Commonsense Solutions to our never-ending “Homelessness Emergency”

Last week, ChangeWA reviewed the negative outcomes of Seattle and King County’s Emergency Declaration issued 10 years ago this month.

This week we look at two commonsense ways to quickly lower homelessness, cut dependence on costly government programs, and save taxpayer money.  Progress has been made – just a few years ago these policies weren’t even discussed by regional policymakers. Today, they are the focal points of the homelessness debate.

1. Replace Housing First with abstinence treatment programs

For the first time since the emergency was declared, there appears to be hope that local homelessness policies will finally tackle the primary reasons for the crisis – addiction and mental health issues.

Since 2015, Housing First policies have been the homelessness strategy implemented in Seattle and King County. Introduced by the Obama Administration in 2013, the philosophy centers on taxpayers’ funding temporary and permanent housing (and a large housing bureaucracy) for those who are homeless. Nearly always, this public housing is available with “low-barrier” restrictions, meaning many of the recipients are still active in their destructive addictions.

Once in public housing, caseworkers will work with the individual and offer them 5,000 different services. Yet rarely is being clean and sober a requirement for receiving government assistance, and almost never is treatment even mentioned to the addict.

These services almost never help those with their addictions. Homeless advocate Ginny Burton, who has been sober for 13 years after a life of addiction, crime, and homelessness, stresses that temporary housing and other services “creates environments that often mirror the dangerous conditions people fled.” With a roof over their head, they continue to use. Nearly half of all overdose deaths occur in public housing (with more than 7,500 drug overdose fatalities during the past decade in King County).

This strategy has failed across the country, with homeless numbers continuing to grow, especially in liberal West Coast cities (such as Seattle, Olympia, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles), where extremist programs are not vetted or overseen by moderate leaders.

This could soon change. In late July President Donald Trump signed an executive order for federal agencies to stop funding the failed Housing First policies. Instead, the federal government will divert this money to programs that tackle addiction and mental health issues which impact at least 75% of those who are homeless. This treatment-based approach is far less expensive and seeks to allow the person to become less dependent on taxpayer-funded services.

This policy change has strong public support. In a recent survey of Washington voters, 80% said they favored a treatment-based approach to solve the homelessness crisis. 62% said they favored ending Housing First.

Simply put, removing drugs and alcohol dependence changes homeless people’s lives, while giving them a free room only gives them a dry place to continue harmful behavior.

2. More accountability and transparency with “Homelessness Dashboard”

One of the most telling facts that ChangeWA has revealed occurred nearly a year ago. In our exclusive interview with then King County Executive Dow Constantine, he could not estimate how much money he had authorized to be spent on the homeless issue for ANY YEAR since his 2015 emergency declaration.  He raised taxes, created dozens of social programs, and funded the creation of King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), but the person in charge had no guess as to how much taxpayer money he had spent.

There is also no requirement for organizations that receive housing funding to report on what they did with the money. A Discovery Institute survey found 17 groups received more than $1 million from KCRHA, yet only five provided reports on how the money was spent.

The large amount of funds available for homeless programs has attracted many unscrupulous people who see a money-making opportunity due to a lack of proper oversight. A recent audit of the King County Department of Community and Human Services stated that “massive fraud is likely” in its distribution of a $1.8 billion grant program.

Also, organizations that don’t obtain good results continue to be funded because they don’t have to provide documentation of their efforts. Without this data, taxpayers keep funding efforts that have never provided positive results.

The taxpayers deserve more transparency of how their money is being spent. There should be public dashboards that provide information on who is receiving public money, how they spend it, and how many people have moved into permanent housing.

Advocates argue that a drastic change to our region’s homelessness approach must occur if we want to reduce the size of our homeless population. They support both moving away from Housing First (to a treatment-based strategy) and providing more transparency and accountability for how the money is spent. This will allow more resources to combat the primary cause of homelessness – addiction. It will also provide the data to policymakers and the public as to what organizations and strategies are having the greatest success. Those programs helping people become independent will continue to receive funding, while those that don’t will be cut off from wasting more of our tax money.

Those who profit from the current system will fight hard to keep the same programs in place. The City of Seattle and other progressive organizations are planning to file a lawsuit to prevent the federal government from ending its financial support of the failed Housing First policies.

For the sake of those who continue to eke out their existence in public spaces, let’s hope Seattle’s lawsuit fails. Ten years of Housing First failures is enough evidence that it has failed to achieve the promise of ending homelessness – in fact the numbers have dramatically increased. It is time to implement a treatment-based strategy that helps people battle the root cause of their problems – drug and alcohol addiction.