Comments

1

$1 million/year / 80 beds / 12 months/year = $1,042/bed/month.

Just upzone the city like mad and provide a rent voucher.

2

Glad to see we're protecting City Hall's employees from COVID, while ending an obsolete model for shelter there:

'Additionally, Hightower said that the new 24/7 facilities and their access to hygiene services, meals, and case managers "have been proven to be more effective in helping people end their experience with homelessness." The city is stationing a "Rapid Rehousing provider" at new shelter sites in order to "produce faster and more successful exits to permanent housing," according to a press release from yesterday. '

In keeping with the Poppe Report, a full-service shelter model, complete with rapid re-housing case managers, represents a superior method for making the experience of homelessness rare across the population, brief, and unique in any one person's life.

Of course, our old and catastrophically failed model has our overbuilt Homeless Industrial Complex to protect it from the mortal threat posed by successful innovation:

'A Sawant-sponsored budget item to spend $655,000 on 24-hour basic shelter operations for facilities run by SHARE/WHEEL made it into the council's current budget package.'

SHARE/WHEEL provides the rent-a-mobs to howl obscenities and threats at our City Council on those rare occasions when our Council dares listen to anyone other than CM Sawant, and so SHARE/WHEEL will always get some no-oversight public scratch, no matter how miserably SHARE/WHEEL fails to get people housed, no matter how offensively they warehouse the most vulnerable human beings for blatant use as political cattle.

4

Why the fuck are SHARE/WHEEL still being funded? Those jokers couldn't re-house a shelter pet let alone a human being. Is their leader still squatting in the kitchen tent of their disputed tent city?

@3 Agreed.

When do the shelters start popping-up in council person neighborhoods? Oh, never? OK then.

6

Blatant political corruption on the part of Sawant and SHARE/WHEEL.

I hope the next FBI investigation ends in arrests, and that neither SHARE/WHEEL nor City Council members in need of volunteers and voters, are allowed to prey on desperate people.

8

@#1: Exactly. Who is being subsidized here? Part of the problem is we have spent the last 40 or 50 years using zoning and other regulations to eliminate all very low cost housing options. Back when Seattle was a frontier fishing / logging / shipping town there was an abundant supply of minimal cost housing options. SRO hotels, boarding houses, basement bedroom rentals, whatever. Now, those are almost entirely gone, by law and design. Combine that with an economic system the makes the rich very rich and the poor very poor, and you get a lot of people who are essentially destitute economic refugees. I think #3 Sit Toby is overly harsh in his judgements. There but for the grace of God go I?
And last and a bit picky: The image labelled a "mock-up" in the article is what we uptight folks in the design world call a "drawing". A mock-up is a built 3-dimensional object.

9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmw2UWV9b84

10

@8: Seattle's homelessness crisis does not originate with economic conditions in Seattle. The homeless population rose dramatically during 2015-2016. From January 2010 to January 2020, Seattle's unemployment rate fell from 10% to 3%. Seattle's survey of the homeless in late 2016 (http://coshumaninterests-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/City-of-Seattle-Report-FINAL-with-4.11.17-additions.pdf) had over two-thirds of the respondents saying they were not originally from Seattle, a minority saying Seattle was the place they most recently became homeless, and a majority saying they used alcohol or other drugs. (Almost 10% said they moved to Seattle for legal cannabis.) A majority said they were either unemployed or unable to work.

"Seattle's" homeless problem was caused by an influx of already-homeless, drug-using drifters, not by locals getting economically squeezed.


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