Seattle's Failed 10 Year Plan to End Homelessness

Homeless man in Downtown Seattle, WA

To the average homeless person in Seattle, names like the King County Coalition on Homelessness, the Committee to End Homelessness, the Housing Trust Fund or the 10 year plan to end homelessness don't really mean anything.  The homeless aren't that concerned about anything outside of finding shelter and food and shelter for the day.  The politics involved in advocating for safety-net programs, the working poor, and the homeless are complicated. Lots of moving parts, but with no production. Seattle started it's ten year plan to end homeless in 2005. It is now 2016 and not only did the plan fail to end homelessness, Seattle actually has more homeless people than when the program started!

Decisions about what direction King county should take to address homelessness are made by people dressed in suits who drive nice cars and most likely would not even stop to give a homeless person spare change.  I suppose they think that they are already doing enough at work to help homeless people.  In King County and the rest of Washington State, we have a veritable "army" of professionals and service providers working on the homeless problem.

 Many of these professionals are compensated very well. Social service programs designed to assist the homeless abound in King County. If you ask a homeless person who is not a Washington native, why they came to Seattle, more often than not, they will tell you that they heard Seattle has one of the best social services programs in the country. As a previously homeless person, I can attest that King County has a lot of social and human service programs, but they are horribly disjointed. For example, the Downtown Emergency Services Center (DESC) houses and treats chronically homeless people, but the way HUD defines "chronic" leaves a whole lot of people out in the cold that DESC will not help. Senator Mark Miloscia of Federal Way remembers that in 2005, as chair of the state House of Representatives’ housing committee, he passed legislation to dramatically increase spending for the homeless while requiring Washington’s counties and state government to create a plan that addressed the root causes of homelessness. The measurable goal of ESSHB 2163 was to cut homelessness in half by 2015.Ours was the first state to make this bold commitment. So what are the results after 10 years?

 

Homelessness has declined by about 35 percent statewide outside of King County. However, King County has seen homelessness spike by more than 15 percent — and now accounts for half of the homeless population in Washington. Local and state leaders have tragically lost control of an ever-deteriorating situation illustrated by the violent homeless battleground known as The Jungle. Other than ask for more money, government leaders are still clueless about what to do next.

 

The Allhome website , which is run by former Director of the King County Committee to End Homelessness, Mark Putnam noted that Homelessness is a crisis in King County. In 2015 alone, nearly 10,000 people are experiencing homelessness on a given day, and nearly 40 percent are unsheltered. People are homeless on average for more than 100 days, and they return to homelessness after being housed nearly 20 percent of the time. Racial disparities are stark, with Native Americans seven times more likely to experience homelessness than Whites, and African Americans five times more likely. As noted above, King County has a lot of very capable professionals working on ending homelessness, or as Allhome says: Make homelessness a rare, brief and one time experience. With all that is being done to end homelessness, it seems to me that San Francisco homeless advocate Paul Boden has is one of the few who has it right. He says it's not the homeless that need to be fixed, but the government. Paul believes housing should be a human right. He declares that nothing ends homelessness like a home. For him it is a social justice issue as sure as the right to vote.

Since the early 80's, under president Ronald Regan's new mandate to reduce federal spending, homelessness increased exponentially. In reality, he increased federal spending through the escalating military budget, all the while slashing funds for domestic programs that assisted working class Americans, particularly the poor. Reagan not only failed to recognize his own HUD Secretary, he failed to deal with the growing corruption scandal at the agency that resulted in the indictment and conviction of top Reagan administration officials for illegally targeting housing subsidies to politically connected developers. Fortunately for Reagan, the “HUD Scandal” wasn’t uncovered until he’d left office. Without a doubt, the biggest cause of homelessness is the federal government's abdication of it's responsibility to build public housing for the poor and working poor. In an article by Will Fischer and Barbara Sard of the Center for Budget and Priorities, the federal government spent $190 billion in 2015 to help Americans buy or rent homes, but little of that spending went to the families who struggle the most to afford housing.

The article points out that federal housing expenditures are unbalanced in two respects: they target a disproportionate share of subsidies on higher-income households and they favor homeownership over renting. It is a fact that there is a direct correlation between the Reagan administration's slashing of social and safety-net program funds in 1979 and the opening of thousands of homeless shelters across the country in 1983. So where should us homeless advocates focus our energy? Is Housing First the best way to house the homeless while HUD continues to slash funds for affordable housing? No. We should demand that the federal government start funding affordable housing at the same numbers it did before the Reagan administration started cutting affordable housing funding.






NPR Report on Homelessness in Seattle