By Eric Ruthford 
Ending homelessness in King County is a goal that government and community leaders have wanted for a long time -- both to save people the punishing consequences of being homeless, and to save the community the cost of running shelters. In 2005, they wrote a plan to end homelessness within 10 years that involved building or converting 9,500 units of housing and getting people into stable housing immediately after they become homeless rather than have them wait months or years in shelters or hotels to find a place to live.
The Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County, created by the Committee to End Homelessness and approved by the King County Council in 2005, is about halfway through its life, and it's time to check in and see whether the county and city governments are going to meet this ambitious goal.
Now we're in a slow recovery from a crippling recession which has drained government resources, making it a tougher sell for government officials to justify building free or subsidized housing for poor people when thousands of middle-class families are losing their homes to foreclosure.
Solving homelessness is one of those abstract accomplishments for a community that can be seen mainly by things that won't happen -- when fewer people experience homelessness, fewer people will end up in emergency shelters, fewer people will go to emergency rooms for the substance-abuse episodes that are associated with homelessness, and fewer people will end up in jail for crimes they commit when desperate for money. These improvements will save the community money, but there's also the added expense of building these housing complexes and starting rental-assistance programs for poor people.
As the county and city governments continue to spend money on ending homelessness, what benefits are evident so far? Are shelter populations dropping? Will the new way of addressing homelessness -- by providing housing first -- actually save money versus the old way -- sheltering people until they can find a market-rate place to live?
Between 2009 and 2010, the annual homelessness count in King County found a 5 percent drop in the number of people who are homeless, an encouraging change, especially considering the high unemployment in the area. Can we reasonably expect the number of people living on the streets to go down? Will the number of street panhandlers go down? Will people continue to live in tent cities?
I was the chief financial officer of Raphael House of San Francisco, a homeless shelter serving families in San Francisco, from 2005 to 2007. Our shelter was an excellent program for stabilizing families in crisis, but it was expensive -- it cost $1 million and helped 150 people per year. We wanted to help more people, but we were always limited by the fact we only had 17 rooms in the building. We knew both from our own experience and national studies that best way to help people deal with the causes of their poverty -- unemployment, substance abuse, family dysfunction and others -- was to get them into stable housing first, and then address their larger problem. I was glad to be working for such a caring organization as Raphael House, but we knew that the solution to homelessness would not be found inside the walls of shelters such as ours.
In addition to my work at the homeless shelter, I've had an extensive newspaper reporting career, working for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Herald of Everett, and the Tri-City Herald. I've also done freelance reporting for The News Tribune of Tacoma, the Pacific Northwest Inlander (Spokane's Weekly newspaper) and I am the business manager of the Seattle PostGlobe, and I wrote a story there about Mary's Place, a day shelter for women experiencing homelessness that was having trouble finding a new location.
As a former shelter administrator and a reporter, I'm intrigued by this ambitious 10-year plan, but I want to know more, including whether the political will exists to finish these housing complexes at a time of drained government resources. This story will include interviews with government officials who are intent on finishing the work, shelter managers who will tell whether their efforts at housing people have become easier. Also, I will interview people who are recovering from homelessness who will tell how big of a difference it made in their efforts to get their lives together to have a regular place to live rather than a car, a hotel, or shelter.
