I hadn’t been to downtown Olympia in several weeks. The coming of the cold weather really highlights the problem our city has with homeless individuals. It looks like what I imagine a refugee camp to be down there around the bus terminal. What an absolute disaster. I’ve lived in/around Olympia for a good portion of my life and can’t remember it ever being that bad, but maybe I just missed it? What is driving the massive numbers of transients inhabiting DTO and surrounding areas. I see the same guys peddling on the corner of Fones and Pacific every day.

What drives it is the lax laws and molly coddling. I bet 80 percent of them aren't from here.

1. Legal weed
2. Sanctuary cities
3. Welfare
4. Other destructive socialism/leftist policies that are soft on crime, vagrancy, and homelessness.
5. Mismanaged government resources, probably a lot of fraud and waste
6. Probably lack of shelters or housing programs or hospitals etc. that other cities offer to get them off the streets
7. Might be optics too, just more visible in the way it's set up. Here in Spanaway we have a lot of "hidden" homeless who live in the woods just outside of view.
8. Rapid population growth in the PNW due to business success drives up property prices and housing prices and prices the lower end out and onto the streets.

Legal Weed?? C'mon now Counselor, that's a stretch at best. Opioid epidemic, Crack? Sure.
I do agree on the other points though.

Seattle jr. here we come....if you build it or allow it they will come

Not sure how long it will take all the bleeding hearts to finally figure out that more and more free stuff is just not the solution to folks that dont need or want saving

Just the minimum free stuff. You know, Socialism and all.

Yeah, the wife had not seen it before & went by I said welcome to the ShitHole, she said "You got that right"... Sad that nothing can be done about this vagrancy... SMH

I 100% agree that legal weed was the start of this problem in our area. I actually votes for it and still support it, but people that wanted a place that was lax and would not hassle them moved to the cities that legalized it. Washington and Colorado. Denver is having similar issues. I know most of them don’t have a weed problem but it set a precedence for folks that don’t like to be contributing members of society. You can argue all you want about weed not being a gateway drug, but find me an addict that never smoked weed and I’ll buy you a beer. Combine this with a liberal mentality and you got yourself a homeless crisis. Politicians will pander to their base to secure a re-election.

There are lots of addicts that never smoked weed. Pain medication over prescribed starts a lot of people on a downward spiral

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Firehoses and German Shepherds would solve a lot of homeless problems. Offer help, a job and place to stay that's low rent. The people that refuse to help themselves, with all the offers, they get the dogs and firehoses.

Just got back from a weekend in Vancouver BC. Took a wrong turn out of the Police Museum and ended up walking up East Hastings past one of the Safe Injection Sites. Ended up being a good thing as I got to have a long talk with my kids about why (Anytime we ended up walking in that general direction, we had to assure them we weren't going down "that street").

I've walked past some of the crap in Seattle and, lets just say that anyone supporting safe injection sites needs to spend some time there. Downtown Seattle looks like a picnic in comparison. Most of the folks didn't seem to actually go in the injection site, but instead were just shooting up out on the sidewalk. For about 4 blocks you have nothing but zombies and the pleasant odor of MJ mixed with vomit. its a good time. I strongly recommend it for your next vacay.

I'll be the first to admit, I don't have the answers. Somewhere along the line something just went wrong. You have a lot of people in the country who just can't make it. Couple hundred years ago, the Europeans solved the problem by shipping those people off to Georgia or Australia. The problem with jobs is that we have a labor laws preventing the kind of work these people can/could do (like sorting trash for sub-minimum wage) and the whole just "give them stuff" routine seems to be just creating more of them (no duh).

I think the base problem is that most of the people coming up with these ideas ignore base human nature, that most people will take the easiest path no matter the other options.

This is a lie the Seattle city council is using to justify things like head tax. Typical resentful zoocialists because others have success and they don't.
This is an insult to anybody that have been or is poor. You just move farther away where rent/housing is cheaper and commute long. Even I have to move 17 miles north from my job to be able to get a good deal on house dollar per sq-feet.

You guys need to take a drive down I5 through Portland.....

Its a shithole.

Best part is where the "Freeway ( )" slows to a crawl I5 northbound is where all the encampments are. Huge REI tents and tarp homes.

I bet its got a real pungent shit/piss stink during the hot dayz of summer.





It was foggy when I went through the I5 south bound Freeway Pinch in the morning.

Yep, my bet is the misappropriation of tax payer funds and lack of any work ethic by the street dwellers.

Let's shitcan the term urban campers and go back to bums