Seattle’s homelessness czar lays out next steps for addressing the crisis

Next week, the City of Seattle will roll out a new team to deal with what Seattle homelessness czar George Scarola calls “street disorder.”

The team of eight people — a mix of police officers and outreach workers -– will be responsible for dealing with a specific aspect of the city’s homeless crisis. That basically means assisting people who sleep and camp on sidewalks.

It won’t be a temporary ad hoc committee, Scarola notes.

Related: Meet George Scarola, Seattle’s homelessness czar

“(They are) people who are going to go and say, ‘here’s the plan for you, we either find you shelter quickly, or you will not come back here,” Scarola said. “And they will have a police officer next to them helping spell that out.”

But there’s one little problem with the plan so far, Scarola said. It’s really only half of a plan. The other half Seattle is rushing to put together. In short, the city needs 24/7 homeless shelters with the capacity to take on the problem.

“The shelter providers would be the first to want to do this — turn into 24/7 where you don’t ask someone to leave in the morning,” Scarola said. But, “They are so crowded they don’t have room to do it.”

So Seattle can send outreach teams, but where are homeless people to go? Scarola did not clarify what the plan for the team was without any 24/7 shelters available.

Seattle homelessness

The Downtown Seattle Association, Seattle Metro Chamber, Visit Seattle and Alliance for Pioneer Square hosted a panel of homelessness experts. It was moderated by KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross, and featured Barbara Poppe, Mark Putnam, and Scarola. Poppe is a consultant who was hired by the city assess what it was doing wrong or right on the homelessness issue. Putnam is the director of All Home, a non-profit homeless organization. And Scarola, Seattle homelessness czar, is charged with leading programs to solve the crisis.

The conversation focused on what has been keeping Seattle from addressing the problem, and what it needs to do. Scarola said there are more than 300 homeless encampments throughout the city.

“The reason you see people moving and coming back is because we don’t have the police power to enforce … in 300 different encampments all over the city,” he said. “Some are small and some are large.”

That’s the reason for the new outreach team. The issue of right of way and areas the public does not commonly use is another issue.

“But those sidewalks downtown, people need to move,” Scarola said, calling it “unacceptable.”

Currently, Seattle is in the midst of its Bridging the Gap plan, which is exactly what it sounds like — bridging the gap between now and its ultimate plan for the Seattle homelessness crisis. That plan, Pathways Home, has a lot of moving parts. Part of it will be getting 24/7 shelters up and running.

Homeless shelters

Shelters operating in Seattle today, Scarola notes, have barriers and are not “user-friendly.”

Seattle surveyed about 1,000 homeless individuals and from that learned that about 90 percent of people living outside would prefer to stay in a shelter.

“Why are some people saying they would prefer to be on the street?” Scarola said. “Because the shelter system … it’s not very user-friendly. Most shelters in this town you cannot bring your partner or friend, you can’t bring your dog. You can’t bring more than a small amount of possessions.”

That will change over the next couple of years as Pathways Home comes online.

“This is the year it starts,” Scarola said. “Next year it really comes into full play, which will be contracted to social services – the goal will not be ‘how many people did we provide shelter to?’ It’s ‘how many people did we get into stable permanent housing?’ That will be the outcome we measure.”

It will require service providers to work “together in a way they’ve never been asked to do,” Scarola said. Ross stepped in and clarified that it sound like some non-profits will be cut off from city funding — the ones that aren’t working — and some for-profit companies will need to step in and help out.

Scarola said, yes, that’s basically it.

“If there was one request of the business community, it’s to help identify space that is livable, under shelter 24/7 space that we can stand up in a month or two,” he said.

“I think it will take a year to see a significant shrinkage of the number of people living on the street, and hopefully within two years a very significant shrinkage,” he said.

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