Just Housing Planning to Seek $500K+ Funding from Olympia for Homeless Encampment Support

The activist group Just Housing, who advocates for what is called Shelter-in-Place as the most cost effective solution to homelessness, may be asking the city for a half million dollars to support unsanctioned homeless camps in Olympia. Shelter-in-Place advocates that the least traumatizing approach to “informal settlements” is to allow the campers to remain on public or private land and have services provided to support them. This also involves “self-government” whereby each community makes a set of rules to abide by.

I found the following document in a FOIA request to the City of Olympia. This was in an email from Tye Gundel of JH to Olympia Council Member Renata Rollins on August 27, 2019, who is also a founding member of the group. This is not legally a conflict of interest, but it does raise questions of coordination, and shows the outsize influence JH has on Olympia’s political landscape when it comes to homelessness.

This document is presented as is, any errors are in the original. I do not know if this has been filed for any funding, it is formatted similar to documents I have seen in applications for the Home Fund. It was asking for Rollins thoughts.

The photographs accompanying the text were taken on January 27, 2020 and published by…