by Cameron Sheppard, Washington State Standard
August 7, 2024
Finding places to operate shelters and stability sites to serve homeless people has proved challenging for Pierce County governments, which often run into opposition from people who don’t want such facilities in their neighborhoods.
A recent suggestion likely would minimize such opposition.
“We’ve had the homeless problem forever, and one of the best ideas I ever heard was to take McNeil Island and make that a place for our homeless to be,” a Gig Harbor resident told the Pierce County Council on July 9.
The woman testified in a council chamber filled with representatives from homeless service providers there to advocate for a policy that would make it easier to establish temporary shelters and tiny home villages for the homeless.
McNeil Island is in Puget Sound, west of Steilacoom and north of Anderson Island. It has long served as home for federal or state detention centers of some variety.
While the providers seemed to smirk and scoff at the woman’s suggestion, it’s not the first time someone has brought up using the island as a place to build facilities for the homeless.
While on the campaign trail in recent months, Republican gubernatorial candidate Dave Reichert pitched using the island to house the homeless.
Recently, McNeil Island was on a list of properties the county’s Human Services Department was considering to host a $2.5 million stability site to serve as an emergency homeless shelter.
Ultimately, the county decided the island was not an ideal fit for the stability site. A spokesperson for the county told The News Tribune the island is zoned for lower density, rural usages, has no sewer infrastructure and is only accessible via a ferry system operated by the Department of Corrections.
Would it work?
For more than 100 years, the island was known for a federal prison that held infamous convicts such as Charles Manson and Mickey Cohen. Beginning in 1981 that facility began to be used as a state corrections center. In 2011, the oldest prison facility in the Northwest was officially closed after 136 years.
The island now is home to the state’s Special Commitment Center, which is run by the state Department of Social and Health Services. The facility serves to rehabilitate sex offenders the state has defined as “sexually violent predators.”
A KOMO News documentary titled “Seattle is Dying” in 2019 suggested using the island’s decommissioned prison to house the homeless and provide wrap-around services such as substance-abuse therapy.
The prison, which is separate from the Special Commitment Center, is owned by Washington’s Department of Corrections (DOC). Chris Wright, a spokesperson for the DOC, said the facility was closed in 2011 and had been “mothballed” since then — empty and without staff.
Wright told The News Tribune the facility was “unusable,” with aging infrastructure, structural issues and asbestos, among other problems. He said he was not aware of any serious conversations about re-purposing the former prison.
“It’s not feasible,” he told The News Tribune in an email.
Rob Huff is a spokesperson for the Tacoma Pierce County Coalition to End Homelessness — a regional coalition of community organizers, service providers and government agencies that meets weekly to discuss efforts and programs to end homelessness.
Huff said he thinks the proposal to send individuals experiencing homelessness to an island usually comes from “folks who haven’t thought through the issue.”
He said even if the island was an oasis with all the infrastructure and supportive services needed to help the unhoused, removing and isolating people would come with a “list of challenges.”
“For me, the solutions should be in the community they live in,” Huff said in an interview with The News Tribune.
He said folks living unhoused often need a job to get back on their feet, and being on an island comes with “obvious transportation issues.”
Huff said he understands that some people are frustrated by the homelessness crisis and made uncomfortable when they see people having to sleep on the street in the cold of winter, but political solutions that aim to get those living homeless “out of sight” are not the answer.
This article was first published by the Tacoma News Tribune through the Murrow News Fellow program, managed by Washington State University.
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