By Eric Ruthford
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.
