When Mayor Jim Ferrell announced his plan to move all the homeless out of their encampments and make sure they didn’t return, the implications were as predicable as falling dominoes.

The mayor and City Council said the homeless couldn’t be on public land and they couldn’t be on private land. City Hall just wanted them gone. The mayor and Council apparently thought the homeless would go to Seattle, or to service providers, or to other communities.

They didn’t.

The mayor’s own staff told him and the City Council that there was no place for the homeless to go. And last year, homeless advocates told the Council that most of the homeless people in Federal Way had family or geographic ties to the area. As a result, many stayed right here.

In this predictable scenario, the first domino was some of the homeless starting to move to the central business district where there are benches, covered doorways, restaurants, and small patches of green space and trees. This was followed by complaints from businesses about the homeless sleeping in their doorways, and the same complaints from some churches – who have the compassion the city lacks but not the resources to help. Some employees of these places, not surprisingly, are afraid.

But what other real choices did the homeless have?

Do you know what it’s like to be truly vulnerable? Imagine it. What if you lost your job and had no family to turn to? What if you were suddenly homeless? What would it be like to not have food or a place to sleep? What if you had to worry about the police arresting you because you went somewhere when you had no other place you could go? What if you were in danger from other homeless people who wanted your coat or shoes or money for drugs or alcohol? You don’t really want to turn to the police for help; they just created the situation you find yourself in by pushing you out of the encampments.

Your encampment is gone and you have no place to go, so the next best thing is the central business area. There, at least, are buildings with some shelter and garbage bins that might yield food or something in which you can wrap yourself when the night gets cold. But then the police tell you to go some place else.

To where?

All the city plan has done is move the problem from the solitude and privacy of the encampments to the visibility and responsibility of the business community and some churches, neither of which are equipped to handled these problems. And as the city closes more encampments, it will get worse.

And what happens next? The second domino. After City Hall clears out all of the homeless encampments and runs the homeless out of the central business district, where do they go next?

With no other options, homeless people will migrate to the city’s neighborhoods. Neighborhoods have parks, and yards and maybe some food. One of those neighborhoods might be yours.

If the homeless are in the forest, we don’t see them. If they’re in the business district, we drive by them. But when they’re in your neighborhood, the problem literally comes too close to home. Then the police calls will increase, and the homeless people, many of whom only want help, will go to jail.

When residents start complaining about the homeless in their neighborhood, the mayor and Council will make sure police will respond quickly. They’ll hire more police if needed to keep the homeless out of the neighborhoods.

And then the problem created by City Hall will have come full circle.

With salary, benefits, a car, training, and overtime, the city probably needs about $100,000 per year for each police officer. Police should be hired to fight crime, not arrest the homeless. A better use of city resources would be for City Hall to provide help and support for the homeless. Tents cost $70; the city has public land available.

Wouldn’t it be better to try and solve the problem, rather than continue an endless game of dominoes between the homeless and our citizens?

Federal Way resident Bob Roegner is the former mayor of Auburn. He can be reached at bjroegner@comcast.net.