On Oct. 23, as the Seattle City Council considers the 2015-2016 budget, Real Change will deliver 5,000 signatures from our OutsideIN petition to make 1,000 homeless people safer by next year.
Mayor Ed Murray recently proposed $1.5 million in new funding for homeless services. While any increase is welcome, this commitment is radically inadequate for the crisis we face. Census data reveal that at least 967,282 state residents now live in poverty, an all-time high for Washington. Rents in Seattle are rising at the highest rate in the nation. These trends have produced predictable results.
The 2014 One Night Homeless Count, conducted Jan. 24 between 2 and 5 a.m. by the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, found a record 3,123 people outside in King County after the shelters were full. This was a 14 percent increase from 2013. In Seattle alone, the unsheltered count rose by 17 percent.
Last week, a friend sent me a picture from Ballard: Seattle Department of Transportation workers were supervising a campsite clearance at 15th and O’Leary. She had been told by SDOT officials that she couldn’t take photos, in order to protect the identities of the work-release prisoners clearing the site. She did it anyway. City records reveal that campsite removals are occurring at record levels.
Seattle is better than this. If we don’t want people camped beneath overpasses and in greenbelts and parks, we need better options.
In one key area, suburban churches are leading the way. Car camping is up across the state. In Seattle, this year’s One Night Count found 730 people sleeping in cars, an increase of nearly 16 percent from last year.
This, almost surely, is a mere fraction of the reality.
In Kirkland, Lake Washington United Methodist Church started offering its parking lot to car campers in 2010. At first, there were few takers. The isolated lot was dark and felt unsafe. Then, the church hosted an encampment called Camp Unity and opened up its facilities to support homeless people.
While the tent encampment eventually moved on to other church hosts, the car campers remained. Since then, it’s hosted 10 or more cars with families at any one time. As the congregation embraced this opportunity to live its faith, its ideals of what it means to be Christian were tested and strengthened.
Between this church and a similarly committed United Methodist congregation in Kent, dozens of families have found the community and resources to move on to housing.
In Seattle, the Road to Housing program, funded in the last city budget at $278,495 through the leadership of Councilmember Mike O’Brien, has created similar successes. Road to Housing has helped four churches open their lots to 15 or more families at any given time.
One immediate way for Seattle to do more, says Councilmember Sally Bagshaw, is to expand support for this and other initiatives that ease the unsheltered crisis.
“For the first time since I’ve been on the city council,” she said, “I see people coming together: business, labor, enviros, human services. They all think we could do better.”
In a recent meeting with safe-parking advocates, Bagshaw tossed out a dollar figure to address the crisis that one leader told me “made their jaws drop.” I called the councilmember to ask what that number might be. “When I said this to Nick Licata,” she said, “he laughed.” The number was $5 million.
While my first reaction was to laugh as well, is this really so crazy?
The proposed public safety budget is more than $577 million, and unless we address the unsheltered crisis with real solutions, we’ll pay in countless other ways.
At minimum, said Bagshaw, homeless people need access to running water, electricity, security and a way out of the elements. “Let’s decide what it will take to provide the basics,” she said, “and decide how we’re going to pay for it.”
“Unless we have alternatives,” she added, “it’s not right for the police to say, ‘Go away.’ ”
Agreed.
Now let’s build a budget that turns words into reality.