- Kelly O
- A kitchen and pantry at Nickelsville, a homeless encampment forced to leave its West Seattle location last year.
Mayor Ed Murray says he’ll propose a new law next month allowing homeless encampments on a “limited number of unused, vacant lots on private and public land in non-residential areas… not including city parks.”
The announcement comes as homelessness is on the rise in Seattle and encampments have been driven to increasingly dangerous parts of the city. Yesterday, a mayor’s task force recommended allowing at least seven camps on public and private land, housing as many as 100 people each, but Murray’s office won’t say how many he’ll allow. (Camps are currently only allowed with a temporary permit or on church property.)
We won’t know all the specifics until Murray sends the bill down to the council, but in a written response to the task force he says service providers who manage the camps should receive some city funding to offset their costs, and to helpus collect demographic data on who stays in the camps. Murray also wants two case managers assigned to offer outreach to people living in encampments, Murray says.
Council Member Nick Licata told The Stranger this fall he planned to resurrect a bill allowing encampments, which failed 5-4 last year. But he put it off when the mayor called together this task force. With Council Member Kshama Sawant replacing Council Member Richard Conlin and this recommendation from the mayor, it’s likely Licata could have the votes for a new encampment bill.
But don’t expect too much urgency. City leaders are about to head out on a two week break. Then, Licata says he may start “walking the halls” to count the votes.
Murray has also promised to find and fund 150 new shelter beds—15 of them for young adults—early next year, some through expansion of current shelters and others at new shelter sites. He’ll direct the city’s human services department to create a “toolkit” for organizations that want to offer their spaces as shelters or homeless camps and will create a fund to help those groups (both recommendations of the task force).
While Murray says he’ll look at the city’s “surplus” properties, he doesn’t support one of the task force’s ideas for increasing shelter space: using community centers that are closed overnight.
“While I appreciate the spirit of this recommendation, I have reservations about this policy direction for the city,” Murray wrote, arguing community centers will be needed late into the evening for things like classroom space for new preschool programs. “We should not pit the competing needs of some of our most vulnerable people against one another.”
Sharon Lee, executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute and a member of the task force, says the group is “very pleased he’s supporting an encampment ordinance. … [and] he agrees with the concept that living in a tent city should not be a long term solution, therefore he’s allocating social workers and case managers to provide services so people can move out of encampments and get into shelter and affordable housing.”
But Lee is still waiting for the real commitment: the money. It’s unclear how the city will pay for the mayor’s ideas. The council included $200,000 in its 2015 budget to pay for the task force’s recommendations and another $100,000 for homeless encampments, but it’ll take more than that to fully implement all of these changes, according to Lee.
“Our big fear is they’re going to say the $200,000 is what they have to work with, which I think would not be acceptable,” she says.
Mayoral spokesperson Jason Kelly points out that the council budgeted a total of $37 million for homeless programs, but when asked whether that means the council is expected to take funds from other programs it had funded in order to pay for these new efforts, all he’ll say is that “the mayor will have an ongoing discussion with the council” about how to fund this work.
