Last year we wrote a column about our city and county's 10-year plan to end homelessness. That plan was heavily weighted toward tracking the area's 6,000-8,000 homeless, identifying who they were and their respective needs, and then delivering a more finely tuned set of services to help them move off the streets.
While we lauded the energy of dozens of people from service providers, corporations and government participating in the 10-year plan, we expressed concern that it largely ignored the structural roots of the problem - the continuing loss of low-cost housing in the region due to demolition, condominium conversion, increased rent and abandonment. No solutions to that continued loss were offered nor did the 10-year plan identify sufficient sources of new revenue: the tens-of-millions of additional dollars needed to provide new subsidized housing to offset that loss.
Today, one year into the 10-year plan, the effort remains fraught with the same shortcomings. If anything, there are more homeless people on our streets, and local and county government has yet to respond in any meaningful way to the consequences of gentrification and displacement. Just two weeks ago it was revealed that over 1,500 low-cost rentals in Seattle were converted to up-scale condominiums last year - a three-fold increase from the previous year. Add to that about 500 more low-cost rentals demolished last year and another 1,000 low-cost units lost to "speculative sale" (speculators buying up lower-priced apartments, then raising the rents 200-300 percent).
No wonder the number of homeless in our communities continues to climb. Until our elected leaders come up with strategies to either prevent these housing losses or ensure that developers pay the cost of replacing these units at comparable price, there will be more homeless people.
Rather than mounting a dramatic push for funding to greatly expand all our shelter and housing programs to meet the growing need, city and county officials instead have chosen to rearrange the deckchairs. They decided to emphasize remedial or transitional housing programs to the detriment of emergency or overnight shelter. As a result, some downtown emergency shelters saw their funds cut by several thousands of dollars so the mayor could fund more transitional programs.
Transitional housing programs allow longer stays for homeless families and are coupled with various social services that improve a family's ability to remain off the street. These laudable programs benefit those lucky enough to qualify, but for every one served, two or three others go without. It behooves us to spend more on such programs, but not at the expense of emergency shelter. Today there are about 3,000 shelter beds in Seattle, but there are over twice that number of homeless on our streets each night.
Lately there's been much in the news about the refusal of SHARE/WHEEL, one of the area's most prominent and essential shelter programs, to provide detailed information required under the newly implemented tracking system. SHARE/WHEEL charges that this violates the privacy of its clients. The city has threatened to cut off funding for SHARE/WHEEL for non-compliance, which would eliminate over 200 beds. In response SHARE/WHEEL has threatened to put up more tent cities across town, in addition to the two it now operates.
While it looks like local government now may compromise with SHARE/WHEEL, and may even come up with more money to fund new transitional programs without cuts in emergency shelter beds, it's hardly an auspicious first year for the 10-year plan. The ship is still sinking as the loss of low-cost housing accelerates.
There are inherent problems with the committee set up to implement the 10-year plan. Many committee members are service providers who focus on fine-tuning the system of service delivery and improving the "continuum of care". These "therapeutic approaches" enhance the quality of service for today's homeless, but they don't respond to the growing housing losses that will render even more people homeless in the future.
And how can you really get at such root causes of homelessness when the committee also includes some of the corporate elite now busy tearing down, redeveloping and gentrifying our communities? Not when we have a mayor directing our city's homeless efforts who is beholden to these developers: people who contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars each election cycle. And not when the majority of council members dutifully march to the same tune.
Last fall, the Seattle Displacement Coalition asked our city to take a more careful look at the problem of displacement and gentrification before upzoning downtown and other neighborhoods. We knew these upzones would lead to more demolition and loss of lowcost units, just as previous upzones have done in the past. Rather than first assessing the added risk and building in policies to mitigate the potential for loss, the city plunged ahead and zoned large areas for higher density - most recently in downtown.
However, thanks to council members Rasmussen, Steinbrueck and Licata, a small item was included in the city budget to study the problem of displacement in neighborhoods recently upzoned. The funds are also to be used to set up and staff a task force made of citizens who will review the data and make recommendations to stem the loss of low-cost housing due to development forces. This task force is supposed to present the results of the study and its recommendations to the council before the year is out.
Well, to date, the study and creation of the task force hasn't even begun. The mayor appears to have sat on the funds and withheld authorization for staff to proceed.
As for the folks ranging from the social service and church communities to all the others genuinely committed to solving our homeless problem who are now participating in the 10-year planning process, perhaps their time would be better spent pressing the mayor to get off his rear and get the study and the task force moving. These people can also put more heat on our officials at all levels to address the root causes of homelessness instead of just rearranging deck chairs on the sinking ship.
Write John V. Fox and Carolee Colter via editor@sdistrictjournal.com.[[In-content Ad]]
