Tag: homeless shelters

homelessness, housing, legislature

Bills Would Crack Down on City Efforts to Banish Homeless People, Shelter, and Housing

By Erica C. Barnett

In previous legislative sessions, lawmakers have successfully overruled efforts by cities, including Seattle, to keep renters out of neighborhoods that were once exclusively single-family, and have even reined in suburban cities that have tried to ban shelter and emergency housing altogether. (Thanks, Jessica Bateman!)

This year, pro-housing lawmakers want to stop cities from taking advantage of loopholes that have allowed them to prohibit market-rate and emergency housing, and to stop cities like Seattle from banning ground-floor apartments, among other proposals to crack down on local NIMBY policies.

Rep. Strom Peterson (D-33, Edmonds) has introduced legislation, House Bill 2266, that would require cities and counties to allow all forms of STEP housing—that’s shelter, transitional, emergency, and permanent housing—in any area that isn’t zoned for industrial use. The bill would also prevent jurisdictions from passing regulations for these types of housing, including shelter, that are more restrictive than the ones the apply to any other type of housing.

The bill expands on 2021’s House Bill 1220, which required cities to allow shelters and permanent housing in all areas where hotels or market-rate housing are allowed, but provided a carveout for “reasonable” restrictions “for public health and safety purposes.” Cities, Pedersen said, took that loophole and ran with it, rejecting shelters because they were within 1,000 feet as the crow flies from another shelter or a school, “even through it wasn’t really 1,000 foot walking distance,” Peterson said.

Last year, Peterson and other legislators proposed a fix that would have given the Department of Commerce “a very big hammer”—if the department determined that local rules limiting housing weren’t reasonable, they could withhold state funds—but that idea proved too unpopular, and potentially expensive, to pass last year.

“‘Reasonableness’ is the word that haunts me,” Peterson said.

This year’s legislation is more straightforward, and it doesn’t include dispute resolution through the Department of Commerce; instead, it states flatly that jurisdictions must allow all types of STEP housing and can’t apply zoning or design rules that are different than those that apply to other residential housing.

Peterson says the changes reduce the potential cost of the new rules—an important factor in a year when lawmakers are trying to close a more than $2 billion budget gap—and takes out any ambiguity about “reasonable” restrictions.

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Cities have been more receptive to some parts of the bill than others, Peterson said. “On the plus side, and I think this is a pretty significant step, cities have said that they believe permanent supportive and transitional housing shouldn’t be treated differently than market housing. … Where we’re running into some issues is on the shelter and emergency housing side.”

Some cities have argued they should be allowed to impose requirements that would preclude certain people, such as people who have criminal records or active addictions, from accessing shelter, a proposal Peterson says could violate state fair housing laws. Others have argued that shelters should be subject to special regulations on noise and litter. “My retort back is, doesn’t the city have noise and litter restrictions? Why is [shelter] being treated differently?”

Rep. Mia Gregerson, D-33 (SeaTac), has proposed legislation this year that could work in tandem with Peterson’s prohibition on shelter and housing bans. House Bill 2489 would prohibit cities and towns from passing bans on sleeping and other activities necessary for survival “unless the city or town can demonstrate that adequate alternative shelter space was available at the time and place of the conduct.”

Gregerson said the proposal is a clarified version of last year’s House Bill 1380, which would have required cities that restrict people’s ability to sit, lie down, keep dry, or sleep on public property to have “objectively reasonable” regulations on these activities. “Last year’s bill was an attempt to really provide total local control” over anti-camping laws, Gregerson said; but as with 1220’s “reasonable” restrictions on shelter, the phrase turned out to be too squishy. “Cities wanted more definition,” Gregerson said.

This year’s bill says that cities can’t ban such “life-sustaining activities” unless adequate shelter is available, and defines the minimum requirements for a shelter to be considered “adequate.” For example, shelters must allow people to stay with their partners or pets, be accessible to people with disabilities, and be located inside the city that has a law banning homeless people from public property.

That last provision could be controversial. Cities without any year-round, general admission homeless shelters at all, like Burien, have passed laws banning people from sleeping in public; in other cities, such as Kirkland, efforts to establish shelters to get people out of parks and off sidewalks have met with fierce resistance. (Burien has one year-round high-barrier program that includes shelter for nine women.)

“One low-turnout election” can completely upend the leadership of small cities, Gregerson noted; in that context, “We’re trying to be the adults in the room—can we come around the table and say we all want people to have a space to live?” After last year’s “productive conversations” about HB 1380, Gregerson said she’s hoping to get traction on a bill that balances local control with the reality that banishing homeless people doesn’t solve homelessness.

 

homelessness, human services, Mayor Harrell

Seattle Still Emphasizing “Shelter Referrals” As a Sign of Progress on Homelessness, Says Other Cities Must Pitch In
Arrow goes up: Seattle touts metrics that advocates, service providers, and a two-year-old auditor’s report have said are deeply flawed.

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington told reporters last week that the city has made impressive progress on removing encampments and referring their displaced residents into shelter, and that new, data-driven criteria for prioritizing encampments now prevents “the loudest voices” from dictating which encampments get removed.

Although incomplete identification data means that any numbers are likely an undercount, Washington said, “we’re happy to say that shelter referrals are up” 20 percent over last year, and shelter enrollments are also on the upswing. “I’m encouraged by the progress we’ve made over the last few years,” she said.

Harrell cited similar numbers in his State of the City speech on Tuesday, crediting a new “state-of-the-art system that informs a data driven, objective and equitable approach to resolving to resolving encampments” for the increase.

In reality, the main component of the city’s “state-of-the-art system” is a frequently updated database of encampments (which replaced an earlier spreadsheet-based system), combined with a prioritization matrix that helps inform which encampments the city removes. That matrix is essentially the same as the one Harrell’s office created back in January 2022, when he first took office.

For years, homeless service providers, advocates, and elected officials have asked the city to stop touting shelter referrals, since that number only refers to the number of people who were told that a specific bed was available, not how many actually slept in a shelter bed for even one night—much less accessed meaningful services or ended up in housing.

The deputy mayor said getting other parts of the region to allow new shelters or housing will be “a challenge. If you were them, and you saw what we were dealing with, would you want a shelter in your city?”

Enrollments—in which a person living in a swept encampment shows up at a shelter for at least one night—totaled 970, up from 746, across all encampment removals last year. While enrollments are a slightly better measure of success than referrals, staying in a shelter for a night or more—perhaps because it’s cold outside—is not a measure of success or progress toward housing.

Because the amount of available shelter space is a fraction of the thousands of people sleeping in tents, vehicles, and doorways every night, the fact that several hundred people a year are “accepting” the city’s shelter offers, and even “enrolling” in shelter, is less an impressive achievement than an indictment of the city’s perennial lack of shelter and housing. Asked about the possibility of siting more shelter and parking for people living in their vehicles, Washington said it was time for other communities besides Seattle to step up.

“I may get in trouble for this, but I think Seattle’s exasperated,” Washington said. “What happens when we go to site anything? The neighbors are like … ‘No, put it somewhere else.’ …Homelessness doesn’t just reside in Seattle, it’s a regional problem. And Seattle needs to not hold the majority of all shelters.” But, Washington added, getting other parts of the region to allow new shelters or housing will be “a challenge. If you were them, and you saw what we were dealing with, would you want a shelter in your city?”

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The Harrell administration has made a lot of adopting a “data-driven approach” to homelessness, suggesting that this distinguished them from the Durkan Administration. Last week, when I asked Washington when the city stopped using complaints as their primary basis for encampment removals, mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen jumped in and responded, “When Mayor Harrell took office”—that is, after Mayor Jenny Durkan left.

Washington, however, is a holdover from the Durkan administration, where she held several roles overseeing the city’s homelessness response including as the deputy mayor overseeing homelessness—her current role. As the head of the city’s homelessness division under Durkan, Washington vigorously defended the city’s strategy for prioritizing and removing encampments. In 2019, when the Durkan administration was forced to acknowledge they had no idea how many unsheltered people were actually ending up in housing, Washington said the exact number didn’t really matter, because “no matter how you look at it, it’s getting better.”

The city’s homelessness data still doesn’t include that information. Nor does the Harrell Administration’s “state-of-the-art” encampment dashboard appear to include most of the information a report from the City Auditor’s office said the city should provide about homelessness back in 2022, at the beginning of Harrell’s term.

That audit recommended the city create a “data dashboard” that would show whether and how the city’s encampment removal were performing based on a wide array of measures, including health and safety outcomes for people living unsheltered (like deaths from hypothermia, overdose deaths among unsheltered people, and the spread of infectious diseases) as well as other measures beyond shelter referral rates, such as outreach workers’ ability to maintain engagement with their clients after a sweep, access to mental health care and addiction treatment, and the availability of public restrooms with running water.

The city’s public-facing dashboard includes data points related to shelter referrals and public safety (such as shots fired and reported encampment fires), and a “snapshot” map, updated four times a year, showing encampments the city has removed.

During his State of the City speech, Mayor Harrell noted that “there have been bumps in the road” since the city and county created the KCRHA in 2020. “So this year, we will drive needed changes to improve oversight and accountability and foster stronger regional collaboration and solutions,” he said.

Harrell has frequently been critical of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, and recently nominated a friend and ally, Darrell Powell, as its interim CEO. (Prior to accepting the new position, Powell was the chief financial officer for several nonprofits, including the local YMCA and an agency, the Scholar Fund, at the center of a dispute with King County over alleged fiscal mismanagement.) He also asked the agency to come up with potential cuts to help the city close its $220 million budget deficit this year.

Those moves, and the increasingly high priority of the encampment-removing Unified Care Team, has led to speculation that the mayor may move to shut the agency down. During his speech on Tuesday, Harrell noted that “there have been bumps in the road” since the city and county created the KCRHA in 2020. “So this year, we will drive needed changes to improve oversight and accountability and foster stronger regional collaboration and solutions,” he said.

Last week, Washington said that the city wasn’t considering such a move, and wouldn’t unless “they fail, which we really hope they do not.” If that happens, she said, “we would have to have a discussion with all of the partners at the table and determine whether we revamp it, change it, restructure it, or completely pull out and everybody goes back to their corners.”

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homelessness, human services

Shelter Enrollments from City Referrals, Already Under 50%, Dropped In First Months of 2022

Chart showing HOPE team shelter enrollment rates over timeBy Erica C. Barnett

A review of six months of data from the HOPE Team—the team of Seattle Human Services Department staffers who do outreach and offer shelter to people living at encampments the city is about to remove—shows that only around 36.5 percent of people who received shelter referrals from the HOPE Team actually showed up to that shelter and stayed there overnight. This number represents a 23 percent reduction in referrals from the 47.7 percent enrollment figure HSD reported in March.

The enrollment rate for the first two months of 2022—in winter, a time when people are typically most likely to move indoors—was even lower, just 33 percent. That means that out of every 100 people the HOPE team referred to shelter, fewer than a third actually showed up and stayed the night.

HSD provided its data in response to a records request from PubliCola.

A spokesman for the Human Services Department said the numbers they provided are lower than the true enrollment rate, because about a quarter of people who use homeless services have opted out of he the county’s Homeless Management Information System, which means that their identities are anonymous and can’t be tracked. For example, one shelter whose residents came exclusively from HSD referrals, Rosie’s tiny house village in the University District, had an official enrollment rate of just 52 percent, even though all 36 units were full.

However, the numbers HSD provided, which represent data from September 2021 through February 2022, are directly comparable to the 48 percent figure HSD itself reported for 2021. Both PubliCola’s numbers and HSD’s earlier report represent a straightforward comparison of referrals to confirmed enrollments, without factoring in people who have opted out of the county’s tracking system. For this reason, the more recent numbers—both the 36.5 percent enrollment rate for the last four months of 2021 and the 33 percent enrollment rate for early 2022—represent an apples to apples comparison to HSD’s own published figures.

The HOPE Team has exclusive access to about 800 shelter beds, or about a third of all shelter beds in the city; those beds can only be filled by the HOPE Team, which leads to a shortage of beds for other providers trying to find beds for clients who are actively seeking shelter, as opposed to those who happen to be in the path of an upcoming sweep. Between September 2021 and March 2022, the HOPE Team made 533 referrals to 20 shelters, including the now-closed Executive Pacific Hotel. Of those 533 referrals, just 195 resulted in someone staying at a shelter overnight.

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Within the numbers, patterns emerge. In general, tiny house villages—private mini-shelters that are among the most desirable forms of shelter currently available in King County—had a much higher enrollment rate than congregate shelters: Three of the four highest-performing shelters on the HOPE Team’s list were tiny house villages. (I’ve excluded the unspecified category “enhanced shelter,” which accounts for 32 referrals and 10 enrollments, and any shelter that had fewer than 10 referrals over six months from this list.)

However, all three tiny house villages that had higher-than-average enrollments had one thing in common: They all opened during the six-month period the data encompasses. Friendship Heights, a tiny house village on Aurora that had the highest enrollment rate at 59 percent, opened last December; Rosie’s Village in the University District, with a 42 percent enrollment rate, opened last November; and the Interbay Tiny House Village, with a 47 percent enrollment rate, expanded to add 30 new units in November.

Similarly, the Benu Community Home—a men’s shelter with dorm-style rooms in the Central District—opened in November and had an enrollment rate of 50 percent.

As we reported in March, shelter referrals and enrollments went up in 2021 because hundreds of new permanent housing and shelter beds came online all at once, adding new supply to the shelter system that was immediately filled by people being removed from high-priority encampments. A separate report from City Council’s central staff revealed that nonprofit service providers requested shelter for their clients four times more often than the city provided a referral, meaning that the vast majority of people seeking shelter were unable to find it.

At the other end of the spectrum, the shelters with very low enrollment rates had a few things in common: Three of the four are basic shelters or “enhanced” shelters that offer services but little privacy. The other is Lakefront Community House—an enhanced shelter with single and double rooms in a former drug treatment center run by the Low-Income Housing Institute in North Seattle. Continue reading “Shelter Enrollments from City Referrals, Already Under 50%, Dropped In First Months of 2022” →

City Council, Crime, homelessness

Councilmember Touts Shelters as Solution to Encampment Shootings
City Hall Park, fenced and closed
JustCARE worked to shelter people living in City Hall Park last year. Proponents argue the program helps reduce gun violence in encampments.

By Paul Kiefer

In the two years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, gun violence in Seattle has both surged and transformed. While the number of gun homicides fell from 2020 to 2021, both the number of people shot and the number of shots fired rose by roughly 40 percent. One of the key drivers of that increase, Interim Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz told the city council’s public safety committee last week, was an uptick in shootings at encampments.

Over the past two years, gun violence at encampments across the city escalated dramatically. In January 2020, only 6.5 percent of the city’s shootings took place in encampments; by December 2021, at least a quarter of Seattle’s shootings were in encampments. Police reports about encampment shootings cite drug deals gone wrong, personal disputes or unpaid debts as inciting incidents, but Diaz did not identify any broader reason why violence in encampments is on the rise.

While Seattle’s efforts to reduce gun violence have historically relied on outreach to young people in gangs, City Councilmember Andrew Lewis, who chairs the council’s committee on housing and homelessness, now argues that the city should think of moving people from encampments to shelters as an essential part of reducing gun violence. “There’s something about unsanctioned encampments—they attract gun violence,” he said. People living in encampments may carry guns to protect themselves, Lewis noted, and people involved in low-level survival crimes often can’t turn to police or courts to resolve disputes.

 “When people are inside and having their needs met, we just don’t see the kinds of violence we see when they are dealing with the insecurities of living in an encampment.” —Seattle City Councilmember Andrew Lewis

In an email to PubliCola on Wednesday, Diaz added that he has no plans to redirect his department’s gun violence prevention resources to focus on encampments.

In Lewis’ view, while shelters are not the only solution to rising gun violence, they seem to have helped curtail it. As examples, he pointed to the city’s tiny house villages, run by the Low-Income Housing Institute, and the hotel-based shelters run by JustCARE, a collaboration between counseling, outreach and diversion providers that serves people with serious behavioral health challenges. So far, he said, there have been no shootings at any JustCARE shelter or tiny house villages.

 “When people are inside and having their needs met,” Lewis said, “we just don’t see the kinds of violence we see when they are dealing with the insecurities of living in an encampment.”

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Although Lewis has championed both tiny houses and JustCARE, he says preserving JustCARE’s funding is more likely to reduce gun violence because the program exclusively serves people who’ve been involved in the criminal justice system.  “Generally speaking, JustCARE clients have had opportunities to be a victim and, in some cases, a perpetrator of gun violence,” he said, “and the fact that they have developed a sheltering strategy that can mitigate that is incredibly valuable.”

In Lewis’ view, the council should start viewing JustCARE “more as a jail and violence mitigation program than as a shelter program. We can find a way to remove people who are vulnerable to being victims or perpetrators of violence from the street in a more sustainable way than putting them in jail.” JustCARE’s funding, which includes federal COVID relief dollars, is set to expire in June.

While Diaz agreed that shelters have been relatively safe, he told the council last week that SPD has responded to more calls from social workers who say they have been threatened with guns in the past year. Diaz framed his comments as a response to questions about safety in shelters, but he did not offer any examples of people being threatened inside either shelters or low-income housing. Instead, he pointed to a February 2021 incident in which a man shot at a staff member inside a Catholic Community Services administrative building in the Central District before fatally shooting himself. Continue reading “Councilmember Touts Shelters as Solution to Encampment Shootings” →

homelessness, housing, legislature

With Advocates Watching Closely, Legislators Propose Office to Respond to Encampments

By Leo Brine

On Thursday, House Democrats amended legislation creating a new office to deal with encampments in public rights-of-way, removing many of the provisions that homeless advocates feared would be used to sweep encampments indiscriminately—and leaving unanswered questions about what its actual impact would be.

The bill, originally requested by Gov, Jay Inslee (SB 5662) and sponsored Sen. Patty Kuderer (D-48, Bellevue), would create a new Office of Intergovernmental Coordination on Public Right-of-Way Homeless Encampments within the Department of Social and Health Services.

The job of the office would be to coordinate efforts to respond to homeless encampments Washington State Department of Transportation right-of-way, such as underneath highway overpasses, with the ultimate goal of “reducing the number of encamped persons through transition to a permanent housing solution so that the encampment is closed with the site either restored to original conditions or preserved for future use.”

Kuderer said the office would identify new permanent housing or shelter options and offer them to people living in WSDOT rights-of-way before removing people from where they are—“meeting people where they’re at” and connecting them with services and resources. 

The bill’s ultimate goal is to transition people living in encampments to permanent housing, she said, but Kuderer told PubliCola she wanted to include temporary shelters and other sanctioned encampment options in the bill so people will have a place to live that’s not next to a highway while the state tries to create more permanent housing.

Affordable housing and homeless advocacy groups like the ACLU, the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance and the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness fear that without changes, the bill could be used to justify encampment sweeps.

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Alison Eisinger, the Executive Director of the Coalition, told PubliCola, “We appreciate the changes made in the House, and we really like investments in housing and services, but we would be opposed to any bill that encourages sweeps.”

Currently, the bill says encampments on WSDOT property will get priority access to shelter and housing, with encampments that pose “the greatest health and safety risk to the encamped population, the public, or workers on the right-of-way” rising to the top of the list. In practice, this could mean that people living in encampments on WSDOT property would get priority for shelter, services, or housing over other unsheltered people because of their location alone.

“Shelter or housing plans should be complete before engaging persons encamped on the public rights-of-way,” the bill says. However, the bill also stipulates that if there are “concerns over public health and safety, worker access and safety, and public access,” jurisdictions could remove an encampment and displace campers without offering them anywhere to go. In Seattle, a similar set of guidelines has enabled the city to define virtually any encampment in any public space, including sidewalks and parks, as an “obstruction,” allowing it to remove encampments without offering shelter or services and without any advance notice.

Advocates also point out that the bill’s description of the process for transitioning people into housing is vague. The bill expresses the “intent” that cities and other jurisdictions will “engage” unsheltered people “with teams of multidisciplinary experts focused in trauma-informed care” and offer them “provisions of service” with the goal of moving them to permanent housing. But it does not explain who the experts would be, how they would provide “trauma-informed care,” what counts as “service,” and what counts as a “housing solution.” 

WLIHA’s Michele Thomas told lawmakers at the House Housing, Human Services and Veterans committee the bill is “a skeleton of a concept” that  “could actually have harmful impacts” if it isn’t fleshed out. Continue reading “With Advocates Watching Closely, Legislators Propose Office to Respond to Encampments” →

Environment, homelessness, legislature

Senate Bill Would Remove Regulatory Hurdle from Homeless Shelter Siting
Sen. Joe Nguyen, D-34

By Leo Brine

State Sen. Joe Nguyen (D-34, White Center) has proposed a bill that would make it easier for homeless service providers to build homeless shelters across the state, including in Seattle.

The city of Seattle consulted with Nguyen on the legislation, which would allow cities to permit homeless shelters without subjecting such projects to a time-consuming environmental review under the State Environmental Policy Act. The bill would apply to jurisdictions, including Seattle, that have declared a homelessness state of emergency, and to shelters permitted for three years or less that serve 200 people or fewer and do not require the construction of any new permanent buildings.

According to Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI) code development manager Mike Podowski, SEPA review can delay the siting and permit process an additional six to eight months “without really adding value, in terms of environmental protection, life safety, or neighborhood fit.”

Once a SEPA review is complete, anyone can appeal its result to the city’s hearing examiner, Podowski added, leading to additional delays.

In July 2018, for example, a group called Safe and Affordable Seattle filed an appeal to stop the expansion of a tiny house village in Interbay, arguing that the city failed to meet SEPA requirements. The appeal, which the hearing examiner denied, delayed the project, which was finally able to open 12 months after it was first proposed.

Nguyen said that tiny home villages and temporary shelters aren’t the answer to the homelessness crisis, “but in lieu of having enough supportive, affordable housing, you need this option.”

This is Nguyen’s fourth year sponsoring the bill. In 2019 and again in 2020, the Senate passed his bill, but the majority house Democrats never brought it to the floor for a vote. Without a vote, the opponents remained anonymous; Nguyen suspects “people who are worried about tiny villages in their district” killed the bill each time. Continue reading “Senate Bill Would Remove Regulatory Hurdle from Homeless Shelter Siting” →