Union Gospel Mission pokes holes in Seattle homeless survey

Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission says there are many unanswered questions in the city’s homeless survey released on Friday.

“When we talk to people, most people say, ‘I’m from here, I grew up here,’” Jeff Lilley with the Union Gospel Mission told KIRO Radio’s Ron and Don Show. “But that’s not really the question. The question is, ‘Are people still coming?'”

Related: Survey results from Seattle-area homeless

“The rate of homelessness is climbing faster than the rate of us creating new housing opportunities,” Lilley said. “All Home and different nonprofits working on this are doing great work … but the numbers are going up faster than they can create new spaces.”

Lilley says the survey didn’t tell them anything that mission officials didn’t already know and he questions some of the results about who is living on Seattle’s streets.

“If you look at the study, it says a significant percentage (of homeless) is from out of state … when you add that, plus the amount of people that said they came because of the legal marijuana, you exceed the number of the growth of homelessness in King County,” Lilley said. “If you remove those two (factors), numbers of homelessness would actually decline.”

The number of people coming from out-of-state is 12.8 percent, according to the $100,000 survey Seattle commissioned.

Lilley also suspects that drug-use numbers are much higher than reported in the survey.

“If you are asking people off the street if they do drugs, the first answer is likely going to be: ‘No,'” Lilley said. “We know. We see addiction out there. It’s just a question if those numbers are accurate. When we were in the Jungle, we got a chance to talk to each individual personally — we were above 90 percent. That was not a random sampling, that was 100 percent of everybody in there we talked to. That was in a particular encampment, but we wouldn’t say that number is true in every encampment in the city.”

In November 2016, 1,050 people answered as follows:

No drug use: 45.3%

Alcohol: 29.4%

Methamphetamine: 17.2%

Heroin: 12.2%

Crack: 5.5%

Other drug (which includes marijuana): 20.6%

The city’s survey included encampments known to be sober camps, which Lilley argues can skew the numbers.

“There are some encampments that are completely clean and have rules and other encampments that are more like the wild, wild West,” Lilley said. “So which ones are you counting and how much does it affect the survey?”

Lilley said the survey was descent but lacked a certain experience to ask the right questions. He hopes city officials will conduct a similar survey on an annual basis —  like the homeless count — and use the results to create actions plans.

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