Homelessness authority has a vision for downtown Seattle recovery — but first they’re asking for $27M

The Regional Homelessness Agency has targeted downtown Seattle in its first major political and financial proposal since its CEO began working.

Chief Executive Marc Dones Calls for $ 27 Million in New Facilities and Public Relations to Solve Chronic Homelessness. The first deployment will take place in what is probably Seattle’s most difficult neighborhood – the urban core. The idea appeals to corporate groups and politicians calling for a solution to the rise in visible homelessness in the inner city, but it has also raised suspicions as to why this area is being prioritized.

The Seattle Times Homeless Project is funded by BECU, The Bernier McCaw Foundation, Campion Foundation, Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Schultz Family Foundation, Seattle Foundation, Starbucks, and the University of Washington. The Seattle Times retains editorial control over the content of Project Homeless.

However, if the proposal is funded and well received, it could be evidence that the head of the new regional homelessness agency can solve homelessness across the county.

“We have to choose a location and we have to influence,” said Dones. “We can’t do everything at the same time and expect us to do it well.”

Prior to the pandemic, more than half of the city’s jobs and tax revenues were in the downtown area. As the pandemic progressed, it has been dubbed a “ghost town,” which closed 163 street-level stores in less than a year. For a while, it seemed like the majority of the people who stayed back in the city center lived on the streets or in the shelters, and the people in the shelters, clinics, and day centers who helped them. One study documented an increase of 100 tents in the city center as accommodations shrank due to overcrowding.

According to the authority, around 800 people live in the city center without protection, most of them sleep in alleys or tents on sidewalks and struggle with a combination of mental illness and drug use disorders.

As downtown is normalizing again, powerful economic players like the Downtown Seattle Association have been pushing for what they call “recovery” there to be a central theme in the November local elections.

“We’ve turned downtown sidewalks and streets into a mental health facility by default in many ways with no treatment,” said Jon Scholes, president of the Downtown Seattle Association, who is enthusiastic about Dones’ plan. “That spills over into shops on the ground floor every day, I think.”

Nearly $ 20 million of the Dones proposal would be used to fund a 150-bed clinician-staffed facility that would care for the people who walk downtown, often in need, dealing with significant psychiatric issues caused by the the use of drugs such as methamphetamine can be exacerbated.

“They are often utterly alone because their behavior is sometimes too extreme for the camp community to hold onto,” said Dones. “We cannot continue to operate a system that offers nothing to the people who are in this situation.”

Dones estimates that there are more than 100 people in this situation downtown.

The remainder will be used primarily for rental vouchers and low-income housing with support services that will open next year. Approximately $ 7 million from Dones would go into the development of a new “peer navigation” system in which professionals who have experienced homelessness would guide people not just off the street but through the maze-like housing system to more permanent homes .

Seattle city councilor Andrew Lewis, who represents the core of downtown, said the waterfront city’s investments along with tourism could “really pull the city out of the malaise of the pandemic.” This would probably help, he said.

Lewis said he was confident that Seattle City Council and King County will work together to figure out how to pay for the proposed investments, noting that King County’s government offices are also located downtown between City Hall and the offices of the City Hall regional homelessness authority. Employees in the district and the courts have been putting pressure on the city and district management for months to improve safety for them when they return to work.

Much of the city’s accommodations are concentrated in the city center, and field workers have reported people being evicted from camps in other parts of the city are moving to the city center, Lewis said.

For this and other reasons, Dones does not want to build the high-voltage system or a large part of the new residential units in the city center.

“Just as we are telling the region, by and large, that there is concentration in Seattle and we need to balance new infrastructure, we are, by and large, telling the city that there is concentration in downtown and we need to find a balance where we’re putting new infrastructure. ”Dones said.

Prioritizing an area with such deep pockets could attract sideways glances from critics of corporate influence on the homelessness strategy. City Council President and mayoral candidate M. Lorena González has insisted throughout her campaign that economic recovery efforts have focused too much on downtown businesses that have opposed the corporate taxes that she and her fellow councilors have tried , to raise.

Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness, declined to comment on the downtown focus, but said the council should prioritize better pay for animal homeworkers during budget season. Long-standing problems with low wages and turnover in homelessness charities have been exacerbated this year by a labor shortage that puts shelters in a position where they often lose workers when they replace them, making new facilities difficult to open.

Adjusting pay “must be a key priority for anyone who wants to maintain and add services,” Eisinger said.

Zaneta Reid, a community activist who has been homeless and sits on the board of directors of the regional homelessness agency, supports Dones’ budget proposals but is wondering whether to focus on downtown first. The last pre-pandemic census estimated there were more than 4,000 homeless people with severe mental illness across the country.

“We have urgent needs everywhere, including other parts of the county,” said Reid, who heard Dones present the plan on Thursday. “I mean, it’s bad downtown, but maybe [this move] is because there are so many people who make so much money down there. “

Dones thinks focusing on the entire county and its needs at once is a lost strategy. In the long-term, Dones’ plan to curb visible homelessness quickly but heavily is to raise $ 1 billion from the private sector to buy bridge apartments that allow thousands of people to walk off the streets while they relax and look for a better one Looking for accommodation or waiting for it to be built.

While this first step may be fueled by big money interests, Dones sees this step as “an alignment of a whole range of interests rather than giving way to one or the other”.

“I don’t think the logic here is how we can appease all businesses, although we definitely want to support them,” said Dones. “They say: ‘This is where the people go, and this is where we support the people.'”