(Image: King County Regional Homelessness Authority)
Ending Seattle’s homelessness crisis with a regional approach is going to be easier said than done. The latest setback starts at the top. Tuesday, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority announced that CEO Marc Dones was stepping down after two years in the role as the organization was taking shape and finally getting off the ground:
The KCRHA team and our City and County partners are grateful and appreciative of the visionary work of CEO Marc Dones in starting up the King County Regional Homelessness Authority as a new regional agency. Mx. Dones has served as CEO since 2021, and was deeply involved in the design of the agency from its first inception in 2018. They have been a tireless advocate for racial equity and social justice, centering lived experience, increasing affordable housing, highlighting root causes of economic instability, and working together to iterate on new approaches to transforming the homelessness response system.
In the statement, KCRHA credits the departing CEO with leading the hiring of “100 people, focused on unsheltered homelessness” and “reimagined the Point-In-Time Count to include the stories of people affected. Dones is also credited with ending “13 long-standing encampments” and starting “the most successful Emergency Housing Voucher strategy in the nation.” KCRHA also developed “a more accurate count of the number of people experiencing homelessness so that we can match the scale of the solution to the scale of the problem,” the organization said.
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has grown into managing a more than $250 million annual budget since its formation before the pandemic in an effort to take on the ongoing homelessness crisis at a regional level. But a Dones-led five-year plan calling for more than a $11 billion investment in the authority raised serious questions about KCRHA’s future.
The new authority was hoped to better organize the various county and city services addressing homelessness in the area.
Deputy CEO Helen Howell will step in to lead the organization while a process begins to hire a replacement for Dones.
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I want ……one…No…..six billion dollars to solve this problem. And now I am leaving.
I believe resources (money) should be allocated towards homelessness. But it’s the dishonesty with homelessness that bothers me. The history has been; the more we spend, the worse the problems gets. Furthermore, the number of available housing units and the number of homeless individuals are out of balance by an order magnitude. I also question whether our local government should be in the housing business. Lastly, homelessness is a federal problem, and should be addressed by the federal government.
They should just build tiny homes for them with that 11B $. Amazon sells them for 8000$. Could get a lot of them with 11B$. Problem solved!
If Seattle didn’t spend what it now spends, the problem here would be exponentially worse. Collectively our public and nonprofit programs (flawed as they surely are) house tens of thousands of people who would otherwise be on the street and in your face. I agree that what we really need is a Marshall Plan for housing, mental health and addiction treatment. But that fact doesn’t excuse localities from doing what they can in the meantime.
We spend on agencies that ignore the real issue, drug abuse and mental health crisis. We spend on “harm reduction strategies” that are all harm and no reduction. We spend nothing on victims of drug addicts violence recovery. We enable felonies to happen and addicts to die on the street.
We need a full reboot of our focus. Any solution that ignores drug addiction is no solution at all. Very likely making the issue worse.
We don’t spend anywhere near enough to solve the problem. Compound that with the GOP holding social services hostage every time there’s a major election cycle pending and this is the outcome we deserve for enabling them. Trickle down baby!
For nearly 50 years, our idiotic solution to drug addiction was to throw them in jail, meaning they now have an addiction problem AND a criminal record. Again, this is the outcome we deserve for that.
Talk to Bruce Harrell, who is directly responsible for SPD and Ann Davison, our “tough on crime Trump republican” city attorney. They were supposed to be something of a “conservative voice of reason”, which yes is an oxymoron.
No, we just need to fully fund the already proven solutions that are instead watered down and used as political pawns.
“Any solution that ignores drug addiction is no solution at all. Very likely making the issue worse.”
That statement is one absolute diamond of truth in your post – but it seems to be surrounded in advocacy for policies that very much ignore the truth behind drug addiction, treating it as a criminal act instead of a health crisis, making this statement depressingly ironic.
Dude was an utter failure and waste of city money and time.
The ‘5 year plan’ is a kicker. It’s as if no one who was here during the ‘10 year plan to end homelessness’ is still around. Except for those without housing.