Homeless: School takeover evokes sympathy, disgust

Re: “Unhoused people occupying Gault Middle School told to leave or face arrest,” (TNT, 11/21).

I’ve been a homeless outreach worker in Tacoma for three years. I watched what happened at Gault with a mix of disgust and sympathy.

I see horrors every day on the streets, under bridges and in encampments – amputations, sickness, people struggling to survive in environments that are constantly beating them down.

People are begging for help from a system that appears designed to fail them, to keep them running from location to location without any forward movement.

When the activists “took” Gault, they did so without appropriately safeguarding the people they moved in.

Worse, they disrupted the lives of the homeless who already lived in that area, who weren’t consulted and were frightened by the sudden appearance of activists and police.

Regardless of these factors, I hope the city hears the call behind what happened. There are people, right now, cold and hungry and suffering in our city.

That our leadership lacks the moral backbone to take meaningful action is abhorrent. The city has failed, by every reasonable metric, to meet the needs of its homeless citizens. We must do better.

This story was originally published November 24, 2020 at 10:11 AM with the headline "Homeless: School takeover evokes sympathy, disgust."