What do you call it when, in 2009, the One Night Count of Homeless People in Seattle found 2,827 homeless people outdoors after midnight, for a 2 percent increase over 2008, but this year found "just" 2,759, for a 5 percent decrease? I know what I'd call it: a statistically insignificant variation. The difficulties involved in counting homeless people after dark are daunting at best, and nobody is claiming accuracy.
For obvious reasons, pretty much anyone hunkered down in a greenbelt during the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 29 got missed by the people with flashlights and clipboards. For more than two years, the city has had a zero tolerance position on public camping. This means that the more obvious sleepers at, say, a downtown bus stop at 4 a.m., are regularly being told by police to move on.
The city's policy of routine homeless sweeps is ongoing. It just happens now, for the most part, without a media strategy coordinated out of the Mayor's office. In the two weeks prior to the count, the visible camps under the viaducts at both James Street and Yesler Way were swept. Hardly anyone took notice.
It doesn't take an urban anthropologist to predict the results. When the visible urban spaces are off limits, people become harder to find. They go deeper into the greenbelts. Their camps will still be regularly cleared, but meanwhile, they'll at least get some sleep.
Everybody knows this. To spin the 2010 count's "decline" in numbers as evidence of even qualified success is simply dishonest.
Here at Real Change, most of our homeless vendors don't stay in the shelters. They sleep out, away from the bedlam and the bugs. Many of us, once we've seen most shelters, would make the same choice. We see the wreckage that those further away might not. In recent years, we've seen the numbers climb, the conditions turn more desperate, and the streets get meaner.
Homelessness will never be solved through narrowly defined and underfunded human service solutions that avoid conflict and controversy. There is a human and civil rights crisis on our streets. It grows from an acceptance of radical inequality. That's reality. Deal with it. n