Seattle City Councilmember wants millions more to fight homelessness

Will an additional $5 million on top of the $35 million in Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s proposed budget for homeless services make a bigger dent in the number of people on the streets?

Seattle City Councilmember Sally Bagshaw hopes that additional money will help her launch a plan to get 1,000 people off the street next year. Last year’s One Night Count revealed 3,123 county-wide live on the streets without permanent shelter.

“The plan is to work with our allies to find spaces for 1,000 people who are on our streets right now. We’ve been chipping around the edges and my goal is to really dive into this and find spaces citywide and King County-wide for 1,000 people this year,” Bagshaw explained in an appearance on KIRO Radio’s Jason Rantz Show.

Bagshaw’s plan includes partnering with experienced services to potentially make use of city buildings and also partnering with faith-based organizations and private parties to find additional space for the homeless.

“Many of the churches have said to me, ‘We would like to take a handful but don’t count on us to do it all.’ I get that. So I’ve reached out and talked to some partners in the private sector saying, would you provide us some land, would you be willing to help take on 30 people?

“Thirty is kind of a magic number in terms of you can create a good community, you can provide management and it’s not too oppressive for a group to either bring together or provide the case management or get the neighborhood buy-in,” said Bagshaw.

She also is looking at what has worked in other cities and thinks small groups of tiny houses could be another possibility.

“They’re modular. You can bring them in. You can build them in a weekend. They look decent. You can put some trees around them and you can put 30 people in an area where we didn’t have them before,” said Bagshaw. “If we start thinking about all of these opportunities citywide, including on government property, there are ways that we can do this.”

Creative solutions and expansion of ideas and methods that are already working are really what Bagshaw wants to support.

“The City can help by making resources available for expanded or creative new opportunities. Details of each situation would depend both on the organizations’ ability to offer space, what services they are willing and interested in providing, and the length of time they are willing to do it. To encourage new ideas, the City would accept proposals and make payments based on a formula and outcomes,” she writes in her blog about her “From Streets to Shelter” plan.

Rantz said the plan sounds good to him, but he wonders if it would have to be more of a regional effort.

“I think it’s something that is worth actually implementing and seeing what some of the long-term effects that it can actually have on homelessness, but isn’t the dirty truth about all of this that the real game changer is getting every single community in the state on board, that we need the help of a Bellevue, of an Everett, of a Tacoma to really tackle this problem, because Seattle alone is not going to be able to do that.”

Bagshaw agrees and says there is good news on that front.

“I have talked with a number of the political leaders in Bellevue and said this is something I’m thinking about. Would you join in? They have said yes, you get something started, you help us do a toolkit, we will be there with you to really help make this happen. I’ve talked with Dow, of course, and Fred Jarrett in the KC executive office. We need to have a regional partnership. Seattle can’t do this alone.”