Fixing Seattle’s homeless problem will take ‘patience’ and ‘consistency’

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray received plenty of grief for saying that city officials were “making this up” as they went along in terms of finding solutions to the region’s homeless problem. Lisa Daugaard, director of the Public Defender Association, told  KIRO Radio’s Ron and Don that there finally appears to be some semblance of consistency by city leaders.

The City of Seattle has its first homelessness czar, plenty of money, and attention from the state to attack an issue that’s been deemed a state of emergency by the mayor. Daugaard, who is also project manager for Seattle’s LEAD diversion program, explained her organization’s stance on moving forward and about the open letter she and other advocates directed at the city council and Mayor Murray that urges them to pass more protections for people living in encampments.

Related: Running out of room to hide Seattle’s inability to fix homelessness

Among other things, the letter asks to strike an appropriate balance between the people who want to live outdoors and legitimate public health concerns. Daugaard said that lessons from the LEAD program, such as coordination between police, case managers, prosecutors and community leaders to make long-term strategies for individuals have proven to work.

“It takes patience and it takes exposure and it takes consistency,” she said. “Way too often what we do is like popcorn: this month this is the plan, next month we have another plan. Nothing is going to work if you change your basic orientation every 60 days.”

The open letter was published a day before Mayor Murray’s Aug. 25 op-ed that discussed the current challenges and explaining the importance of George Scarola, who was hired last week to the cabinet-level position of Director of Homelessness.

Daugaard said she’s excited to work with Scarola and his most important tasks are to not create any “counter-productive measures” that make it harder to help and engage people, and also to not relocate people who feel safe outdoors, unless there is a specific place the city can direct them to live.

Daugaard says there is a lot of empirical evidence that the sweeps are harmful, pointing to a Seattle Times report that described it as a “flawed” system. She says a sense of “home” is crucial.

“When you think about what is a home, obviously it’s really nice to have a comfortable place, it’s nice to have a place that has heat and air conditioning, but the bottom line is it’s a place that you know you have the expectation of returning to every night,” she said. “When we take that away from people so other people don’t know where to find them, they don’t know where they’re going to be able to come back to, it’s incredibly destabilizing and traumatizing. It also interrupts supportive relationships that can begin to form with outreach workers and case managers. When we scatter people, you start over and I cannot stress enough how counterproductive that is if we really want people not to be living outside, which should be all of our goal.”

What is the goal?

Ron Upshaw questioned the overall goal. He said there is an underlying concern that taxpayers are throwing $50 million at a problem that sometimes feels like it’s rewarding bad behavior. He asked Daugaard whether it’s time to change that mindset.

“I don’t know if that’s a mindset that needs to change, I think that I would suggest that we frame in terms of what’s effective,” Daugaard responded. “I really want to stress that it’s the position of my organization — I think it’s the position of everybody who signed that open letter — that nobody should be living outside and that should be our common ground. People should not be living in encampments. It is at a crisis level … and really the only question that we should be challenging one another with is how to get there. What actually works? To the extent that you’re saying that current methods are not effective, I actually think that’s something everyone can agree on.”

But, Ron asked, might the solutions come more easily if the $50 million were taken out of the government’s hands.

“Just taking money out of the hands of government is certainly not a recipe for solving anything, per se,” she responded. “We know what works with people who are profoundly poor, who suffer from mental illness, who suffer from substance-use disorder, we know how to effectively engage those folks.

“We are, however, facing the hard, cold reality that we do not have places to live for all the folks who are living outside right now. So, that needs to change, and until it changes we need to have a rational policy for how we’re going to engage people who are left outside, frankly, as a product of our policies.”

Encampments need dumpsters, porta-potties

Don O’Neill also questioned the “maid-service-like” way that the city sweeps the encampments. He said he’s watched as the city pops in, people move, only to make another mess once the clean-up crews are gone.

Daugaard’s said that some individuals will need to continue to live outside for “some period of time” and that, until the city gets systems properly reorganized, that the city should “deliver hygiene services,” such as access to water, dumpsters, and porta-potties, to Seattle’s encampments.

“I think there’s been a lot of ping pong about should you or shouldn’t you; is that enabling,” she said. “For the time being, some people are going to be staying outside and it should be unacceptable to all of us that that’s happening without basic hygiene. We provide it to other residents of the city, we should provide it to people who have to live outside. I think if we close ranks around that basic principle, and stop fighting about it, I’m certain city departments can do that in a way that’s efficient and humane.”

Don, however, said some encampments are providing these services and they either aren’t used or are trashed.

“I’ve also attended sports events where people coming out of the stadium use alleys as restrooms but that doesn’t mean that it’s typical among people and that’s not OK, obviously,” she responded.

“We’re not talking about sports stadiums. We’re talking about people who are living outdoors,” Don retorted.

“We have to be real honest, though, about what’s going on out there,” he added. “And what’s going on out there is a lot of people can’t clean up after themselves because they’re high on heroin and when you’re high on heroin, you’re just kind of gone for six or seven days straight and you don’t know what’ s going on. I think something we can all agree upon is there is a heroin epidemic in this city and it is certainly pushing the homeless problem.”

Daugaard said 80 percent of the homeless people who are engaged in the LEAD program see improvements to their lives. She says putting those types of solutions to scale would lead to better outcomes.

“That said, we don’t have a particularly good housing strategy for people who are active drug users,” she said. “So if we’re going to kick people out of housing and shelters while they’re using drugs, they are going to be living outside, so that’s a policy we have urged be reconsidered. It is better to house people first and then they are better positioned to engage their substance-use issues. As of now, we don’t have a public policy that really supports that.”

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