HOPE Team 2021 shelter referrals by month and shelter type (Image: HSD)
As it wraps up business and winds down its term in the mayor’s office, the Durkan administration is touting a new report showing what officials say is evidence the city’s homelessness outreach and “shelter surge” is successfully moving people off the street amid the greatest demand recorded since the city began tracking the data in 2018.
“The HOPE Team has made tremendous strides standing up this new model and approach to supporting those living unsheltered in Seattle,” Tess Colby, interim deputy director of the Human Services Department, writes in the report. “Their collaborative efforts with outreach and shelter providers, City departments and community, have resulted in hundreds of people moving from encampments to safer spaces and on a pathway to ending their experience of homelessness. ”
The report comes as Seattle voters are set to decide in November on Charter Amendment 29, the Compassion Seattle initiative that would change the city charter through at least 2027 in a five-year burst requiring Seattle to provide 2,000 housing units within one year, ease regulations for creating new housing, and guarantee 12% of the city’s general fund for homelessness and human services. It would also force the city to crack down on encampments by requiring sweeps and clearances of public spaces once the housing efforts and services are in place.
The new Human Services Department “Performance Outcomes” report for the 2021 April, May, and June period, below, says the city’s eight-person HOPE Team “referred the most individuals to shelter and had the most confirmed enrollments into shelter ever recorded by City efforts.”
In Q2, the HOPE Team made 432 referrals to shelter, the most recorded by HSD since tracking of this data began in Q4 2018. This was a 132% increase over the number of Q1 2021 referrals, and they were made based on 1,097 shelter recommendations from 17 provider partners.
The HOPE Team records also indicate that the vast majority of referrals where race was recorded were for People of Color — “For referrals where data on race was collected (89% of Q2 referrals), 76% of referrals were to BIPOC individuals experiencing homelessness who are disproportionally represented in the City’s homeless population.”
According to the HSD report, the 132% over the first three months of the year was boosted by a simple factor — more space. Seattle’s ongoing “shelter surge” includes leasing rooms in two downtown hotels. “The increase in recommendations and referrals reflects the availability of the new hotel-based shelters that opened at the end of Q1,” HSD reports. “Of these referrals, 95% were to 24/7 enhanced shelter spaces or tiny houses.”
Another factor? The Homelessness Outreach and Provider Ecosystem (HOPE) Team has been part of the clearances of encampments across the city and on Capitol Hill as it is tasked with coordinating efforts to communicate with people living in encampments before the spaces are swept. The city requires “every individual at an encampment prioritized for removal by a property-owning department (I.e., Seattle Parks & Recreation, Seattle Department of Transportation, Seattle City Light, etc.) receives an offer of shelter.”
This winter and spring, Capitol Hill saw a string of city sweeps of encampments in spaces including Cal Anderson, Williams Place Park, and Broadway Hill Park. In the Broadway Hill clearance in May, Seattle Parks and the Human Services Department say two people living in the park were referred to shelter at the Executive Hotel Pacific, one of the city-leased locations in the effort to move more people out of camps as COVID-19 slowed. The city said five others “voluntarily relocated out of the park.”
In July, Capitol Hill’s Tashkent Park was cleared leaving many camp items behind with a parks representative telling CHS outreach staff “reported that those who were residing onsite opted to take their belongings that they wanted as they moved into shelter.” The rep said the HOPE team visited the park and “indicated that those who were residing at this park said that the remaining belongings were no longer wanted.”
The report comes as the city’s outreach team’s priorities have shifted away from the Navigation Team approach. HSD, it says, “no longer leads encampment trash and debris mitigation efforts or encampment removal operations.”
Encampments in the right of way, parks, and sidewalks are now prioritized by the departments that own or are responsible for the impacted property. The HOPE Team supports their work by coordinating outreach and shelter referrals at their prioritized locations, with the goal of helping all those residing onsite into safer shelter spaces.
It also comes as city leaders have hoped to shift more homelessness resources — and spending — to a regional approach. In 2022, outreach contracts will begin shifting to the King County Regional Homeless Authority.
The report also comes as voters prepare for the Compassion Seattle in November. If passed, the initiative would require the creation of 2,000 shelter spaces within a year, budget 12% of the city’s general fund for homelessness and human services, and require public spaces like parks and sidewalks to be free of encampments. The amendment would be in place until the end of 2027 at which time it could be updated or scrapped.
Seattle’s candidates to replace Jenny Durkan in the mayor’s office disagree on the proposal. Bruce Harrell said he backed the initiative. “In Compassion Seattle, I’m pleased to see broad agreement between leading human service providers, advocates for the unsheltered, and local business leaders on a path forward,” Harrell told CHS. Lorena González said she opposes the charter amendment because “it is an unfunded mandate that does not identify a sustainable progressive revenue source.” “I oppose cuts to essential city services and support progressive revenue measures to build more housing,” González said. Ballots for the November 2nd election will begin to be mailed out in mid-September.
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For some scale here, there was a “point in time” count in 2020 of 5,578 unsheltered people in king county.
https://kingcounty.gov/elected/executive/constantine/news/release/2020/July/01-homeless-count.aspx
Compassion Seattle may just be slightly more effective than the proposed Lucille Bluth charter that consists of:
Classy move putting Compassion Seattle in quotes in the ‘article’ title. It’s nothing but passive aggressive editorial commentary straight out of the Sawant playbook.
In fairness, that could simply be a limitation of the CMS vs a commentary. I know I struggle with ways to indicate titles on platforms where you can’t italicize things. Not sure if there’s a style guide in these cases or it’s a free for all.
Attributing it to the Sawant playbook is ultra classy as well.
Your Jump to Conclusions Mat™ must not be functioning very well.
If CHS was trying to be “passive aggressive”, it would have been ‘Compassion’ Seattle.
What does a “referral” actually mean? Of those referrals, how many homeless people actually get to the shelter and avail themselves of services? How long do they stay there, and what is the recidivism rate back to homelessness? Is anyone actually tracking these outcomes? If not, a “referraL” may or may not be considered progress.
A referral can mean many different things, depending on what is avaliable. As FRO said below, if there’s nothing avaliable just the HOPE interacting with an individual is considered a successful “encounter” in terms of how they measure outcomes. What a referral often means is the offer of a mat on the floor of a group shelter somewhere, in by 7pm and out by 6am, with no storage for more then a backpack and maybe another bag. Oh, and no pets, couples and often no substance use. Realistically, thats not an option that people find any better then living outside. That’s not even getting into how dangerous these shelters can be, with theft, assaults, and sexual assaults being not uncommon especially for the most vulnerable folks like women, LGBTQ people and those with a disability. It can be different when folks are offered a space in a tiny homes community or permanent supportive housing, but the spaces at sites like that are very limited with extremely high bars for entry and long waiting lists with often burdensome application processes. I work at a non-profit that in the international district that serves allot of people living unhoused so I’ve seen the system in action for the last 3 plus years. The HOPE team is the NAV team “rebranded”, they haven’t made shelter access any better from what I can see, and they are the gatekeepers to shelter access for the majority of shelter options in the city.
You fail to mention the most recent option of hotel rooms for referrals. I’m not sure of the numbers, but there are a lot of them in at least two hotels, and their availability has made a significant dent in the acceptance rate when referrals are offered.
It is often claimed, as you do, that basic (overnight) shelters are “dangerous” as far as crime goes. Is there any actual data to backup this assertion?
The number of hotel rooms available is not nearly enough, but anything helps. It’s hard to tell exactly how many hotel rooms King County currently has for homeless, but I think it’s around 800. A recent Seattle Times article talks about potentially having up to 1,600 room by 2022. Compare this to the 2020 homeless count of nearly 12,000 people and the current estimate of 10,500 housing units needed to get everyone off the streets.
What doesn’t help are the people fighting and suing to disallow hotels to be converted to shelters because they are entitled, heartless idiots that would rather people continue to live on the streets. There’s also city governments that are actively banning new shelters in their cities or even criminalizing homelessness. Because one thing that encourages people to escape rock bottom is the threat of criminal penalties, right?
In the end, hotels are not solutions to the homeless crisis, but getting people off the streets should be a bare minimum for a civilized society. We still need to address the reasons why people are on the streets, including mental illness and drug addiction, but the problems go well beyond that.
The fact that people live outside should be enough to convince you that the shelters are inadequate and unsafe. Use your critical thinking skills for a minute: what would cause you (or anyone else) to sleep outside instead of taking accepting a (albeit temporary) roof over your head.
I know it goes against your beliefs that tens of thousands of human beings in King County are choosing to be homeless, but living outside on the streets is a horrific experience that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.
So shelters must be pretty bad or woefully inadequate for over 11,000 people to continue to live out in the elements. HarmReductionist has a pretty good description of why our current shelter system is only slightly better than doing absolutely nothing.
“The city requires “every individual at an encampment prioritized for removal by a property-owning department (I.e., Seattle Parks & Recreation, Seattle Department of Transportation, Seattle City Light, etc.) receives an offer of shelter.” – if only this actually happened. Referring agencies and HSD’s HOPE Team will verify that they cannot offer what isn’t there. There is a fairly up to date list of beds open that they all can access so at least they know what they are getting into.
It’s when the city can address all the single isolated homeless and the people who are leaving encampments and refusing services that lasting change will happen. Judging the city’s response during this pandemic, while services we’re shut down, is sad and misleading. the revolving door will continue as it always has.