Homeless camping bans vs. sit-lie laws in WA. What’s the difference?

After a recent Supreme Court ruling opened the door to stricter camping bans, Tri-Cities leaders are looking at pairing the bans with other existing codes to see if they have enough legal authority to prevent homeless encampments .

That’s left some wondering what the difference is between a camping ban and the tools cities have been using to remove unhoused people from public places.

Many cities in Washington had public camping bans in place before a lower court ruling barred them.

Those were either repealed or left unenforced and cities looked toward other measures to combat the impact of homelessness. Cities were still allowed to enact limited bans in some public areas, such as parks.

Public drug use bans and drug paraphernalia littering bans also have played a part in disrupting areas where unhoused people congregate, but sit-lie ordinances have been the most prominent tool used by cities.

While these ordinances can’t legally target specific groups of people, like those experiencing homelessness, the result is often the same.

Richland’s city council was the first in the Tri-Cities area to begin discussing reviving its camping ban ordinances.

Camping ban discussion

The Tri-Cities is the only major metro area in Washington state without a “low barrier” shelter.

Tri-City Union Gospel Mission provides shelter and services in Pasco, but they are a private, religious organization and not everyone is willing or able to meet their criteria.

Their women and children’s shelter is particularly overburdened.

Advocates say that unhoused people typically try to find a place to camp near services they need or near enough public transit to get across the Tri-Cities.

There are no large wooded areas in the Tri-Cities outside of natural reserves and parks, so that’s where people tend to end up. Richland, like most other cities in Washington, already has permanent camping bans in public parks and city property.

Richland Deputy City Manager Joe Schiessl said at a council meeting last month that Chamna Natural Preserve has become a frequent camping spot.

The closed off former campground in Columbia Park also is often used by people with nowhere else to go.

“ What we typically see is in these Russian olive areas, they grow so thick you can carve out almost like a hut,” he said.

While the city can enforce camping bans on public right of ways, Schiessl said that hasn’t yet become a problem in the Tri-Cities.

Advocates have told the Herald that these bans don’t work, they just force people to find a new spot more frequently and it makes it harder for them to access the necessary services to get help. It also makes it more difficult for volunteers to find them.

Cindy Fish, who works with unhoused people she’s met through a weekly meal service in Kennewick, told the Herald last summer that the sit-lie ordinances and camping bans don’t take into account the fact that many people need to spend hours at a time waiting for appointments for mental health services, getting assistance applying for housing and more.

“Well, it has pushed them away from there, but they’re still here and they’re just having to continuously move from here to here to here,” she said.

Fish said that means when she goes to help someone who is trying to navigate the system, she has to search for them and it can cause them to lose momentum.

Richland City Councilman Kurt Maier said they need to be cognizant that prosecution isn’t going to solve the issue, but he supports an ordinance that allows the city to manage its parks without being overly punitive to people who aren’t being abusive.

“There’s no community on earth that’s ever jailed its way out of having unhoused people,” he said.

Councilwoman Sandra Kent said that maybe it’s time Richland and the larger Benton County community begins looking into what it will take to get a truly low-barrier shelter up and running.

“I believe that this council also needs to take a harder look at what can we do to become part of the solution conversation,” she said.

Kent said it’s difficult to balance the need to keep parks clean and safe while also taking a realistic approach to homelessness in the community.

“Quite frankly the cost of surviving is just getting really expensive. It’s just getting harder and harder for people to make ends meet,” Kent said. “I think that we need to become part of the solution, but I do wholeheartedly support these changes … because we did not set up our parks facilities and public spaces to be places for people experiencing homelessness to congregate, but there should be somewhere for them to go.”

Other enforcement tools

Over the past few years cities have tried a variety of means to reduce homelessness, to varying degrees of success.

By far the most successful program, according to Washington Department of Commerce data, has been emergency housing, such as hotel vouchers. Those programs were especially impactful in the Tri-Cities because of the lack of shelters.

Unfortunately the cash infusion from pandemic related funds dried up at the end of 2023. That’s made it harder to help with immediate needs for people who cannot take advantage of Union Gospel Mission for one reason or another.

There also is not a “no wrong door” mental health and substance use recovery center for people struggling with addiction.

The inability to stay sober or mental health issues is one of the main reasons many people experiencing homelessness don’t stay at the Union Gospel Mission.

Their space for women and children is also extremely limited at the mission’s women’s shelter. They’re in the process of fundraising for a new facility in Kennewick that would rival the size of their men’s shelter, but that could be years out from becoming a reality.

The publicly-funded Columbia Valley Center for Recovery, for mental health and substance use disorder, is still about a year and a half out from opening.

Sit-Lie zones have become an effective enforcement mechanism for the Tri-Cities recently.

They tend to be aimed at keeping walkways clear for businesses.

They’re primarily enforced during daytime and early evening hours, typical 6 a.m. to 11 p.m.

The city of Kennewick expanded its zones to include a one-mile stretch of Clearwater Avenue and about a block to the north and south in order to combat issues with drug use and crime that other ordinances just weren’t making a dent in.

Pasco recently added a new zone that covers most of the business district in downtown Pasco surrounding Lewis Street, east from Tacoma Street and west to 10th Avenue.

Importantly, these sit-lie bans don’t bar people experiencing homelessness from finding a safe place to sleep.

There are also extensive littering and public drug use ordinances in place across the Tri-Cities.

Those codes were largely enacted in response to the legislature’s slow pivot to rewrite drug possession laws after the Blake Decision , which essentially decriminalized possession.

Like the camping bans, cities were required to refer offenders to service rather than ticket or arrest them.

Cities can now ticket or arrest people using drugs in public places or discarding drug paraphernalia. Regular littering and dumping laws have also been used to discourage encampments.

The city of Kennewick has worked with private property owners to remove groups of rundown RVs people were living in.

In one case, one of the RVs caught fire, prompting the Kennewick police to work with the property owner to remove the encampment because it had become a safety concern.

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