A Camp Grows in Burien - Part 2

This Article on Burien's Homelessness Crisis is shared with permission of The Burien Voice on Facebook. Originally posted on August 27, 2024.

A Camp Grows in Burien  (Part 2)

I visited the Starbucks vagrant camp again yesterday. A business owner who was crossing the alley told me that the camp had expanded about five feet to the east in the previous 24 hours. Campers physically moved the fence out further into the alley overnight and expanded their camp into the newly opened space.

When I asked the gentleman if the camp had caused problems for his business, he told me that several customer vehicles had been broken into since the camp popped up and that his staff regularly show up to work to find piles of feces outside the dumpster, which he rents jointly with nearby businesses. (Bottom photo.) The campers are also using the dumpster to throw their trash into, he added. He pointed out a blue recycling bin between the dumpsters. It just turned up there mysteriously the other day, he said.

He told me that incidents of domestic violence break out there on the regular and that the businesses along the alley have sheltered women fleeing from abuse more than once.

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CONTEXT

This camp is just a few hundred feet due west of the courthouse camp, and the two camps are undoubtedly in communication with each other. The courthouse camp, which has been effectively sanctioned by Dow Constantine, King County Executive and the King County Sheriff's Office, is contained inside a fence that circles the area, but the "sister camp" at Starbucks continues to sprawl to the east and west along the alley. It's reasonable to assume that the Starbucks camp is taking "overflow" from the courthouse camp and will keep expanding to take any courthouse campers who refuse services and refuse to leave Burien when that camp is eventually cleared. Needless to say, if people at the courthouse camp know they can find another camp somewhere nearby, many will decline offers of help.

I spoke about the problem of "camp creep" with Lisa Daugaard of LEAD, who gets funding from King County to work with these people and is involved with a plan to close the courthouse encampment. When I told her that the county needs to shut down both camps at the same time, she demurred, saying there was no money or hotel space with which to do that:

"We feel similarly (we are [also] an adjacent business!)," she wrote, "but there are definitely not the dedicated shelter and housing resources to close both camps. All I can say is -- if the courthouse effort falters, we will shift our small handful of spaces to the Starbucks camp. We can partner with Kristine [Moreland, who runs the non-profit outreach agency "The More We Love"] in hopes that the strategies she offers might be a fit for some folks, but it will be challenging to fully resolve this location without access to any other options besides our own 15 rooms (which we only have because we're stretching to use currently underutilized capacity essentially subsidized by other sources)."

MORE CONTEXT

As regular readers of this page know, the Burien Police Department and City of Burien Government have tried discouraging vagrancy through "no camping" ordinances, but Dow Constantine, King County Executive and the King County Sheriff's Office have put the kibosh on that. The sheriff's office has primacy for law enforcement in in King County, and the "Burien police" are actually sheriff's deputies working on contract with the city. If the King County Sheriff's Office tells Burien officers not to enforce Burien's anti-vagrancy laws, the officers have to obey. Or they'll lose their badges.

Meanwhile, the County has not provided Burien with any other options for removing the camps, so they continue to grow.

The battle over the no camping ordinance has something to do with why the courthouse camp is located on King County property and not City of Burien property, but Burien police couldn't have removed the camp even if it was right in front of city hall.

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