An encampment in Silverdale was working. Then garbage piled up, and it fell apart

SILVERDALE -- Crystal Mitchell called herself the de facto campground mom at the "Hospital Hill" homeless encampment, before it was cleared on Wednesday.

Mitchell, a single mother, fell into homelessness after her former partner destroyed parts of her apartment, leaving her with a tarnished rental history and a bill of over $3,000 that took her two and a half years to pay off. A Portland, Oregon, native, Mitchell has been homeless for years and migrated up to Mason County before spending time homeless in Bremerton and then Silverdale, where she eventually settled in a section of woods bordered by the Clear Creek Trail, St. Michael Medical Center and Highway 303, known in her community as Hospital Hill.

There were only two other campers about a year ago when Mitchell first pitched her tent on a stretch of even ground amid the sloping and forested terrain. As the encampment grew, Mitchell invited as many “tent-surfers,” as she calls them, into her large tent as would fit, which was sometimes eight people. She would help her companions access food, clean clothing, treatment and any other caretaking.

Mitchell always had a wagon outside of her tent though, with an umbrella perched over it to protect from the rain, in case she needed to leave at a moment’s notice. Her belongings and her clothes are packable into two large plastic bins.

“If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t go,” she said.

It went this week. By Wednesday morning there were about 11 people still at the Hospital Hill encampment when Kitsap County workers and homelessness and housing service agents arrived to clear the area. The camp had existed for more than a year and fluctuated in size to as many as 25 campers.

The last of four notices to vacate issued since mid-February was posted 72 hours before teams from Kitsap County’s HEART, Kitsap Community Resources, Sponsor-A-Can and Northwest Hospitality arrived on site. They were there to provide services and move people along, collecting shopping carts, providing storage for belongings for up to 60 days and offering campers with resources and shelter, including treatment and bed space with the Kitsap Rescue Mission.

The Hospital Hill encampment, once a functional congregation for successful camper and outreach service relationships, offered a taste of what an enclosed and regulated campground could look like. But slowly developing issues that can be common to encampments eventually arrived, marking it for closure by the HEART team.

What a 'functioning encampment' could be

Mitchell has been engaged with homelessness and housing service agencies all the while she’s been at Hospital Hill, like many of her neighbors. Team members from the HEART and REAL team have been connecting campers with treatment, housing, transportation and everyday necessities. Northwest Hospitality has provided a mobile clothing closet and other services.

Northwest Hospitality has helped Mitchell secure jobs, even after she lost one. She’s now first on the waitlist for a slot at Pendleton Place, the permanent supportive housing complex in West Bremerton.

“This was a functioning encampment: it had  providers coming out here, they had people engaged with resources,” said Northwest Hospitality’s founding director, Anton Preisinger.

“It was clean, it was maintained, it was a safe space for people to be, and it looked like a campground where people were just finding a place to live.”

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Preisinger and Mitchell said HEART team members told them that the encampment wouldn’t be cleared and were under the assumption that campers could stay on the hill without the expectation of moving, as is the case for most properties across Kitsap County where temporary encampments have developed. In Bremerton, for example, a city ordinance now makes it illegal to camp on public property while shelter is available. There is no similar ordinance for public property in the county.

When the HEART team first began working with Hospital Hill campers in March of 2023, the Salvation Army was weeks away from closing its annual winter shelter. The team decided it would be best to work with campers where they were at, said Jarrod Moran, coordinator of Kitsap County's HEART, or Homeless Encampment Action Response and Transitions team, now nearly two years old.

Moran had told the Hospital Hill campers throughout that he couldn’t authorize their encampment, but that they would not be moved along until HEART could offer shelter services. In Kitsap today that means the Salvation Army's overnight shelter, through agency shelters like the Kitsap Rescue Mission's Quality Inn shelter, or case managed programs like Pendleton Place, Benedict House and Kitsap Community Resources.

There was success in getting campers connected with treatment at Hospital Hill as HEART worked alongside Compass Health’s MCOT and Catholic Community Services’ SCOPE, Moran said.

“We were just working to try and get people stabilized, to see what fit the people best.”

HEART provided over 200 doses of Narcan, connected people with Orca Cards for transit use, helped them access state identification if needed or bought pet food, paid for storage and reunited a few people with their families, Moran said. Over the lifetime of the camp, there were no overdose deaths, and there were only two instances where Narcan needed to be administered.

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Providing services to and building relationships with campers was efficient at Hospital Hill, with many gathered in the same space, Moran said. And until the leaves fell from the trees, the tents themselves were hardly visible to neighbors and Highway 303 drivers.

It’s better not to play “Whac-a-Mole” and push people from place to place with clearings, Moran said, “but at a certain point, it looked like it definitely had devolved quite a bit.”

HEART wants to exhaust all options before clearing an encampment, Moran said, but his team eventually voted unanimously to close down Hospital Hill. With the Salvation Army shelter and Kitsap Rescue Mission’s Quality Inn shelter both having available space, the encampment could be legally closed in accordance with the 9th Circuit Court Ruling of Martin v. Boise.

Trash collection issue leads 'to hell in a handbasket'

The encampment was kept relatively clean for months. In March 2023, the HEART team coordinated with Kitsap County solid waste to regularly bring a truck to the border of the encampment, accessing the trail network close to the tents via the neighboring Salmon Medical Center property. Mitchell and the other campers would collect their waste into garbage bags and drop it off once a week. That is, until services stopped.

“When they were having that trash routine, it was actually really kept up,” said camp visitor Jordan Seas, who goes by Banks. “The HEART team was coming out, it was really motivated and in the spirit of trying to get people to come out and help and participate.”

But in the summer, Salmon Medical Center erected a black chain link fence because campers had started to “impede patient care and staff access to vehicles,” said executive director of the Doctor’s Clinic, Jay Burghart. Campers were congregating on the facility’s picnic tables and it had become part of the staff’s daily routine to collect and dispose of garbage and drug paraphernalia left behind. That cut off the trash collection route.

The trash route was redirected through the Clear Creek Trail network, down a quarter of a mile where campers could drop off their waste in the parking lot by the All Star Lanes bowling alley. Trash pickup there ended about a month ago, Preisinger said, while Moran said campers stopped using the service around November.

“Everything was going really good up here and flowed really good,” Mitchell said. “And then once (the garbage service) got taken away, everything just kind of went to hell in a handbasket.”

The HEART team set a baseline expectation for maintaining cleanliness, but when the fence was erected it seemed too difficult of a challenge for campers, Moran said. The 50-foot walk to dispose of trash turned into a half-mile trek round-trip. Cooperation in cleaning efforts fell apart.

“I'm speculating that that's right about when they decided to sweep the encampment,” Preisinger said. “Since they've removed those services, people don't have anything to do with their trash, so it's all just piled up, and now they're gonna come in on the 28th, take pictures and look around and say, ‘We're looking at this horrifying, encampment.’”

While trash accumulated, more illegal activities began infiltrating the camp. Drug use became more noticeable, there were people arriving with felony warrants and a woman was punched in the face, Moran said. The fence was also cut 15 times.

“It was a pretty neat thing while it was happening and working well,” Moran said. “It was cool to see so many people engaging with us while we were able to manage it, but that wire gate was really tough.”

Hospital Hill was never meant to be an open air encampment, but ended up being a type of experiment for that concept, Moran said. Moran has looked to Tacoma’s Forging Path Community, which operates a city-sanctioned outdoor encampment where homeless people can access services and transition into housing.

An open air shelter was one of three options presented by Bremerton Mayor Wheeler’s administration for a shelter option to succeed the Salvation Army’s congregate shelter. The administration and City Council declined to pursue the option.

But now that the once "functional" encampment has come to an end, so has some campers’ trust in the service providers.

“I'll never be disrespectful to them, and it’s not their fault, per se, but there's absolutely no trust there anymore,” Mitchell said. “There's a certain amount of drug use and crime, things that are associated with these kinds of places and camps, and of course that’s a given… but I'm tired of them treating all of us like we are and all of a sudden we're all being swept into the same pile together.”

Running out of places to call a home

“It might be illegal for me to camp in some places and be homeless there, but they can't force me out of Silverdale – this is my home,” Mitchell said. “Moving out here to Kitsap County, this is the first place that has felt like home to me.”

Campers like Mitchell are running out of places to go, given their needs and circumstances, and clearing of encampments makes it more difficult, Preisinger said. Unauthorized camping is legally enforceable in Bremerton and Port Orchard, he said, and it seems like “the county's attitude is changing, even though the resources available aren't changing.”

Unauthorized encampments around the county have been home to people who can’t enter shelters because they have incompatible medical or behavioral issues, keep pets, or they’ve been banned, Preisinger said. Some don’t want to enter shelters for fear of illness, exposure to drugs, adherence to rules or proximity to strangers, while others stay in certain areas for work and family.

Before Hospital Hill was closed, Preisinger and Mitchell said drug treatment was offered the most as a place to go after the clearing. But some, like Mitchell, aren’t suffering from a substance addiction, and others like Banks can’t afford to store their belongings while they would be away.

HEART also offered the Benedict House, George's House, Pendleton Place, Oxford Houses and Eagle's Wings as possible shelters – depending on qualification, Moran said.

“It really comes down to which all have openings," Moran said. "I believe most of them do.”

“They just need housing,” Preisinger said, but “the housing doesn't exist.”

Most, if not all, of the Hospital Hill campers will be making their own shelter arrangements and none of them will be going to open shelter spaces, Mitchell said, having spoken with most of her fellow campers. Mitchell will be packing up and staying with a friend where she will contribute her share of the rent after restarting her old job at Arby’s, she said.

Hospital Hill campers have been scouting out a new place to set their tents, Mitchell said. Some campers have their eyes set on another existing encampment by Greaves Way, on the opposite side of Highway 3, which Moran was inform about though he can’t and won’t stop them from relocating there.

The Greaves encampment already has about 15 to 17 campers and is on non-county property, Moran said, so he’s only been able to visit it a couple of times for outreach with permission from the Washington State Department of Transportation. But it’s already being eyed for closure, which Moran has communicated to interested campers.

Banks said he was told he must clear the area in March.

Banks has been living at the Greaves encampment to stay close to job opportunities – relatively speaking. He’s looking at a couple of opportunities four miles away, but for him, camping in Silverdale is the closest he can get.

“It's kind of been really hard trying to find new places to go – Silverdale's kind of running out of areas,” he said, then mentions another possibility, about four miles south. “I'm thinking about going up towards Newberry Hill.”

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Homeless encampment near Silverdale hospital cleared by outreach team