The “Jungle Woods” encampment on Martin Way E Just moved to the area and I’m sure I will get the standard answers and takes. But I genuinely am curious how long this encampment has been here and why the city tolerates it? Does the city lack resources? Lack of will to do something about it?

Last week the City of Olympia issued a press release stating it would coordinate with the City of Lacey and Thurston County on a regional response to The Jungle. On Monday, May 18, signage was posted at the encampment announcing that a By Names List would be generated for closure — and that this list would close on May 28. This timeline is deeply concerning.

The By Names List is a tool that grew out of the nationwide Built for Zero movement. It is designed to identify individuals by name alongside their specific needs — barriers to housing, health conditions, history of homelessness — with the goal of enabling individualized case planning, service matching, and housing placement. Generating a By Names List requires outreach workers going into an encampment repeatedly, building trust, and conducting individual intake interviews. It is relationship-based work. And critically — it is intended to be a living, continuously updated document, not a one-time snapshot.

A By Names List is only useful if it accurately reflects who is actually living at the encampment at the time of closure. Closing the list on May 28, 2026 — when actual closure won't occur until 2027 or 2028 — means the list will be significantly out of date by the time it matters most.

Homelessness is a dynamic, person-specific problem that changes from night to night and person to person. Over the next 18 to 24 months, people on the list will move, die, enter housing, be incarcerated, or simply leave The Jungle. New people will arrive — as they always have, particularly when other encampments are cleared. By the time closure begins, the list may describe a population that no longer exists in its current form, while the actual population at the site has no individualized housing plan at all.

Closing the list creates two classes of Jungle residents. Those who were present before May 28 will have individualized housing plans. Those who arrive — or reappear — after May 28 will not. This is precisely the kind of situation that produces the "lost in the shuffle" outcomes we have seen before. Twenty-five people fell through the cracks when the City of Olympia cleared Percival Creek Canyon in October. Sixteen people fell through the cracks when WSDOT cleared another section of Percival Creek in April. The same story has been told after every single encampment clearing in the Encampment Resolution Program process.

There are many reasons a person might not be available for a By Names interview during a ten-day window. They may be new to the location. They may have been temporarily absent. They may be incarcerated — and notably, a Department of Corrections warrant violation currently carries a 30-day hold. The City of Olympia is allowing 10 days to generate a By Names List for the largest encampment in Thurston County — home to at least 125 residents, established for approximately 20 years. Ten days.

At last night's City of Olympia Council meeting, Mayor Payne noted that he feels caught between the needs of Jungle residents and advocates on one side, and community members who want The Jungle gone yesterday on the other. I understand that. It is a genuinely hard balance to strike, and our entire community is grappling with how to hold accountability and compassion at the same time.

The question for the Mayor and his regional partners to consider is this - how will it look when The Jungle is declared "cleared" — but it isn't really? When a rushed, inadequate process produces the same outcomes it always has — people cycling back to the streets, new encampments forming elsewhere, taxpayer dollars spent with little to show for it? The political fallout from a failed closure will be significant. The human cost will be worse.

Closing the list well before encampment closure signals that the list is being used to check a box — to demonstrate that outreach happened — rather than as a genuine tool for ensuring every Jungle resident has a real path to housing.

So the question for leadership is a simple one - are they committed to actually closing The Jungle - meaning every resident is connected to housing and services - or are they committed to checking a box? Because they are not the same thing. And the community deserves to know which one leadership is choosing. 

Whether you view The Jungle as a humanitarian crisis that pulls at your bleeding heart, or whether you just wanted those junkies gone 5 years ago, you should care about how the closure process is implemented. The process will define the outcome.