How will Tacoma’s encampment-ban expansion impact plans to address homelessness?

The Tacoma City Council passed an amendment to expand areas where homeless encampments are prohibited. While some city leaders say the move is necessary given the recent loss of shelters, others worry the timing is inopportune.

While the city has made efforts to expand and improve its homeless-outreach efforts recently, the ordinance could expand where the outreach team will have to respond.

The closure of a number of shelters in 2025 has reduced the areas in which camping is prohibited, and supporters of the expansion say that caused an uptick in encampments. Those opposed say the shelter closures have given the unhoused nowhere to go.

Supporters of the expansion claim the city is hosting more than its fair share of homeless services, while those opposed say the expansion will force the homeless outside the city where support is scarce.

How will the expansion of the camping ban impact the City of Tacoma’s approach to the homelessness crisis?

Camping ban in place since 2022

In October 2022, the Tacoma City Council passed an ordinance that prohibits camping and the storage of personal belongings in a 10-block radius around temporary shelters and all public property within 200 feet of Tacoma’s rivers, waterways, creeks, streams and shorelines. Under the ordinance, violators face fines of up to $250 and up to 30 days in jail.

As part of enforcement, the city implemented its Homelessness Engagement and Alternatives Liaison (HEAL) team to offer services and give notice to those living unhoused before their encampments are removed.

In enforcing the ordinance, the city has removed more than 9 million pounds of items and trash from encampments. According to the city’s quarterly report, it has removed more than 964 encampments since implementing the ordinance. Of those, 776 were inside the buffer zones.

“The camping ordinance has also decreased the number of larger encampments that used to exist in Tacoma,” city spokesperson Maria Lee told The News Tribune. “When encampments are smaller, our HEAL team is better able to connect with individuals, including those who may have been hesitant or unable to seek help in larger more established encampments, making them more receptive to the services they offer.”

How will it impact outreach efforts?

According to Lee, acceptance rates for services have been consistently higher in the prohibited areas than outside them.

Since implementing the ordinance, the HEAL team has reported making more than 7,675 contacts, with a reported 50% of those contacts expressing interest in services. In 2025, the HEAL team reported an improved 63% expressing interest in services.

City Council member John Hines cited the high service-acceptance rate when discussing his proposal to expand the no-camping buffer zones to two blocks away from public schools, parks and libraries.

During the council’s study session on Oct. 14, Hines said his proposal to increase the areas in which encampments are prohibited is due to a loss of established shelters in 2025 due to a funding shortfall. According to the proposal, the city lost five buffer zones from 2024 to July 2025 — almost all of which shared overlapping areas in downtown, south and east Tacoma.

Hines said the loss of buffer spaces around the closed shelters led to an increase in encampments in those areas.

Before losing buffer zones at the end of June, the HEAL team consistently placed a higher proportion of people found camped inside the buffer zones into shelter as compared to people contacted living outside of them. Following the loss of the buffer zones, those numbers became more even, according to data the city shared with The News Tribune.

In 2025, the HEAL team reported a much higher rate of accepted services and shelter placement among those contacted. With fewer buffer zones to emphasize outreach efforts in, they also reported making far fewer contacts.

“Our HEAL team attributes this success to the consistent and repeated engagement that the buffer zones facilitate. By concentrating our efforts in these designated areas, our teams are present more frequently,” Lee told The News Tribune. “This constant presence allows them to move beyond brief interactions and build genuine, trusting relationships with individuals experiencing homelessness. This trust is the key to helping people accept services.”

Lee said the HEAL team is currently at its “full capacity” with eight full-time employees who worked a collective 3,568 hours from June 1 to Aug. 31 this year.

Hines said he anticipates the demand for outreach services would be comparable to what it was in 2024 before the closure of several temporary shelters. Tacoma’s homeless outreach team is budgeted for $3,286,519 in the city’s 2025-2026 biennial budget, according to Lee.

“If approved, these ordinance changes are unlikely to require additional resources to implement,” according Hines’ proposal. “HEAL and TPD resources are already positioned to address illegal camping in prohibited zones and have ceased to enforce [the ordinance] in several of the original prohibited zones that no longer exist.”

In an interview with The News Tribune, Hines said he expects calls for service related to homelessness to be “roughly about the same” as it was prior to the expansion. He said the HEAL team already responds to calls in areas where camping is considered “non-prohibited,” and he does not expect its workload to significantly increase.

“The job is the same,” Lee said when asked if the HEAL team’s work could be more difficult if the proposal is approved. “To provide compassionate, relationship-based outreach to individuals experiencing homelessness throughout Tacoma, and to connect people to services, reduce harm, and help them transition toward safe and stable housing.”

If the need for additional HEAL team employees becomes apparent following the passage of the proposal, Hines said he would be supportive of increasing the team’s budget.

Other council members did not respond to The News Tribune’s request for comment on how they thought the proposal would impact the HEAL team’s workload.

“I’ll be monitoring this really closely,” he said. “This is going to be an ongoing conversation about how to connect with people.”

Does the city have enough shelter to make this work?

The expansion to Tacoma’s encampment ban comes at a time when the city’s shelter capacity is the lowest since the pandemic.

The city closed roughly 200 shelter beds in 2025 due to funding shortfalls. The city had about 1,099 shelter beds as of the beginning of 2025 and had 860 by the end of June.

Some council members who were opposed to the amendment questioned whether the city had invested enough into shelter and services to institute a policy that would prevent people from camping without ample alternatives.

During the Oct. 21 council meeting, council member Joe Bushnell said he opposed the amendment because of the city’s lack of low-barrier shelter options.

“I think if we are asking people not to stay in certain areas, we should have a location for them to go and to come as they are,” he told the council.

“Tonight I feel like we have failed ourselves and I cannot get to ‘yes’ in this until we have got to ‘yes’ to the other things,” Deputy Mayor Kiara Daniels said before voting against the proposal. “We have done so much work in homelessness and so much work in sheltering, and I do not think it is enough to only be a little bit better than the couple of cities next to us.”

Regional impact

Tacoma is recognized as the largest host of homeless shelter and services in Pierce County.

Tacoma’s deputy city manager Sonja Hallum previously told The News Tribune the city hosts about 80% of the region’s shelter capacity and that the city’s loss of hundreds of shelter beds in 2025 would have county-wide implications.

“I think it’s a little bit premature for us to be making large changes to policies at this level until we have a larger conversation with our neighboring jurisdictions and how that impacts the regional approach we are trying to stand up,” Bushnell said during the Oct. 21 meeting.

The county is putting together the Unified Regional Approach (URA) to homelessness, a coalition of local governments, agencies and service providers. The URA is intended to be a body of governance that coordinates efforts and resources among jurisdictions in an attempt to reduce silos of decision-making and patchwork efforts which plague the region’s approach to homelessness.

Organizing the URA has taken multiple years without much to show for its efforts.

“As the seat of Pierce County, we have multiple cities around us who don’t provide shelter, who don’t provide solutions for housing affordability, and [have] really made Tacoma step-up,” Council Member Olgy Diaz told the council before voting to oppose the amendment on Oct. 21. “We have been one of the biggest providers by spending more than $100 million on creating more affordable housing and shelter services in just the three years since I’ve been on council.”

Advocates for the homeless have said they believe the expansion will force those living unhoused outside of the city.

“It’s going to make most of the city out-of-bounds for folks who are homeless,” said Rob Huff, spokesperson for the Tacoma Pierce County Coalition to End Homelessness, during an Oct. 10 meeting. “It will make it really hard for anyone who’s homeless to know whether they’re staying in a place where they’re going to immediately be hustled away, or if they’re going to be able to spend the night there without being harassed.”

During the Oct. 21 meeting, the council passed a resolution brought forward by council member Sarah Rumbaugh, who voted in support of the camping-ban expansion.

The resolution directs the city manager to “seek partnerships with other agencies to identify a location and funding options to create a new low-barrier shelter site.” The resolution dictates that the city manager should provide an update on those efforts to the council within 60 days.

The text of the resolution suggests that the low-barrier shelter site could be located in other parts of the county.

“As we seek to understand and meet the needs of homeless individuals throughout the County, we know we need more shelter beds and we need geographic disbursement of shelter options so Pierce County residents can receive services in the communities they call home,” a memo on the resolution read.

Addressing the root of homeless issue

Hines has previously said his proposal is not meant to address the root causes of homelessness, and rather is meant to mitigate the impact homeless encampments have on the surrounding community and those living inside of them.

“This plan is not about ending homelessness. I am a firm believer that the way we end homelessness is by providing shelter and housing for folks in our community,” Hines told the City Council during its Oct. 14 study session. “But I think the challenge we are looking at with some of our encampments is that encampments are not safe.”

During the Oct. 21 meeting, council member Kristina Walker suggested the city could do both at the same time.

“Our city really goes above and beyond in terms of supporting the community in this space. We have committed staff, far more than we used to. We have funding. We have both policies and programs that are keeping people in their homes and making sure we are supporting folks to get back into that housing when they don’t have it,” she told the council.

With the amount of people living homeless in the region showing increases in the years since the camping ban was put into place, advocates are concerned the expansion will lead to more of the same.

“This policy is not going to be good news for those who are currently homeless in our community, or really for our community in general,” Huff told members of the coalition. “The whole time that the camping ban has been in effect we have not seen a reduction in homelessness, and instead we’ve largely heard the city brag about how much trash has been collected as they chase people around and clean up camps over and over.”

This story was originally published October 29, 2025 at 5:00 AM.

Cameron Sheppard

The News Tribune

Cameron Sheppard is a former journalist for the News-Tribune