A February assessment found 200 campsites in the area under I-5 known as the Jungle.
A February assessment found 200 campsites in the area under I-5 known as the Jungle. City of Seattle

UPDATE: The city council unanimously approved a resolution today outlining a course for clearing the Jungle that is dramatically different from the plan announced by the mayor's office earlier this month.

"We're not making the kind of progress that we need to make" on homelessness across the city, said Council Member Sally Bagshaw, who sponsored today's resolution. Limited shelter options—particularly, the lack of 24-hour-shelters—mean homeless people may have few real alternatives to places like the Jungle, Bagshaw said. "I have real concerns about the quality of shelter that's available."

Until the city has better alternatives to offer, she and other council members argued today, it should not force people out of encampments under I-5. That's a significant shift from an earlier announcement that Mayor Ed Murray's administration would give outreach workers just two weeks to clear the area of homeless campers. I've asked the mayor's office for comment on today's resolution and am waiting for a response. In a statement, the mayor "thanked" the council for the resolution and pledged to continue working to make the "very dangerous area" safer. "We want to provide people a safer place to sleep, offer them individualized services and assistance, and get them on the path to permanent housing," Murray said.

The resolution calls for extensive outreach before Jungle residents are ultimately required to leave the area permanently. It's still unclear when that will happen. (More details below.)

While Council Members Mike O'Brien, Lisa Herbold, and Kshama Sawant wanted to delay today's resolution to get more input from groups like the ACLU of Washington and Columbia Legal Services, the rest of the council expressed a desire for "urgency."

Sawant called on the council to go further and outlaw all encampment sweeps. "What I want to say is 'no sweeps,'" Sawant said. "These are human beings. Let's provide real options." O'Brien and Herbold have made similar statements, but the council majority appears unlikely to support that.

ORIGINAL POST: The Seattle City Council will vote today on a new vision for how to clear the large homeless encampment under I-5 known as "the Jungle." In the months since a high profile shooting at the encampment in January, the city and state have been trying to figure out how to clear the longtime encampment. Earlier this month, Mayor Ed Murray's administration announced that outreach workers would have just two weeks to offer services to the people living in the area before it would be cleared with heavy equipment. After pushback from advocates and the city council, the mayor backpedaled on that plan last week. Today's council resolution, spearheaded by Council Member Sally Bagshaw, lays out an outreach-heavy plan that would not force any homeless people out of the area until outreach workers have offered every person living there "meaningful offers of available shelter and services that appropriately [meet their] needs."

The outreach, per the council resolution, should include "taking into consideration individual barriers such as criminal background, eviction records, domestic violence, mental health or addiction issues" and outreach workers should report to the city council on what types of services they've offered. The resolution also calls for outreach workers to make garbage bags and sharps containers available in the area while people are still living there.

The resolution does, however, acknowledge that the Jungle will ultimately be cleared of human beings, which runs counter to calls from some advocates to allow it to remain open. Council Member Mike O'Brien has also said he believes some areas under the freeway should stay open to homeless campers.

If some living in the area are "unwilling or unable to accept offers of shelter and services," the resolution says, outreach workers should notify the city's multi-disciplinary outreach team. (That team leads sweeps of encampments across the city.) If the mayor's administration is going to require anyone to leave the area, the council asks for three days of advance notice. Read the full resolution here.

Overall, the resolution serves two purposes:

1) It outlines in writing some of the council's concerns. For example,the mayor's office has partnered with the Union Gospel Mission for outreach in the Jungle, which led to some questions from council members last week about whether UGM is proselytizing. The resolution calls for "religiously and culturally appropriate practices to reduce harm" to people living in the area. The resolution also says flatly: "People are not to be arrested simply for being homeless."

2) It attempts to slow the clearing of the area, which looks inevitable. By requiring outreach workers to contact "each individual living in the Greenbelt [the council's favored term for the area]," council members are reiterating that the executive's original two-week plan was insufficient.

But resolutions are not legally binding. Mayor Ed Murray has said repeatedly he believes the area under I-5 should be cleared and permanently shut down. It will be up to his administration to see that any of this "meaningful" outreach happens on the way to that closure.

The council will vote on the resolution at its 2 p.m. meeting. I'll update this post after the vote.