Long before a wave of new laws passed in recent years to make it harder for people to live outside in Washington cities, Kent had banned camping or storing personal belongings in public places.
This month, Kent City Council unanimously voted to tighten that ban in an attempt to force people found in violation to face potential jail time or seek services for mental illness or substance use disorder if a medical professional or certified agency recommends it.
Kent’s mayor, some City Council members and the acting deputy city attorney all declined to give interviews or respond via email about their motivations for modifying the original 2000 ordinance.
But at the Oct. 18 City Council meeting, Mayor Dana Ralph said these efforts were driven by a need to protect Kent’s natural resources, including its waterways, and to create a tool to “help people seek help.”
“We are very responsible in the protection of our environment, our natural resources, making sure that they are available and our investments in our public spaces,” Ralph said during the meeting.
Kent’s tougher stance on people sleeping outside is part of a growing regional and national trend in which cities are passing laws to try to reduce visible homelessness.
They have become so prolific that the leader of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, an agency that suggests policy at the federal level, released a statement last week, saying these policies are “ineffective, expensive and actually worsen the tragedy of homelessness.”
Mayors and other local officials are under pressure to do something, Executive Director Jeff Olivet wrote, “but blaming, criminalizing, and moving people from streets to jails does not solve homelessness or fix the systems that created it.”
In May, the city of Edmonds passed an ordinance making it against the law to occupy or store belongings in public places overnight. Mercer Island passed a law in 2021 that banned camping in public places, and Auburn passed something similar that same year, making public camping a criminal penalty.
These restrictions must comply with Martin v. Boise, a landmark case that the 9th Circuit Court decided in 2018 that says homeless people cannot be punished for sleeping outside on public property in the absence of adequate alternatives.
Kent, as well as others in the Puget Sound region, rely heavily on shelter and resources outside their city limits to comply.
There are currently two overnight shelters in Kent — one is for domestic violence survivors and one for women and children. Nearby Auburn has five shelters, only one of which serves single men, according to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.
When officials passed Auburn’s ban, they said it can only be enforced if shelter space is open.
Edmonds doesn’t have overnight shelter, so people have to either accept an offer to be bused to a shelter that could be up to 35 miles away or risk a fine of up to $1,000 or possible jail time. Mercer Island also doesn’t have any homeless shelters.
Tristia Bauman, senior attorney with the National Homelessness Law Center, said she’s seen a number of cities respond to recent homeless camping court orders with what she says is a strategy “to try and skirt the constitutional line to avoid liability but still target and punish homelessness.”
Bauman questions whether some of these ordinances would hold up in court. Kent’s new version adds a significant amount of specificity to the previous law and includes a section that creates new rules for “sensitive areas,” which include sidewalks, streets, city-owned parking lots, critical areas around water supply sources and sections of parks that cover everything from picnic shelters to open fields to parking lots.
For these sensitive areas, the police department or other city staff authority can ask someone to leave immediately, rather than providing a minimum of two days’ warning to prepare.
Bauman said that a person always has a protected interest in their property under the Fourth Amendment, which is why many cities warn of an encampment removal days ahead.
“So long as we think of homelessness as a crisis to be dealt with by cities, we will continue to play whack-a-mole with punitive policies that are designed to hide homelessness and visible poverty,” Bauman said.
Pat Fitzpatrick, chief administrative officer for the city of Kent, said the city doesn’t interpret Martin v. Boise’s impact to mean that a shelter bed has to be offered within a particular geographic area.
Any violation of the new ordinance will qualify as a misdemeanor; however, people who break the law will not be fined.
“The city will not arrest or charge an individual for camping who in fact accepts shelter,” Fitzpatrick said.
The new language also makes it illegal to build a fire on public property or “deposit urine or feces into or onto a place other than a receptacle intended for the deposit of urine or feces.”
People who don’t accept an offer of shelter and choose to stay where they’re living could go to jail.
Mike O’Reilly, commander with the Kent Police Department, said the new ordinance more accurately reflects how the Police Department long has been operating when it comes to homelessness and that the added language “makes the scope a lot more clear.” He estimated that not much will change in their approach.
“We understand that there’s no way you’re going to arrest your way out of this problem,” O’Reilly said.
If someone is charged for violating the new law, the city said it will accept a deferred prosecution “where a licensed or certified professional or agency recommends mental health or substance abuse use disorder treatment.”
But not every person living outside needs that form of treatment.
On a cloudy and cold October afternoon, three vehicles are parked in a gravel lot. People pass by them occasionally to walk or bike on the Green River Trail.
Mike Slater has his black Chevy’s hood up, his hands covered in grease, to work on his power steering. He has lived around Kent for more a year, with his three little dogs, all with black and brown coats and white bellies. He is on a fixed income for a disability and doesn’t earn enough to afford rent, he said.
Kent’s median income is $73,891, according to the most recent U.S. census.
Next door, Wade Stephens has been living out of his vehicle along the Green River for about the last two months, he said. He lost his housing after he suffered a serious injury to his right leg and didn’t qualify for disability.
“I don’t want this,” Stephens said.
He said he feels judged and stereotyped for his circumstances by some of the housed neighbors that walk by.
Every day, he said, he wakes worried whether this will be the day a Kent police officer tells him he has to leave. He has three backpacks ready to take with him if he has to abandon his vehicle. With electrical issues and a dead battery, he doesn’t have enough funds to get it fixed.
“It’s ruining me,” he said.
Kelly Wiggans-Crawford said she bought her condo along the Green River more than 20 years ago and she’s dealt with several encampments close to her house.
“I cannot continue to be told I need to accept encampments in my neighborhood by those who are not confronted by it on their doorstep,” Wiggans-Crawford said at the Kent City Council meeting.
She was one of several community members who spoke during public comment to voice their support for the new ordinance. A minority spoke in opposition.
It’s not just the Green River area that is changing.
Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission runs one of Kent’s shelters and a spokesperson said in an interview that their shelter for women and children has been running at or near capacity in recent months.
“The need is definitely increasing,” said spokesperson Jennifer Rice.
Kent Councilmember Brenda Fincher, before she voted to approve the law, reminded her colleagues that there’s more work to do.
“We still need housing,” Fincher said. “This is only half of a solution.”
In May, Kent City Council decided to forgo a proposed recent plan for the Low Income Housing Institute to install a tiny house village in the city and instead to review temporary shelter and transitional housing, like tiny house villages, as part of the city’s comprehensive plan. That won’t be considered until 2024.
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