The Jungle has been visible from Interstate 5 for a decade, 20 acres between Martin Way and Pacific Avenue, tents and tarps and the quiet accumulation of everything that happens when a community runs out of places to put its most vulnerable people. Depending on the season, somewhere between 100 and 250 people call it home.
The City of Olympia, working now with Lacey and Thurston County, has announced a regional plan to address it. The partnership is real, the commitment to a phased and compassionate approach is genuine, and the officials involved are saying the right things. No one gets displaced without options, the housing system is under strain, this will take time.
All of that is true. None of it is new.
We have been here before. We spent 16 months closing Percival Creek Canyon, and the people who couldn’t find housing ended up at the Jungle. We closed the Desmond Drive encampment in 2024, and the people who couldn’t find housing ended up at the Jungle. We have closed more than fourteen encampments in recent years, and through all of it the Jungle has grown, because the Jungle is not just a place. It is a consequence of every closure that moved faster than the housing supply.
The current regional plan is thoughtful in its process and unspecific in its commitments. There is no unit count, no confirmed sites, no cost estimate, and no defined threshold that says we will not move people until this many shelter beds are ready and waiting. That is not a criticism of the people doing the work so much as a description of where the work currently stands. The plan is a framework, and a framework is not yet a plan.
Seattle is attempting something structurally different, and it is worth watching. The city has committed to 1,000 new shelter units by year’s end, named specific sites and operators and shelter types, and allocated specific dollars before moving people at scale. It is still unfolding, faces real questions about long-term funding, and Seattle has its own unresolved struggles with homelessness that no one should minimize. But the approach is instructive. Build the receiving capacity first, then begin the transitions. That is what has been missing here, not just now but every time.
What would it look like to do it right? None of these questions are easy to answer, and the regional partners know that better than anyone. But they are the questions a real plan has to answer before the first phase begins. How many units of shelter or transitional housing will be available? Where are the sites? Who is operating them? And what is the trigger that unlocks phase one?
The moral case here is inseparable from the practical one. When we displace people without giving them a place to go, we don’t solve the problem, we move it, and make it worse. That is not successful policy. It doesn’t help the people who get displaced. It is the same problem with a new address.
The people living at the Jungle are, by a significant majority, from this region, from Olympia and Lacey and Tumwater and the rest of Thurston County. They are not strangers. They are our neighbors who have exhausted their options. They deserve a closure plan that has somewhere for them to go before the gate swings shut.
City Manager Jay Burney has said this could take 18 months to two years, and that is a reasonable estimate. It is also enough time to build the receiving infrastructure this region has never quite managed to build before closures begin. What the plan needs now is the specificity that turns a framework into a promise we can keep.
We know what happens when the promise isn’t there. We drive past it every day.
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Rob Richards is a Navy veteran and former congressional staffer who has been an active community member in Thurston County for over two decades. To submit an opinion to the Thurston Chronicle, email news@thurstonchronicle.com
