I wrote a piece for Grist this week about the problem of illegal dumping at homeless encampments, which is exacerbating the garbage pileups that often lead to encampment removals. It’s a problem duplicated in other West Coast cities struggling with the homelessness crisis.

Here’s a short excerpt; check out the whole story at Grist. 

The 6-foot-long mauve couch just showed up one night.

So did the washing machine, and the box spring, and the piles of office chairs that littered a homeless encampment on a hillside overlooking downtown Seattle in early June, where a 1-800-Got-Junk truck just pulled away, loaded to the brim.

“I’ve seen televisions, couches, random bags of trash that isn’t ours,” said Jody*, who has been homeless for about two years and was living in a tent near the top of the hillside on the day of my visit, directly below a large apartment complex.

“Things will just appear. People in those apartments there” — she gestured further up the hillside — “dump bags of trash over the fence.” Jody’s friend Robyn, who was living with her partner in a nearby tent at the time, added, “People dump stuff here all the time. I don’t know why. They’re so lazy — you have trash service, why don’t you use it?”

As homeless encampments proliferate across the country, so do the piles of trash that build up in, around, and near them — trash that local waste management companies struggle to collect. The problem is particularly intractable on the West Coast, where rising housing costs have combined with a lack of investment in shelters to create a proliferation of tent cities from Los Angeles to Vancouver.

In Los Angeles, the number of people living outside or in cars rose 16 percent over the past year to more than 27,000. And in Seattle, the one-night count in January found 3,558 people living without shelter, a slight decrease from last year. Unsheltered people are surrounded by a staggering amount of trash: Garbage collectors report picking up five to seven tons every day in Los Angeles; 24 tons at a single encampment in Berkeley; and 8.5 tons along a single stretch of Interstate 84 in Portland, according to Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler.

In Seattle, the city picked up 355 tons of trash at or near 71 encampments in just the first three months of this year. But as in Los Angeles — where L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez recently reported that local merchants “routinely dump their own trash on the streets or pay homeless people a few bucks to get rid of it for them” — the story in Seattle is more complicated than it seems.

Read the whole piece at Grist.