out with none, the bank had seized it all. He took it to the Thurston County Court and lost. 2018 was the first year he spent the night in a homeless shelter.
Then for a while, he was sleeping in the back of his truck. His mom heard about it, even though they hadn’t spoken for years, she heard about it and gave him her RV. He and his service dog stayed in it over on Deschutes Pkwy for a while, before the Olympia Police Department re-directed him to Ensign Rd., even offered to tow him there, says T.J. Up until a week ago, that is where he was, on Ensign.
The sun glinted off of small engine parts meticulously scattered around the collapsable chairs we sat in on the sidewalk next to his T.J.’s RV. He was in the middle of helping Russel fix a generator. The rocker arms were bent. As we spoke, T.J. occasionally tore the filter off of his next cigarette. He apologized when he let a curse slip and unraveled his answers to my questions with pleasant non-sequiturs.
Of his seven degrees, one is in automotive repair. “I’ve been working on my own car and helping with other people’s vehicles. I do what I can,” he said. “[Russel] asked me yesterday well what do you wanna do I said well if you got the parts for the generator. So I took it apart.”
Another of his degrees is in culinary art, a skillset he used as a chef for President Reagan. “People can’t afford to pay me because of how I cook,” he said. Proudly now retired, his Facebook is dotted with photos of smoked beef briskets and blue cheese spare ribs. Some of the younger people around the camp on Ensign call him Chef.
“But yeah I’m terminally ill,” he told me casually, “just sitting here waiting to see what happens. I have an infection from my feet all the way to my head. I don’t like to really go too far because of my health issues. You know coronavirus is out here, I don’t want it. So I’d rather be close where I can go right up the road [to the hospital].”
He still lives with pain from his surgeries every day, too. “I smoke a lot of pot for my pain. I have family who are drug and alcohol counselors so that makes it hard on me. They say you’re still doing drugs and I say no I’m not. I have a prescription.”
While he did feel secure living on Ensign, it wasn’t without its difficulties. A couple of months ago someone threw a bomb at the side of his RV, another fact he dropped with nonchalance. “Everybody came running to my RV because of the smoke they thought my place was on fire. But if they would’ve got it in my window it would’ve blown the whole thing up. Now I have to get a paint job.”
And he has experienced other instances of hostility while on Ensign, too. “People will honk from the beginning of the road there [where the first RV is parked], all the way to here [where the last lived in vehicle is parked].” T.J. didn’t appreciate that. One time he walked crossed over Ensign from the side he was parked on and put his hand out for one of the honkers to stop. The driver didn’t slow down, his side slapped T.J.’s hand. He showed me that it was still red. I asked him why he thought people acted that way. “Just rudeness,” he said. “A lot of people are afraid of becoming homeless.”
“I would rather have a place where we’re actually safer,” he said. “I recommended [to the City] that because of this being swampland they could turn it into an RV park but they said they can’t do that because it’s a wetland.” He noted that the City owns lots of vacant lots that could be used for safe parking for the homeless. It was frustrating but not surprising to him that the City was planning to displace the Ensign residents without offering them another place to go.
When I asked him if he thought that Ensign residents are responsible for obstructing emergency vehicle traffic, he quickly said no and that the biggest problem is “looky-loos”–people who slow down as they drive past the encampment, to take footage or just observe from their car. “It should be against the law to slow down. It causes accidents.”
And it’s not just that, he said, “Would they like it if we went by their houses? I always tell people do unto others as you want them to do unto you.”
He also takes umbrage with the close eye that Code Enforcement keeps on the homeless. “Do they do this to the people at their houses and business or just the homeless?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s a ‘hey can we go to your house and see how dirty your house is?’ type thing. Like I said I’m working on something [the generator] so by tonight this’ll be clean. There won’t be nothing out here. My house is always clean.”
At some point in our conversation, T.J. got up to get some documents out of his RV. With the paperwork arrayed on his lap, he pointed to “Department of Enterprise Services” at the top of one of the documents. “They wanna call it an enterprise, well where’s the money for the people. They spend all this money to clean that chrome dome over there. And then they got the new buildings going in this and that. It’s like, why keep building buildings when you could do stuff helping the underprivileged? This is our heavenly father’s land, not theirs.” He maintained that providing support for the unhoused was a State problem but that the City of Olympia was not excused.
“I keep trying to explain it to [the City] that they need a heroine recovery center around here.” He told me a story about a man down the street who overdosed and the slow emergency response time afforded him. “They came here drove all the way around back again and just because he was homeless. They don’t take care of us. They treat us like trash.” In his experience also, his status as a homeless man has resulted in poor medical service. He’s been shuffled around from room to room and only had his problems addressed at surface levels.
I asked him where he would go if the City followed through with the sweep. “Back to Centralia,” he said. That’s where he grew up and his mother and his sister still live there. But he wouldn’t be able to stay with them, he and his mother don’t get along.
I was back on Ensign the next day to talk with some more people. As I walked past his RV, T.J. came out with more paperwork in his hands and a toothy, toothless smile. Some lawyers had brought by paperwork for him to fill out: a Reasonable Accommodations defense under the American Disabilities Act–possibly the best line of defense in allowing him to stay on Ensign until he found a safe and permanent place to park. “You see that?” he asked. It was hopeful.
But on the 26th, it was unclear if the RA defense would abate the City. And by the time the letter came from the Attorney General’s office that made clear the illegality of the City’s planned sweep of Ensign, T.J. was already on his way back to Lewis County.
Things have been no easier for him since he’s been there. Again with no Safe Place to Park, he has been sleeping on the side of the road and has already been served a parking violation. He’s been trying to get medical help, but the hospital lost his records. “It’s too much paperwork to get nothing,” he said. In addition to all his other medical complications, he also has a heart condition.
As we were speaking over the phone he was trying to get some coffee and food. Some organization down there was handing it out to the homeless. There was a lot of background noise.
Micheal J. F.
“Alaska was beautiful. Astonishing. It’ll take your breath away it really will.” Micheal had been up there working for some friends of his who own a food truck that they drive all over the state for fairs and weekend festivals. “Plus we would go fishing and hunting and camping and all of that,” he said, “it was part work part vacation.”
He came back to Olympia just under a year ago and started off looking for work again. He landed a job at a company that he did not want to name, but before long, COVID started up and they started cutting hours and laying people off. Micheal was soon out of work. To make things more difficult, he had misunderstood the parking fees at the airport and had to pay over $1,000, nearly everything he had saved, to get his car out of the airport parking lot. He had no place to go and started sleeping in his car.
The next few months were hard. He started parking on Ensign Rd every now and then to hang out and get some rest. After a while, he noticed that more people were staying there and decided, with no other place to go, that that is where he would stay. “I was wary of it at first I was like wow is this real? Are they really gonna not mess with me? Not gonna take my car? But nothing happened and I got comfortable enough to start working odd jobs here and odd jobs there and saving up everything I could to make my situation better. So it was a blessing you know.”
A couple of weeks ago though, his car was towed. It had broken down and he couldn’t afford to fix it. The city has ordinances against broken cars parked along the roadway. The tow company took it away with everything he owned in it–his medicine, his clothes, his supplies. When he had to sign over the title, he was in tears.“That car was my best friend it was always there for me when I had nothing else or when I didn’t have a safe place or when I was cold. I could at least turn the battery on and listen to some music or something get my mind off of things for a little bit.” After paying a steep fee he was able to retrieve his belongings.
Since they took his car, Micheal has been living in a tent in the woods. “Man it’s been freezing,” he told me over the phone, “my hands are purple even right now and it’s hard to hold my cellphone up.”
Micheal’s parents and grandparents taught him to work for what he needs. So when he got sick from being out in the cold, it wasn’t easy for him to reach out to his sister to ask for help. She brought him some medicine and propane for the heater in his tent though. “That was really nice,” he said.
In his time on Ensign, he came to feel that the community members there are like a big family. “There is bickering and this and that but that’s just people trying to figure things out. People tend to steal stuff from each other or borrow without asking but you won’t get no help from nobody if you’re against the rules. Everybody’s gotta help each other out, we all know the situation. We’re there temporarily, it’s not looked at as a permanent situation by no means.”
“The misunderstanding [between homeless people and the rest of society] is that they look at homeless people like lazy and worthless but we’re all humans. We’re not all out there being lazy, we’re really trying you know. And [homeless people] are responsible people, we have phones, we have brain cells. Haha. You know it’s like damn, we’re not idiots and assholes.”
“Sometimes there are people out there that just don’t care anymore and they’ve given up, completely given up, they’ve lost all hope. But it takes a lot for that. I thought I’d been there at some points but I’ve always pulled myself out…You can’t get up unless you’ve gotten down.”
And Micheal feels like he’s getting up now. He is in the process of finding work through DCHS. When I asked him what type of job he’s looking for he said he didn’t know. “I have quite the extensive expertise. I’ve worked so many jobs. I’ve worked in the food industry. I’ve worked in pest control. I’ve worked as a gondola operator at a ski resort. I’ve worked all over the place man you name it.”
And he has a new license coming in the mail. Plus, with the support of family along with funds he has been able to set aside over the past few months, he has purchased an RV. The next steps are to get it registered and then find a safe place to Park.
“I’ll be totally good,” he said. “It’s a self-sustainable unit so it has solar panels and it will provide itself energy. I’ll be able to take hot showers and cook food, and lock it up and sleep. And have a job you know, maybe even get a dog. Or maybe even have a girlfriend maybe haha. Ain’t no girlfriend gonna be living in a car with me that’s for damn sure!”
“Life has its ups and downs for sure but being homeless has definitely humbled me and opened my eyes. I’m, I’m never gonna give up. I’m not just out here to just take from everybody and stand out with a sign. I’ve never held a sign. not once in my life and I won’t. I’ll always work and earn what I need. I’ll never take or ill never rob it or steal it you know.”
As Micheal and I wrapped up our phone call he suggested doing a follow-up interview in a few months. “That’d be cool to see the transformation because it’s happening now bud.”
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