County should reverse hard-hearted homeless decision

Longview should seek end-run to get funds for pallet home project

The Cowlitz County commissioners should reconsider their refusal to help finance Longview’s HOPE Village pallet home site for homeless people.

If they don’t, the city should appeal to the state Department of Commerce to release the funds, which can only be used to combat homelessness.

The commissions’ objection is hard-hearted and driven by ideological biases that ignore the practical and urgent need to replace the squalid Alabama Street Camp. It ignores evidence that pallet home communities in Vancouver, Tacoma and other locations have reduced crime and helped homeless people find permanent housing. Finally, there is no better, immediate alternative that is practical or politically acceptable.

Local officials have tried for years to come to grips with homelessness. A lot of time and money have been wasted on failed projects and models — like the Love Overwhelming shelter that operated adjacent to the County Administration Building. 

Longview officials spent months this summer and fall developing  plans to replace the wretched Alabama Street homeless camp with a supervised, 50-unit pallet home community at the same location. The city had established the Alabama Street camp late in 2019 as an emergency step to address a pandemic-spawned homeless crisis that led to tent cities springing up at Lake Sacajawea and the medians adjacent to Longview City Hall. 

Businesses and landowners near the camp objected to the blighted camp, but extensive attempts to find a new location have failed for a simple reason: No one wanted it in their backyard.

In October, the city hired the Salvation Army to run the new camp, authorizing up to $1.4 million for that task.  Putting up 50 pallet homes cost another $1.15 million, and HOPE Village opened Dec. 13.

On a 6-1 vote this month, the City Council asked the county to fund the operation of the pallet community with document recording fees, which under state law must be spent on affordable housing and homeless programs.

Commissioner Dennis Weber supported the request. However, his fellow Republican commissioners — Arne Mortensen and Rick Dahl — wouldn’t  agree to put the matter up for discussion or even meet with city officials about it. 

Dahl, elected in November,  called HOPE Village a  “flawed program” and insisted that spending time going over the city’s request would be “a waste of time.” He has argued that the project doesn’t make economic sense and may duplicate existing services.

Such a high-handed response ignores evidence that the city of Vancouver is now building its third supervised pallet community because the first two have worked well.  

According to the Vancouver Columbian, at least 25 residents moved into permanent housing since the first 20-home pallet home community — called The Outpost — opened in December 2021. In the following six months, police calls and officer-initiated visits dropped 30 percent within a 500-foot radius of The Outpost, falling from 108 to 82 calls. 

Tacoma  began its program in 2017 and now has 58 shelters. It has served about 570 individuals, with 20% to 30% of them transitioning to permanent housing, city officials report.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee visited the Vancouver site and hailed the community as a success story that is more economical and successful than other alternatives.

Pallet home communities are no longer experimental, and they are rehab centers in addition to providing basic  shelter. HOPE Village will be supervised 24/7 and include wash stations, daily meal service and on-site security. Residents will get help with counseling and finding permanent housing, jobs and  connecting with other services. They will get security for themselves, their few possessions and important documents.

Pallet home communities aren’t by themselves a solution to homelessness, which locally and across the nation has been driven upward by a lack of affordable housing.  But they are a pragmatic, if somewhat  pricey, stop-gap solution to get people out of vermin- and crime-ridden tent cities.

In fairness to the two commissioners, both had signaled their opposition to funding HOPE Village well before the city requested funds — Dahl during his successful  fall election campaign.  That the commissioners and city are at loggerheads at this point proves how dysfunctional the local war on homelessness has been.

Mortensen, a libertarian-leaning Republican, in October 2021 distributed a seven-page “white paper” among local officials that reads like a conservative manifesto. It criticized what he sees as the failure of the war on poverty and the “welfare industrial complex,” which he blamed for  spawning bureaucracy and making  people dependent and “entitled” to government payouts.

Governments should not be responsible for taking care of people, nor can it afford to, he wrote. Poverty, he added, should not become an excuse for bad sanitation, destruction of property  and other criminal and uncivil behavior.

He advocated creating what he called military-style “Recovery Centers” in rural areas so that they don’t affect urban neighborhoods and remove the homeless from troubled environments. These closed communities would feed, educate, train and house the homeless.

There’s a good deal of blaming the victim in Mortensen’s treatise, and his call for  shutting the homeless away from society smacks of old debtors prisons. It’s doubtful many of the homeless would want — or could — to be isolated at a rural camp. And the cost likely would be more or at least on par with pallet communities

We have a crisis on our hands and a  stop-gap solution that looks promising. Real solutions to homelessness — creation of more housing, improved job opportunity and drug and mental health counseling — are big, long-range challenges that don’t address immediate needs.

By contrast, HOPE Village is operating. We should give it every chance to succeed. Money the county gets for document recording fees can’t be used for any purpose other than homeless or housing programs. The cash is available, and if the commissioners don’t want to spend it on HOPE Village, the city should  petition the state Department of Commerce to force the issue.

This is not just a Longview problem. It’s a countywide problem. It’s time to get the response off high center.