Homeless people choosing streets over shelters is a problem, civil rights attorney says

Update:

Mayor Ed Murray on Tuesday launched a service center modeled on the San Francisco Navigation Center, a dormitory-style living facility for Seattle’s homeless.

“Our strategy for helping people without shelter has to be broader than designating another site in the city to pitch a tent,” said Murray.

The new facility gives people a place to store their belongings, take a shower, do laundry, and work with round-the-clock case management and mental and behavioral health services. Serving up to 75 people at a time, the new center will cater to couples, people with pets and possessions. These were challenges noted within the city’s shelters.

The cost of the new facility is paid in part by state legislative funds ($600,000), a city donation earmarked for homelessness services ($600,000) and a fund to collect additional private donations.

Original story:

People choosing to live outside, rather than in a shelter, is something the director of the Public Defender Association says the City of Seattle should take seriously.

Lisa Daugaard told AM 770 KTTH’s Todd Herman that outreach workers are being told that people feel safer in places — like the city’s largest homeless encampment known as the “Jungle” — than they do in shelters.

“When people are making rational choices to live under those circumstances, you have a good indication that the alternative is not looking viable to them,” Daugaard said.

Related: WSDOT crews in constant tug-of-war with Seattle’s homeless

Herman says there could be several reasons people are opting out of shelters and that he’s heard that people began moving out of the Jungle after an initial deadline — now rescinded — was placed on the people living there. Daugaard says people have moved out, but not to better places.

“Now they’re living in more visible places, causing more difficulty for surrounding neighborhoods then where they were originally living,” she explained.

Of the people who moved out of the Jungle recently, Daugaard says a small number moved into a shelter. Most were dispersed to other areas.

But the debate shouldn’t be over the stand-alone issue of the Jungle, Daugaard says. If the city really wanted to clear out the stretch of greenbelt running along and under I-5 in South Seattle it could; but at the expense of efforts being made elsewhere in the city, she says.

There needs to be a housing-first effort in the city, and shelters shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss people looking for help, even if they have some kind of chemical dependency issue, she says. The rules at shelters are often too strict, which is why people end up being kicked out, leaving, or not going in the first place.

“If you put people in the Jungle in a shelter, they will get kicked out,” Daugaard says, adding that people living on the streets aren’t always playing by the same rules. “That is how people end up on the street in the first place.”

Ross: Is a tax to maintain Seattle’s homeless camps the right answer?

Follow @https://twitter.com/mynorthwest