Recently I had the opportunity to speak with students at Antioch University about homelessness in Seattle. With me was Rev. David Bloom, who almost 20 years ago founded the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness, and Rev. Rick Reynolds, the longtime operator of Operation Nightwatch.
Each of us has seen the long arc of rising homelessness in Seattle, and none of us was in an especially hopeful mood.
The numbers from January’s point-in-time count documenting an 8 percent increase in homelessness countywide and a 22 percent increase in unsheltered homelessness, had just been released.
Each of us struggled to absorb the new numbers.
That we’d seen similar annual increases in 2014 and 2015 did little to help.
As Rick Reynolds put it, “We’re not even putting our fingers in the dike anymore, because there is no dike.”
Since Real Change started in 1994, I’ve seen the overall numbers of homeless people in King County more than triple. Worse, the proportion of unsheltered people in the homeless count — those left outdoors after the shelters have filled — has more than quintupled.
For the past two decades, about one in three homeless people in King County has been unsheltered. With the latest count, that proportion rose to nearly half.
Homelessness, despite all the hopefully misleading rhetoric of becoming “rare, brief and one-time,” is anything but.
Homelessness, truth be told, is common as dirt, often prolonged and a serial occurrence for far too many. Growing homelessness arises from the instability that comes of economic abandonment, the criminalization of the poor and rapidly rising housing costs.
The policy initiatives that drive the countywide Pathways Home plan mostly shuffle the deck. The accountability for rising homelessness has been aimed at the wrong people: the shelter and housing providers who provide the emergency response.
If only providers were more efficient in moving their people into housing — housing that mostly doesn’t exist — we’d be winning.
And the programs that are now most threatened are the ones focused on simply keeping people alive.
Not good enough, say the planners and bureaucrats.
And we must ask, “Not good enough for who? The people kept alive?”
Every time there is a new plan to mitigate homelessness, I’m reminded of the old saw from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
Every time there is a new plan to mitigate homelessness, I’m reminded of the old saw from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
“Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!”
“Again? That trick never works.”
“Buckle up my sleeve, and presto!” (Pulls out a roaring lion’s head.) “Oh, wrong hat.”
Our policies for addressing homelessness, for all their overall effectiveness, might as well be written by Moose and Squirrel.
This is what happens when a human-services approach to homelessness elides the problem of radical inequality.
We are pulling rabbits from the wrong hat. The results are uniformly disappointing.
The reality is this: Rising housing costs in King County, and Seattle in particular, have created economic instability more quickly than a robust human-services industry’s capacity to mitigate the carnage.
The revolving door between our emergency shelter system and the community-destroying and racially disparate criminal justice system only deepens the abandonment that poor people face.
And beneath it all, we are devoured by rising inequality. Between 2009 and 2012 in Washington state, the richest 1 percent captured 175 percent of income growth.
Meanwhile, average incomes in King County for the poorest quintile were stagnant, averaging just $15,285 per household.
If you want to know why homelessness is increasing in King County, one need really look no further than this.
Fifty years ago, on April 4, 1967, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called for a revolution of values to address the triple evils of militarism, racism and poverty. Those words are more relevant now than ever.
The hope for ending homelessness does not lie within the bureaucratic, incremental policy approaches that blame the victims and mask the real issues.
Our hope, instead, must be with the rising social movements that take their dissatisfaction and desperation to the streets and the ballot box.
Tim Harris is the founding Director Real Change and has been active as a poor people’s organizer for more than two decades. Prior to moving to Seattle in 1994, Harris founded the Spare Change homeless newspaper in Boston in 1992 while working as Executive Director of Boston Jobs with Peace.
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