It has cost millions and moved just 46 people into housing. Still, judging Tacoma’s tent city is tricky.

In some ways, judging the success of Tacoma’s Dome District stability site isn’t hard at all.

It’s been expensive, with ongoing costs running in the millions and counting.

It’s been fraught with challenges, with city officials readily acknowledging hiccups and plenty of important lessons learned along the way.

Perhaps most importantly, the effort has succeeded in moving only 46 people — out of more than 200 who have utilized the site — into permanent or temporary housing.

All of these facts were conveyed Tuesday afternoon during an update on the progress of the Dome District stability site —which opened in June 2017 as part of the city’s response to its declared homelessness-related public health and safety emergency —presented to the City Council.

Despite everything listed above, City Manager Elizabeth Pauli — who was tasked with the bulk of the updating — didn’t paint a grim picture.

Instead, Pauli was realistic, noting the effort’s significant list of achievements.

What should we make of this? It depends, as it so often does in cases like these, on what metrics we’re using to judge Tacoma’s grand tent city experiment — the human victories or what we were told to expect.

“We emphasized from the beginning what this was and what this wasn’t. And I just want to reiterate that today,” Pauli told the City Council this week. “The program was and is an emergency response to health and safety issues related to homeless encampments in the city. The program is not, and was not at the time … a solution to end homelessness.”

That’s true, and probably a good thing, because it certainly hasn’t accomplished anything close to it.

So what has the stability site and accompanying enforcement efforts — which are budgeted to cost the city $3.4 million this year — accomplished?

Together, the efforts have virtually eliminated large unauthorized encampments in the city and provided nightly shelter to nearly 100 people experiencing homelessness, Pauli and the city staff said.

Furthermore, the effort has connected these individuals with important services, including mental health services, medical aid, addiction recovery and job opportunities.

Finally, as mentioned, the city has successfully transitioned 46 individuals into permanent or temporary housing.

That’s 46 people’s lives greatly improved, which — whatever side you’re on — is a feat not to be taken lightly.

“There are good things happening at the site. They’re just the kind of things that can be imperceptible because they’re long-term, very individual issues that we’re working on,” Pauli later told The News Tribune.

Pauli also stressed that the city’s response to the declared homeless emergency has focused on the immediate health and human safety concerns associated with large encampments, both for those living in encampments and those near them — which is precisely what she was instructed to do.

A move to simply build more housing, she argued, wouldn’t have accomplished this with the urgency the situation demanded.

“I count all of those things as successful, both at the individual level as well as on an organization level,” Pauli said of the stability site’s accomplishments.

The trouble for Pauli, and the city as a whole, is the expectations were far greater in the beginning. That’s where things get sticky.

While Pauli is right to point out the stability site was never billed as a solution to homelessness, it was described as the second phase of a three-phase response.

That third phase?

Transitioning individuals experiencing homelessness into temporary housing … which hasn’t exactly gone as planned.

“What we learned was that we could not move people through and out of the stability site at the rate that we had hoped,” Pauli told the council on Tuesday. She pointed to an overall lack of such housing, and a population at the stability site that largely requires housing that’s permanent, not temporary, and equipped with the kind of ongoing professional support that people with high barriers to housing often need.

That’s also in short supply.

“I feel very confident in saying that was not a success,” Pauli candidly said the following day of the original intentions of Phase 3.

All of that, satisfying or not, brings us to the present, and how Tacoma moves forward from here.

In light of everything the city has learned, Pauli told the council that the city’s goal has shifted.

The hope now, she said, is to work with existing service providers and faith based organizations to create enough new shelter beds by the end of 2019 to make the stability site unnecessary, while ensuring that no one is displaced when it eventually closes.

Ultimately, Pauli say this move “will free up more resources … to focus on some of the other things, like housing.”

“I think that we have got to focus on more permanent solutions,” Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards noted, in response to the hour-long presentation she’d just heard.

It’s a good idea, and also the kind of thing that sounds fairly obvious in retrospect.

This story was originally published September 19, 2018 at 5:07 PM.