During the campaign people would ask me, “What are your top three issues or your top three priorities once you’re in office?” And sometimes my answer to that was, “Homelessness, homelessness, homelessness.”
Back in 2015, Seattle first declared a state of emergency on homelessness and it’s just gotten worse since then. And particularly unsheltered homelessness. Seattle’s like a national outlier in terms of how many people we have sleeping unsheltered on the street, and it just can’t keep going that direction for so many reasons.
The homelessness crisis is going to be a major challenge for my administration. And [solving it] is not rocket science, in a sense. We have models that work. We know that the vast majority of homeless people who are living unsheltered, if they are offered a space inside that actually works for their needs and situation, they will accept it. And so, it’s a matter of creating those realistic pathways for people to get from the situation that they’re in to a place that is stable and where they have the supportive services that many people need.
But that’s hard for a lot of reasons. It’s hard for reasons of resources. It’s hard because some people, especially someone who’s chronically homeless and has complex needs related to drugs and mental illness may need a lot of support. And so, part of the question is just, where do the resources come from?
[There’s also the question of efficiency.] Right now, if you look at our homelessness response system, there are so many players, and often it ends up being really inefficient in the sense that we’re helping someone over here, but then they kind of fall off a cliff. So we’ve got the hospital that’s treating someone who is homeless and in crisis, and then they get discharged back onto the street. And it’s like, that is a moment where we should be helping someone inside. To some extent, it’s a matter of reorganizing the systems that we have so that…
Auteur: Katie Wilson
