A voice from the streets about how to solve homelessness

In his position as president of Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission, Jeff Lilley has dealt with homelessness on a different level than most. On top of that, he’s watched the tactics used at the city level and the plans being made to solve the issue locally.

So how does Lilley think Seattle is doing with the local homeless issue?

“I think right now they are scratching their heads and trying some new things,” he said. “There is some stuff that is coming out in the future and we have been in conversations with them about other strategies. I think they are realizing that some of their strategies, or just lack thereof, have not been working.”

Lilley said that the area’s effort to end homelessness over the past decade wasn’t as big a failure as many critics would argue. Rather, many have been helped. The problem, however, is outpacing any local efforts.

“We want to simply build a program, throw some money at it and solve the problem,” he said. “But the reality is that if it’s my son, your brother, your dad, whoever it might be that is facing one of the challenges that put somebody into homelessness, it is a complicated issue and requires almost a customized approach to help that individual. It requires more people to get involved in that person’s life and get messy with them. We say at the mission that homelessness is not a resource issue, it’s a relationship issue.”

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And, therefore, blanket approaches, according to Lilley, aren’t likely to work. In his opinion, that includes programs such as tent cities, RV lots and safe injection sites for addicts.

“I think most people know that (tent cities and RV lots) don’t work,” he said. “When you look at homelessness in general, there’s two big slices that we look at. (The first) slice of those individuals are on hard economic times. Those individuals can pretty much move toward services, and they’re able to navigate that system and the system is designed to help people get out of homelessness.”

And that system generally works for that group.

“There are other individuals that tend to isolate more; they tend to not move toward those solutions,” Lilley said. “They are going to be a little more complicated, so we require more from them and if they are not capable to navigate that — whether that’s from their own motivation, a mental health challenge or maybe an addiction — then it becomes the problem that is most visible for us.”

“Visible” meaning the signs of homelessness that Seattleites and others in the region are familiar with.

“When we are talking about those individuals that we see unsheltered camping alongside the freeway then we are talking about a different population with a different set of issues,” he explained.

Despite what some may argue, Lilley also notes that Seattle and Washington’s policies and laws aren’t as much of a major attraction to homeless individuals as some suspect. That doesn’t mean that laws such as legal marijuana don’t attract people to the state, or programs to house and feed people. But it doesn’t speak to the majority of people that he deals with.

“In general, when we talk to individuals on the street, the vast majority are from here,” Lilley said. “I’ll be out underneath the freeway and I’ll ask somebody, ‘What are you doing here? Where’s home?’ And they will literally point and say ‘I grew up two miles from here,’ and ‘my brother still lives here and he’ll have me for Thanksgiving or Christmas.’”

“So it makes sense to me that the reason most individuals are here is that they are close to family,” he said. “Does that mean that nobody’s coming? No. We have people that come in and say ‘here’s a place that is providing housing,’ and they come to get in line for that.”

As for safe-injection sites, he notes they are basically designed to ensure that people don’t overdose and bring down opiate death numbers. And people are paying attention to the issue because opiate addiction and death statistics are now greater than traffic deaths, he said. In that logic, Lilley puts it this way:

“What this is tantamount to doing is to stop and say, If we have somebody who has a heroin addiction, we make sure they don’t die.’ We’re OK that they suffer with that addiction all along as long as they don’t die. This is like a car going off a cliff and it can roll and tumble all the way to the bottom, and as long as the person doesn’t die at the bottom, we are OK with that. The fact that they suffered all along or went off the cliff isn’t as much of a concern, as long as they don’t die at the bottom.”

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