Delgado delivered this speech for the Real Change 27th anniversary celebration, Sept. 16. He has been a service provider in the Seattle area for over 20 years, has experienced homelessness himself and is a tireless advocate for unhoused people.
Thank you, Brett (Hamil), and thank you, Real Change, for this opportunity. It’s an honor and a privilege to be speaking at a Real Change event.
I want to use this time to give some insight to the public to the realities of what providing services to the unhoused looks like.
I’ve been working as a service provider in Seattle since the year 2000. Through that time, I’ve worn almost all the hats that a social worker can wear, from youth counselor, substance abuse counselor, shelter staff, doing clinical work, working on the mobile crisis van, outreach to case managing people in RVs.
And I’ve done various forms of outreach, which led me to the last couple of years, working as what I’m going to call an ‘assertive neighborhood outreach worker.’
There are some outreach workers who run around and give out supplies and information about services. Another form of outreach is providing soft case management, like DESC having workers providing mental health medications and doing clinical work on the street.
I thought that was it until the BIA (Business Improvement Areas) contracted me for a specific neighborhood. I have spent the last few years just in one neighborhood. I am invited into neighborhood meetings, and I have started seeing new potential in outreach and the impacts these neighborhoods are having on the participants I am trying to serve, which altered how I approach outreach.
After hearing so many complaints coming from the businesses about the unhoused, and so much anger with the police in the neighborhood, I decided to give the businesses my card and invited them to call me during the day if it’s not an immediate safety issue. So after my invitation to call me as an alternative to 911, addressing community concerns has taken up most of my time doing outreach.
What type of calls do I get? Well, most of these calls end up not being crises at all. Almost all of my calls are not real safety concerns. Most of the time, people are calling me because there is something that is making them feel uncomfortable.
For example, during COVID, I did get a call from a business that described their situation as an emergency because there was an unhoused person sleeping in one of their parking spots on the ground. The store was closed because of COVID, and the parking lot was empty. When I got there, I invited the man to get a cup of coffee with me. He didn’t even know I was moving him. After we got a cup of coffee, I sent a text to the business saying, “Problem solved.” That could have been a 911 call.
There are times where I have been called by the BIA to inform me of real crises, like someone who is struggling with their mental health and needs help or is possibly a danger to themself, like walking into traffic.
Now in this situation, if I can’t de-escalate the situation, one option is to access the Direct Crisis Response team, but it takes them weeks to come and look for the person, so this isn’t an option during a crisis. The other option is the Crisis Center Downtown, but I’m not allowed to call and refer people to the Crisis Center as an outreach worker.
Currently, the only way to access the Crisis Solution Center is either through the police or the hospital, but I’m coming across so many traumatized people who are struggling with their mental health and have had many bad experiences with the police and with hospitals.
When the person who needs help hears their options, they often get up and walk away without getting any help.
If there’s anybody in the audience who has the power to change this contract and make crisis services more accessible for outreach workers, it would help the whole community, and it’s something we can fix right now without any extra funding.
I bring this up because I believe that this is a social justice issue. With so much of the public asking for alternatives to policing, we need effective crisis services. When you have neighborhoods calling on outreach workers for help, but the workers don’t have access to crisis services, the public loses faith in service providers and starts relying on 911 and the police again.
Another social justice issue for the unhoused are the sweeps. The city prefers to use the word “cleans,” but when you’re removing a person and they have no choice, it’s a “sweep.” I do cleanings in my neighborhood all the time. I made friends with the street cleaners and realized they weren’t intimidated by the unhoused. If someone is making a mess and causing tension in the community, I communicate with the cleaners and we help the person clean the mess without sweeping the person.
The neighborhood I work in supports me when I do this because they understand that if I know where the participants are, I can actually find them when housing or transitional living opportunities arise. Those opportunities will go away if I can’t find the participant and might not come back for months or years, which perpetuates homelessness.
The last Point-in-Time count showed that King County has over 11,000 unhoused people. The city of Seattle only has about a fifth of that amount of shelter beds available. We have a mayoral candidate, Bruce Harrell, who justifies wanting to sweep all the encampments because he will add 1,000 shelter beds. According to that math, if everyone in every encampment wanted to go to a shelter, the city and the county do not have the space for them, even with adding the shelter spaces the candidate is promising.
People of color are disproportionately represented in the unhoused community. When a mayoral candidate goes on the news claiming to be an advocate of social justice, threatening to create a policy to hold people accountable who are quote “not accepting services,” you are putting the most vulnerable people of color populations in direct contact with law enforcement and the criminal justice system.
No outreach worker I speak to thinks that this is a good idea. But because we want to keep our jobs, very few of us are able to say this publicly. This plan seems counter to any concepts of social justice that I am aware of.
I also heard this same candidate, Bruce Harrell, tell the news that when sweeps happen, the encampment residents are being offered housing.
I want to make it very clear to the public that I am not offering housing during my outreach and I’ve never seen any outreach workers walk around offering housing. To get someone from a tent to permanent housing, the very fastest estimate would be a whole year, but it can take multiple years. So, people in encampments are not refusing services; they’re just not being offered adequate services.
A shelter can only house people that the shelter staff is trained for. And many shelter staff are not trained to help people with severe mental health issues. The people who need shelter the most are the first to get kicked out of a shelter because their mental health needs are not being met. It is unfair and cruel to go to someone on the street experiencing severe mental illness and give an option of either being swept or you can go into a shelter, which is not equipped to meet your needs.
Hotels, tiny houses, supportive housing and transitional living programs are often placements that would be accepted. Shelters are the least accepted service and quite frankly, as an ex-unhoused person and through many years of working through the shelters, I wouldn’t sleep in a shelter; I would pitch a tent.
The reality of the situation is there is a very high rate of recidivism with shelters. If you help someone get into a shelter, they will most likely be back on the street within a short amount of time. One of my co-workers reminded me recently that there’re a lot of days that there are no shelter spaces available to anyone in the city, meaning our shelters are often full.
When a sweep happens and there are shelter spaces available, that means those shelter spaces were held for the sweep. So a situation is created where outreach workers, like my co-workers and myself, are coming across people who want shelter but can’t get them into shelter, because the city is holding those spots for the encampment they’re sweeping whose residents might not accept shelter.
Outreach workers are being contacted by unhoused people asking us where the next sweep is so they can go there to camp out to try to get services that are being held for sweeps.
We only have a fifth of the shelter spaces of the need, so it is incredibly difficult to be equitable with the services. It feels similar to a hospital during COVID being overrun with sick people, being put in a position of who is going to get a ventilator. And that is the real reality of outreach.
Another dynamic the public should know regarding the sweeps is every time Ballard does a sweep, I’m seeing those unhoused people in other neighborhoods. Then every time those other neighborhoods do a sweep, the people end up back in Ballard. For years, I’ve seen BIAs advocate for sweeps, but they’re sweeping people into other neighborhoods where there are other BIAs who will advocate for sweeps too.
I suggest that we change our perspective on the situation. No mayor is going to fix the homelessness crisis. It’s not going to be done through the City Council.
The human services is a Band-Aid. This is a community issue and we need a community response. There are community members in these neighborhoods that ask for clean and safe neighborhoods.
Every social worker and outreach worker that I have worked with all want our neighborhoods clean and safe. The unhoused people want the neighborhoods to be clean and safe. Nobody wants to have people sleeping in the streets. It seems like we all want the same thing, but we’re coming at it from different perspectives, and the community fights are making it worse.
I do believe it’s possible for us to work together to achieve our common interest of making our neighborhoods clean and safe while acknowledging the dignity and respect of people, especially our most vulnerable neighbors.
I want to mention how helpful the street medic team from DESC has been. Some of the best doctors and nurses I’ve ever met are working at King County’s mobile medical vans.
I want to give a big thanks to Mutual Aid – Seattle. I want to thank all the LEAD (Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion) case managers that have left their offices and met me in the street to help me deal with complex situations. I would like to give some recognition to one of the best outreach workers I have worked with, and her name is Nichole Alexander from the JustCARE program.
And there are two businesses in the U District that have been amazing advocates to the unhoused. Instead of complaining about homelessness, I have personally witnessed the owner of Sweet Alchemy walk out to the street with a trash bag and actually help the unhoused clean around them.
And last but definitely not least, I want to thank Cafe Allegro. That business has brushed up against the homeless crisis for longer than any other business that I’m aware of, and they have done nothing but be supportive to the unhoused in their area. So please, if you want coffee, go to Cafe Allegro, and if you want some really good ice cream, please consider Sweet Alchemy. We need to support the businesses that are supporting the most vulnerable.
And of course, thank you to Real Change for what they do. Real Change reports on the crisis of homelessness to truly teach the public about the complexities that unhoused people face and is an amazing publication.
Read more of the Sept. 22-28, 2021 issue.