NWH Director, Anton Preisinger, composed the following letter and sent it Mayor Putaansuu of Port Orchard, WA, in response to the March 21, 2023 City Council Work Study Session.

Dear Mayor Putaansuu,

I watched the March 21, 2023 Work Study Meeting of the Port Orchard City Council, interested in your discussion about the Grant’s Pass decision and how that is expected to impact the homelessness response policies throughout Port Orchard. 

I am writing to provide a response to some of the discussions I saw during that meeting and would be more than happy to sit and talk with you or any of the council members if there are questions about outreach or homelessness that I can help to address. I am not a trained service professional but years of experience working one-on-one with people who are directly affected by the policies and precedents that you and your council are setting may grant me some insight that’s worth sharing. At least in some cases, it appears that the Port Orchard leadership would benefit greatly from more experience or education around these topics prior to establishing the impactful policies that are currently in development.

One of the most common tropes I hear you and others mention during these meetings which I’d like to firmly challenge is that people turn down services more often than not. It may very well be true that when code enforcement or law enforcement goes out to offer services, they are rejected out of hand but the context that is consistently missing during your meetings and discussions is what services are being offered. I work closely with Jarrod and the HEART Team so I have an intimate understanding of the lack of services available to them when making referrals. People should not be seen as “refusing services” when those services are not appropriate for their needs which is frequently the case. An apt metaphor for what we are doing is finding people who are lost and barefoot in a blizzard and being indignant with them when they refuse to accept the pair of broken sandals we offer. Then we use that refusal to justify locking them out of our cabin because “they don’t want our help.”

More than once during Tuesday’s meeting, you referenced Sovereign Citizens, or people who want to live off the grid and be left alone by government entities as a constitutional right, and I took your comments to imply that most of the people you and the outreach teams encounter in the encampments in question claim some kind of Sovereign Citizen status. This is not at all representative of what I have seen through my years of experience doing outreach, nor have I heard others who work in the field say that this is a frequent occurence. Since starting my nonprofit, I have provided direct support to hundreds of people in Kitsap county while meeting and speaking with many more we were unable to help due to our own shortcomings, not because they didn’t have needs and certainly not because they were satisfied with their circumstances. Out of these encounters, only one man has made any claim to his constitutional sovereignty and, after working with him for over 6 months and getting to know him, he informed me that he was being forced to make this choice due to some family pressures which made it impossible for him to feel any hope toward housing or employment opportunities - he was attempting to wrest even a tiny bit of control over his situation out of impossibly complicated circumstances. Claiming that living outside was his choice - and making his space pretty comfortable, all things considered - was his way of taking control of the only part of his life he thought he could. That is the singular incidence of sovereignty claims I have ever encountered but you and your council are using it quite prominently as an excuse to continue failing to provide adequate, appropriate resources that meet people’s needs and recognize the complexity of their situations. Rest assured, if the term “Sovereign Citizen” is never again uttered by you or any of the city staff, you will be representing your unhoused constituency much more accurately. People want help, they just don’t trust that they will get it and/or the help they actually need is not being offered or is not available - it really is that simple.

I do recognize that you have an impossible task. The resources that people need to find treatment, recovery, employment, stability, and housing from the streets in Kitsap County do not exist. We require sanctioned encampments (non-existent), safe parking (only exists for people fleeing domestic violence, at least we have that), tiny homes (not essential if everything else were working as it should but there is a lot of interest and tiny homes would help a lot of people), more respite beds, a more compassionate emergency healthcare system, cheaper affordable housing (getting harder to find every minute even with subsidies), and way more permanent supportive housing. The county’s service providers don’t have enough case managers to connect people with the resources that do exist. No part of this system is working the way it should because everything is underfunded and city and county governments continue to priorize the property rights of housed, rich, and vocal community members over the rights of our unhoused citizens to life and access to food, shelter, clothing, and stability. Ironically, providing better resources to our vulnerable neighbors has been clearly shown to be the best way to ensure that the property rights of our better-off neighbors are protected.

During Tuesday’s meeting, you said that “we need to do better,” and “we want to help” but when Fred Chang asked one, simple clarifying question, what happens when people with pets are offered shelter at the Vista (which does not accept pets), you betrayed what feels like a more truthful sentiment when you said, “We don’t have a legal requirement” to accommodate such needs. Which is it? Do you want to help or do you want to satisfy the minimum legal requirements so that you can kick people around until they leave the city? Everything I saw during the meeting on Tuesday made it appear to me that you and most of the council are not looking for the best way to help our most vulnerable neighbors and community members. On the contrary, the discussion demonstrated that the city’s goal is to do the minimum required to avoid future litigation and to reduce the number of people that are seen to be struggling within city limits - not to reduce the number of people struggling, just to reduce the number that everybody else can see as struggling. The policies being discussed appear to be designed to make it easier to sweep camps, not address the lack of resources or work to build a healthier community that would provide better support to its community.

I appreciate that the city is looking into hiring a navigator. It’s a fantastic idea, and I hope that you are able to find an incredible public servant for that position. However, I can’t help feeling like they are being set up for failure. Homelessness responses like this, when not done comprehensively, are doomed. Your new navigator will not be able to succeed because the funding and resources they will require to serve their clients are not going to be provided to them. No doubt, they will rely on Kitsap Community Resources whose Case Workers are still reeling from the overwhelming task set them when Veterans Memorial Park was swept almost a full year ago - all it took was those additional ~20 clients to completely overwhelm the entire system for the county. Housing, mental health, treatment, and other essential resources and services are all inadequate throughout our region. Frustratingly, much of this is out of your hands or the control of the City Council. Trust me, I know how maddening this can be but as you grasp for something to do to actively respond during this homelessness tragedy, don’t enact policies that punish the victims because it’s easy and looks like action, this inevitably contributes to the problem. Sweeps make it harder for our outreach teams (including HEART) to maintain connections with people that turn into progress. Without a resource to accept or an approved place to move to, sweeps just create more damage to the community in more locations. People are also more on edge when they don’t have a stable place to call their own - this has been directly commented on by the people organizing the Severe Weather Shelters throughout the county. Guests at the shelters are more aggressive, less cooperative, and harder to work with because they are being harassed nonstop. A few years ago we had far fewer incidents in the Severe Weather Shelters because people had places they could call home - they were healthier for that stability and so was the community at large.

While I understand the impulse to use them as a resource (there is an admitted dearth of options to choose from in the city), the Vista Motel will not be effective in the way you outlined during the meeting. Some people may accept a night or two there if it’s offered, but that should hardly be considered appropriate shelter to justify destroying a person’s living space (and I doubt it would hold up in court if presented in context). It takes our service network much longer than that to serve people even when resources are available. Furthermore, you’ll likely find that many of the people you look to put up in the Vista will be on their extensive Do Not Rent list, unless you’ve included some way to circumvent that in your agreement with them, which I doubt as they have been fairly inflexible in the past. Many others will have pets so the Vista will not represent an appropriate resource. You may still use this “resource” to justify sweeps but just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s right. Still others may have accessibility issues that the Vista is incapable of catering to - if they have any ADA-compliant restrooms, they certainly can’t keep them open just in case the City has to force someone out of a camp.

The level of ignorance on display when one of the council members suggested fining unhoused people for the trash they leave at their encampments is immensely frustrating. I’m grateful that it wasn’t given much consideration but even the suggestion was utterly shameful and demonstrative of how little the council has prepared or educated themselves to be discussing these topics. What options do our unhoused, vulnerable neighbors have? Why should they care, given the way we are treating them? What would we expect to get from fining an unhoused person? Even if they are able to pay, it’s just making it harder for them to work their way through the systems and back off the street, which is what we want them working toward, isn’t it? Questions like the one your council member posed make me wonder if they couldn’t care less about the people and their outcomes so long as that council member doesn’t have to see or think about the people who need our help. It isn’t hard or expensive to provide regular trash services to encampments and doing so is better for our environment, the community, and the encampment residents. The fact that providing trash services for unhoused people isn’t the standard response shows pretty clearly that we as a city and county prioritize money over the health and wellbeing of our citizens, housed and unhoused alike. Another irony, as in the grand scheme of things, it costs our communities significantly less to provide these services upfront than it does to make up for the lack of them down the road.

I don’t know what this letter is going to accomplish. I am doing everything I can, as inconsequential as that is, and things are rapidly getting worse so I’m trying everything that comes to me to stop or slow the progress of these policies and practices that make homelessness worse and weaken our communities. We, as a society, need to stop responding to these challenges out of ignorance and fear. We need to learn from other jurisdictions and let our humanity and logic guide our decisions. Lowering the barrier to sweeps will destabilize the city, make people harder to serve, put undue pressure on outreach services, and make our city and county even more intolerant than it already is. Implementing policies that make sweeps easier, if those policies are implemented successfully, will only serve to push people from public lands where we can easily recognize and serve people, to private properties. This will directly hurt, not help, our housed citizens and we’re already seeing this happen. Shifting the enforcement costs and responsibilities to private land owners will not be a popular outcome in the long run.

I urge you and the City Council to take more time to consider these policies which will not yield the desired results and will undoubtedly have countless impacts that are not being recognized. I am, as always, happy to continue the discussion and I have confidence that Jarrod from the HEART team or anybody from the Kitsap County Housing and Homelessness Division would be happy to weigh in with their own expertise. 

Thank you for your considerable time,

Anton Preisinger
anton@nwhospitality.org