By Eric Ruthford 
First in a series funded by the Spot.Us community published by Seattle Post Globe.
Dara Kommovongsa’s ordeal started with unemployment in the Tri-Cities, hitchhiking from the Tri-Cities to the Seattle area, then couch-surfing. Eventually she and her 5-year-old daughter found themselves out of luck when they were made to leave the apartment where they were staying because the landlord said there were too many people. It was Thanksgiving time. She did not have anyone to turn to. Dara could not get food stamps because she had no permanent address. For the same reason, she couldn’t get state-sponsored health care.
"It took a few days to get over my initial shock of being homeless and on the streets with an asthmatic child in tow," said the single mom.
She spent the next several weeks sleeping in the doors of storefronts and sitting at bus stops. One December night, her daughter complained that she was cold, as she had several times before. She reached out to touch her mom. "Her hand was ice cold," Dara recalled.
Their troubles were just starting and aren’t unique: The King County Committee to End Homelessness estimates that 24,000 people in King County become homeless at one time or another during each year. That’s akin to just about every resident of SeaTac being homeless, or more than enough people to fill KeyArena. This despite the fact that in 2005, with fanfare, The King County 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness was adopted by the Metropolitan King County Council.
The plan now is about halfway through its work and has provided new services for the homeless. But it has yet to show much progress in reducing the number of people seeking shelter or reducing the time it takes for them to get in to stable housing. It’s clear that it’s going to fall short of what the general public might expect from the term “end homelessness.”
The plan envisions 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. Almost half of the units are completed or committed, but there’s little change on the street: Demand for emergency shelter remains high, and shelter managers are often turning people away due to lack of space. The new units are great for those who can get into them, but persistent high housing prices and high unemployment are keeping the homeless population large, and holding down recovery efforts.
A coalition of government and non-profit leaders wrote the plan in 2005 when the economy wasn’t exactly great, but it was growing, and they envisioned changing and expanding the methods used to serve the homeless. If there's one way to describe the new way of serving those who have lost their housing, it's that agencies know that they need to help people like Dara find permanent homes so they can have "me time." To recover from being homeless, people need the space, time and stability to really live normal lives, not just survive. Sustaining them in an emergency shelter is not enough.
Dennis Culhane, a researcher on homelessness at the University of Pennsylvania, said that homeless shelters are a broken system that does not solve homelessness.
"It’s really a 19th-century-type throwback institution, a la the ‘poorhouse.’ There’s nothing remotely modern about it," Culhane said. "It's essentially a subsidy for housing that's substandard, when you could directly pay for people's housing."
Culhane said that a future without homelessness is one in which few people stay in shelters after they have a housing crisis: Rather, they receive emergency cash payments to help them keep their housing or get rapidly re-housed. And if people do need to stay in a shelter, it should only be for a few days, never more than a month. Is that where our county is headed?
The Modern Phenomenon of Homelessness
With her daughter’s hand so cold that December night in 2003, Dara went to a Taco Bell drive-thru just after it closed and looked for change that people had dropped on the pavement. She said it took two and a half days to find enough for bus fare for her and her daughter. They got on the 194 bus for a trip to Seattle, which, she discovered, was a bus that a lot of homeless people rode in winter (before light rail eliminated the route). That’s because it was a long ride, it was warm, and it ran late into the night.
Dara looked to several different Seattle homeless shelters to see if she could find a place to stay for her and her daughter. They got turned away at each. No room. Finally, they ended up sleeping under I-5 at 7th and James for a few days. A group of hoodlum passersby tossed a beer bottle at Dara, bruising her elbow.
Knowing that the shelters were full, Dara tried to find someone else whom she could "double up" with, and an acquaintance recommended her to an elderly man who lived in Seward Park who needed someone to cook and clean. Mom and daughter moved into his house to discover he suffered from multiple-personality disorder and alternated between being acting elderly, middle-aged and teenaged. Dara did not view this as a good place for her child, either, and kept trying to get into a shelter.
The notion of "ending homelessness," as the 10-year plan to end homelessness sets out to do, isn't the easiest thing to imagine. There's little that the community can do to prevent people from being poor. There still will be people who lose their homes after a job loss, health problem, domestic violence or substance abuse. Homelessness has been with us as long as people have been living in cities. But U.S. cities saw a sharp increase in both the number of people who were becoming homeless and the length of time they were remaining homeless in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Bill Hobson is the executive director of the Downtown Emergency Services Center, a non-profit agency that provides both emergency shelter and permanent housing to the homeless. He remembers a time when homelessness was a smaller problem.
"When I first came to this state when I was as a professor in the 1970s, I remember winos in the alleys, not chronic homelessness," said Hobson, 70, pictured at left, who has been the executive director of the DESC since 1987.
"I think we’re raising a generation of young people to think that homelessness has always been a feature of America."
Articles in social-sciences journals try to explain the reason behind the spike in homelessness that never went away, but most authors end up giving a number of factors that came together during the recession of the early 1980s: High unemployment, urban redevelopment that demolished "skid row"-style hotels and other low-income housing, cuts in mental-health services, an overall increase in the cost of housing in U.S. cities, and cuts in public-housing funding. The pattern of closing mental health hospitals from 1950 to 1975 was a factor, but not a primary cause. Despite stereotypes, one 1980s study of homeless populations found only 15 percent had been mental patients in a hospital, and only a few of them had been in state-run facilities.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, cities increased funding for homeless shelters, thinking that protecting people from the elements long enough for them to make it on their own would be enough to solve the problem.
Dara finally landed in a shelter. About a month after becoming homeless, it happened: Providence Hospitality House in Seattle offered her and her daughter a space in its 30-day shelter for moms and children in crisis.
Dara and her daughter moved from there into a transitional housing project. Transitional housing usually provides tenants apartment-like living, plus regular visits from social workers. Rent is government-subsidized. The idea is to provide a place where people who have been homeless can live while they get jobs, get their lives together and move on to getting a regular apartment of their own. Transitional housing has a time limit ranging from three to 24 months. After that, tenants usually have to move out. That deadline is supposed to create an incentive, although critics say that the extra stress of having to move out makes it harder to recover from being homeless.
As she moved, Dara enrolled her daughter in school, but quickly found that she was behind the other children academically and developmentally as the girl had not had the time to study while homeless. The other children in her second grade picked on her. They could tell she was different.
"She would come home crying every day," Dara remembered. "They would tie her hair to the chair."
Dara moved from the transitional housing unit to her own apartment, which she was able to keep until the landlord raised the rent, and then she ended up again in transitional housing. During the time she was moving from one place to live to another, she gave birth to a second daughter.
The obstacles that Dara would continue to face in an effort to find housing could be used as a list of things that the writers of the 10-year Plan to End Homelessness wanted to change in the way that people in King County recover from homelessness.
Dara spent about four years going from shelter to transitional program to shelter before finally in 2007 getting into stable housing – a subsidized apartment in Seattle's Yesler Terrace (pictured at left), which requires her to pay 30 percent of her income as rent. The 10-year plan seeks to build or convert 9,500 units of housing so that there will be more places that people like Dara can go – and keep. Also, the plan seeks to minimize the use of transitional housing, which is more expensive per month to run than emergency shelter or permanent independent housing, according to a recent study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It showed that in Washington, D.C., it cost between $2,496 and $3,698 to house a family in emergency shelter for a month. But it only cost $1,251 to house a family for a month in permanent supportive housing.
The 10-year plan puts a big emphasis on reducing the use of shelters and transitional housing and increasing the use of permanent supportive housing like Dara’s place in Yesler Terrace.
Not everyone agrees
That change isn’t popular with everyone. Mike Buchman (pictured at left), communications manager of Solid Ground, an agency that runs transitional housing and emergency shelters in the Fremont and Sandpoint neighborhoods of Seattle, said that it was wrong to put so much focus on one end of the spectrum of care.
“The 10-year plan is not doing an adequate job of supporting emergency shelters' needs,” Buchman said. “You can’t simply build enough housing for the people who need them and then that’ll be that."
For the city, reducing tax dollars for the shelters has proved difficult. Al Poole (pictured at left), division director of the Homelessness Intervention and Block Grant Administration at the Seattle Human Services Department, said that after the 10-year plan was written, the city tried to move $600,000 in city funding from homeless shelters to longer-term housing solutions. But the outcry generated by the proposed change prompted then-Mayor Greg Nickels to restore funding to the shelters.
Focusing on getting people who are homeless into housing before dealing with their underlying problems – mental illness, substance abuse or domestic violence – can make it easier to deal with those problems later. It also can reduce costs. This approach is known as "Housing First" in the homeless-service provider field. Culhane co-wrote a study in 2002 of a Housing First program in New York City in which the city built 3,700 units of supported housing for severely mentally ill people, and tracked the residents' use of health services, homeless shelters and the corrections system. Before being housed, they used an average of $40,500 per year in services. After they got into housing, they used fewer services, for an average savings of $16,200 in costs.
Running the supportive housing cost about $17,200 per unit, per year, meaning that the program on net had a cost of $1,000 per person to society, which Culhane said made it a nearly break-even proposition while freeing up medical and law-enforcement resources that could be better used to serve the community.
Ending homelessness is “smart business”
Studies such as Culhane's and others made city leaders across the country realize that shelters and jails are an expensive, ineffective way to deal with homelessness. They decided they needed to take a more direct approach toward affordable housing for people with extremely low incomes. In the middle of the last decade, cities across the United States began writing 10-year plans to end homelessness, most of them aiming at 2015 or somewhere close as the year that they believed it could be accomplished. The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, a federal government agency, encouraged the development of these plans.
In these plans, solving and ending homelessness is more than just the "right thing" to do. It's "smart business." It’s a way to reduce costs both to the community and the people who go through homelessness. People who have homes are more likely to succeed in getting and keeping a job, and children who have homes are more likely to succeed in school.
King County's 10-year Plan to End Homelessness made it a goal to make 9,500 new units of permanent housing available for the formerly homeless. About half of them will be built by local government and non-profit agencies, and half of them are existing units in the open market that formerly homeless people will be able to get through rental subsidies. According to Bill Block (pictured at left), the project director of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, the county has 4,111 units of housing built, under construction, or "in the pipeline," meaning that the money's been committed for them.
Most of these housing units require that residents pay 30 percent of their income in rent and utilities, with the remaining cost of the rent being made up by a government subsidy. Considering that in the Seattle area, fair-market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in 2009 was $820 a month, according to HUD statistics, it would require someone to have a wage of at least $15.75 an hour to be able to spend 30 percent of his or her income on fair-market rent.
Most people who are homeless are considered "extremely low income," a HUD designation meaning that they earn less than 30 percent of the average median income. So it is difficult for them to get into housing unless one of these subsidized units is made available for them.
Virginia Felton, spokeswoman for the Seattle Housing Authority, which rents out 6,100 apartments and other housing around the city, said currently the waiting list for public housing in Seattle stands at 11,000 people.
The Housing Authority is planning to build more units of housing over the next few years, and Yesler Terrace, which houses many extremely low-income tenants, is one area it is looking to redevelop. The 28-acre site was built in the late 1930s and has about 1,200 residents in 561 apartments. Felton said that sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, the Housing Authority would like to replace the current Yesler Terrace buildings with mixed-use buildings that have 3,000 to 5,000 apartments and neighborhood commercial businesses such as grocery stores and dry cleaners. The number of subsidized units would remain the same or be increased, Felton said, but they would be mixed in with apartments that could be rented or bought on the open market. All current residents would be able to get one of the new units, she said, provided they were in good standing.
At a park by their home in Yesler Terrace (above). Below, examining a slug from the backyard of their home. (Photos: Mike Kane)
Dara Kommavongsa is in one of the apartments at Yesler Terrace, where she and her two children, now ages 12 and 5, tend to a garden and enjoy their own small yard. If the Housing First approach toward re-housing people becomes available to everyone who needs it, it means that people like her will not have to bounce between homeless shelter and transitional housing program for months or years, like she did. Rather, they will be able to go straight from losing their home to getting a unit like hers.
When Dara was living on the streets and in homeless shelters, she was depressed, and did not have time to think about her own health.
"I was sick a lot of time when I was homeless,” Dara said. “But that didn't matter so long as she [my daughter] was in shelter and safe. That was enough."
Dara called the shelters and the transitional programs a blessing because they proved such an improvement over couch-surfing and living on the streets, but they're not the best places to return to a normal life.
"It is kind of like a holding tank,” Dara said, “because people could be utilizing their time more effectively and productively. In a shelter, you have certain times you have to be there and curfews, and you must receive your kids when they come home from school." The amount of time it took her to meet basic needs for her and her daughter during that time made it all the more difficult to find work, she said.
Having the apartment that she knows will remain hers long-term allows her to use her time better, Dara said. "Being homeless takes a big emotional, physical toll," she said, and when she was homeless, she was focused on survival. "Now, my time is about education, self-sufficiency, striving to be better than what I was before. Now I can help with my kids' homework. Time is essential."
TOMORROW: How the numbers stack up
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ABOUT THE SERIES
Reporter Eric Ruthford's story was underwritten by your donations via Spot.us, while photojournalist Mike Kane's photos of Dara Kommovongsa and her family are made possible by your donations to Seattlepostglobe. All other photos are from the web sites of the officials depicted.
Eric dug to get answers to these questions regarding the 10-year plan to end homelessness in King County: Now that the time period is half-way through, what benefits are evident so far? Will the new way of addressing homelessness -- by providing permanent housing instead of overnight shelter -- actually end homelessness, as planned? Having written for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other newspapers and worked as a homeless shelter's financial director, he is uniquely suited to explore this topic.
Mike Kane is an award-winning freelance photographer specializing in documentary, editorial and outdoors photography and photojournalism. Until its closure in 2009, he was a staff photographer at the Seattle P-I and before that a Hearst Fellow at three newspapers.
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 06/28/10
Often, a person who has just become homeless or is about to become homeless has just one problem – lack of ability to pay the rent. Rapid Re-Housing uses cash to keep people out of the shelter and transitional system by paying for a portion of their rent. This will either prevent them from getting evicted, or makes their time being homeless very short. Bill Block, chairman of the committee to end homelessness, told me that while the 10-year plan intends to create 9,500 units of housing, agencies in King County are also providing Rapid Re-Housing money to prevent them from having to use any of the new units.
When I was at Raphael House, we got a grant of $150,000 over two years from the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation for Rapid Re-Housing. Whenever we received a family whose only problem was inability to pay a security deposit, we tried to get them to use this money to leave the shelter after only a few days, rather than months, and would pay their security deposit and some of their rent for them. The first year we did it, we were able to serve an additional 70 people because people were moving through the shelter more quickly.
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 06/08/10
You may have noticed a certain parental attitude towards the low-income people in the description of programming at homeless shelters and transitional housing. The idea is that they need someone to solve their underlying problems in order to overcome homelessness. A movement within the homeless-services field called Housing First is devoted to the belief that people who are homeless need to get a stable place to live right away without conditions or incentives being held out to them for good behavior, and then they can address their other problems.
For those in the homeless services field, it's kind of a hard notion to grasp because they believe they're supposed to care for those in need, not stick them in an apartment by themselves. I went to a seminar given by Tanya Tull, CEO of Beyond Shelter in Los Angeles, who is a proponent of Housing First. She said that her staff will often think that if they let a domestic violence survivor get her own housing too quickly, she'll sit in her apartment for a while and then look at the phone and think, "He wasn't that bad," and call up her old abuser and get back together with him. A Housing First model, on the other hand, treats housing as a basic right that needs to be met first, and offers domestic-violence recovery services – and other services – after someone has housing.
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 06/07/10
The newer way of trying to end homelessness has service providers getting people in to units of housing that are really "theirs." Once they get to this point, they're no longer homeless. Here, a non-profit or government agency provides housing that a formerly homeless person can afford, usually requiring 30 percent of his or her income, with the agency subsidizing the rest. There isn't a time limit.
When the King County 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness talks about the 9,500 units of housing that the community wants build, it means mostly permanent supportive housing. Some sites can be independent apartments, while others can be complexes that have case management staff there to help with disabilities, mental illnesses or addictions.
With permanent supportive housing, there's also the possibility of getting vouchers for market-rate apartments, with a formerly homeless person living in a privately owned apartment but getting his or her rent subsidized by an agency. HUD's Section 8 housing does this, but when I was in San Francisco, the waiting list for Section 8 vouchers was about 20 years long.
Many people, having been through the trauma of whatever crisis caused them to become homeless, need a place to stay in between being in the shelter and going back to market-rate housing. Social workers are usually present at the transitional housing sites, and the residents have a time limit on how long they can stay, which is supposed to give them incentive to get their lives together and get in to market-rate housing. The time limit can be from 3 to 24 months. Many transitional housing programs are funded by HUD. The King County government spent $4.7 million on transitional housing in 2009.
At Raphael House, we tried to steer our families away from transitional housing because we knew once the time was up in the transitional program, they would be looking for shelter again. Transitional housing has a reputation of being a holding tank, with people cycling from shelter to transitional housing and back again. Also, large numbers of people in transitional housing don't actually need visits from social workers – they are functional people cycling in and out of a therapeutic program because they can't afford rent.
Next: Permanent Supportive Housing
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 06/02/10
Shelter
Homeless shelters are run by a charities or government agencies and provide a temporary place to sleep, usually at no cost. Professor Dennis Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania said that today's homeless shelters are basically modeled after the 19th Century "poorhouse" and have not changed much since then. The idea behind a shelter is that having a roof over your head will stabilize you enough to get a new job and an apartment.
Shelters that someone can walk in to at a moment's notice are called "emergency shelters" because they exist to help when sudden homelessness occurs that people cannot plan for. They often have time limits of a few days or a few weeks
Raphael House is a shelter, although it isn't so much of an "emergency" shelter because people had to get on a waiting list to get in. It typically took three to five months for a family to be able to move out. The reason for the long wait was that it took them that much time to save up for the security deposit and rent on an apartment. Father David Lowell, the executive director, explained that when he started there back in the mid-80s, families would stay for a couple of weeks – at that time, if you saved up two welfare payments, you could start paying rent on an apartment.
We tried as hard as we could to keep Raphael House from being a holding tank. We had a rigorous program of activities to keep family members engaged with each other in games and crafts in the evenings. We also banned television and radio from the house in an effort to get family members to be more functional with each other. (The TV ban was also a great way to scare away lazy people.) The people who participated in our programs benefited from them, but I wasn't sure that it was really necessary for their success.
We did serve great numbers of families with serious problems such as family dysfunction, domestic violence or recent release from jail, and I think they needed our supervision, but about half of the families we served would have functioned pretty well in their own apartment – if they had one. For them, I think, we were just providing a holding tank – a place to stay while they waited until they could save up for an apartment.
Another thing about Raphael House's shelter is that it wasn't very cheap – it cost $1 million a year to run the shelter, and it served between 115 and 150 people a year when I was there. We often wished we could close the shelter and serve families a different way. We also knew that funding for shelters was slowly drying up as charitable foundations were tiring of their reputation as holding tanks. A recent study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development showed that running a shelter is a pretty costly way of serving the homeless – in three U.S. cities, the cost of providing emergency shelter for an individual ranged from $408 to $1,817 per month, while fair market rent for a one-bedroom apartment ranged from $549 to $643. For families, the cost of emergency shelter for adults in four U.S. cities ranged from $1,391 to $3,698 per month, while fair market rent for a two bedroom unit ranged from $599 to $1,225 per month. The short lesson of those numbers is that it can actually be cheaper to pay rent for people than to shelter them.
Next: Transitional Housing
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 06/01/10
When people are homeless, they are often under a roof – but it's never certain how long they can stay there. An assortment of places can be the temporary living space of a person experiencing homelessness, and in writing my story about the King County 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness, I thought it would be helpful to provide a definition of the places. For someone outside of the homelessness field, the names sound interchangeable – shelter, transitional housing, supportive housing, rapid re-housing – but they're quite different. I'm going to blog about these over the next couple of days.
When I was working at the Raphael House shelter in San Francisco, we had this huge plaque full of the names of donors to the house at the front desk. Its title was "In support of the families who walked through these doors to a better life." When a charity is working right and gets someone out of homelessness, that short statement is a good description of what it is doing.
When it's not, it's a holding tank that maintains people in their homeless state. Over the last forty years, great numbers of well-intended efforts to help the homeless have ended up turning in to holding tanks.
First:
When someone loses housing, usually their first step is to sleep on the floor of family members or friends, or to end up in a hotel. You can call it "couch surfing" or being "doubled up" or being on "skid row," but by government definition, this is considered being homeless if there's no permanent address that the person can get back to. When I was in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, there were large numbers of single-resident occupancy hotels around the shelter where I worked. These hotels provided tiny rooms with shared bathrooms and kitchen facilities, and many homeless people were living in them and paying rent. Many of the families we received had spent several months, or even years living in these SROs.
Bill Hobson, director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center, said that Seattle used to have a much larger number of "skid row" style bunking houses, but urban renewal efforts in the 1970s and 1980s removed them, which was one factor behind the increase in homelessness that began then. While these SROs were dreadful places to live, what was worse was that there was no replacement for them.
I had an interview with Bill Hobson, executive director of the Downtown Emergency Services Center, today. The DESC is a major homeless-services provider, operating about 750 units of supportive housing and running an emergency shelter with 300 beds. It is also the operator of 1811 Eastlake, a housing project for chronically homeless severely alcoholic adults that I wrote about earlier in this blog.
During the conversation, I asked if he had any clients who might be willing to talk about their experiences in the new style of housing, and he said no, and challenged me to write a story without trying to put a human face onto homelessness. He said that the personalized stories about homelessness are getting way overdone in the news media.
It does pose an interesting question. I must admit that I, too, am tired of the "weeping mother" cliche when it comes to news reporters -- both print and television -- trying to illustrate a complex social problem. But if you just talk to administrators, you end up with kind of a dry story. I think I am still going to try finding someone who's gotten in to one of the new units of permanent housing that have been built in King County, not to emotionalize the story, but I do need to be able to tell readers what it means to get from the chaos of emergency and temporary shelter to the stability of permanent housing.
Hobson does have a point. I told him, "One of the reasons you see reporters present stories that way is that we are bad at math, and it's easier to present a personal story than using statistics."
One assumption about providing homelessness services in the
A well-written and engaging magazine article on the topic, Million-Dollar Murray, made a compelling case for this kind of care. The author, Malcolm Gladwell, tells the story of a homeless man named Murray in
Having worked for a homeless shelter in
I've found another article, more scholarly, that pokes some holes in those theories. Dennis Culhane is a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote an article called The Costs of Homelessness: A Perspective from the United States, which reviews the scientific studies that have been done on the subject over the past fifteen years and finds that when populations of severely mental ill or severely alcohol adults have been given long-term supportive housing, it does reduce their visits to emergency rooms, shelters and jails, but the additional costs of running the housing program are about equal to the savings, or slightly more. This means that the new way of doing things breaks even or costs slightly more than the old way of doing things.
This conundrum does help illustrate the problem from the perspective of a budget committee chairman who doesn't want to spend more money on homeless services. The homeless advocates will tell him that he can save all this money by running preventative services, but it's difficult to get your head around how those savings are realized. And, if you're in charge of writing the budget, you're going to ask, "If this program will prevent emergency-room visits, shelter stays and visits to jails, does this mean you won't complain if I cut funding to jails, hospitals and shelters?" And the answer will always be no.
Gladwell’s article inspired an assortment of city governments in the past couple of years to think that they could do their own cost estimates of the cost of homelessness without paying for a scientific study, and the results are a whole load of data that is not really comparable.
Reading Culhane’s article was very interesting, but a little disappointing because now one of my “established facts” -- that the new way is cheaper -- that I tell people at parties isn’t so “established.” Oh well.
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 05/18/10Government leaders, when they set a goal for a project, such as ending homelessness, pick something they think they can achieve. There's nothing wrong with that -- everybody likes to succeed -- but leaders often pick easy tasks, or they define government success by government action. Surely, King County can build or convert 9,500 units of housing for people who are recovering from being homeless, but does that really solve homelessness?
Too often, we in the news media let government define its own notion of success, and then we judge it by those standards. For example, a police department fighting a drug problem might set a goal for arresting drug suspects, but are they reducing consumption? Or, the U.S. Army might set a goal of driving insurgents from towns and occupying them, but does that really solve the population's problem?
The King County 10-year Plan to End Homelessness involves lots of talk about building units of housing and modifying services to better meet the needs of those recovering from homelessness, but I want to know about some things that I would call success here -- for example, would emergency shelters be able to close because fewer people became homeless? Would tent cities still exist? 2014, the endpoint of the plan, isn't that far off, and I'm wondering what kind of revolution I'm going to see when it's done.
Maybe I should rephrase that -- as a journalist, I ought be examining these efforts by how the readers would define sucess in the effort to end homelessness. (I'm a little overinvolved in the story, having been a homeless-shelter administrator.) I want to know from you what you think the county would look like if homelessness really ended. How will you judge the success of this effort? How would a visit to an urban core change? How would the life of a social worker change? How would the life of a low-income person on the brink of losing his or her housing change?
Please write, please help. This style of journalism is supposed to be more participatory, and there's little more embarrassing than not having blog comments.
The story is coming along slowly and I'm hoping to get the first part done in the next week or so. I've been struggling to manage time with the temp jobs that I'm doing, but I'm really looking forward to getting this crowd-sourced story -- that you've made possible -- out for publication!
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 05/16/10
One of the challenges I'm finding in researching this story is to illustrate the overall costs and benefits of reducing the number of people who become homeless. Certainly one can make a moral case that society has a duty to help those in need, but the new homelessness programs are designed to do more than just provide help. They're supposed to save us money in the long-term.
Having been the financial officer of a homeless shelter, I am inclined to believe the claim that it's far cheaper to prevent people from becoming homeless with supportive housing and rental subsidies than deal with the effects of their being homeless long-term by paying for jails and hospital visits. It's an assumption that homeless services these days are designed around, but I'm out to check it out, with classic journalistic skepticism, as that old joke goes, "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out."
So far, the only good research on results that I've been able to find has been the article that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association about reduced jail and hospital stays by chronically homeless, severe alcoholics who moved into 1811 Eastlake in Seattle. I had a nice talk with a statistics keeper at the City of Seattle about Safe Harbors, the Homeless Management Information Systems. The 2008 annual report is here for that system, which shows some attributes of the homeless population. A few facts include:
Safe Harbors is going through a computer upgrade right now, so data's available in some areas that I need, and not so much in others.
This project to get readers an update about King County's 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness is coming along slowly.
Also, I have recently found an unrelated temp job, which is slowing down research a little. But, such is the life of a freelance journalist. Thanks again for all your support!
Photo from GypsyFae
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 05/01/10Today's New York Times had an interesting article on the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing program. It tells the story of Antonio Moore in San Mateo, Calif., who's been given some temporary help to keep him from falling into homelessness:
"Faced with eviction, he was staring last month at the imminent prospect of joining the teeming ranks of the homeless. His last hope was a new $1.5 billion federal program aimed at preventing that fate. Days after Mr. Moore applied, a check for $775 was on its way to his landlord, enabling him to stay — at least for now."
Progress on the homelessness story is coming along well. This week, I've been interviewing a lot of administrators in Seattle and national policy thinkers in Washington, DC, who have been offering me their thoughts about trends in homeless policy. More on that soon...
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 04/23/10
Wow, the story is fully funded now! Thank you to everyone who donated. I'm really impressed by how quickly this story gained funding. The process of writing this crowd-funded story and of blogging about it is going to be a new experience for me. The old method of writing a story was to get approval from your editor, and then the story was something of a secret except for those who needed to know. When you were done, you published your story and you wowed the city with it, and made your competitors at Other Seattle Daily Newspaper curse that they hadn't thought of it first. (Or, at least that was the fantasy that we journalists had.)
So what's the process now? It's developing, that's for sure. I would be very interested in hearing suggestions for aspects of the story to cover, or things you'd be interested in reading in the blog.
For today, let me give you a link to an intriguing article about 1811 Eastlake, a facility built in Seattle for chronically homeless people with severe alcohol problems in 2005. The unique thing about the facility is that it placed few restrictions on the consumption of alcohol for the residents -- they were free to drink in their rooms. The idea behind this style of housing service is that if people with chronic problems have housing, their other negative behaviors will reduce, and they'll make fewer visits to hospital emergency rooms, jails and homeless shelters.
This article, written by University of Washington researchers and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, studied 95 of the building's residents and compared them with a group of chronically homeless people with severe alcohol problems who did not have housing, and found that the housed people used, on average, $2,449 less in community services per month.
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 04/20/10In coming up with new ways to serve the homeless, social workers have to battle a phenomenon called "creaming." People who become homeless have varying levels of need -- some are newly homeless and have some family in the area to rely on, while others have been homeless for years, have no one to rely on, and might be struggling with mental illness as well. In the analogy with cream and milk, you might say that those who have the best personal resources are the cream who rise to the top.
When government planners try to come up with services aimed at the chronically homeless to get them off the streets and in to a safe place to live, often what happens is that the new services don't reach them. Rather, the newly homeless take advantage of the additional services and are able to shorten the amount of time they spend getting back on their feet.
It is very difficult to design a program that will reach harder cases of homelessness -- those who deal with mental illness, substance abuse, physical disabilities or a combination of all three. At Raphael House, we had the strictest homeless-recovery program in the city -- active drug/alcohol users weren't allowed, we didn't allow television or radio, we required residents to save 80 percent of their money, and they had to come back to the shelter at 5:45 p.m. each day. Our restrictions were meant to tell potential residents that our program meant business, but at the same time, it saved us from having to deal with harder cases like drug addicts. Something I always wondered about was whether we were just cherry-picking those who had the best abilities in the first place.
This San Francisco Chronicle article from 2004 details some of the problems the city encountered as it reformed its homeless services.
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 04/15/10When I worked for Raphael House, a homeless shelter serving families in San Francisco, we were able to serve about 200 people a year in the shelter, and about a thousand outside of the shelter. We had a program called AfterCare, with which we supported our formerly homeless residents after they had moved on to their own stable housing. We provided all sorts of services from tutoring, to tuition support for children to participate in sports, to rental subsidies to help them stay in their homes rather than relapse into homelessness.
AfterCare had a success rate of 95 percent, meaning that 95 percent of the people we helped were able to stay in their housing without becoming homeless again. It was also much cheaper than the shelter. In 2006, it cost $405 per person we supported with Aftercare, and it cost $4,150 per person we housed in our own shelter.
These were promising numbers that made us want to move towards a "housing first" model that did not include a shelter, or even transitional housing for the people we served, but stable housing that they could keep under the presumption that the rest of their lives would improve once they had a stable place to live. But, we were a small organization, assuming that our modest successes would work well on a large scale.
King County's 10-year plan on homelessness wants to move away from the homeless-shelter model as well. In this story, I want to find out how well this is working on a county-wide scale. How much easier does the new approach make the recovery process for the families? Does it save us any money over the old way?
Posted by Eric Ruthford on 04/14/10
