XPost: seattle.politics, alt.politics.liberalism, sac.politics
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From: byker@do~rag.net
"Leroy N. Soetoro" wrote in message
news:XnsA8EF7A1D492A16F089P2473@0.0.0.1...
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/05/22/seattle-created-its-homelessness-crisis-now-its-trying-to-make-it-worse.html
Seattle never learns. The city says it has a homelessness problem that is getting out of control and something needs to be done about it. But Seattle’s ultra-liberal politicians are making things worse by insisting
on more bloated government to solve a problem bloated government created.
"Just about everybody who works on homelessness—from Secretary Carson to liberal advocates in Seattle—supports a policy known as 'housing first.' The idea is that you immediately move people off the streets into housing, then
get to work on other issues, like drug addiction. But in a market as
expensive as Seattle, that would be an immensely difficult and costly undertaking. There simply is not a lot of vacant property to house the homeless. What does seem clear is that Seattle, a quintessential
21st-century boomtown, offers a stark warning about what our society could
look like as it is increasingly dominated by the tech economy. It also shows what happens when social support organizations and local governments decide
not to try to end homelessness, but rather attempt sympathetically to
'contain' it. Ultimately, Daniel Malone says, we need to decide whether
we're okay 'living in this third-world society where there's a whole lot of affluence, and there's a lot of visible, Mumbai-like slums right in our midst.'" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Homeless in Seattle
ETHAN EPSTEIN
April 8, 2018 8:47 PM
The northern wall at the office of the Licton Springs Village on North Seattle's gritty Aurora Avenue features a poster containing a stark notice: "BOTULISM WARNING."
"A suspected WOUND BOTULISM case has been reported in King County. Health officials believe the case may be related injecting [sic] black tar heroin,"
it reads. "Injecting heroin that contains the bacteria that causes botulism
can cause serious infection and even death."
Of course, one might think that the flyer could simply warn that black tar heroin contains...black tar heroin. Heroin is an unusually dangerous drug—wickedly addictive and far more lethal to its abusers than cocaine or alcohol. But Licton Springs Village, a microcommunity of 30 tiny houses and
a couple of large dormitory tents—one that is officially sanctioned by the City of Seattle—takes a permissive view of drug abuse. It's a "low-barrier" community, meaning that people can use drugs freely here. Most homeless shelters and encampments demand residents live drug and alcohol free. But
here, clean needles are distributed to the residents to prevent the spread
of disease, and Narcan is available to resuscitate people who overdose.
Open since April 2017, on a formerly vacant lot squeezed between fast-food joints and low-budget motels, Licton Springs Village is home to nearly 70 homeless people who were "sleeping rough" until they moved in. The residents include several married couples who live together in simple, tiny homes—basically, wooden boxes 12 feet by 8 feet—donated by local groups. Children aren't allowed because of the open drug use. The village is
operated by local nonprofit SHARE/WHEEL, and the on-the-ground support staff are all formerly homeless themselves. Conditions are makeshift: There's a shower, but the toilets are all of the port-a-potty variety; there are no individual kitchens, but residents are eligible to eat once each day in the communal dining area.
Licton Springs Village, unique in many ways, exists to address a common and once again growing problem: American homelessness. The problem is
particularly acute on the West Coast. Here in Seattle, the homeless
population skyrocketed by 44 percent between 2015 and the end of 2017, mirroring the experience of other Pacific coast cities, notably those in the Bay Area, which is also experiencing a homelessness crisis of mammoth proportions. King County, home of Seattle, now boasts the third-largest homeless population in the country.
"We're in kind of a perverse competition with San Francisco," says Daniel Malone, the executive director of Downtown Emergency Service Center, an advocacy group in downtown Seattle, noting the extraordinary surge in
visible homelessness throughout his city. Tents abound, even downtown. It's hard to find a bridge that doesn't have people sleeping under it. Because of the growing number of people sleeping in cars, city leaders are moving to scuttle long-established parking restrictions.
The growth in the homeless population comes from all kinds of people experiencing homelessness; not just the chronically homeless, who are
usually severely mentally ill, but also people who not that long ago were gainfully employed and had fixed accommodations.
Nationwide, the homeless population is ticking up at about 1 percent a year. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development's most recent point-in-time count, 554,000 Americans were homeless, and the vast majority were sleeping outside. (The HUD census tries to assess how many Americans
are homeless on one given day.) The American homeless population is larger
than the populations of Miami, Pittsburgh, or Atlanta.
But growth is being driven by a surge in just a few areas, chiefly Seattle, Portland, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading authority on homelessness, points out that because those areas are experiencing such
rapid gains and the total population has increased by only 1 percent, other areas of the country are actually reducing their homeless populations.
Culhane says further that certain populations have been dealt with
effectively: Veteran homelessness has declined by about half in recent
years, he tells me, as HUD and Veterans Affairs have made addressing that particular population a priority.
But the broader numbers—and the simple experience of visiting San Francisco or Seattle these days—raise a couple of questions. Why are some of the country's most prominent cities seeing such a surge in homelessness? And why now, when the economy is booming, nowhere more so than in the Emerald City, which is drowning in Amazonian riches? The answer may provide a cautionary
tale about the perverse impacts of a hypercharged tech economy.
Tent cities in Seattle
There wasn't a job Bebe wouldn't do. Throughout the 1990s, the Seattleite worked as a bartender and a house cleaner. She worked in retail and in
delis. But in 2001, she was struck with a degenerative bone disease in her
leg and slowly lost her ability to work. The pain became unbearable and,
after years of taking painÂkillers, she turned to heroin. With her sole
source of income her disability check, not nearly generous enough to cover Seattle's sky-high rents, Bebe eventually became homeless.
Today, she tells me, sitting in the tiny home in Licton Springs Village that she shares with her husband Mike, she's a "heroin addict." She's not a happy person—she wishes she could work, she says, and she hates being an addict—but the tiny house is a marked improvement. Before the Village opened she and Mike "were sleeping under the freeway," she says. Now, at least, she has shelter.
Duane, a middle-aged Native American man originally from Arizona, agrees. "Being homeless sucks," he says. "It's not a fun life." Licton Springs
Village is a huge improvement. A gregarious man who worked on horse farms in Louisiana, Duane invited me into his small, extremely messy, tiny home,
which Duane's large frame dominates. I find a seat on the edge of the
cluttered bed. Before moving in here, he spent four months on the streets.
What went wrong? "I've been a drunk all my life," he tells me. "And I can't read or write." Duane is clear-eyed about the effect that homelessness could have on Seattle. "It's destroying the tourism industry," he tells me. "You think tourists want to visit downtown Seattle and see a bunch of homeless people?"
While tourism numbers have yet to fall in this picturesque city nestled on Puget Sound, it indeed was partially due to concerns like Duane's that
Licton Springs Village came to exist in the first place. For years, as Seattle's homeless population grew, unsanctioned tent cities began to pop
up. In a way, they demonstrated man's impressive capacity to impose order.
They were self-governing, and many did not allow drug or alcohol users. The local governments often assigned residents important tasks, like working security.
Charlie Johnson, who lived in a tent city shortly after becoming homeless a
few years back, said the tent city's governance model was a plus for him. Within a few weeks of moving in he was "in leadership, which was super
helpful for me, because [when I became homeless] I was despondent... Just
the fact that I had to be social, that there were people around" was beneficial. Johnson, a well-spoken middle-aged man, speaks to the diversity
of Seattle's homeless: A graduate of the University of Washington who has
lived abroad, he says simply that his own dysfunctions led him to "blow up
his life."
Greg Nickels, Seattle's mayor from 2002 to 2010, regularly cleared the unsanctioned encampments. (In a cheeky protest, one roving tent community dubbed itself "Nickelsville.") But Nickels lost reelection in a primary, and
as the homeless population continued to grow, the city began to rethink its approach to the problem.
In 2015, the city council voted to create Seattle's first three legally sanctioned encampments. The logic, according to a city press release, was
that "authorized encampments offer a safer alternative that can help
stabilize the person before transitioning indoors." They could be on either city or privately owned land. Three more were legalized in 2016. Each encampment is allowed to stay for 12 months, with the option to re-up for another 12. After two years, however, they must be dismantled or moved.
People found by the city of Seattle's "Navigation Team," which actively searches for homeless people to offer them services, would be funneled into
one of the encampments so long as there was room.
Barbara Poppe, who served as executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2014, initially opposed the move to legalize the encampments. They "were not providing basic human needs," she tells me, like electricity and plumbing.
In other words, they were barely superior to sleeping rough. Poppe also
feared that the setup of the encampments—the chain-link fences that surround them, in particular—was inherently "stigmatizing." Today, the fears over utilities have been allayed at least, as the tent cities all have
electricity hookups. But the chain-link fences remain.
Particularly controversial was the notion of legalizing a "low-barrier" community like Licton Springs Village. After all, homeless shelters and encampments are almost always contentious among their neighbors. One of the selling points shelters make to the broader community is that they will
insist that their residents be clean and sober. But Licton Springs Village turned this model on its head: "Our main goal is to be nonjudgmental and
just be cool as we can," says Charlie Johnson, the former tent city resident who now helps manage Licton Springs. "We just want to let people accept themselves, accept us. That's our main goal: to provide a safe, stable, relatively harmonious place." To that end, only violence or theft can get somebody evicted. The leadership does not attempt to push residents into treatment or, for that matter, encourage them to enter the labor force. Originally billed as a way station before people could transition into real housing, Licton Springs Village looks increasingly like a final destination.
Speak Out Seattle! (SOS), which bills itself as a "grassroots coalition of residents, business owners and neighborhood groups with members living and working in every district of Seattle," led the charge against the
controversial settlement. Last year, the group sent a fiery letter to then-mayor Ed Murray, who had backed Licton Springs Village's establishment. SOS said it had "hoped to hear that the city would be extending extra
services to the area to protect it from any adverse consequences of moving 50-70 people with active addiction, mental illness, behavior problems and criminal histories into an approximately 5,000-square-foot lot adjacent to a family neighborhood." This was not the case, however: "This 'make it up as
we go' approach is a recipe for disaster and a significantly modified
proposal is required," the group charged.
Barbara Poppe, on the other hand, says there might be a use for such places. For one, if you insist on sobriety, "you keep out the neediest people," she says. Also, a lot of people: According to HUD data, a third of the homeless population are serious substances abusers. (When I asked experts whether the opioid epidemic was having an appreciable effect on homelessness, they said yes—but only anecdotally. Little academic research has been done on the topic.)
Moreover, if you don't allow addicts, you "eject people back into the neighborhood," Poppe points out. In a way, places like Licton Springs
Village, therefore, reduce neighborhood annoyances. Think of it as a form of containment. Charlie Johnson, for his part, says the success of the
settlement has allayed many concerns that neighbors had beforehand.
The Paradox of Prosperity
Marty Hartman, executive director of Mary's Place, a nonprofit that helps families and children facing homelessness, mostly by operating its own shelters, has been fighting homelessness for 18 years.
She says something has gone terribly wrong in Seattle. "For the first decade [at] Mary's Place, we never saw children. We were open to having children,
but very rarely did we see a mom and a baby. Whereas in 2009, we saw a huge surge in the numbers of moms with children seeking services and a place to stay," she says. That, perhaps, is intuitive: The United States was hit by a
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