The City of Seattle’s draft Investment Plan for Homeless Services in 2012-2018 landed a few weeks ago with a barely audible thud.
To most, the plan seems uncontroversial. The proposed shifts in funding don’t occur for two years. The changes outlined appear to be of little concern to anyone but human services providers, and these people have for the most part kept their criticism on the inside.
That’s unfortunate, because the plan paints a disturbing picture of homelessness and poverty in Seattle. Homelessness is on the rise, more of us are living below the poverty line, and black and brown people now comprise a greater proportion of the poor.
Proposed shifts in city priorities deepen these problems while purporting to solve them. Behind the bland, bureaucratic language about “investment” and “responsibility” and prioritizing communities of color, the city is subtly encouraging housing and human services providers to abandon those who are hardest to serve — the addicted and mentally ill — in favor of the more compliant poor.
While this might make for better statistics over the short term, Seattle’s new plan for human services represents a troubling retreat from the principles of harm reduction and Housing First. In a time of growing inequality and the race-based criminalization of the poor that is the war on drugs, this is not likely to bring good results. We are headed in the wrong direction.
A Tough Policy for Tough Times
The “economic reboot” has not been kind to the poor, and our city is no exception. According to the Human Services Department (hsd), the number of individuals in Seattle who live below the poverty line increased in 2010 from
11 to 15 percent. The numbers for female-headed families, at 27 percent below poverty ($23,050 for a family of four), are even more dismal.
Worse, federal funding is in decline, as exemplified by the recent loss of $3.75 million in Community Development Block Grants. In February 2011, the 60-month limit for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families kicked in and 17,000 Washington state families immediately lost their tanf assistance.
While just 9 percent of Seattle residents are black or African-American, these groups make up more than half of those in shelter. African-Americans, who since the war on drugs have received the disproportionate attention of law enforcement, last year represented 39 percent of those in King County Jail.
Although hsd is silent on overall trends for homelessness, the results of the One Night Count speak for themselves. Since 2006, the first full year of the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness, the numbers of homeless people in emergency and transitional shelters in King County have increased by 7 percent. Over the same period, the unsheltered street count in Seattle has grown by 17 percent.
The 2012-2018 Investment Plan assumes a future of level funding in the face of what will likely be escalating need, and outlines two major policy shifts. Over time, the plan states, funding for homelessness intervention, or shelter, will be reduced in favor of housing, support and prevention.
There’s more. Despite, for example, the recent deep cuts in Olympia in funding for drug treatment, Seattle’s service providers will be held more accountable for producing results, as outlined by the plan’s five “investment principles.”
The most concerning of these principles emphasizes the requirement to enter into “good neighbor agreements” with local businesses and law enforcement. This puts human services providers in the difficult, perhaps impossible, position of having to account for their clients’ actions.
In their response to the plan, The Seattle Human Services Coalition raised a number of concerns. Will providers be held responsible for problems they can’t control? How do they pay for the additional time and work involved in controlling client behavior? Might having to function as police undermine staff/client relationships? Will service providers be punished when their good neighborhood relations are not reciprocated in kind?
Their memo concluded with a polite question. “As people who provide help to our neighbors dealing with the long-term challenges of abuse, racism, economic injustice, and disproportionality in healthcare and education, we often embrace and include people that others may wish to avoid or find disquieting.”
How then, they asked, can human service providers, who stand at the front lines of the war on the poor, “embrace all of our neighbors, including those who are better off,” and continue to partner with the city of Seattle?
It’s a very good question, and hsd has yet to provide answers.
A Disturbing Retreat
The city’s newfound enthusiasm for the policing of client behavior is even more troubling given that its “investment principles” lack any mention of Housing First and harm reduction.
Housing First has been the cornerstone of Seattle’s commitment to ending homelessness and is exemplified by desc’s 1811 Eastlake Building, which has provided housing for 75 chronic alcoholics since 2005, with no requirement or even expectation that individuals cease drinking.
Rigorous, peer-reviewed evaluations have demonstrated repeatedly that approaches based on harm reduction and Housing First can generate enormous criminal justice and public health cost savings, result in better individual outcomes, and increase public perceptions of safety.
The retreat of hsd from the principles of Housing First, coupled with the clear message that human service providers, as a condition of their funding, will be held responsible for client behavior and rewarded for producing good statistics, is alarming. It could easily lead agencies to abandon more troublesome clients — those with personality or behavioral problems, addictions or more than one diagnosis — to focus on clients whose issues appear easier to resolve.
What doesn’t get tracked doesn’t get reported. Those who don’t get served will disappear into the parallel institution of the criminalized and incarcerated or into the largely ignored but growing numbers of unsheltered homeless. Meanwhile, the providers who most successfully play the numbers game by selecting the “cream” of their intakes will support the attractive notion that solving homelessness mostly involves getting folks to “behave better” without the expense of adding additional resources and strategies.
hsd’s argument seems to be that by simply shifting how, when and to whom our inadequate resources are dedicated, we can have a significant impact on homelessness in Seattle. This presents homelessness as fixable without all the muss and fuss of fundamental systemic change.
Over the past two decades, there has been a direct relationship between the local economy and repression of the poor and homeless. During the Rhodes Project to develop Westlake Center and revitalize downtown, the city council enacted “sit/lie” ordinances that restrict use of public space. A downtown condo boom brought zero-tolerance for urban camping. The collapse of the credit market and the ensuing recession spawned an attempt to outlaw panhandling.
Now that the housing market is once again showing signs of life and all those new downtown high-rises are beginning to fill, city policy once again reflect the perceived preoccupations of downtown interests. Blaming service providers for the failures of social policy can only increase the problems we seek to remedy.