April 13, 2006

By ADAM HYLA
Editor

Cross your fingers. The four-month dispute between the city and its largest and cheapest shelter provider may soon have a happy ending.

The city’s Human Services Department (HSD) and SHARE/WHEEL made good progress in discussing their differences over the Safe Harbors data collection system Monday. The parties drafted a mutual agreement that they have refused to disclose to the press — not until their constituencies sign off.

The final agreement may look something like what City Councilmember Nick Licata proposed about a month ago: that SHARE, the city’s largest and most cost-efficient provider of shelters, collect demographic information on those who sleep in them on a quarterly basis, with no personal identifiers (name, date of birth, gender, Social Security number) needed.

That the parties are still talking is a victory in itself. The Very Rev. Robert Taylor, Dean of St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, gets lots of credit for using the gravitas of his position to convene Monday’s meeting. Our respect also goes to City Councilmembers Nick Licata and Jan Drago, who have succeeded in keeping the issue alive in the face of a slow-moving bureaucracy. Drago worked with the Mayor’s Office, and Licata originated the proposal for the manual survey that SHARE/WHEEL and Seattle’s Human Services Department (HSD) discussed for four sessions before talks finally broke down. The talks mediated by Taylor picked up where these left off.

SHARE/WHEEL has objected to the personal data system on grounds that are both logistical — that residents at self-managed shelters won’t interview each other about their personal backgrounds, or enter information into computers that they don’t have — and moral. People shouldn’t have to release their personal information to receive a necessity of life.

But perhaps the most compelling argument for SHARE/WHEEL is that data collection shouldn’t trump the direct services that keep people alive tonight.

The 13 congregations that host SHARE/WHEEL shelters, their leaders, and other sympathizers in the religious community have never lost sight of this fact. In a public break much touted by HSD officials, the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness urged the homeless group to drop its opposition to Safe Harbors. A letter stating that there was “no more time, nor need, for oppositional tactics” became public.

The city seized on this as a sign that resistance was cracking. They were wrong. When SHARE threatened to encamp 300 homeless people in three downtown parks, the community — the 13 churches, their members, and others — made it clear that they would support homeless people squatting in a city park to protest the loss of shelter.

A solution that avoids creating Tent Cities V, VI, and VII will save face for the city. Mayor Nickels’ office will try to recast this as something other than the concession that it is. That may take some doing. But what the city gets out of it — besides unoccupied parks — is mended relations with its partners on the Committee to End Homelessness.

The committee recently began to discuss a sort of protocol for member agencies to use before they rob Peter to pay Paul, as the city planned to do last December when it deep-sixed SHARE and cut other emergency shelters by as much as 20 percent.

There is a bigger picture here that anyone sincerely interested in ending homelessness needs to understand. SHARE/WHEEL’s peripatetic Tent City strategy, which has caused neighborhood after neighborhood to first confront homelessness personally and then come to a new understanding of the poor, has done more to build the political will to end homelessness than all the Task Force meetings of the past three years combined. They have kept homelessness in the press and in people’s faces. SHARE/WHEEL has not allowed us to be complacent.

But there is another argument. Dignity isn’t something that is can be measured and entered into a computer as a “metric.” And while few would argue that SHARE/WHEEL’s self-managed shelter is perfect, they provide a peer-managed alternative that most guests find far less stigmatizing than the alternative. There’s something deeply wrong with any response to homelessness that doesn’t have room for organizations like SHARE/WHEEL.

If the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness is about fulfilling a bureaucratic requirement to get federal grants, then fine. Let’s just stop kidding ourselves and admit that it’s about pushing bits of paper around. But if we’re serious, we need to work together and allow conflict to move us to higher ground. Ending homelessness is a huge, audacious, visionary goal that is going to take all of us, including homeless people themselves. We need SHARE/WHEEL. Now more than ever. n