What are we supposed to do?
Last April, homeless people and friends packed a large room at city hall to tell the Committee to End Homelessness in King County (CEHKC) that it is on the wrong track.
We were tired of being told that efforts to end homelessness are working when the fact is that they’re not. Since 2006, the first full year of the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, the numbers of unsheltered homeless people in Seattle has risen by 17 percent. The numbers of people in shelter have gone up by 7 percent.
About 150 people went to the quarterly governing board meeting of CEHKC to tell the lead policymakers on this issue to rethink its losing strategy. We said that there are more important things than collecting good data. We said the committee needs to listen to homeless people and support our efforts to create communities of survival like Nickelsville.
We said that human services alone could never end homelessness, and that we need CEHKC to be an ally in the fight for economic justice.
The board listened in respectful silence. And it has been silent ever since.
Meanwhile, the city’s new homeless services plan, finalized last month, sidesteps the issue of rising numbers of people on the street to pretend that we can withdraw funding from shelters without hurting anyone.
It imposes conditions for funding on human service providers that inexpensive, self-managed shelters like SHARE will find impossible to meet, and it places housing and shelter providers in the position of policing the behavior of the mentally ill and addicted.
Providers told the city loud and clear that this would create the unintended consequence of abandoning the hardest to serve. The city didn’t listen.
The mayor’s office has submitted an ordinance to city council regarding homeless encampments on public and private property that, if passed, would immediately make Nickelsville’s current location illegal. The conditions the proposal imposes would make nearly any public encampment impossible. We told them this. They didn’t listen.
A task force of homeless advocates concerned with the city’s efforts to end outdoor meals programs recently broke with the city to arrive at an independent set of recommendations. Why didn’t the task force work with Seattle Human Services to arrive at a mutual plan? Because advocates felt the city wasn’t listening. And the city takes its cues on homeless issues from the silent CEHKC.
Are you sensing a theme? On July 25, the CEHKC’s governing board will convene again for its quarterly meeting. We will again spend the prior night — July 24 — sleeping out in a downtown park, in solidarity with the nearly 3,000 people counted outside this year after the shelters were full.
The next morning, we’re going to the governing board meeting but we’re not going inside. We’ll sit outside, in silence. We’ll start talking when they start listening.
For more information, email [email protected]. On Facebook, look for Occupy CEHKC.