The solutions to homelessness are well known, but the systems that should address the crisis have been under-resourced for decades, hampering the efforts of advocates, policy professionals and service providers to turn the corner, said participants of a panel discussion hosted by the League of Women Voters of Seattle-King County on Dec. 2.
The panel discussion was moderated by Erica C. Barnett, editor and publisher of PubliCola and featured Alison Eisinger, the executive director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness (SKCCH); Daniel Malone, the executive director of DESC; Marc Dones, the CEO of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA); and Cynthia Stewart, the Housing and Homelessness Issue Chair of the League of Women Voters of Washington (LWVWA).
They went deep on their hopes and frustrations as the county transitions to a regional approach to homelessness, a sentiment captured in the panel’s title: Homelessness: A New Approach? Or More of the Same?
Hope — perhaps paradoxically — sprang in part from the coronavirus pandemic, which saw a massive influx of resources from the state and federal governments to the local level. It facilitated a shift away from congregate homeless shelters and toward hotel-based models that allow individual rooms, privacy and security.
“There are those of us who have lived through the last 20 months who are very clear: We’re never going back to some of the things that were accepted as standard or even good ways of providing care pre-COVID,” Eisinger said.
The homelessness system has been under-resourced for decades and can’t turn on a dime, Eisinger said, a sentiment with which Dones agreed. As CEO of KCRHA, it is up to Dones and their team to craft the new, regional response, a monumental task in terms of planning and service delivery, particularly in an environment when large services agencies remain understaffed.
But, Dones said, the fundamentals remain the same.
“If we hadn’t under-resourced this system for 30 years, if we had people, we could do some incredible stuff tomorrow, because at the core of it — and I think the optimism that people are bringing to this conversation — is we actually do know how to house people,” Dones said. “We know how to house people, we know how to support people... that world is not mysterious.”
Homeless people require housing that is appropriate to their needs and income levels. Some of the most vulnerable people experiencing homelessness get by on social security and disability insurance (SSI), which often amounts to just under $800 per month, Malone said.
That amount doesn’t vary with the cost of living in the city or area in which they live, be that Seattle or somewhere with more “naturally affordable” housing.
DESC works with some of the most vulnerable people experiencing homelessness: chronically homeless people who have a disability and have spent a long time without housing. These are often people that are “visibly homeless,” the roughly 30 percent of the homeless population that can have severe behavioral or mental health problems that make them noticeable to their housed neighbors, sometimes in negative ways.
Finding a way to get people housing while they’re still dealing with the trauma and consequences of being on the street — called “Housing First” in policy circles — is critical to their recovery and success, Malone said.
“Our society is not geared toward very well meeting the needs of these people with these kinds of conditions and the experience of homelessness exacerbates them quite significantly,” Malone said. “The good news though, the optimism, is that everybody is house-able.”
Barnett harkened back to a previous interview with Malone in which he referred to a “magical treatment carwash” that some people believe exists — simply provide people with treatment for their conditions and they’ll “get better.”
Malone was clear that he believes in treatment — DESC provides it, after all — but that it works best when people have a measure of stability.
“What we struggle with in doing that work is being successful with people when their lives remain chaotic,” Malone said.
Much of the conversation about homelessness investments leading up to the Nov. 3 election was influenced by the provisions of failed Charter Amendment 29, more commonly known as Compassion Seattle. That amendment to the city’s charter — its foundational document — would have required 2,000 units of housing or shelter created in the first two years and keeping parks and sidewalks clear of people experiencing homelessness.
SKCCH was one of the organizations that brought the lawsuit that ultimately killed the amendment, but Eisinger said that it wasn’t because of a lack of belief in shelter. Shelter is necessary, if insufficient, to the overall homelessness response. Opposition stemmed from the unfunded mandate created by the amendment.
“It pains me, and it pains me not because I’m opposed to the city of Seattle setting itself the goal of rapidly creating additional thousands of safe shelter spaces for people. It pains me because I’ve been at this long enough to have served on multiple so called emergency task forces. I’ve been at this long enough to remember when former Mayor Ed Murray declared a homelessness state of emergency in an extremely cynical move with a one-time $5 million investment that included 100 additional shelter beds,” Eisinger said.
“I would hope that we are past the point where any proposal that doesn’t include a clear plan, excellent ways to measure the implementation of that plan and sustained funding for the plan is not to be taken seriously,” she continued.
There have been moves in recent years at the state level to begin funding more actual affordable housing, Stewart said. It took time to get those interventions moving, but the legislature has put hundreds of millions into the Housing Trust Fund in recent years. The trust fund provides grants and loans to nonprofit developers to create such housing.
The legislature also took action on new document recording fees to support affordable housing construction; offered flexibility in how cities can use certain real estate taxes called REET; allowed a one-tenth of 1 percent property tax for housing to be approved by local councils without going to the voters; and let cities retain a portion of state sales taxes for housing.
It also passed tenant protections in an attempt to forestall what some feared would be a wave of evictions after the state-level eviction moratorium ended and allowed more flexibility for faith-based shelter development.
New pushes in housing and homelessness will be difficult in 2022 because it’s a short legislative session, 60 days long, Stewart said.
At one point during the Q&A period an audience member asked about the point-in-time count (PIT), an exercise required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to find the number of people experiencing homelessness in the county.
HUD waived the PIT in 2021 due to concerns around the coronavirus, but it has not waived the 2022 requirement. However, KCRHA announced it would not conduct a count of unsheltered homeless people on the appointed day at the end of January, which marshals hundreds of volunteers to canvass cities and rural areas of the county to find people sleeping rough.
KCRHA will do an administrative data analysis through the Homeless Management Information System, which documents when and where people access homeless services in the county. That won’t necessarily capture people sleeping outside.
The reasoning, Dones said, is that the PIT is well known to be an undercount of people experiencing homelessness, and the Authority will be rolling out other ways of better assessing the number and needs of King County’s unsheltered population.
KCRHA will count the number of people that interact with the system and extrapolate from there to arrive at a number that is effectively a PIT, but that number will not receive a “banner rollout,” Dones said.
“It does a disservice, and I can’t stress that enough,” they said. “It becomes something that because we roll it out in marquee lighting, we then fixate on and it harms our conversation around what we do actually need.”
SKCCH ran the PIT — then called the One Night Count — for 37 years until it was taken over by KCRHA’s predecessor, All Home, in 2017. Eisinger said she had mixed feelings about the One Night Count because it took a great deal of effort and was, ultimately, “deeply imperfect.” But it also allowed housed people to engage with and bear witness to the crisis of homelessness.
“I think there’s a really important opportunity here for us to not get stuck in this particular task — because it is a task assigned to each community by the federal government — and to really think about what do we gain and lose and what we want to lift up collectively,” Eisinger said. “I think what’s missing in our community and many others is a strong sense of collective responsibility.”
Ashley Archibald was the editor of Real Change through July 2023, and is now a communication specialist for Purpose. Dignity. Action.
Read more of the Dec. 8-14, 2021 issue.