Sixteen outreach workers are not enough to help the nearly 2,000 people who sleep on the streets of Seattle each night. There's also a lack of coordination among the 12 programs they work for and, when people they make contact with do want to get off the street, there's often no place to take them and no money to help obtain housing, even if there was enough affordable housing in Seattle to begin with.
No small problems, but at a time when the city is facing budget cuts, it's not likely it can do much about the findings, which were presented to the City Council's Housing, Human Services, Health and Culture Committee on April 28 by staff from the Human Services Department. The analysis was requested by the council last fall after Councilmember Tim Burgess proposed a now-vetoed panhandling law and called for more beat cops and homeless outreach.
Of the 12 outreach programs surveyed, HSD says in the report, the city funds only three and only one of those