Tag: Navigation Center

City Council, homelessness, Morning Crank, Police

Still No Street Sinks, Pedersen Tone-Polices Council Colleague, No Discipline for Cop who Retaliated Against Whistleblower

1. The nearly year-old debate over street sinks for people without access to indoor plumbing boiled over at last week’s meeting of the city council’s homelessness committee, as Seattle Public Utilities director Mami Hara outlined some of the Durkan Administration’s many objections to providing cheap, accessible places for people experiencing homelessness to wash their hands.

As PubliCola has reported, the city council funded street sinks last November, with a goal of quickly installing more than 60 simple sinks at key locations around the city. Access to clean running water and soap—not just hand sanitizer, which the city is currently considering as an alternative to sinks—is essential to preventing the spread of communicable diseases such as shigella, hepatitis, and cryptosporidiosis, which have spread among Seattle’s homeless population since the COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of most publicly accessible sinks last spring.

Six months later, there are still no sinks on Seattle’s streets. Instead, the mayor’s office, SPU, and the Department of Neighborhoods have expanded the scope of the funding to include food waste disposal, “options for accessing safe drinking water,” and new ways to “reduce illegal dumping and litter.” Last month, the city put out a request for proposals for a new “Seattle Water & Waste Innovation Pilot” with the goal of picking two or more contractors later this month.

Council member Teresa Mosqueda, who chairs the council’s budget committee, said the council’s budget directive wasn’t “to evaluate what kind of additional programs or services should be investigated … it was, how fast can we get these dollars out the door for very low-cost, already proven handwashing strategies. So I would like to ask…. where are the handwashing facilities and why is it taking so long?”

The city also needed to ensure that the sinks are “really durable and resilient against lots and lots of things that can happen to them,” SPU director Mami Hara said, and to make sure they don’t present “a tripping hazard or another hazard.”

Andres Mantilla, Durkan’s DON director, responded the city had expedited the grant application process to move more quickly than usual. Hara added that although the council might find it “counterintuitive when your’e trying to get things out quickly to consider public health requirements,” the utility has an obligation to think about people’s safety. For example, she said, people could “cross-contaminate” sinks with germs if the water isn’t “continuous, reliable, and adequate.” The city also needed to ensure that the sinks are “really durable and resilient against lots and lots of things that can happen to them,” Hara said, and to make sure they don’t present “a tripping hazard or another hazard.”

“The point isn’t to build super sinks and only be able to afford five of them; the point is to be able to get sinks out throughout the city so that folks [can] have access to running water.”—Councilmember Tammy Morales

“I understand the frustration—it’s like, ‘Let’s just put a sink out there,’ versus making sure that it’s done in a way that does not cause injury or harm to folks as well,” Hara said.

In response, Mosqueda pointed out that the city expedited temporary permits for restaurant owners to put tables on sidewalks in response to COVID, and council member Tammy Morales noted that while she was glad to hear that the executive branch now wants to open up the application process to small groups besides the Clean Hands Collective, such as mutual aid groups, “this work was intended to be out the door months ago and we are entering the fourth wave now of COVID.”

“The point isn’t to build super sinks and only be able to afford five of them; the point is to be able to get sinks out throughout the city so that folks [can] have access to running water,” Morales said.

2. Later in the same meeting, Morales addressed public commenters, saying they should direct their anger about ongoing sweeps of homeless encampments at the mayor’s office (which oversees encampment removals) rather than the council (which has adopted legislation opposing them). After following that comment with a number of calm but pointed policy questions, Morales got a dressing-down from Durkan ally Alex Pedersen, who suggested she was being rude to executive department staff.

“I just want to implore my colleagues to strive to treat our city government colleagues with respect and to not question their intentions,” Pedersen said, admonishing Morales to “take the temperature down and treat our colleagues with respect.” 

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Pedersen’s tone-policing comments prompted Mosqueda to jump in. Morales, she said, had been “respectful and in order,” and her questions were “very much appropriate for the situation that we’re in—a year into the pandemic, when the CDC has continued to say that we should not be sweeping people if we had no alternative non-congregate options available.” We’ll have more on the state of outreach and encampment removals this afternoon.

3. Two officers who filed a complaint against Navigation Team director (and former SPD lieutenant) Sina Ebinger subsequently complained that a friend of Ebinger’s followed them in her police cruiser, cut them off, and threatened them with professional retaliation after Ebinger lost her assignment on the team, a newly released Office of Police Accountability case file reveals. Continue reading “Still No Street Sinks, Pedersen Tone-Polices Council Colleague, No Discipline for Cop who Retaliated Against Whistleblower” →

Addiction, Drugs, King County

After Two-Year Gap, Detox Center Will Open on Beacon Hill
King County Executive Dow Constantine stands next to a detox bed at the soon-to-open Recovery Place.

The new detox and inpatient treatment center that will open later this year on Beacon Hill doesn’t look like much from the outside. A low-slung institutional building surrounded by a black iron fence and fronted by a small parking lot, it looks somewhat out of place in a residential neighborhood where brightly colored townhouses have sprouted like dandelions in recent years.

Even from the inside, you have to squint to imagine the transformation—from what Valley Cities Behavioral Health Care CEO Ken Taylor called a “ghastly” institution, run by Recovery Centers of King County, into a modern, brightly lit facility with fitness rooms, two large kitchens, and rooms for group meetings and private counseling.

The opening of the new facility, called Recovery Place, marks a significant milestone for detox and treatment in King County—the restoration of 32 beds for people needing medical detoxification from alcohol, heroin, and other drugs, and the first residential detox center in King County where people can access treatment for addiction and mental health issues simultaneously. (Most treatment centers do not deal with dual diagnoses).

The city’s Navigation Center, a new low-barrier shelter less than a mile away, will direct clients to Recovery Place, which will also take patients directly from emergency rooms and (eventually) on a walk-in basis. In addition to detox and a traditional two-to-four-week inpatient treatment program, the center will offer medication-assisted treatment with drugs like buprenorphine to heroin and opiate addicts. “We’re embracing a harm-reduction approach as much as an abstinence-based approach,” Milena Stott, Valley Cities’ director of inpatient services, said.

Valley Cities CEO Ken Taylor in the detox wing of Recovery Place

The last tenant to occupy the building, Recovery Centers of King County, went bankrupt and shut down abruptly in 2015, and since then, the 27 detox beds they provided have been distributed all over King County through contracts with institutions like Fairfax Hospital in Kirkland and the Seadrunar long-term treatment center in Georgetown.  Before RCKC closed down, Taylor said, the building “was dark and damp, and all throughout the central corridors there was plumbing and electrical running literally right down the middle of the corridor.” Outreach workers told me last year that RCKC was known for treating clients rudely and asking “inappropriate” personal questions in earshot of other patients; the new facility, in contrast, will have private consultation rooms. After RCKC closed, the building itself was taken over by squatters and stripped bare, with everything from the toilets to the copper wiring stolen and carted away.  Morgan Irwin, a Republican state representative (R-31) and Seattle Police Department officer who was on hand for yesterday’s tour, said that the last time he was inside the building, which is on his beat, “It was literally flashlight and gun out.”

The building cost $4 million to buy, plus $9 million to renovate. A million dollars of the budget to buy and fix up the building came from King County; the rest came from a combination of state and grant money and a $4.5 million loan that Valley Cities took out from Bank of America to cover the remaining costs. The state’s capital budget, which remains in limbo, is supposed to provide about $2 million toward the cost of repaying the loan, but Taylor said Valley Cities “is going to be able to repay the loan” ion its own if state funding doesn’t come through. “We’re very fortunate. Not every agency can do that.” Ongoing operations will cost about $5 million a year; that funding will come from the state and federal governments as well as from patients’ insurance payments. RCKC went bankrupt, King County Human Services Department director Adrienne Quinn told me, in part because of unfavorable state reimbursement rates, which she was quick to add have been addressed.

Contrary to common belief, not every person with addiction needs detox, although medication can ease the suffering and make it less likely that people withdrawing from opiates, for example, abandon treatment. (Severe alcoholism does require detox because going cold turkey can cause seizures, DTs, and fatal heart conditions.) Buprenorphine, and other opiate substitution medications, can help short-circuit the withdrawal process and get opiate addicts on a path to stability. “I hope that everyone for whom buprenorphine is appropriate will elect to do that,” Taylor said, “but sometimes it takes them time to get to that point.”

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Addiction, homelessness, housing, Seattle magazine

Navigation Center Has Housed Just Two People Since Opening in July

This story first appeared at Seattle Magazine. 

Late last month, the city’s Human Services Department released its first annual report on Pathways Home, a new framework for serving homeless residents that emphasizes “rapid rehousing” and submits service providers to new performance standards. Among other conclusions, the report found that the Navigation Center, a 75-bed shelter that serves people who don’t do well in traditional shelters, has struggled to place people into permanent housing within the 60-day time limit set by the city.

“People coming inside from being unsheltered have a big adjustment to make and multiple issues to address and many barriers to housing stability; the Navigation Center is finding that mapping out a strategy to get them housed could take more than 60 days,” the report says.

In fact, as of October, the Navigation Center had placed just two people into housing, according to the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), which runs the Center. DESC’s director of administrative services, Greg Jenson, says that one of those clients is now in transitional housing and one went to live with family. According to the Pathways Home report, of the 105 clients who came through the center in its first six weeks, 32 have left, and “nearly half” of those “have refused to disclose or didn’t know where they were exiting to.”

DESC director Daniel Malone says the “biggest challenge” to placing clients in permanent housing isn’t just that the people the Navigation Center serves are hard to house; it’s that there simply aren’t enough places for Navigation Center clients to go.

 

The Navigation Center is designed to serve clients who are the “hardest to house”—people experiencing chronic homelessness who often face multiple barriers to finding a place to live, such as ongoing substance abuse and mental-health issues. It “was not designed to serve the needs of the higher-functioning individuals who are more likely to thrive in traditional shelter settings which have strict rule requirements,” Jackie St. Louis, the coordinator for the Navigation Team, says.

However, DESC director Daniel Malone says the “biggest challenge” to placing clients in permanent housing isn’t just that the people the Navigation Center serves are hard to house; it’s that there simply aren’t enough places for Navigation Center clients to go. “One thing that has been good is being able to identify people who have a natural priority for the limited housing that is available in the community,” by giving them an assessment that scores them on the number of barriers to housing they face, Malone says. But, he adds, “If we aren’t producing new housing, they’ll just be getting it instead of someone else.”

Seattle’s Navigation Center isn’t the first of its kind; that distinction goes to a low-barrier shelter by the same name in San Francisco, which also serves a hard-to-house clientele. In San Francisco, clients seeking permanent housing stay an average of 90 days, and that figure would likely be larger if the city didn’t set aside some low-income housing units specifically for Navigation Center clients, something Seattle does not do. Although Seattle officials were familiar with the challenges San Francisco faced in housing people through its Navigation Center, the city adopted a 60-day cap, predicting that Seattle’s Navigation Center would be able not only mimic but surpass San Francisco’s success.

The city’s Navigation Teams—groups of police and outreach workers who facilitate encampment removals—frequently refer encampment residents to the Navigation Center. According to a report issued by the Navigation Team itself earlier this month, the teams have sent about 75 people to the center this year.

Meg Olberding, a spokeswoman for the Human Services Department, says she’s confident that the city is sending people who want and will benefit from the services that the center provides. “HSD and DESC are satisfied that the right clients are being referred to the Navigation Center,” she says.

But Malone notes that DESC has “definitely heard from some people that they only came there because they were having to leave where they were staying out, and they hadn’t really decided for themselves that was something that they wanted yet.”

Malone cautions against reading too much into what happens at the Navigation Center in the first few months. “Has it changed the face of homelessness in less than three months? No,” he says. “There have definitely been some start-up issues, and we need to try different things out.”

In San Francisco, Navigation Centers have been successful at getting some homeless people off the street, but they’re hardly a panacea. The success or failure of Seattle’s Navigation Center will be measured not by how many hundreds of people it moves on to permanent housing, but by how many dozens.

Affordability, Density, Development, Drugs, Election 2017, homelessness, housing, human services, Morning Crank, neighborhoods

Morning Crank: Why They Didn’t Apply the Racial Equity Toolkit

1. King County Council member Joe McDermott and Jeanne Kohl-Welles have proposed legislation, sponsored by five of the council’s Democrats (Dave Upthegrove’s name is not on the legislation), that would remove Initiative 27—the ballot measure that ban supervised drug consumption sites throughout King County—from the ballot. In its place would be a two-part question that would give voters the ability to say “yes” to safe consumption sites, along with the other seven recommendations that were unanimously adopted by the county’s Heroin and Prescription Opiate Addiction Task Force a little over a year ago. The task force included public health experts, elected officials, cops, and representatives from the King County Sheriff’s Department and Prosecuting Attorney’s Office.

The legislation essentially asks voters to decide whether either  measure—I-27 or the task force recommendations—should be adopted; then, if a voter says “yes” to the first question, which option they prefer.

“If the people are going to have a chance to vote on safe injection sites, I want them to have all the alternatives,” McDermott says. “This is an effort to have a positive alternative on the ballot to address the public health crisis on our streets.”

A group of advocates is suing to prevent I-27 from going on the February 2018 ballot, arguing that state law does not allow voters to veto adopted public health policies. The case will be heard in King County Superior Court on Friday.

2. The committee charged with reviewing the city’s policies around encampment sweeps met last night for the first time in a month to hear from the city’s Office for Civil Rights (which monitors the sweeps to see if rules like a 72-hour notice requirement are being followed), the Department of Finance and Administrative Services, and the Navigation Team itself about how things are going.

Questions that came up during the meandering meeting: Whether SOCR should be in the position of monitoring encampment removals at all, given that they are themselves a city department (the committee is far from the first to raise this issue); whether the committee should have its own encampment removal monitor that answers only to the committee; and why the city did not initially apply its racial equity toolkit to its sweeps policies (Finance and Administrative Services Department director Chris Potter said it was because the city declared homelessness an “emergency.”)

One question I hoped the city might answer (they didn’t) is why FAS, SOCR, the city’s Human Services Department, and the navigation teams don’t share data in a way that enables them to know exactly what happened to each individual person who received “outreach” during an encampment sweep. HSD and the mayor’s office often tout high numbers of “contacts” and “referrals” to services and safer alternative sleeping arrangements as proof that the Navigation Teams are working, but it’s virtually impossible to find out what happened to the people who received these referrals over the long- or even medium term. No single agency or organization tracks people’s progress after the initial contact by the navigation teams, and people count as success stories for the city’s purposes even if they stay in a shelter for one night and move on.

Navigation Team coordinator Jackie St. Louis did provide some information about where the teams were providing referrals to (not everyone who received a referral followed through by showing up at the shelter or other location to which they were referred). The most common locations for referrals were: The new low-barrier shelter run by Compass Housing on First Hill (capacity: 100); the sanctioned encampment in Georgetown (capacity: 70), which does not allow drugs or alcohol; the sanctioned low-barrier encampment at Licton Springs (capacity: 70), which does not require sobriety; and the Navigation Center (capacity: 75), a city-run low-barrier shelter.

That means that most people the Navigation Teams encounter are being referred to either other encampments or low-barrier shelters, not traditional shelters, transitional housing, or behavioral health or addiction treatment centers. The large influx of referrals from encampments could be one reason the Navigation Center is taking longer than that to move people along to the next thing; last month, HSD reported that the city-run center was “finding that mapping out a strategy to get [clients] housed could take more than 60 days.”

3. At an AARP-KOMO TV-sponsored debate last night, mayoral candidates Cary Moon and Jenny Durkan offered their responses to a question about whether the two-thirds of Seattle’s land zoned exclusively for detached single-family houses should be opened up to allow other types of housing. (Former mayor Ed Murray initially proposed allowing duplexes, row houses, and other types of low-density housing in single-family areas as part of the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda but backed off after homeowners complained that other types of housing would drive down their property values, make it impossible to park their cars, and destroy their neighborhood character). Moon said she wanted to restart the process so that neighborhoods could be involved in determining how to accommodate density while preserving neighborhood “character”; Durkan seemed to suggest that if the city simply made it easier to add mother-in-law and backyard apartments to existing single-family houses, there would be enough density to provide all the “missing middle” housing Seattle needs.

Moon: “I would restart that conversation with communities to say, ‘This is how many folks are moving here. Here are all the tools we could be using, including backyard cottages, mother-in-law apartments, clustered housing, row housing, stacked flats,’ and show folks all the different models for how do we add infill development in neighborhoods, and invite them to be a part of picking what works for their neighborhood. Because if you impose it from on high in Seattle, that doesn’t work. We all feel this right to shape our city, the right to be at the table and help determine what’s the right way to grow with grace. … We’ve got to involve neighborhoods in doing it together in a way that works for their character that they’re trying to protect, for how they live their high quality of life in their neighborhood.”

Durkan: “I’ve got some friends who, for 18 months, have been trying to get a permit for a mother-in-law apartment. If we made it easier for folks to get mother-in-law apartments and real backyard cottages—not these monstrosity[ies] that everyone’s afraid of—we could make almost every single-family lot into a triplex overnight. But we are having impediments, so we need to make it a priority, and the mayor needs to say to the housing and zoning people, ‘We’re going to speed up affordable housing. We’re going to give people the ability to have density,’ and then we’ll move forward.”

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please considerbecoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

City Council, City Hall, gender, homelessness, housing, Media, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: “Meets All Necessary Privacy Requirements”
Image via Hope to the End.

1.  Some little-picture observations about the proposed city budget, which interim mayor Tim Burgess released on Monday:

• The budget includes extremely sunny ridership projections for the South Lake Union and First Hill streetcars, assuming that farebox revenues from the two streetcars combined will be 25 percent higher than actual 2016 revenues, and 21 percent higher than the assumption that was used for the 2017 budget.

• The budget includes $343,000 to expand the city’s Our Best program, which is aimed at increasing mentors for young African American men and improving black male outcomes. As I’ve reported, this fix-boys-first focus can black girls, who face very different challenges than black boys, behind; programs like Our Best also tend to emphasize traditional gender roles, including a heteronormative family structure in which the man is the breadwinner and the wife stays at home.

• The phrase “African American/Black” occurs 10 times in the city budget itself. Nine of those 10 times, it precedes either “male” or “boys.”

• In addition to increasing funding for homelessness-related programs and services by $2 million, the budget for the city’s Human Services Department includes funding for new Homeless Management Information scan cards, which are just what they sound like—bar-coded scan cards identifying and tracking homeless people who use the city’s shelter system. According to the budget book, the cards will, “for a small investment, significantly decrease the burden on people using homeless services to provide information and decrease the burden on agencies to enter duplicative data while significantly increasing efficiencies in the homeless service delivery system by ensuring data quality.” The proposed new homeless scanning system, HSD assures readers, “meets all necessary privacy requirements and is used in homeless response systems around the

• In another nod to HSD’s renewed emphasis on “performance-based contracting” and “measurable outcomes,” the department’s budget also includes two new data analysis staffers.

• And in a nod to the fact that addressing homelessness was never going to be a short-term problem, the budget takes two positions that were created in 2017 to execute the city’s interim response to homelessness and makes them permanent.

 

“The Navigation Center is finding that mapping out a strategy to get them housed could take more than 60 days.”

 

2. Speaking of homelessness as a long-term problem: The first annual report on Pathways Home, the new city homelessness framework that emphasizes “rapid rehousing” and “performance-based contracting,” is out. Overall, the city gives itself high marks for moving people from unsanctioned to sanctioned encampments and for getting people into safer (if still precarious) living situations. HSD praises itself, in particular, for the work of its new Navigation Teams—groups of police and outreach workers who offer services and safer shelter or housing to people living in unsanctioned encampments that are about to be swept by the city—and for two new low-barrier shelters, the city-run Navigation Center and a new low-barrier shelter run by Compass Housing, which together provide 175 new shelter beds.

However, the number of people served by the city-run Navigation Center remains low. (The Compass facility just opened last month). Between July and September, according to the report, the center has seen just 105 people—and 30 percent of those left the program in the first 45 days it was open. The goal of the Navigation Center is to get hard-to-house and chronically homeless clients with complicated problems, including addiction, into long-term shelter, permanent housing, or treatment. When the center opened, HSD said it would aim to get people through the shelter and on to their next living situation within 60 days; the progress report released Monday, however, concedes that “[p]eople coming inside from being unsheltered have a big adjustment to make and multiple issues to address and many barriers to housing stability; the Navigation Center is finding that mapping out a strategy to get them housed could take more than 60 days.” Next year, the city will switch to a system that awards contracts to shelter providers based in part on how many of their shelter clients “exit shelter to permanent housing,” which could weigh against shelters like the Navigation Center that serve clients that are among the most challenging to house.

“There is an urgent need to provide unsheltered people with real time referrals to shelter and housing by using scan card technology in the field to link outreach workers and housing resources.”

 

The report also touts the Navigation Teams, praising the groups for getting people living in unsafe encampments into “safer alternative living spaces.” Overall ,64 percent of the people the Navigation Teams “engaged” accepted some kind of services (down from the 69 percent an SPD lieutenant described as “staggeringly high” back in May). Thirty-nine percent accepted alternative living arrangements (up from 32 percent), which include other (sanctioned) encampments; although the city tracks this number closely, HSD has told me it does not know how many people in that group actually got permanent housing, as opposed to a shelter bed or reassignment to another outdoor encampment.

In a nod to the budget line item adding funding for homeless scan cards, the Pathways Home report says “there is an urgent need to provide unsheltered people with real time referrals to shelter and housing by using scan card technology in the field to link outreach workers and housing resources.”

3. Eli Sanders, the Stranger writer-turned-speechwriter/deputy communications director for interim Mayor Tim Burgess, has said he plans to use what he sees and hears while embedded at the mayor’s office as material for a piece of “experiential journalism” when he returns to his job at the paper full-time in November. (Sanders will continue to host the Stranger’s political blog, “Blabbermouth,” one day a week.) On Monday, the city provided me with Sanders’ offer letter for the position, which consists primarily of writing Burgess’ speeches and public remarks, not taking media calls or dealing with external communications. Sanders, according to the letter, will make $55.598 per hour, plus a five percent bonus for his first 520 hours; after that point (which Sanders will likely never hit, given the short-term nature of his assignment), he will receive a ten percent bonus.

Doing the math: Sanders started his new job on September 19; the job will conclude on November 28, when a new mayor takes office. At 8 hours a day, and assuming he receives no pay for additional hours or other bonuses, Sanders will make $26,153.30 for his 56 full days of work for Burgess, which (if extrapolated out to the full year) would amount to a salary of $125,762.78. This places Sanders’ starting salary within the top third of mayoral staff salaries; only 16 of the 47 mayoral staffers make more than Burgess’ new hire.

Also Monday, I got a request to remove Sanders’ personal email information from his offer letter, which is a public record available to anyone. The ask was reasonable, and I removed the address, but I couldn’t help but note a certain irony in the request, as I told the staffer who asked for the redaction:

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please considerbecoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

City Council, City Hall, Election 2017, gender, homelessness, housing, labor, Morning Crank, Women

Morning Crank: What Socialist?

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support!

1. One name that won’t be on the long list of those running for mayor when the window for candidates to file for Seattle offices this year closes at 4:00 this afternoon is city council member Lorena Gonzalez. Although Gonzalez would have been giving up her council seat by running for mayor, since both offices are on the ballot this year, she had decided to take the risk as recently as last Friday—until she failed to secure a key endorsement, sources close to the council member say. On Tuesday, she announced she wasn’t running.

That key endorsement? US Congresswoman (and former state senator) Pramila Jayapal, who was the executive director of immigrant rights group OneAmerica when Gonzalez was its board chair. Jayapal’s decision not to endorse Gonzalez reads like a major snub not just because Jayapal supported Gonzalez when she first ran for city council in 2015, but because Gonzalez reversed her own endorsement of Brady Walkinshaw, who, like Gonzalez, is Latinx, to support Jayapal when she ran for Congress after Jayapal accused Walkinshaw of running ads she said were racist and sexist. After sticking her neck out for her former OneAmerica colleague and longtime political ally, Gonzalez might have understandably expected Jayapal to return the favor. Jayapal has not made any endorsement in the mayor’s race so far.

2. Speaking of erstwhile political allies, the King County Labor Council’s secretary/treasurer Nicole Grant sent out a harshly worded statement earlier this week denouncing socialist city council member Kshama Sawant for endorsing former Tenants Union director Jon Grant, and excoriating him for being a “phony” who advocated for low-income people harmed by the foreclosure crisis while living in a foreclosed house purchased for him by his parents. (Jon Grant has said he is paying the mortgage himself). Nicole Grant is a supporter of Teresa Mosqueda, a longtime labor lobbyist in Olympia who is running for the same Position 8 council seat Jon Grant is seeking. The Sawant endorsement is especially painful, Nicole Grant says, because she considered Sawant a strong labor ally; Nicole Grant even helped swear Sawant in after her election in 2013.

Nicole Grant says that as a woman of color, a labor leader, and a renter struggling to make ends meet in an increasingly unaffordable city, Mosqueda “represents what workers see in themselves when they look in the mirror. And all of a sudden, a coalition partner [Sawant’s Socialist Alternative party] that we’ve worked on many different issues with is like, ‘Yeah, we’re going to go with the socialist. And we’re like, ‘What socialist? Who are you talking about?’ And they say, ‘Jon Grant,’  and [my reaction is] just, ‘What?'”

“It’s hard when you support someone with real passion and real consistency, and then you ask them to support you and they don’t. That is not a great feeling,” Nicole Grant says. “When [Sawant ran] and Socialist Alternative needed labor to support her, labor was there. … So when the labor movement has an incredible candidate emerging and it’s not good enough for them that she’s a union member, that she’s a working class leader, that she’s a woman of color, that her record is strong—when they’re just like, ‘Oh, it doesn’t say “socialist” behind her name, sorry’—it’s outrageous. Because it’s not reciprocal.”

Nicole Grant criticizes Jon Grant’s leadership of the Tenants Union—”I feel like we’re spiraling into the abyss and our’e the one with the steering wheel in your hand”—but her major critique is that Jon Grant doesn’t acknowledge the privilege that enabled him to spend years building his resume at low-paying nonprofit and campaign jobs and that allows him to campaign full-time now. “Jon comes from the privilege machine—he is fired in the kiln of privilege,” Nicole Grant says. “Bainbridge Island, all the best private schools—for him to be like, ‘Oh, I’m a socialist’—it’s like, ‘No, dude, you’re slumming.'”

Of the credible candidates in the Position 8 race, Jon Grant is the only white man. Nicole Grant says it shows. “At a forum, he made some comment like, ‘I’m seeing a lot of experience [on Mosqueda’s resume] but I don’t see any ideas here. That is just such a classic. I don’t want to be like, ‘Okay, white man,’ but—okay, white man. I know that narrative. The woman does the work, the man has the ideas.” Nicole Grant points to Mosqueda’s work on public health, paid family leave, and wage equity legislation. “She’s the one that closes the deals,” she says.

Jon Grant and Mosqueda are widely viewed as the frontrunners in the race, which means that we could still be watching these issues play out throughout the summer and fall.

3. In response to a records request by The C Is for Crank, the city’s department of Finance and Administrative Services provided a complete list of expenses associated with the city’s emergency response to homelessness since February 21 of this year, when Mayor Ed Murray announced he was activating the city’s Emergency Operations Center in response to the homelessness crisis. (In practice, this means that representatives from various city departments meet at the EOC facility for two hours every morning to discuss and coordinate the city’s homelessness response.)

The two biggest costs so far have been construction of the Navigation Center, a planned (and delayed) low-barrier, 24/7 shelter for homeless individuals, and garbage pickup at unauthorized encampments. The city has spent $2,244,000 building the Center, and plans to spend another $1.3 million this year to operate the 100-bed shelter.  Garbage pickup has cost the city another $2,165,000, although most of that line item is labor from existing city staff who have been repurposed to administer, plan, and actually pick up the trash. The Navigation Team, an eight-member team that does outreach at encampments and conducts encampment sweeps, has cost the city $759,000 so far, including labor costs and overtime expenses for eight police officers and one sergeant. Three new authorized encampments have cost the city $201,000 to operate so far this year.

See the full list of the city’s homelessness-related expenses between February 21 and April 30, 2017, here. 

City Council, City Hall, homelessness, housing, Mayor Murray, Morning Crank, Transportation

Morning Crank: It’s Not Clear What Lessons We’ve Learned

field-protest-mayors-office

1. Four city council members—Rob Johnson, Mike O’Brien, Debora Juarez, and Kshama Sawant—signed a letter Monday urging Mayor Ed Murray to delay for one week the city’s plans to clear the homeless encampment on state Department of Transportation -owned Airport Way South and S. Royal Brougham, known to residents as “the Field” or “the Field of Dreams.” Camp residents have proposed a three-part plan to clean up the encampment and make it safe for human habitation, but it’s unclear how many of their proposals are feasible, given current conditions at the camp.

The city initially sanctioned the encampment as a temporary holding place for people relocated from the Jungle, the three-mile-long encampment under and surrounding I-5 near Beacon Hill. The city cited unsafe and unsanitary conditions as its reasons for clearing the Jungle, and is now making the same claims about the Field. Last month, a camp resident was arrested for rape and sex trafficking, and drug dealers have reportedly also moved in; meanwhile, the field itself is muddy and rat-infested, and garbage is heaped up in piles.

“The conditions down there are really quite appalling,” council human services committee chair Sally Bagshaw said Monday morning. “People who are living there say it looks like the ground is moving, there are so many rats, and that rats are running over people’s feet. … I think as a city we have got to be able to stand up and say that when something is so rat infested and there is mud literally up to our ankles … this is not something we’re willing to say is okay.” Besides, Bagshaw added, “There are options now. It’s not like people are being swept and told ‘Go find another place to be.'”

jesus-h-christResidents of the Field said they have asked for fire extinguishers, wood chips, trash pickup, and additional generators to keep the encampment clean, safe, and free from rats and garbage, but the city hasn’t delivered. Instead, encampment residents and supporters said, they’ve been offered the same shelter beds and long-term treatment slots that they were rejecting by moving to encampments in the first place. “When I see the Field, I am reminded of the two years Nickelsville spent at the Glass Yard” in Delridge, a resident of the Ballard Nickelsville encampment named Matt told the council. “When I see the Field, I am reminded of the times when Union Gospel Mission was sent in by the city to offer false choices of housing that wouldn’t work,” including shelters that don’t allow partners, pets or possessions, mats on the floor in facilities many encampment residents view as inadequate and unsafe, or beds that were only available to those who committed themselves to sobriety or agreed to submit to religious instruction.

The city has consistently said that it now offers real housing options to encampment residents. But in an interview before the council meeting yesterday afternoon, O’Brien told me that claim relies on sleight of hand. “We don’t have 50 good housing options for folks,” O’Brien said. “If you have one housing option, you can offer that one housing option to 50 people, but as soon as one person takes that housing option they’re going to stop offering it.” The rest, he said, will be forced to accept inadequate shelter or move on to the next encampment site.

This morning, the city plans to move in to the Field and remove any remaining tents, belongings, and people starting at 9am. Several groups opposed to encampment sweeps, who sat outside Murray’s office yesterday afternoon and eventually spoke briefly to his homelessness director, George Scarola, have vowed to show up to physically resist city staffers when they try to evict the remaining residents. O’Brien says that even if the protesters manage to stop this morning’s sweep, “My expectation is that the police will be persistent.”

“When they swept the Jungle, from the beginning, it was like, ‘This is chaos, this is unacceptable,'” O’Brien says. “The problem is it’s not clear what lessons we’ve learned as a city if we just keep doing this over and over again.”

little-saigon-nav-center

2. The council’s discussion of the Field encampment was interrupted briefly yesterday morning when members of the organization Friends of Little Saigon burst into council chambers, waving signs with slogans like “Stop Ignoring Us” and chanting, “Talk with us! Not at us!”

The impromptu protest was a response to the way the city announced the location of the first Navigation Center, a low-barrier, 24-hour shelter for people, like the Field residents, who can’t or won’t sleep at regular overnight shelters. The Friends of Little Saigon and other organizations and businesses in the neighborhood sent a letter to the council and mayor in February asking the city to delay opening the center at the Pearl Warren Building at 12th Avenue and Weller St., arguing that they weren’t consulted on the location until a few days before the announcement, and that by then it was a fait accompli.

Quynh Pham, a representative of Friends of Little Saigon, told me the Navigation Center announcement was the final straw after the city failed to consult the neighborhood on a series of major events, including First Hill streetcar construction and the Womxn’s March, that negatively impacted neighborhood residents and businesses. “We were speechless” when the city’s Human Services Department told them about the decision,” Pham says. “We felt like, why even tell us without a plan to really address the impacts or understand where we’re coming from? They just came to us with the proposal at the last minute.”

Yesterday morning, council member Lisa Herbold blamed the lack of communication on the mayor’s office, which she said “needs to figure out a way to approach public process and engage with communities very differently.” Noting that the Navigation Center has not only been in the works since last year, but will now open months behind schedule, Herbold said “there has been no lack of opportunity to engage with that community.”

3. The mayor’s office plans to bypass the city council to get its $55 million homelessness levy on the August ballot by collecting signatures instead of sending it to the council for approval. Historically, the council tinkers with ballot measures that originate in the mayor’s office or in city departments, adding and subtracting funding for specific programs. In this case, the levy measure is likely to lean heavily on rapid rehousing—short-term vouchers to house homeless people in apartments that will revert to market rate after a few months—and eliminate some funding for agencies that have received city funding for decades, such as those that provide transitional housing. Groups that will likely lose out from a shift toward rapid rehousing include the Low-Income Housing Institute, which runs a number of transitional housing programs—and has heavily lobbied the council against proposed cuts to its programs. Expect an announcement on the levy from the mayor’s office on Wednesday morning.

4. In this afternoon’s transportation committee meeting, council members will get a briefing on the city’s progress on Vision Zero, the city’s plan to end traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030. One thing that briefing won’t include is a report on traffic deaths and injuries in Seattle over the past two years; the Seattle Department of Transportation’s most recent report covers 2014, before most Vision Zero changes were implemented. I’ve requested a copy of the latest available information, but the lag, O’Brien notes, makes it difficult to draw conclusions about whether the city’s efforts are working; “it’ll be two years,” O’Brien notes, before recent pedestrian fatalities on NE 65th Street and in Wallingford show up in official city records.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

 

City Council, Drugs, homelessness, Mayor Murray

Some Questions for the City About its Progress on Homelessness

edmurrayedlee

After spending two hours listening to Seattle Mayor Ed Murray discuss homelessness with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee at Seattle U last week, I came away impressed by Murray’s obvious evolution on some key issues related homelessness, including encampment sweeps, drug addiction, and the need for shelter that accommodates substance users.

After watching several of Murray’s department heads brief the council on the progress the city is making on several key issues related to homelessness, including encampment sweeps, needle disposal, and shelter that accommodates substance users, I just came away with a lot of questions.

Murray, who was joined onstage by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, journalist Joni Balter, and SU Master of Public Administration Director Larry Hubbell, expressed frustration at the state and federal government for “fail[ing] to come forward” to supplement the tens of millions the city spends on homelessness every year, and expressed frustration at the kind of complaints he hears from Seattle residents about homeless people in their neighborhoods. “I have heard from so many people that they know exactly who the homeless are and what their problem is and how to solve it,” Murray said. “The conversation [in Seattle] is so polarized, it worries me about our ability to [be a] model for our nation for how you deal with issues of poverty and inequality, and in particular, homelessness.”

Two days later, at a meeting of the council’s human services committee, representatives from several city departments delivered an update on the city’s progress toward building low-barrier shelters and dealing with unauthorized encampments that illustrated some of the challenges Murray was talking about. A 24/7 low-barrier shelter that was supposed to open last month still lacks a location and opening date; new, more humane encampment cleanup protocols remain a work in progress; and the city’s most visible response to the heroin epidemic so far has been the wholly inadequate placement of six needle collection boxes around the city.

Officials from the Human Services Department, Seattle Public Utilities, Finance and Administrative Services, and Murray’s office described the progress they’ve made responding to neighbors’ complaints about trash and needles, touting, among other initiatives, an “on-call” needle response system to ensure that when a neighbor calls to report a needle on public property, SPU will arrive to dispose of the needle within 24 hours. They also touted the work they’ve done to expedite trash pickup in and around encampments, which SPU deputy director Ken Snipes said has led neighbors to say things like “This is the cleanest I’ve ever seen it.”

But they left many questions unanswered—about the schedule for delayed initiatives, about what the city is doing to ensure that it doesn’t discard important belongings when it sweeps occupied encampments, and about what the city plans to do to improve safety not just for neighborhood residents upset by needles, but for people shooting up on park benches and in public bathrooms. Here are a few of the questions I would like to have heard Murray’s staffers address.

Why can’t the city force the state to pick up garbage on state-owned property?

As council member Tim Burgess pointed out, despite SPU’s best efforts to clean up trash and provide Dumpsters around encampments, there are still huge piles of trash and debris under bridges and beside overpasses around the city. “It’s frustrating that we have this accumulation of garbage and trash all over Seattle. … It’s not healthy, it’s not good for the city, and it certainly sends the wrong signals to the taxpayers as to how we spend their money,” Burgess said. Typically, the city responds to questions about trash under bridges by pointing out that most of those sites are owned by the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), and that was Snipes’ response yesterday, but Burgess wasn’t having it. “I’ve been hearing this for years: ‘Well, that’s WSDOT property,’  therefore we think we’re somehow paralyzed and can’t act.” If WSDOT won’t clean up messes on its property, Burgess said, then “we should issue citations to WSDOT.  It’s inside the city of Seattle. Our ordinances apply. Why do we take so long?”

Snipes’ response: A familiar refrain. “We’re reaching out and we’ve connected with them and we’re making some headway on a plan to address those areas.

Now that the Seattle Office for Civil Rights no longer oversees each encampment sweep, what is the city doing to ensure that the civil rights of people living outdoors aren’t being violated? 

Back in December, city council members learned that under the mayor’s (still unreleased but, according to Potter, “imminent”) new protocols for encampment sweeps, the Seattle Office for Civil Rights would no longer be monitoring encampment removals and making sure workers were complying with rules about notice and disposal of people’s possessions. A Seattle Times report last month detailed many apparent violations of existing protocols for encampment removal, and described several sweeps that were shut down after SOCR monitors observed violations of the rules.

In the future, FAS director Chris Potter said, SOCR will “continue to monitor the [sweeps] in an auditing capacity—they’ll come out in the field from time to time, and have access, like everyone else to all the information [about specific sweeps] on our external website,” including photos of specific encampments before and after the city enters, conditions at sites chosen for sweeps, and a general sense of what happened to the people living there. (When council member Sally Bagshaw asked specifically if the city’s new encampment information website would include details about outcomes for the individual people displaced by sweeps, Potter demurred, saying only that there would be a “ramp-up period” to get the new protocols in place before the city could attempt to provide more detailed information about the people being swept up in the sweeps.)

The departments’ vague answers about what role the civil rights office will play in monitoring encampment sweeps in the future prompted council member Mike O’Brien to say, “It is going to require a certain level of independence [for the civil rights office] and a willingness to highlight where there’s room to improvement.

“These departments all report to the mayor, and so—not to put words in the mayor’s mouth, but none of us want to be embarrassed. So I want to make sure that the civil rights department will be able to be somewhat independent and make clear statements when the city makes mistakes.”

needle-disposal-map

Why doesn’t the city put sharps containers in more public places, particularly places that are actually convenient to injection-drug users?

It’s been three months since the mayor announced plans to place ten new needle-disposal boxes around the city. To date, the city has added a total of six new sharps containers, distributed across the city from Mineral Springs Park in far North Seattle to the center median at 27th and Cheasty in Beacon Hill. This model requires injection-drug users (who, let’s be clear, cluster in places like Ballard, Capitol Hill, and Belltown that are nowhere near the new disposal sites) to schlep to one of the six designated locations to dispose of dirty needles. If the goal is to get drug users to stop leaving their needles in restroom trash cans and public parks, wouldn’t it make more sense to make sharps containers ubiquitous, at least in places (like libraries and parks) where drug users tend to congregate?

Granted, the sharps containers are getting used—Snipes said the  SPU contractors who pick up the boxes report that they’re “almost full”—but the demand for safe disposal sites clearly exceeds the supply. (For example, Snipes said SPU’s rapid-response needle team had picked up 1,243 individual needles over the last two months.)  On balance, it seems that giving drug users an easy way to safely dispose of needles on site would be a saner approach than the current model, which is to deny users a place to dispose of sharps and then deploy an army of on-call SPU workers to drive  around the city plucking individual needles off the ground.

But seriously, what’s the holdup with the Navigation Center?

The Navigation Center—a 24/7 low-barrier shelter that will not bar people for being intoxicated or high and will allow partners, possessions, and pets—was supposed to open in December. A month later, the city has yet to even announce where the center will be, and officials at the table Thursday cited unspecified ongoing “negotiations” as the reason for the holdup. “I won’t be able to say when the site negotiations will be complete, nor do I have a timeline about when that site will be open,” HSD deputy director Jason Johnson said. “What I did want to share today is that we’re working with [the Downtown Emergency Services Center, which will run the Navigation Center] to set up some interim services” to replicate the services that will be centralized at the Navigation Center.

Part of the problem with providing people access to a bunch of services while they’re still living on the streets, as I reported earlier this month, is that it’s much harder to navigate a complicated system when you’re living out of a shopping cart and fighting every day for physical survival. Having DESC serve as a clearinghouse for services may be a step in the right direction, but it’s a long way from the Navigation Center model, which recognizes that people need a sense of stability before they can start jumping through the hoops that lead to housing.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into it as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Read even more reasons to support The C Is for Crank here!

Affordability, City Council, homelessness, housing, Mayor Murray

The Future of Seattle’s Shelter System is in San Francisco

SF-nav-center-entrance

San Francisco’s Navigation Center for the homeless is a promising model for Seattle—if the city decides to really embrace it.

Last month, the Seattle Human Services Department dropped several pieces of bad news in the laps of the city council’s human services committee: First, the department had failed to locate sites for all four of the sanctioned encampments Mayor Ed Murray promised as part of his “Bridging the Gap” proposal to shelter some of the city’s unsheltered homeless population, now several thousand strong. Second, ongoing sweeps of unauthorized encampments will no longer be monitored by the city’s Office of Civil Rights, which was charged with overseeing encampment removals and making sure workers comply with rules about notice and disposal of people’s tents and other possessions. And third, a planned low-barrier shelter known as the Navigation Center, to be operated by the Downtown Emergency Service Center, won’t open on schedule due to trouble locating an acceptable site for the facility. “Identifying a site has taken longer than we originally [anticipated], so we’re going to have to issue a new timeline once the site has been identified,” HSD deputy director Jason Johnson said at last month’s meeting.

The Navigation Center delay was a blow to advocates who’ve argued that Seattle needs shelter options that serve the hardest to house among the city’s growing homeless population—those who don’t use regular shelters because they have one or more of the “three P’s”—pets, partners, and possessions, which aren’t allowed in traditional shelters—or because they’ve been scared away by bad experiences in the shelter system.  Add to those three disqualifiers a fourth “P”—problems. Shelters don’t work well for people in acute mental distress, people who happen to be drunk or high, or people whose mental or emotional troubles make it difficult for them to stay in close quarters with hundreds of other people.

It’s a fairly safe bet that the city will announce the Navigation Center site sometime in January—too late to help those stuck sleeping outside in subzero temperatures during the first half of this unusually cold winter, but in time for Murray to attend the opening before his reelection campaign begins in earnest. But what do city officials really mean when they talk about “low-barrier” shelter, anyway—and what will make the Navigation Center different from other shelters DESC operates, like the Morrison Hotel downtown, which takes people in any condition on a first-come, first-served basis?

To help answer those questions, I headed south to San Francisco, where the original Navigation Center opened in the Mission District in March 2015. (The city has since opened another Navigation Center, and is working on a third; all three are temporary facilities on public land slated for eventual redevelopment.) Located in the middle of a a dreary street of Mission Street populated largely by street kids and older people just sort of hanging around, the Navigation Center stands out for its clean sidewalk, airy entryway, and woodsy, modern exterior. It looks more like the entrance to a pricey new condo building than a shelter—if that condo building  was flanked by two portable buildings painted institutional yellow, and fronted by a short but official-looking sturdy iron fence.

“It’s hard to explain that it’s never looked so good [on the street outside], but there it is,” Sam Dodge tells me as we walk through the center. Dodge is the deputy director of San Francisco’s new Department of Homelessness, and he—along with John Ouertani, the site manager—is one of the chief evangelists for the Navigation Center model. “This property is open 24 hours and is very low-threshold,” Ouertani says. “There are a few rules, but the guests pretty much come in and out as they please.” As we’re talking, a new guest comes in—a skinny young man, probably 30, staggering under some unseen weight, his head parallel to the dusty ground. A case worker steers him toward his dorm, urging him to get some sleep.

Physically, the center consists of several low portable buildings—an admissions center, a dining hall/TV room, an ADA-accessible building with showers, restrooms, and free laundry facilities, and five dorms—clustered around a central courtyard. The layout gives clients (the Navigation Center calls them “guests”) more physical room than a traditional shelter, to walk around, play with their pets—and sleep. The dorms themselves house a maximum of 15 people each, a far cry from the hundreds of bunk beds that crowd a typical shelter, and some beds are pushed together in pairs, to accommodate couples who want to sleep together. Meals are available all day and night in the common building, and showers are open 24/7, to give people a sense of autonomy and to differentiate the center from other institutional living situations that guests may have encountered and found unwelcoming or traumatic in the past.nav-center-portables

“A lot of people [the Navigation Center serves] haven’t had contact with a shelter for a very long time, but they have past memories of shelter or they’ve heard rumors on the street, and that’s kept them out,” Dodge says. “I think it’s really important that we’re telegraphing to people that ‘You are going to make this amazing life change, and it’s going to be hard and it’s going to take a lot of appointments and all this stuff, but we’re here to make it easy for you, and we want to make a tranquil environment where you can rest when you need to rest, and you can eat when you need to eat, and stay focused on the goal of ending your homelessness.” In contrast, traditional shelters typically serve meals, if they serve meals at all, at standard times, clear out sleeping areas during the day, and are anything but tranquil.

DESC director Daniel Malone says that during one of his visits to the San Francisco Navigation Center, he and his colleagues witnesses a client become “really agitated about something,” yelling and pacing around frantically. What they noticed, he says, is that the man “was basically able to blow off some steam—the physical environment there seemed to allow for him to have that moment, or that event, without really significantly affecting anybody else. And some of us from DESC observed that and immediately made the connection that if that had happened in the DESC shelter—and things like that happen in the DESC shelter all the time—he would have had a different reception, because a lot of people would have been around and wouldn’t have had the patience for that happening.

“It helped some of us feel more confident that there could be some real differences by going this route of creating a place where we weren’t just trying to squeeze in as many people as humanly possible.”

Another key difference between the Navigation Center and a traditional shelter is that the Navigation Center is truly low-barrier, welcoming people who have partners, pets, possessions—and problems. Ouertani estimates that at any given time, there are a dozen or more dogs on the property—many of them pit bulls—and says that as long as they’re vaccinated, on a leash, and don’t attack people or other dogs, they can stay. “We had about 17 pets come in within the first month and an half after we first opened up, and that’s pretty much what dictated where the guests went, because you can’t put 10 pit bulls in one dorm,” Ouertani said. People are also allowed to bring large possessions, like shopping carts, bikes, and what Dodge calls “survival stuff from the street.” (Weapons are taken at the door and stored for clients to retrieve later.) And they’re allowed to stay with partners‚ unlike typical shelters that require couples to split. (Dodge says there have been times when women, for example, or transgender people have said they felt unsafe sleeping in coed dorms, and the Navigation Center has accommodated them by making one of the five dorms single-gender). Finally, they’re allowed to stay at the center even if they’re  under the influence of drugs or alcohol—or, in most cases, even if they consume drugs or alcohol at the center. “We’re not so much focused on the drugs and alcohol,” Dodge says, “because we know those are almost a given. So if you get caught using on the property, it does not mean that you are asked to leave. That’s our time to outreach to you.”

nav-center-courtyard

Clients can’t just walk in to the Navigation Center, nor will they be able to do so in Seattle. Instead, the center seeks out new clients at encampments (often right before announced raids by San Francisco city authorities) and through groups serving homeless people from marginalized communities. “One of our [initial] ideas was that we could go and just take a whole encampment and bring them inside,” Dodge said. “And then we saw from some of our data that in taking the whole encampment, we started to preference a younger, whiter group that felt comfortable in places of conflict, so then we started to say, ‘Let’s select for some racial equity and try to balance those numbers out a little bit.'” Like the city of Seattle, San Francisco uses a race and social justice lens when designing and funding city programs. “And then we went to the Haight Ashbury [neighborhood] and worked with some of the groups up there, and said, ‘Let’s work with a younger cohort. Let’s try to preference transgender people who seem to feel unsafe in a lot of our shelter system.'” The result is a population that goes through demographic changes based on the center’s current outreach priorities. f the population looks a little too young and white, they can tweak their outreach to bring in more Latino immigrants; if it’s skewing heavily toward straight, older couples, the center can increase outreach to groups that serve LGBTQ youth.

“Part of the model is being able to experiment and try new things and collect data and analyze it and experiment again,” Dodge says.

One reason  the original Navigation Center has been so free to experiment is that it’s funded largely by private dollars, through a no-strings-attached grant from an anonymous wealthy donor; Seattle’s Navigation Center will be funded by a combination of state and local dollars.

Daniel Malone, the DESC director, says his group plans to emulate the experimental spirit of the San Francisco Navigation Center, but notes that the city will choose clients based on its own set of criteria, which will in turn be dictated, to some extent, by federal priorities. “Essentially, folks are going to [come] to us after being selected by the Human Services Department,” Malone says. Johnson, the HSD deputy director, says Navigation Center clients will be chosen by outreach workers who will “engage with an unsheltered person or couple to try to tease out what that couple might need to move from living outside to living inside”; if it seems like they’ve rejected other shelter options because of barriers like restrictions on partners and pets, “then the Navigation Center comes into play.”

nav-center-beds

Johnson says Seattle’s Navigation Center, when it opens, will still embrace “the core themes that hold true at the San Francisco Navigation Center,” but it will be uniquely Seattle.”  For example, Johnson says, people will be expected to move out of the center, and into more stable (if not permanent) housing within 30 days—an ambitious goal given that, also according to Johnson, the average shelter stay in King County is 200 days. Johnson says the San Francisco Navigation Center has “changed their model” to move people through the center in 30 days, but Dodge says that for those who are seeking stable housing (as opposed to shelter or treatment), moving through the system takes longer, about 90 days on average.

San Francisco’s Navigation Center has moved nearly 300 people into more stable housing since it opened in 2015, which is quite a feat—especially when you consider that many people enter the center with few or no prior connections to the city’s homeless “system.” That’s another thing that’s different about the Navigation Center—instead of just providing phone numbers and addresses for service providers and sending clients on their way, the center provides each client with an on-site case manager who helps them make appointments and actually show up, as well as service providers who come to the center weekly.  Of all the barriers to housing, Dodge says, the sheer number of appointments can be one of the most daunting. “At one point, we were averaging 28 appointments that someone had to make coming from the street [before getting] housing, and for some of these other cases, where you’re dealing with immigration and maybe the Veterans Administration, it’s much more.”

The most ambitious versions of San Francisco’s plan max out at about six Navigation Centers, which works out to about 450 theoretical clients at a time. The unsheltered homeless population of San Francisco is nearly 6,700, according to a 2015 count; in Seattle, it’s around 3,000. (The actual numbers are likely much higher, since those figures only represent the number of people homeless count participants actually encountered sleeping on the streets.) Johnson says Seattle has no immediate plans to start siting a second Navigation Center, and indicates that the site the city will choose won’t be a temporary use of publicly owned land, like the ones in San Francisco.  Given that a single low-barrier shelter will barely make a dent in the growing demand, many advocates point out the obvious: Seattle needs more low-income housing, and not just in the form of short-term “rapid rehousing” rental vouchers.

“I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that, when I got to Seattle 20 years ago, there were literally a third of the homeless people that we see now,” says Real Change director Tim Harris. “My issue with the [Navigation Center] approach is just simply that 75 beds doesn’t go all that far, given the depth of the need.”

Malone, whose organization will be charged with making the Seattle Navigation Center a success, says that “if the Navigation Center fails and doesn’t have a lot of throughput”—that is, people entering the center and exiting into housing—”then it’ll end up being a very expensive shelter, and that’s not what anyone’s looking to do.”

A final unknown: What will federal housing policy look like under the Trump Administration? Immediately after the election, housing and homelessness advocates were deeply concerned about who Trump would pick to head up the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which sets federal housing policy. (The federal government provides about 40 percent of Seattle’s budget for homeless services). Now that Trump has chosen Ben Carson, the libertarian-leaning surgeon and failed Presidential candidate, they’re looking for funding closer to home, at the state and local levels.

Council member Sally Bagshaw, who heads up the council’s health and human services committee, says that “as dire as it is, what we’re facing right now, I actually don’t think that the federal government was going to help us anyway, because of the Republican Congress. I believe firmly that what we do, and every step of progress that we make is going to be done by the city and the county, with, hopefully, some help from the state.”

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City Council, homelessness, housing, Mayor Murray

Navigation Center Behind Schedule, Fourth Encampment Off Table


A proposed low-barrier, 24/7 shelter called the Navigation Center won’t open by the end of the year as planned because of issues with site selection, city officials told the city council’s human services committee Monday. A second planned 24/7 shelter will be much more like a bare-bones traditional shelter—not pets, property, or partners allowed. Four planned encampments may now be three, since the city has had trouble locating a suitable site for the fourth. And ongoing sweeps to “clean up” unauthorized tent encampments will no longer be monitored by the Office of Civil Rights, whose work revamping protocols for tearing down encampments the mayor’s office says is now complete.

Oh, and those trash cleanups at encampments that neighbors fed up with seeing litter and needles have been demanding? They’re not exactly working out as planned, in part because some trash contractors hired by the city are refusing to venture into the encampments.

The mayor’s director of homelessness and officials from the Human Services Department, Finance and Administrative Services, and Seattle Public Utilities briefed the council on the status of what the mayor’s office is now calling “Bridging the Gap”—the plan to add new encampments and shelter beds while the city ramps up its large-scale plan to address homelessness, a voucher-based “rapid rehousing” proposal called Pathways Home. As homelessness director George Scarola described it today, Bridging the Gap is “an interim plan that is how the city responds not just to encampments, but to the issues of garbage, needles, and crime that community members associate with encampments.”

george-scarola
George Scarola, the mayor’s homelessness director

There’s a lot to unpack from today’s status report, starting with the news that the Navigation Center is behind schedule.

The contract to operate the Navigation Center went to the Downtown Emergency Service Center, the most experienced provider of low-barrier shelter services in Seattle, last month. Despite initial plans to open the center in November or December —in time to get some hard-to-house people inside for the winter—the city has yet to announce a site, which pushes the project back at least a couple of months. “Identifying a site has taken longer than we originally [anticipated], so we’re going to have to issue a new timeline once the site has been identified,” said Jason Johnson, HSD’s deputy director, today.

When we spoke last week, Johnson told me that the Navigation Center will be designed to shelter people with barriers (including active problems with substance abuse) that have kept them out of traditional shelters, and won’t be a traditional first-come, first-served facility like DESC’s large shelter at the Morrison Hotel downtown; outreach workers will identify candidates for the center at homeless encampments and on the streets (in San Francisco, the Navigation Center typically identifies new “guests” when the city sweeps homeless encampments there)and bring them to the center. When they arrive, Johnson continued, they’ll get notice of the center’s “30-day expectation”—that is, the understanding that guests are expected to leave the center within 30 days of their arrival. “It’s not that on day 29, someone’s going to be given an eviction notice, but yes, we set a 30-day expectation on all our shelter programs,” Johnson said. The average shelter stay in King County is around 200 days.

Johnson mentioned the 30-day expectation in today’s council meeting, calling the Navigation Center “a place where people can remain in a shelter with a roof over their head, but the entire time they’re there, we’re working on their exit.”

Those who don’t qualify for the Navigation Center, or can’t find a space in the new encampments or existing shelters, would also have the option of spending the night in one of the new low-barrier shelters the city said it also hoped to open next year. These lower-cost facilities  would include lockers, but people wouldn’t be able to hold on to large quantities of possessions or bring their pets or partners with them. Most likely, these shelters would look similar to DESC’s current facilities, which include small lockers and gender-segregated dorms with metal bunk beds set up head-to-foot across a large, warehouse-style room.

Alternately, they could apply for a spot at one of the city’s three new sanctioned encampments, in North Seattle, South Seattle, and South Park. However, those new camps will house fewer than 200 people, leaving thousands still outside. Originally, Mayor Ed Murray had announced that the city would open four new sanctioned camps, but Scarola said the city had had trouble siting a fourth, and anyway, “They will fill gradually, they won’t fill overnight, and we’ll see what the market [need] is for the fourth site.“

Ultimately, city staffers emphasized, the goal is to transition the county’s entire human services and homeless housing infrastructure over to the framework described in Pathways Home, a plan touted by Mayor Ed Murray and most council members that would provide homeless people with short-term vouchers to help them rent apartments on the private market, and assumes that many people will have to be severely rent-burdened or move far away from the city of Seattle to find a place they can afford.

(At a public forum on rapid rehousing the other night, several service providers and housing experts panned this plan for imposing de facto segregation on low-income people, and suggested the real problem was not a lack of flexibility on the part of homeless people, but a lack of affordable housing. In response to those critiques. HSD director Katherine Lester shot back, “Are we waiting for a perfect situation? Or do we want people to get indoors?”)

The Navigation Center will shelter about 75 people. The three new encampments might add (substandard) shelter for another 150 to 200. That still leaves thousands of people sleeping outside, in doorways and alleys and the unsanctioned encampments that cause neighborhoods such consternation. To address these perceived public safety issues—including, council members and staffers noted pointedly, the safety of people living in encampments—the city plans to continue its practice of periodic sweeps, under protocols that are still being hashed out by the mayor’s office.

“One of the most contentious topics that [the mayor’s] task force [on encampments] took up was the protocols on where and when city would be cleaning up encampments,” said FAS director Chris Potter. “We embrace the need for, and process of, having other people weigh in on the [protocols], and I fully expect that will be a very extensive and contentious process.” Potter said council members could expect to see a draft of the sweeps protocols by the end of January.

Council member Lisa Herbold said she had been told back in November that whatever the protocols end up being, the Seattle Office of Civil Rights—which was charged with monitoring encampment removals and making sure workers were complying with rules about notice and disposal of people’s possessions—will no longer be monitoring the sweeps. A Seattle Times report yesterday detailed many apparent violations of existing protocols for encampment removal between September and November of this year, and described several sweeps that were shut down after SOCR monitors observed violations of the rules.

“I want to know if the executive feels there is not value to be added by the unique perspective that SOCR brings to monitoring this work, and if an FAS staffer can adequately replace that value,” Herbold said. Potter responded that, basically, SOCR has been helpful at suggesting new practices, like posting stickers on tents to give their occupants advance notice of sweeps, but “we want to operationalize and routinize the process of encampment removal.” Then he changed the subject to the reports FAS plans to publish detailing the outcome of each future encampment sweep.

Despite what sounded like an awful lot of bad news—no more civil-rights monitoring of sweeps, fewer encampments than anticipated, delays to the Navigation Center, a huge unmet need—both Scarola and committee chair Sally Bagshaw seemed remarkably bullish on the city’s homelessness efforts. “We are at the point where big changes are going to happen, and people in our city are going to be able to see that big changes are happening,” Bagshaw said. It was unclear to which people she was referring.

If you enjoy the work I do here at The C Is for Crank, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter of the site! For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the substantial time I put into it as well as costs like transportation, equipment, travel costs, website maintenance, and other expenses associated with my reporting. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.