By Erica C. Barnett
We had a special guest on this week’s episode of Seattle Nice: Downtown Emergency Service Center director Daniel Malone!
DESC provides low-barrier shelter, housing, and health care to some of Seattle’s most vulnerable homeless folks, and has been at the vanguard of the housing-first response to homelessness for decades; the nonprofit’s 1811 Eastlake project, which remains the only housing in Seattle explicitly for people with alcohol use disorder that welcomes residents with no plan to stop drinking, is a model that should be emulated across the city and beyond.
It’s challenging to sell elected officials on the idea of harm reduction (including the inadequate, but bare-minimum, notion that people can’t get sober if they’re dead), especially right now (cue Sara Nelson talking about the need to fund housing that kicks people out if they relapse.) But Malone has been here through several political pendulum swings, and he’s managed to get more than a few moderate-to-conservative Seattle officials to buy in to DESC’s low-barrier model.
PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.
On this week’s show, we talked with Daniel about the future of King County’s so-called regional approach to homelessness; what it really means when the mayor declares he has “reduced tents by 65 percent”; and the endless debate over which approach to homelessness works better, housing or shelter.
Daniel also responded to a common question about housing for formerly homeless people: Given that it costs so much to build housing in Seattle, why not move people from here to places where housing is cheaper, like Puyallup or Enumclaw?
Learn from one of the region’s hands-on experts on homelessness by listening to Seattle Nice now, and if you like the show, please leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts; it really helps us get the word out about the show!
People seriously need to pay attention to the data that is found in the One Night Count/Count us in surveys. A plurality of respondents admitted to drug or alcohol addiction, and a larger number say they have one or more disabilities (some governments count alcoholism as a disability, some count drug addiction as a disability, some don’t count either). If a person is actively using long enough, it is bound to affect job performance, and people lose their jobs. THAT was a large portion of the reason people are/were homeless. The actual percentage of people who said they were homeless due to high rent was lower than the other factors.
DESC may be helpful to people experiencing homelessness, but they are truly awful to most neighbors of some of their not-very-supported living apartments. The residents are free to do drugs, so drug dealers are just right outside the doors, ruining neighborhoods where people had just bought brand-new townhomes before one of those not-very-supported living apartments was built. The DESC (and other similar organizations) have inadequate staffing and not nearly enough rules to keep their residents from terrorizing neighbors, breaking into neighbors’ property, destroying and stealing property, and more. Numerous overdose deaths, assaults, rapes, and stillborn babies have occurred in just one of those properties on 96th Ave N & N Aurora.
DESC’s model has worked in a few places, but the further from downtown, the worse the oversight is. And given that our tax dollars fund DESC (and similar organizations), we demand greater accountability.
I SO agree! And the depredations to which these (I call them) wet houses subject their neighbors is rarely mentioned, and never in my experience by local news or politicians. I live not too far from the building you discuss and those folks are making their way south, too. Just a few days ago at 85th and Aurora some “person” attacked 3 14 year old girls. He was found armed with a marine knife, and other weapons and drugs were also discovered. https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2024/10/23/man-arrested-for-harassing-teen-girls-with-combat-knife-weapons-and-narcotics-recovered/. Possibly a resident of the 96th house, or maybe from one of those 2 new apartment buildings just north of 85th on the east side of Aurora. It’s not clear on which side of the street this attack occurred, but there’s a bus stop on that side so … Anyway, why are we as a city allowing a minority of folks who for whatever reasons are not willing or able to function as productive healthy members of society prey on the majority? We are rewarding behavior we need to be sanctioning. And the pious don’t do anything to compensate the suffering and losses the majority are experiencing. Cray cray!
Very good interview. Only complaint: wish someone had brought up the underlying reason for homelessness in Seattle: lack of building enough housing. Two or more times Malone said “high rent” but high rent is a result of lack of sufficient housing for the growth in population, no the cause in itself. Made me wonder if Malone did not want to say that explicitly because it might anger some of the people DESC relies on funding from such as Mayor Harrell.
Is it possible to get a transcription of this pod? I can’t listen to podcasts but am interested in what this person has to say.