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Shanna Gorr says that the police occasionally will sweep campsites and “are very rude,” often throwing away people’s blankets and belongings. The area she’s staying at near Pike St. and Boren Ave. on Capitol Hill is on a list of sites swept regularly by the Department of Corrections. Gorr, 18, from Tacoma, has been homeless in Seattle since the age of 11 due to family problems. New county money may help social service workers reach out to the 2,500 homeless people planners estimate are staying outside in the county.
Photo by Jon Vachon |
Mari Beth Wilson goes out four times a week to the underpasses, the roadsides, and the forested greenbelts near the city’s center looking to meet people. She goes with her partner, a nurse. She meets people in sleeping bags, in tents, people walking the clay trails at the foot of bridges.
Her opening line? “We tell them that we’re outreach workers,” she says. Her co-worker “introduces himself as a nurse. We ask them if they’re interested in having a referral for nighttime shelter.”
Not many say yes.
“Then we tell them there’s going to come a time when the city will clear the area,” she says. “We leave our cards with them and tell them if they change their minds about it to call us.”
This is the outreach promised by the city’s ramped-up effort to clear out urban campsites. Wilson’s been doing it for four weeks.
“It’s all so new,” she says, “that we’re still trying to get things worked out.”
And it might change again as the 2006 countywide levy for human services and veterans’ aid beefs up outreach to homeless people in the downtown area.
In early 2009, the six-year, nearly $80 million Veterans and Human Services Levy will target the estimated 2,500 chronically homeless — people characterized by alcoholism or substance abuse, mental illness, and long bouts of time without any place to go — with plans for outreach, better services, and interagency tracking of individuals who move from jail to shelters to underpasses.
“The focus is on people who tend to get bumped around, who may get evicted or kicked out of a shelter,” says Janna Wilson of Health Care for the Homeless, a federal- and county-funded services agency.
What do those people need? More invitations to treatment or shelter and better case management, says the draft plan. It suggests recasting the Dutch Shisler Sobering Center, a place where street alcoholics have a safe place to sleep off a binge, as a “service center” where people could drop in, meet with counselors, and warm up to the idea of treatment.
And the plan notes the long wait for treatment and “the lack of detox beds,” or places to stay while enduring that wait. More treatment is coming from the $50 million annual boost for the county’s mental health and substance abuse services, passed last year by the County Council.
The plan also sets aside $130,000 each year for two outreach workers to canvass urban areas for homeless people and invite them into shelter.
And while outreach has often focused on the mentally ill or addicted, unsheltered homeless people who don’t suffer from either mental illness or addiction will also be the subject of greater outreach and monitoring by a new interagency Client Coordination Team, which, the plan now states, “will be working to address the long-term, vulnerable homeless population regardless of whether they are making high use of sobering, hospitals, and the justice system.”
County mental health and drug dependency supervisor Jim Vollendroff says the idea is to avoid the duplication of services. “We’re strategizing so that we’re not taking up precious few outpatient slots with the same client,” he says. “Different case managers will have different ideas of what they need based on their knowledge of that client. If we’re all at the same table, we have a better picture.”
City Human Services Department staffer Jerry DeGrieck has advised county planners on the use of levy funds; he says the Client Coordination Team will make it easier to get people “into the services they need.”
“That can only happen when all agencies know better what each other is doing,” he says. “We need to see better coordination and communication.”
Outreach worker Mari Beth Wilson needs a partner. The mental health services group REACH is hiring for another part-time position; when it’s filled, REACH will be visiting 10 sites that the city is preparing to sweep each week.
And while the Human Services Department created 20 new shelter spots for victims of these sweeps, Wilson says that after four weeks of asking people whether they’d like to come into a shelter, just five of those spots are occupied.
Why not more? Mental illness, substance abuse, or previous bad experiences at shelters are some of the reasons people give for rejecting the invitation, she says. Still, she revisits the campsites and asks again, usually finding the same people there. Even after a work crew has cleared an area, the campers “are usually back the next day.”
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