The city of Colville is planning to shut down its homeless camp

After two years, Colville city officials plan to close down their homeless camp.

This decision follows a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in July that determined laws preventing the homeless from camping on public property are not cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

In 2018, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the Martin v. Boise case that camping in public spaces must be allowed if there are no shelters available. And in Seattle v. Long in 2021, the Washington Supreme Court made a similar ruling for people living in their vehicles, meaning the city could not enforce its 72-hour parking time limit.

Because of this, Colville reserved a 1-acre lot in 2022 where homeless people have been allowed to camp so that the city could legally enforce its ordinances against camping on public property and long-term parking. In addition, Stevens County loaned the town $125,000 to hire a facility manager and for miscellaneous expenses.

Colville Mayor Jack Smith said in a city council meeting Oct. 23 that they will revise camping ordinances to resemble the ordinance before Martin v. Boise and Seattle v. Long that limited bans on camping on public property, according to the Statesman Examiner.

The town’s rough timeline is said to start Jan. 1, when it will stop accepting new residents into the lot. It will start moving individuals out in April, by removing those who have been there the longest, and have everybody out by October.

Since the money Colville received from the county was a loan, Stevens County Commissioner Wes McCart said the city will have to pay back funds, but only if it doesn’t want to continue to use those funds for homeless purposes. The exact amount it would have to pay back hasn’t been stated by city officials.

“The agreement was that they use it for homeless purposes … they can’t turn it into a city shop or for parking, city trucks and things like that, but if they were still using it to store homeless equipment, to work things that they have related to homelessness, then we wouldn’t be asking for a return to the money,” McCart said.

Smith didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Barry Bacon, founder of Hope Street, said he was never in favor of the homeless camp and thought there were better solutions rather than “putting everything behind a fence.” Still, he’s concerned about where people are going to go.

“The camp has very limited services – so our concern is not that the camp was so great, but if this is the exit strategy that the city is planning for as people exit the camp, that’s really the conversation that we want to have with leadership,” Bacon said.

Hope Street has been serving homeless people since 2015, helping more than 250 find housing and jobs.

Bacon emphasized, though, that housing has been a struggle for all community members in the area.

“The typical wait in Stevens County for a rental is two years or more,” Bacon said. “There are the vulnerable populations, like women and women with children, understandably, moved to the front of the line, but the largest demographic is still single males, and there’s no housing to be had at this point.”

In 2020, Catholic Charities commissioned a market study to assess demand for affordable housing in Colville. The study reported vacancy levels at or below 1% and that 1,841 households were eligible for subsidized affordable housing, 76 households were experiencing homelessness, and 12 were chronically homeless.

Catholic Charities is working on affordable housing that will help homeless people and low-income families, and provide a place for more than 60 families.

The Colville Planning Commission has been meeting over zoning of a four-unit apartment in the Pheasant Ridge neighborhood of Colville.

Community members in recent city council meetings, however, have voiced concerns over safety, traffic and wanting to keep the neighborhood as it is.

Kim Herman, who retired as the executive director of the Washington State Housing Finance Commission in 2019, said this level of concern isn’t unusual, especially in rural communities.

“The issue is people in communities and neighborhoods have the feeling that if this unit is going to be, say, a rental unit, ‘Our rental apartment project is going to be a portion of low-income people or formerly homeless people,’ that they’re not going to be good tenants and that they’re going to cause problems in the neighborhood by drinking, maybe they’ll bring other people with criminal records or something else into the community,” Herman said. “… It’s not, it’s not an uncommon response.”

But in three to five years, he said 95% of people tend to forget that it was low-income housing in the first place.

“The honest truth is people forget that it’s even a low-income housing project, and it just becomes part of the community and it’s accepted,” Herman said.

Bacon said Catholic Charities’ efforts for housing in the area will be helpful for homeless families and solve part of the equation, but it won’t solve all their issues.

He also hasn’t heard any updates on exit strategies from the city council for those who reside in the homeless camp.

“There’s a need for housing, there’s a need for mental health support … and there’s a need for additional support to maintain sobriety or addiction treatment,” Bacon said.