It’s philosophical, according to Paul LaKosky, and practical.
As executive director of the Dave Purchase Project — responsible for overseeing the long-running Tacoma Needle Exchange and the nonprofit’s related outreach initiatives — LaKosky knows a thing or two about building relationships with people on the street. To help someone who’s unhoused or battling addiction, it takes trust, he says.
It’s why LaKosky, who began his career in public health in New York in the early 1990s, has opposed Tacoma’s ban on public camping since it was proposed, passed and implemented in late 2022. He’s never been a fan, he says.
More recently, it’s why the organization LaKosky has led since 2017 put its money where its mouth is, with the firm backing of its board of directors.
In a letter dated Feb. 29, sent to City of Tacoma director of Neighborhood and Community Services Allyson Griffith, the Dave Purchase Project announced its intention to return roughly $50,000 in funding at the end of this month.
The money represents the remainder of a two-year contract the nonprofit applied for in the months before Tacoma’s ban on homeless encampments was hatched. It was targeted for outreach to Tacoma residents living unhoused or struggling with substance-use disorder, LaKosky said, including providing clean needles, survival supplies and referrals to available housing and addiction recovery programs.
The contract awarded the Dave Purchase Project/Tacoma Needle Exchange approximately $60,000 a year between January 2023 and the end of the year, LaKosky told The News Tribune. The program, which has an annual budget of roughly $1 million, will continue to serve unhoused individuals across Pierce County, but will do so without financial support from the city.
The money the nonprofit is relinquishing represents the only funding it receives from the city for its services in Tacoma, LaKosky said.
He provided a copy of the letter to The News Tribune.
The move underscores a distinct, troubling and perhaps even growing disconnect between the city and the local service providers it depends on.
One of Tacoma’s most celebrated nonprofits — with nearly four decades of experience providing essential homeless and addiction outreach, the first of its kind in the nation when it was launched during the height of the AIDs epidemic — has decided enough is enough. The city’s policy and approach has made the deal his agency struck untenable, it now believes.
LaKosky, like the board of directors he serves, is convinced that Tacoma’s decision to outlaw encampments in much of the city has done far more harm than good, inflicting fresh trauma on the unhoused and pushing the vulnerable further and further into the shadows.
To back up his anecdotal experience in Tacoma, LaKosky pointed to a qualitative study of the negative impacts of encampment sweeps recently published by the journal Social Science and Medicine, which concluded that encampment sweeps were “physically, psychologically, and socially destructive.”
In more direct terms?
Tacoma’s current encampment policy has made building relationships more difficult. The city’s stance on public camping has also made it more dangerous for his employees, LaKosky said, based on the new hostility they often encounter during the course of their work.
“The city’s really aggressive campaign of sweeping the encampments has changed the dynamic on the street in a lot of ways,” LaKosky said by phone, echoing concerns shared by several other local service providers who spoke to the newspaper this week.
“We can’t serve the folks the city has given us money to serve because the city’s chased most of them away. And when we can find them, they don’t want us around, because they’re suspicious we’re working with the city.”
SWEEPS VS. ‘DIGNITY & RESPECT’
As far as stark contrasts go, Tuesday provided a doozy.
That’s when Griffith, as the person responsible for the city’s response to a growing crisis, updated the City Council on her department’s work. Griffith described the city’s outreach efforts over the last two years as a measured success, at least given the severity of the situation in Tacoma.
The assessment included a review of the policy that has now been publicly condemned by the Dave Purchase Project and its board — the city’s ban on public camping.
During a noon study session, Griffith said the limited ban, which has prohibited public camping within 10 blocks of the city’s temporary emergency shelters since November 2022, has been a useful tool, helping Tacoma’s Homeless Engagement Alternatives Liaison (HEAL) Team connect more than 350 individuals with housing. More than 3,500 outreach “contacts” have been conducted during that time, according to City of Tacoma spokesperson Maria Lee.
On Tuesday, Lee said the city had yet to officially receive LaKosky’s letter. The News Tribune provided a copy during reporting this week.
In an emailed statement, Lee maintained that Tacoma “does not conduct ‘encampment sweeps’” as they’ve been portrayed by some homeless advocates, including in LaKosky’s letter. The city’s HEAL team is “dedicated to treating every individual with dignity and respect,” she said.
In a city where the number of unhoused people has increased dramatically in recent years, the disparate perspective, between city staff and a long-standing local service provider, sure feels like cause for alarm.
“The city’s process (for clearing encampments), on paper, is not aggressive. It seems fairly reasonable. But on the ground, watching these things occur, for the people living there ... it can seem very aggressive,” LaKosky said. “Let’s just say, it doesn’t have the real air of a human services, social services approach. It seems more like a police operation.”
In the background of all this, Pierce County’s homelessness crisis has been “experienced acutely” in Tacoma, in the estimation of the city’s official homeless strategy. The situation was deemed a public health emergency by former mayor Marilyn Strickland and a long-gone version of the City Council in 2017 and hasn’t shown many signs of improvement in the years since.
Tacoma’s homeless strategy — essentially the city’s blueprint for responding — depends on what’s described as “deep partnership and collaboration, especially with the organizations who are closest to the priority populations that we aim to serve.”
The Dave Purchase Project’s decision to return roughly $50,000 in city funding illuminates how tenuous and frayed at least one of those partnerships and collaborations has become since Tacoma banned public camping.
On Tuesday, Griffith provided her take, telling The News Tribune that Tacoma homeless encampments are “generally smaller and can be addressed more quickly” since the city’s targeted ban took effect.
“This has actually increased the (HEAL team’s) ability to build relationships with individuals and offer them the services they need to get back on their feet,” she said in an emailed statement.
“Relationships are key, and collaboration with service providers,” Griffith added, “especially those engaged in outreach services will be critical.”
Griffith said the city was “disappointed” with the Dave Purchase Project’s decision to terminate its contract early. The nonprofit had “significantly exceeded its contract goals in 2023” and was on pace in January to do so again, she said.
The suggestion — underscoring that the nonprofit had surpassed the expectations of its contract, despite its assertion that the work has become unmanageable — was hardly subtle.
“The City remains open to feedback on improving service delivery effectiveness in this and other areas of need and continues to be appreciative of all of its community partners, including its service providers,” Griffith said.
“The City is not currently aware of other service providers considering returning funds,” she added.
MORE ‘HOSTILE’ & ‘ISOLATED’
The Dave Purchase Project might be staking new ground as the only local homeless services provider willing to turn down city funding in protest of the local public camping ban, but the criticism expressed by the nonprofit is not unique.
This week, The News Tribune spoke to several local homeless outreach professionals with lengthy histories working in Tacoma.
Some declined to speak publicly for fear of retribution from employers or to avoid the risk of jeopardizing future city funding.
One, who has worked as a rapid rehousing case management specialist in the area for the last decade, described the city’s encampment ban as “counterintuitive,” resulting in a “shuffling of people from place to place” that makes many “far less receptive to receiving support.”
Individually, each described Tacoma’s current encampment policy as toxic and ineffective.
Jake Nau, who has worked in homeless services on the West Coast since 2011, is currently an outreach caseworker for St. Vincent DePaul in Tacoma, where he’s been employed since early last year.
As a young adult, Nau faced alcoholism and addiction. Today, he works primarily out of St. Vincent DePaul’s new community resource center near its South Tacoma campus, relying on what he described as his gift for connecting with people and “investing in the community.”
“I’ve been down before, and I’ve needed a hand up,” Nau said of his chosen career. “Everywhere you drive you see unhoused folks living outside, you see people suffering.”
“It doesn’t feel OK for me not to do this. I can’t unsee it,” he told me.
Nau, who began working as a homeless services provider in Tacoma in 2017, said St. Vincent DePaul does not receive funding from the city of Tacoma.
The independence gives him the freedom to say things other Tacoma-area service providers can only share in private, he suggested.
Naul told The News Tribune he also works part-time for Comprehensive Life Services, which has received city funding in the past.
“Previously, when you did outreach in Tacoma, people knew you were trying to help,” said Nau of life on the ground prior to the city’s ban on public camping.
“You didn’t have to prove yourself when you walked into a place,” he added. “Now, your first job at an encampment is establishing you don’t run with the city.”
For Tacoma, the real question is how much this simmering tension actually reveals.
On one hand, criticism and push back from homeless providers and advocates — including those the city depends on for critical outreach and services — is nothing new. In the lead-up to the passage of Tacoma’s targeted ban on public camping in 2022, opposition was fierce, with some of the most pointed criticism delivered by providers working in the trenches.
At the same time, LaKosky said opposition among Tacoma-area homeless service providers to the city’s encampment ban is growing, driven by one unavoidable truth: It’s not working, LaKosky told The News Tribune.
“As an agency that serves houseless folks on a daily basis, my staff and I have witnessed the impacts of these sweeps on the health and well-being of the people we serve,” LaKosky said. “Chasing homeless people outside of the city is not an effective way of serving homeless people. ... Very few people are actually getting into housing. Very few shelter spots are actually opened that are accepting of the folks that need it.”
“The level of hesitation, and even hostility, exhibited by a somewhat anxious and greatly agitated houseless population — that have previously always welcomed us … has made it unsafe to send outreach workers to these locations,” he added.
“The reason they are hostile and in more isolated, less-safe locations, is because the city — through its policy and actions — has pushed them into these places.”
