By Erica C. Barnett

As snow, ice, and freezing temperatures closed in on Seattle in late December, the city opened three shelters in the downtown Seattle area, with enough beds to serve several hundred people. The emphasis on the center city reflected an implicit assumption that most people living unsheltered in Seattle either live near the center city or could get there easily on public transit, using transit passes or the free bus tickets the city’s outreach teams distributed for this purpose.

At the same time, over in West Seattle, Keith Hughes was worried. Since 2019, the retired carpenter and electrician has run an occasional, informal shelter out of the American Legion hall on Southwest Alaska Street, providing a place to stay for a handful of local unhoused residents during the coldest winter nights. Initially, Hughes opened the building, which is owned by the West Seattle Veterans Center, as a place for unsheltered people “to get dry and warm up” after noticing that “four, five, six people” would often sit under an overhang in front of the building to get out of the rain. Later, when the temperature dipped into the 20s, “I couldn’t get myself to throw them back out of the building,” so he started keeping the building open on the coldest night of the  year.

“I started it because it needed to be,” Hughes, who is 74, said. “The hall is there, not getting used, 95 percent of the time, so I decided it needed to get used.”

Ordinarily, according to Hughes, the shelter, which is run by Hughes and a handful of volunteers, serves between 6 and 12 guests a night, although it often has fewer. Hughes said this year was shaping up to be much the same as previous winters—until the county, city, and Seattle Times included the shelter on their official, public lists of available shelters just after Christmas.

The result, Hughes said, was instantaneous. “I was trying to take care of people locally in West Seattle, and suddenly I was getting phone calls from Beacon Hill, and SoDo, and Capitol Hill, and a Sound Mental Health clinic, and Navos Mental Health [in Burien], asking if I had space in my shelter. I’m not a professional. I’m not a mental health counselor. I’m not a social worker. It was too much.”

Tomasz Biernacki, a West Seattle resident who volunteered at the shelter several nights, said the shelter was “being run by three people with no training, zero support, and our only hope was that Tracy [Record, the editor of the West Seattle Blog] would post updates on what’s going on with the shelter so that people would” volunteer for shifts, which she did. Biernacki described several instances when shelter volunteers were overwhelmed by situations they were underqualified to deal with, including “at least one person in mental distress that was sent from another shelter” and a man who was paralyzed from the waist down who involuntarily “crapped all over the place” and had to be transported by ambulance to a hospital.

“Somebody brought in a Somali woman who said she was running away from an abusive family—they found her in the snow wearing just a t-shirt and a pair of pants, so they brought her in,” Biernacki said. “I started calling every single phone number I could get my hands on for, like, a women’s shelter— I only have so much knowledge about this—and nobody ever called me back.”

Hughes said the influx of people needing a place to stay overwhelmed the shelter. “Basically, all the city did was add me to the list of shelters out there and made my address public, which doubled the number of people that showed up,” Hughes said. “On really cold nights this year, I had 18, 20, 22 people, some of which were being sent to me directly from mental health facilities. I had a guy sent to me who had been hit by.a car, patched up by the crisis clinic, and released back onto the street with a bus ticket and my address. He couldn’t hardly walk. I’m not a medical facility.”

It’s unclear who, exactly, made the decision to list the West Seattle site on both the city and King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s list of available shelters. Lisa Gustaveson, a former HSD staffer who now works as a senior advisor to the KCRHA, was apparently the first to identify the site as a viable shelter option for people outside downtown Seattle, and initially advocating against making the shelter location public.

Jenna Franklin, a spokeswoman for the Seattle Human Services Department, said the city listed the shelter after it became a “funder,” which it did by agreeing to pay Hughes’ higher-than-average utility bills during the official winter emergency—the only reimbursement the city has offered. In contrast, other winter shelter providers, which (unlike Hughes) have formal contracts to provide shelter services, will be compensated for additional staff, services, and supplies associated with the winter shelters they operated. Editor’s note: This paragraph initially said that the city “had to list” the shelter once it became a funder, which was inaccurate. PubliCola regrets the error.

Franklin said the city was not the first to publicly advertise that the shelter was open. “The shelter was listed in the broader news (West Seattle Blog and Seattle Times) prior to HSD listing it, and KCRHA published this location on their site and map on 12/25, prior to HSD sharing it as well.”

Still, it would be misleading to suggest that the city wasn’t primarily responsible for making Seattle residents aware of what shelters were available. Throughout the weather emergency, the city’s public information officers, including Franklin, directed the media to use and link to the HSD website in stories about available shelter; the KCRHA’s winter shelter blog post also directed visitors back to the city’s website.

And although the Times did include the site on its map of shelters, its post described the location as a small shelter with “limited space for the local homeless population.” The West Seattle Blog, which is aimed at a West Seattle audience, mentioned the site in the context of a call for volunteers on December 22, and followed up with several additional calls for volunteers and donations after the city declared a winter weather emergency on Christmas Eve.

KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens said the authority worked to contact local faith-based groups to help out at the shelter after other organizations, including Operation Nightwatch and the Salvation Army, were unable to send staffers to West Seattle. Ultimately, the Westside Interfaith Network and other religious groups stepped up to help meet the need for volunteers. Rick Reynolds, the director of Operation Nightwatch, said “no one asked” his organization, which is located in the Chinatown/International District, to staff the West Seattle shelter, but they wouldn’t have been able to do it anyway. “We’re trying to bring relief to the Nightwatch neighborhood, and the homeless people we see at night already,” he said.

At the time, the city, not KCRHA, was still responsible for winter emergency shelters; that responsibility shifted to the county authority on January 1.

“With many mentions prior to HSD and the support funding provided, the add to our list corresponded to our support agreement and therefore the public should be able to know the location is available,” Franklin said. “Additionally, there was never a request to remove the information, and it would have been pretty much the opposite purpose of funding service during an emergency to withhold the fact that it is open from people out in the cold in need of shelter. The facility didn’t report being above capacity, and was only at capacity on one night according to the census counts provided. Keeping open capacity hidden from the community seems counter to the point of opening emergency severe weather shelter.”

Hughes sees it differently; if the city planned to encourage people from all over the city to come to the site, they should have provided him with warning, staff, and resources, he said. “If they were going to include the West Seattle shelter in this, it should have been included on the same kind of basis as the other shelters that were stood up just for the emergency,” he said. “If you’re going to send people, you have to send staff, and they didn’t.”

Despite his frustration with local officials, Hughes said he wouldn’t hesitate to open the shelter again. In fact, when we talked in the first week of January, the official “emergency” was over, but the shelter was still going strong. “I’m still open, and I’m still getting calls from multiple agencies because the city and county emergency shelters have all shut down,” he said. “Just this afternoon, I got a call from someone at Virginia Mason who wanted to know if my shelter was open because they were discharging someone. I told them it was open. I’m not going to let someone freeze to death.”