Vashon HouseHold is attempting to clean up what has long been one of the Island’s worst illegal dump sites, a wooded area near Roseballen that until last week was littered with several couches, a washing machine, old tires and mounds of trash.

The site, which straddles land owned by Vashon HouseHold and a parcel owned by Michael Montana of Seattle, is on 103rd Ave. S.W. just beyond the new sweat equity housing project, where nine families have completed their homes and another 10 families are in the final stages of building. In an effort to support Vashon HouseHold’s efforts, King County’s Solid Waste Division plans to install three “no dumping” signs at the site, including one that advertises the county’s illegal dumping hotline number, said Dinah Day, the program manager for the illegal dumping hotline.

Vashon HouseHold is also poised to remove five long-abandoned vehicles on the site, a complex and expensive process because it requires working with the state to identify and notify the last registered owners of the cars and then paying to have the vehicles towed off the Island, said Margaret Cruse, Vashon HouseHold’s project manager. The car-towing effort alone could cost the nonprofit housing organization more than $500, she said.

Vashon HouseHold decided to move forward on the cleanup project in part because it has worsened in just the last few months.

“To have one corner of this property a blighted dumping ground is not tolerable,” said Sam Hendricks, executive director of Vashon HouseHold.

“It’s gotten really bad,” he added. “We want people to know that there’s someone paying attention and caring about this piece of property.”

The area is also well-known as a site for small camps of homeless people, in part because it offers thick stand of woods near Vashon town, where fresh water is available. At least one homeless person was recently seen getting out of one of the abandoned vans tucked into the woods, although the homeless camp is actually deeper in the forest and not at the dump site, Hendricks said.

Hendricks, whose organization has won accolades for its groundbreaking effort to provide affordable housing for low-income Islanders, said Vashon HouseHold is not trying to push homeless people out of the woods by cleaning up the site. In fact, he said, the organization is committed to working with other agencies and organizations on Vashon to find a permanent solution to homelessness on the Island, he said.

The issue is that the site has become both an eyesore and a health hazard, Hendricks said.

“It’s a little ironic that all of our four most recent development sites have had a homeless presence of some sort,” he said, referring to Roseballen, J.G. Commons, Eernisse and Sunflower. “We’ve never taken aggressive action against that unless they’re causing problems.”

The site on 103rd, he added, “is a monumental eyesore and a health hazard. This place is supposed to be a place of natural beauty. And it’s being destroyed.”

Roseballen sits on 19 acres off of 103rd, much of which has been set aside as a natural area; adjacent to Roseballen is Montana’s property, another 40 acres. The county road — 103rd Avenue — is paved until it gets past Roseballen and then turns into a deeply rutted unmaintained road, so thick with mud that a King County Sheriff Department deputy said his cruiser recently got stuck in there.

Jean Bosch, a real estate agent and housing activist who helped to found Vashon HouseHold, said the area where Roseballen now stands “has traditionally been a hotspot for squatters. … I’ve walked that area pretty extensively and counted as many as 20 camps back there.”

It’s not clear if the recent rash of dumping incidents is connected to the homeless camp tucked into the woods, but it appears some of the items dumped there have been used to help set up makeshift homes. A mattress, for instance, had been dragged into the van that sits on the site.

Cruse, with Vashon HouseHold, said she and others at the organization are troubled that the site has become such a hot spot for illegally dumped junk.

“I think someone has found that this is a lovely place to avoid paying a dumping fee,” she said.

Day, with the county’s solid waste division, said her decision to install three signs is a measure of how bad the dump site has gotten; it’s rare, she said, that the county installs all three. (One says “no dumping,” another gives the toll-free illegal dumping hotline number, and a third says the site is being monitored.) But this site has become a chronic problem, calling for more assertive action, she said.

“It’s a wound that won’t heal,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Vashon-Maury Island Land Trust is working with Vashon HouseHold and Roseballen residents to put the trailhead for the land trust’s new Town Loop Trail at the site where the dumping has occurred, said Beth Bordner, the land trust’s office manager. Were the land trust to start its new loop trail at the site, it would have to cross wetlands behind Roseballen before connecting up to the network of trails in Island Center Forest. Just recently, the land trust brought a King County official to the site to get technical advise and permitting information about a project that would traverse wetlands.

A trail through the site would likely do much to deter future illegal dumping, Bordner said.

“We very much expect that if there’s through-traffic there, that will help to discourage this activity,” she said.