By Erica C. Barnett
This week’s episode of Seattle Nice was all about shelter—specifically, Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to allow larger tiny house villages, spend $5 million up front funding them, and—boring but potentially most significant—put the city itself in charge of leasing land for new tiny house villages, RV safe lots, and sanctioned encampments. Currently, any organization that gets city approval to set up a village or sanctioned encampment still has to get permits and approvals from a long list of city departments, which can add as much as a year of delay.
With the city itself in charge of stuff like approving and connecting utilities, signing leases with property owners, and making sure tiny house village locations are up to code, Wilson is betting the city can dramatically cut the timeline from a shelter proposal to opeming day.
Wilson, as we discussed this week, vowed during her campaign to add at least 1,000 new shelter beds in her first year, with a goal of 4,000 new beds by the end of her term. This ambitious goal marks a philosophical shift away from strict housing-first principles (the idea that people need permanent housing before they can tackle their behavioral health issues) toward a shelter-first approach that emphasizes mandatory case management and individualized services to stabilize people after they leave the streets.
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Listening back to our conversation, I was struck by how familiar much of the conversation sounded—not to our usual Seattle Nice bickering over whether Seattle NIMBYs treat homelessness as an aesthetic problem (but—last word—they totally do), but to the last 15 years of debate over how to fix homelessness. Over time, the political pendulum has swung back and forth between a focus on new housing for almost everyone (which costs millions and often takes years), housing vouchers for almost everyone (the concept behind the short-lived Partnership for Zero) and shelter for almost everyone (as a “front door” to housing). The pendulum currently rests on shelter, this time with mandatory case management and bespoke services that will, the Wilson administration hopes, be a more successful approach than past shelter efforts.
Wilson will probably propose a local capital gains tax, or some other kind of progressive revenue, to supplement $5 million her team found in two underutilized city funds. (Note/clarification: This post, and my comments on the podcast, were both a bit flip about the funding source. Around $3.3 million comes from two funds in the Office of Housing that were being underutilized. Both are revolving loan funds paid for by Community Development Block Grants.) And she seems likely to propose using unspent Office of Housing funds to pay for shelter, a prospect that could mean less money for permanent housing in the future, money being fungible. But actually solving homelessness—no one talks anymore about ending it, but making it “brief, one-time, and rare”—has eluded every mayor since Ed Murray declared an official state of emergency on homelessness in 2015.
My biggest concern is that Team Wilson will address unsheltered homelessness by getting thousands of people in shelter, and people for whom homelessness is primary an aesthetic problem—we have to clear those tents near my house, it isn’t compassionate to let them live that way!—will oppose efforts to fund housing for all those people in shelter because they consider the problem solved. My modest hope is that she’ll find a way to build all the shelter she wants and create more pathways to permanent housing, because no matter how warm or colorful, a 100-square-foot shelter is not a home.
Why not SROs, though? Or some kind of apartment (efficiency, micropod, whatever). My concern over tiny houses is that we are institutionalizing a kind of shelter that no one would choose unless it meant sleeping rough and even then some don’t. Anyone could live in an SRO or tiny apartment, many people have and still do, and placing them in buildings with market rate or larger units means community and integration vs segregation by income/status/whatever. When I am reminded of the 10 year old state of emergency I shrug…an emergency that lasts 10 years with no end in sight — imagine a 10 year forest fire with 0% contained — is the new status quo, the new normal. It doesn’t have to be this way but that is the collective choice.
Yes, lets allow and build SRO; yes, let’s use tiny house villages in the meantime. The issues are limited funds, limited ROW, and limited social services; how will those three be distributed over time and between temporary and permanent housing. The elected officials have to balance it out. The Mayor and others seem to think the immediate need is shelter.
Best thing so far out of the Katie Wilson Administration are these three words: “mandatory case management”.
Erica’s criticism of so-called “NIMBY’s” opposition to tents is NOT about aesthetics, but the danger that many drug addicts and those with severe mental illness pose. We have had far too many examples of innocent people being assaulted by both populations, not to mention the risk caused by the abject filth of human waste, drug paraphernalia, and rats that are around unsanctioned camps and RVs.
The fact that Wilson understands that mandatory case management is imperative gives me great hope that progress will be achieved.
No, “a 100-square-foot shelter is not a home”, I completely agree with you there. But I spent nearly six years in a 100-square-foot room in an SRO, and then nearly eight and a half years homeless, and let me tell you, it’s a huge difference. I was able to hold paying jobs on a more or less regular basis in the SRO; while homeless, one job, for a total of six months.
We should not make the best the enemy of the good. Bring on the tiny houses.