The Jungle: What Closing It Will Actually Take
Following the recent news of plans of closure for The Jungle, a look back at its history and what steps can be taken for a proper transition for those most affected.
by Whitney Bowerman
In early May, the City of Olympia announced it would begin a regional effort to close The Jungle encampment, in coordination with the City of Lacey and Thurston County. A regional encampment transition planning team has been assembled, including representatives from the City of Olympia, the City of Lacey, Thurston County, Interfaith Works, Family Support Center, Olympic Health & Recovery Services, and Intercity Transit. The closure is expected to take 18 months to 2 years or more.
For a moment, this seemed like it might be different — not a sweep, not a clearing, but a genuine attempt to do the right thing.
And then the City of Olympia announced the By Names List. It would open May 18 and close May 28. Ten days to collect the names of every single person living at The Jungle. After the list closes, no one can be added. Those on the list must check in with the City weekly and cannot leave the camp for any reason, or they lose their place. This compressed timeline was driven in part by pressure from the Washington State Department of Commerce, which controls the Encampment Resolution Program (ERP) funding the City needs to make the closure work.
The gap between the stated intention — a thoughtful, compassionate regional closure — and the reality of a 10-day list with weekly check-in requirements is significant.
As of May 28 approximately 250 people had signed up on the By Names List. Some outreach workers speculate there may be 300 to 350 people who live part or full time in The Jungle.
What The Jungle Is
The Jungle covers roughly 20 acres between Martin Way and Pacific Avenue in Olympia, visible to every driver passing by on I-5. What was once a densely wooded area is now a landscape of blue tarps, tents, makeshift structures, and the accumulated debris of years of human habitation without the necessary infrastructure or services.
The encampment grew organically, beginning around 2007 when it was barely noticeable under the thick tree cover. Prior to 2010 the site was so densely wooded that a person could easily get lost wandering the trails that wound through it. A handful of campsites existed in those early years — quiet, largely invisible to the outside world. Over time, through a combination of Olympia’s broader homelessness crisis, the displacement of residents from other encampments, and the simple reality that The Jungle became known as a place where people would be left alone, the population grew.
In 2021, the City of Olympia made a notable decision: rather than simply clearing the camp, it purchased two of the parcels comprising The Jungle, totaling 6.75 acres, for $237,000, effectively acknowledging the encampment’s existence and choosing to manage it rather than repurpose it. The remaining parcels are privately owned. The City has the option to purchase them at a current market value of $3 million (subject to appraisal), but has not yet exercised it. That option expires at the end of June 2026. According to the June 2, 2026 consent calendar, the City Council is expected to take this opportunity to purchase for three more years at a cost of $80,000 a year.
The majority of people living in The Jungle are from Olympia, Lacey, Tumwater, and other parts of Thurston County. They are, by and large, local people who have ended up in the most extreme expression of homelessness our region has to offer.
How It Got This Big
The Jungle did not grow in a vacuum. Its expansion is directly tied to the pattern of encampment clearings that has characterized Olympia’s homelessness response for the past decade.
Olympia has closed more than 14 encampments in recent years under the Encampment Resolution Program. Each time a camp is cleared, residents are theoretically connected with housing and services. In practice, a significant number end up somewhere else — and for many, that somewhere has been The Jungle.
The most recent example is the Percival Creek Canyon encampment, whose 16-month closure was completed in October as part of the City’s “One Community” plan. Many of the Canyon’s residents successfully transitioned into housing ahead of the closure. But at the final clearing, approximately 25 individuals were left with nowhere to go, and at least some ended up at The Jungle. In April, WSDOT cleared another section of Percival Creek, displacing 16 more people, including a family with four children under the age of 13. Again, with nowhere to go.
This pattern — clearing one camp and watching its displaced residents appear at another — is one of the most consistent yet least discussed themes in Thurston County’s homelessness history. It is the humanitarian equivalent of whack-a-mole. People are still unhoused. They are simply unhoused somewhere less visible, at least until The Jungle became so visible that it could no longer be ignored.
Who Lives There and Why
From the outside, The Jungle is often characterized purely by its problems - and those problems are very real. Violent assaults, sexual assaults, and murders have occurred there on multiple occasions. The violence is a genuine safety crisis for the people who live there, who are overwhelmingly the primary victims of it.
But The Jungle is also a community — complex, imperfect, and real. Many residents take pride in their space and seek connection with the broader community when given the opportunity.
Like many in the unhoused community, Jungle residents live with the constant weight of stigma — the perception that they are dangerous, lazy, or responsible for their own circumstances. Research consistently shows that this stigma around homelessness is not only painful but also functionally damaging: it reduces motivation to seek housing, reduces trust in services, and makes the idea of re-entering mainstream society feel increasingly impossible. Some residents have lived at The Jungle for years and rarely leave its borders — not because they are unwilling to engage with the world, but because the world has made them feel deeply unwelcome.
The requirement by the City of Olympia that By Names List members check in weekly and not leave camp, or lose their housing plan, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how homelessness actually works. People move. People disappear for thirty days because they caught a warrant violation and the Department of Corrections holds you for exactly that long. People leave to visit family, seek medical care, or simply survive. A housing process that penalizes the normal rhythms of unsheltered life is a process designed around administrative convenience, not around the people it is supposed to serve.
The Department of Commerce’s Role
The City of Olympia did not arrive at a 10-day By Names List window on its own. The Washington State Department of Commerce, which administers the Encampment Resolution Program and controls the funding the City needs to close The Jungle, exerted significant pressure on the City that no new people be allowed to enter the encampment. Faced with that pressure and dependent on ERP funding to house the residents of The Jungle, the City felt it had little choice but to restrict encampment entry. The 10-day list was the result.
The concern driving Commerce’s pressure is the so-called magnet effect — the fear that allowing new entries or keeping the list open will draw more people to The Jungle seeking housing. It is a politically understandable concern. It is not, however, supported by research. What research consistently shows is that encampments grow when other encampments are cleared with nowhere for people to go — which is, again, exactly what has been happening in Thurston County for over a decade.
More significantly, Commerce’s administrative approach appears to conflict directly with the legislative proviso that created and funds the ERP program. The proviso language — the actual law passed by the Washington State Legislature — requires that housing be identified for everyone living on a site and offered to them before an encampment is cleared. It further specifies that housing must be a “meaningful improvement over the individual’s current living situation” and “well-matched to an individual’s assessed needs.”
A By Names List closed 10 days after it opens — months or years before the actual camp closure — cannot fulfill those requirements for people who arrive at The Jungle after May 28. The Legislature said house everyone. Commerce’s administrative pressure has produced a list that covers only those present and available during a narrow 10-day window who additionally manage to check in every single week for the next 18+ months without leaving camp. Those are not the same thing.
This gap between what the Legislature intended and what Commerce is implementing is not a minor procedural disagreement. It is a question of whether the most vulnerable residents of The Jungle will have individualized housing plans when the tents come down, or whether they will be the next generation of people who fall through the cracks once again.
What Closure Will Actually Require
The City of Olympia and its regional partners have stated a commitment to closing The Jungle safely and compassionately. That language is right. The question is whether the systems and resources exist to back it up.
At a January City Council meeting, speaker after speaker urged that encampment residents be meaningfully involved in the planning. “The residents of The Jungle know what they need,” said one advocate. “If Olympia and Lacey want to help, please talk directly with them, not around them.” Council Member Kelly Green voiced support for this principle, acknowledging that any durable solution must involve the people actually living at the site.
In the May 19 City Council meeting, Mayor Dontae Payne acknowledged feeling caught between residents and advocates who wanted everyone to receive appropriate services and community members who wanted The Jungle gone yesterday. That is an honest and difficult position to be in. But the answer to that tension cannot be a compressed, inadequate process that predictably produces the same outcomes as every prior clearing.
Getting people housed is hard. Keeping people housed is harder. The Jungle’s population includes a high concentration of people with serious mental illness, substance use disorders, trauma histories, and years or decades of unsheltered homelessness. These are not people who just need an apartment key. They need sustained, high-quality wraparound support: ongoing case management, mental health care, addiction treatment, peer support, and genuine community connection. Services that meet them where they are, not where we would like them to be.
Thurston County’s homeless services system has significant gaps in its ability to provide that sustained support. Too many people are connected with housing and then left to navigate a complex system largely alone. When placements — and they do fail, regularly — there is often no safety net. And when that happens, where do people go? They go somewhere. They have always gone somewhere. Often, that somewhere has been The Jungle. What happens when The Jungle no longer remains?
The Question Left Unanswered
The closure of The Jungle is the right thing to do. The site is unsafe. It lacks the infrastructure to support human life with any dignity. Its residents deserve better.
But closing The Jungle without honestly examining why people end up there — and why they bounce back out of housing — will not solve homelessness in Thurston County. It will produce a headline and, eventually, a new encampment somewhere less visible.
Will the City and its partners look honestly at the gaps in the current system? Will they ask why people cycle back to the streets and fund real answers to those questions? Will they involve Jungle residents as genuine partners? Will they allocate sustained resources — not just for the closure, but for the years of support that successful housing retention requires? And will the Department of Commerce examine whether its own administrative rules are actually consistent with the legislative mandate that created the ERP? Will the goal of genuinely housing everyone at The Jungle, not just those who were available during a 10-day window in May 2026 be actualized?
These are not hostile questions. They are the necessary ones. The measure of success will not be the day the last tent comes down. It will be where the people who lived in those tents are sleeping five years from now.
The Jungle has existed for nearly two decades. Closing it is the beginning of the work — not the end of it.