Tacoma is fixing homelessness? That’s not what I see every day | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Tacoma’s HEAL team and camping ban shift encampments but fail to house people.
- City reports higher service interest but actual contacts and shelter exits fell.
- Council pushes buffer-zone camping bans; author urges funding shelters, prevention.
As a homeless outreach worker, I’ve witnessed first hand the misinformed and ridiculous policies our current City Council have proposed and implemented to address homelessness in Tacoma.
The camping ban and Homeless Engagement Alternative Liaison (HEAL) team interventions in particular have proven ineffective, fiscally irresponsible and harmful to people I know and care about. The feedback from homeless service providers, lived experience representatives and our unhoused neighbors has echoed the same.
Imagine my surprise to read the Oct. 1 piece published in The News Tribune highlighting the city of Tacoma’s service-first approach.
Despite the fact homelessness is increasing in Tacoma, the first two-thirds of the article emphasize that the percentage of people interested in services from the HEAL team has increased, along with the percentage of people that same team connected to shelter.
The buried lead: the actual number of successful outcomes were down, and the number of total contacts made were way down. In the third quarter of 2025, for instance, the eight-person HEAL team placed 43 fewer people in shelter than the quarter before and only contacted 359 unhoused people, compared to 1,156 the same quarter in 2024.
For frame of reference, our outreach team at the SVDP Community Resource Center routinely sees that many homeless folks in a week. The city’s spokesperson Maria Lee spun this ineptitude by suggesting the HEAL team has made such a low number of contacts this year due to the lack of visible homelessness in Tacoma, which she asserts is a sign of the city’s success.
Is that a joke?
In the 2025 point-in-time count, Pierce County recorded 2,955 people experiencing homelessness, 2,037 of them in Tacoma. This is an increase from the year before. Likely the real numbers are double or even triple that.
Tacoma’s camping ban and HEAL team interventions are not working — verifiably so. But the city is so drunk on its own Kool-Aid that Council Member John Hines is proposing an ordinance amendment to double down on the camping ban. Hines and friends want to extend Tacoma’s camping ban to include a “buffer zone” of two blocks around any of the 72 schools, 70 parks and recreation sites, and nine libraries in our city.
This, combined with the current 10-block camping ban around all shelters, will effectively make it illegal to be homeless in Tacoma.
This actually sounds more shocking than it is because in reality, as any homeless person will tell you, it is already effectively illegal to be visibly homeless in Tacoma. Since 2022, if a person tries to sleep outside anywhere in Tacoma and a 311 call is made to report the person for living outside, it will eventually result in a visit from the HEAL team who, regardless of services offered, will absolutely tell the homeless person to leave and by when.
Know for a fact that every HEAL team intervention ends the same way: With the camp being forced to move a block or two away — and no one becoming less homeless. It is literally just clearing space.
The amended camping ban is after-the-fact legal justification for what the city is already doing every day. It is political theater — a fight intentionally selected because it allows Hines to give the public impression that he’s tough on homelessness while effectively doing nothing different. Nothing for the businesses and neighborhoods impacted by homelessness, and nothing for the people in Tacoma experiencing homelessness.
Tacoma’s HEAL team and camping ban are failed interventions that Hines and his shrinking sphere of influence at the city are clinging desperately to, like a captain on a sinking ship. Let them go down together.
To the rest of the Tacoma City Council: Please stop!
Instead of allowing for a final salvo in your defeated colleague’s war on the poor, try something new. Vote this amendment down and retire the HEAL team. Redeploy those funds for hotel sheltering of families and elders and to fund prevention services. Provide legitimate spaces where homeless people can be while working towards housing solutions. We cannot continue chasing people in circles as an extension of city policy. Please find a new way forward.
Jake Nau is a homeless outreacher at St. Vincent de Paul and an organizer with Common Good Tacoma.