Seattle councilmember seeks to keep funding in place for City Hall homeless shelter

As Seattle councilmembers continue to deliberate on the city’s 2021 budget, Council President Lorena Gonzalez is pushing for what she sees as a crucial addition: An overnight homeless shelter in City Hall.

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Seattle City Hall has housed a pair of overnight shelter spaces for roughly 160 people since 2018. In the current 2021 budget proposal councilmembers are weighing, though, funding for that shelter space is not included, due to its current operator — the Salvation Army — consolidating its shelter operations at a new SoDo site.

It’s Gonzalez’s intention to include the shelter space in the 2021 budget regardless, in hopes of finding a new service provider to manage it next year.

“I understand that the motivation for this budget reduction is (the Human Services Department’s) belief that they will be unable to identify a provider to operate the shelter. But City Hall is The People’s Building and a shelter at City Hall is living our values,” she said Friday.

My office will continue to work with Council Central Staff, service providers and HSD, to identify whether there is any possibility of identifying an interested operator for this additional shelter capacity.

— Council President M. Lorena González (Seattle) (@CMLGonzalez) October 30, 2020

In the event that the city fails to find a new provider despite including the City Hall shelter space in the 2021 budget, Gonzalez notes that the money set aside for it can still be used to make the building a “flexible shelter space to provide additional emergency shelter beds during cold weather events.”

Mayor Jenny Durkan’s proposed 2021 budget includes support for roughly 2,300 shelter spaces to house the city’s homeless, encompassing overnight beds, enhanced spaces, sanctioned encampments, leased hotel units, and tiny homes. During the last “point in time” count over the summer, just over 8,100 homeless individuals were observed in Seattle alone, totaling over 11,700 across all of King County.

This comes while many are expressing concerns over a perceived rise in homeless encampments in parks, not long after Seattle councilmembers effectively cut funding for the city’s Navigation Team in August.

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The Navigation Team specializes in homeless outreach, aiding in the clearance of these encampments and attempting to redirect them to open shelter spaces. It came under criticism earlier in 2020, when councilmembers grilled leaders from the Navigation Team over their clearance of homeless camps, pointing to low rates of accepted offers of shelter (around 24 percent according to data presented by the Human Services Department).

Councilmembers and the mayor’s office eventually came to an agreement on a scaled-back version of the Navigation Team in October, primarily to manage outreach efforts for the remainder of 2020 while they negotiate over the team’s funding in the 2021 budget.

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