www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/ending-homelessness-in-downtown-seattle-may-be-harder-than-expected/
Why ending homelessness downtown may be even harder than expected
PaywallYes, as a long time survivor of homelessness, I have to totally agree because the majority of the homeless population is nomadic by necessity and as soon as one place offers better service than another, you got a massive influx of people coming for those services. That is not a bad thing, but it will never help to address the problem in one place. It has to be done at the federal level. The only way to work is high density housing with caseworkers and social workers and security
No, it is a bad thing. It puts more stress on localities that have little choice but to do something about it while allowing other localities to simply push the problem elsewhere without addressing it.
It’s a bad thing until we learn the lesson that local solutions might offer temporary relief but they’ll never be solutions until everyone is doing the same thing
i think the king county homeless survey from a few years ago showed 92% of homeless became homeless in king county. so while people are moving around within the county, i think theres less interstate migration than most people think
I have friends at the top of the feild in the county. I will ask them. Like my friend designed all the legal financial and logistical side of the tent and tiny house communities. My other friend runs the national vehicle residency coalition and has moved on from Seattle to work at the national level.
Wtf. The reason so many people are homeless is because they're drug addicts.
No. Many of them are drug addicts because they are homeless. See studies like CASPEH https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/our-impact/studies/california-statewide-study-people-experiencing-homelessness
The overwhelmingly primary reasons for people becoming homeless include high housing costs and low income.
You're not wrong, but also the downtown area is part of an economy of homelessness. That's where they get the drugs, that's where they scam tourists, that's where they shoplift from stores, that's where government offices are, that's where the services are.
You have to break these economic cycles, and I'm not sure even the Feds can throw pocket change at the situation and make it go away. We need robust healthcare and housing policies that cost more than Congress is willing to spend because they think people don't deserve it.
I think you are missing the point. As I said I don't think we should do anything at the local level. I would also argue that the other problems you bring up about drugs need addressed at the national level. There is nothing the Seattle council can do that would solve the fentanyl crisis. To reiterate there are things they can and should be doing to lessen the negative effects on the area. But the city would just be putting a bandaid on a wound that needs stitches from the federal government.
The problem is that no amount of local changes will fix the issue because people can export their homeless. That's why it needs a federal solution, otherwise taxpayers here will just foot the burden, one which will increase as long as other parts of the country can export their homeless.
because people can export their homeless
That's a canard not based on data. Most of the homeless in King County were previously housed in King County.
I never even commented on the percentage of our homeless that were exported here, so your point doesn't really apply.
My point was simply that we cannot really solve it unless we also stop the exportation of homelessness. That can only be done at a federal level, I think. Not sure if a state can stop another state from exporting their homeless.
My point was simply that we cannot really solve it unless we also stop the exportation of homelessness.
And my point, which does apply, is that exportation of homeless is not the real problem here.
The point of the system is what it produces.
Our culture, political policies, philanthropic models, and economic norms produces vast disparities of resource access, poverty, stress and suffering.
To treat homelessness as an unintended and unwanted phenomenon is to miss the truth that it is an essential threat, to keep us in compliance to uphold what is.
What is to be done with systems which are working out exactly as intended, when what we see as a "problem" is framed as individual failures so that we can all avoid our shared complicity in upholding these systems and norms which produces homelessness?
How can it be my fault, the homeless person should have been smarter and born to wealthier parents like the rest of us normal people were.
EXACTLY
I had a friend who grew up in Bellevue in a home that’s now worth $3m, went to great schools, had a two parent household, etc. He ended up on the street and died due to his drug addiction. His father was a successful lawyer but he as a functioning alcoholic and had the same addiction gene it appears. All homeless are not from low-income families and victims of capitalism, there are many rich kids that become addicts. Usually their families have the resources for expensive rehabs but some people can’t get clean for multiple reasons.
That’s my cousin. Wealthy family and had everything growing up. Had a successful career and a beautiful family and house but now is homeless somewhere in Portland and addicted to fentanyl. His parents and kids have gone looking for him but haven’t had any luck, they thought he had passed up until recently because he was able to shut down the missing person case they had out for him. What a bummer
Yeah, it is a threat. It’s intentionally seen as inevitable impossible to avoid. Same with wealth inequality in general. They want an excuse for billionaires too.. as an inevitably.
But honestly, based on they way I’ve seen some ultra wealthy talk about it. I think a lot of them get off on it. Money is a relative thing and the people who want extreme wealth, who seek it even when they already have enough for a thousand lifetimes, also consciously want that disparity. Because the more someone is desperate for their money the more it’s worth to them. Like literally like “make the monkeys dance.”
It’s like those rich people who would throw red hot pennies into the street back hundreds of years ago so they could watch poor people burn themselves in their desperation.
We live inside structured abuse. And not enough people see that for what it is. They are just afraid of losing their place they’ve carved out in the hierarchy. And some just intuitively understand it’s abusive nature and would rather live in a world like that even if they aren’t on top because at least they get to abuse those that are below them (lots of conservatives/bigots feel that way.)
You know a tree from its fruit
It’s a feature, not a bug
I mean the article is basically saying the blade is a hub for all sort of terrible things moving in and out of the region. Trying to solve the problem only here just means an endless supply of new patients
There are absolutely steps that need to be taken at the federal level, but so much is possible at the local level. Just redoing how we approach zoning alone would significantly reduce the issue. Cities with affordable housing simply don’t have the same levels of homelessness.
I literally say that we should do things locally. But I am acknowledging the fact that this problem is a nationwide problem and therefore should be addressed at the Federal level to get the most effective action. Also expecting Seattle to carry the burden of homelessness for all of Washington is silly too. Yes Seattle needs to pass affordable housing. But there are things that the county can do there are things the state can do and there's things that the federal government can do that would help this problem as well that's all I was trying to acknowledge. That this problem is much bigger than a lot of people realize.
i think a bunch of cities passing things locally is the only way something happens federally
Sorry, wasn’t trying to imply you didn’t. Just pushing back on the idea that we can’t solve it without the feds. Their help is needed because they can do a top-down push, but the fact that homelessness is such a hyper localized issue, even across the country, puts more of the power and onus on localities. Seattle doesn’t need to do the work for the whole state - every city needs to do the work. If every city just upzoned some and was more willing to build housing, that alone would solve most of the issues, I would very comfortably bet. Places like Burien need to chill tf out.
I think you're missing my entire point of why I feel the federal government is necessary to solve this problem. Because even if we do everything you say and every city fixes to the best of their ability the local issue of homelessness there is still a larger issue of homelessness that exists in this country. Homeless people are nomadic. Fix the "problem" and get every homeless person in a home and new ones will come. That's the problem. We have social programs to deal with homelessness and the fentanyl epidemic. But those systems are being overrun because other places don't have those systems so people who need those systems will come here because no other place is offering them. This is why homelessness is so bad in Seattle to begin with. So no we can't solve the problem without the feds.
Some factors, like drugs are better suited for federal level, but others may not be, homelessness varies by region and city and doesn’t neatly fit patterns of things like weather. Other local policies impact it, such as housing zoning and affordability.
I don't think you realize how much the drug problem and homeless problem are interwoven. I hear what you are saying and kinda agree to the point you are making. But you need the federal government's help.
The issue also is that what people dislike about the homeless isn't even necessarily them sleeping on the street, it's the large groups of, often drug users, loitering in large groups in public.
This likely wouldn't go away even if every last one of them had shelter.
Controversial take but the Bellevue nimby approach of "ship them somewhere else" (Seattle) seems to make more and more sense. We don't need to fix it for the whole US- not being able to fix the problem universally is not a good reason to not target a fix locally. Offer resources, offer housing, but then whoever is still left on the street on their own accord does not get to stay.
This is why nobody likes Bellevue. This does nothing but make the problem worse for others. This is selfish this is short-sighted and this is why homelessness Nationwide is such a problem because this is the strategy that is used most often. People continuously push the problem to somebody else and somebody else and somebody else. That's why a lot of homeless people end up in Seattle because Seattle is unwilling to push the homelessness away. We actually want to address and fix the issue nobody else actually wants to fix the issue. But Seattle can't be the only one who fixes the issue.
Bingo...the hard truth. The fact is most homeless are mentally ill and do not want to homed for numerous reasons. All successful attempts to home the cronic homeless only result in attracting more ill population from other less enabling cities. So those homeless that do have the will to exit do so. Policies of toleration and support may improve the living conditions but are ultimately counter productive as they result in growing the homeless population. Yes, it is the lack of federal support of mental health that is the root cause of this urban condition. The cities, even with state aid, do not have the means to unilaterally end this condition leaving the only rational and practical policy, albeit ruthless, is to shut out this population.
That's not a fact in any context, from any data collected, and is a hateful assumption made by people who don't care enough about the issue to know basic facts.
I'm not trying to be snarky or ask a rhetorical question here but what kind of data would you want to see?
If you do a trip through downtown Seattle (I passed through yesterday en route to a concert and it has actually gotten worse recently), it's pretty easy to tell who is zonked out on drugs. It's not about generalizations when there are people openly shooting up drugs on the sidewalk, which is criminalized.
If someone commited another crime like stole your wallet, would you say, well let's slow down here and look at the data? I know it sounds like a sweeping generalization to say many of the homeless are mentally ill or addicted to substances, but that's the simple reality. There are definitely people down on their luck as well (or perhaps all of them are) but there are also many active drug abusers.
In the states, we don't even tolerate people drinking alcohol in public. Why is fentanyl, heroin, meth, okay?
I lived on 3rd Avenue (in an apartment, not homeless) for 4 years for the record, so I don't think it's reasonable to assume I'm out of touch or have never been exposed to the reality.
I disagree. This problem, (meaning large chronic urban homelessness), began when the feds under Reagan defunded federal mental health programs. Sure, there are sundry other causes such as poverty and drug abuse but these are in themselves solvable.
There is no solution for a population that is mentally ill. Even if ill, you are still possessing your rights of free choice, association and movement. These homeless do not want responsibility. They don't want rules or to be told no. They want to do what they want without consequence. They are reasoning or socially disfunctional and will not "fit in" to living within the social norms.
Institutional care is required but in doing so we usurp rights and increase the public burden...not tolerable by a majority of us.
“Shut out”
I’m not even sure what you mean by this. They’re still human beings.
By shut out I mean exactly what is finally happening after all the millions of dollars spent in failed attempts to right the problem of homeless squalor. The cities are blocking access to encampment areas shifting access with whack a mole policy shutting them out of public areas. It is a desperate but the only workable response: waiting until murder, mayhem, fires or worse occure then cleaning house and blocking access.
Yes, they are humans. They have rights and they exercise these rights in ways that eventually infringe upon the rights of other humans. Yes, some do accept help, some do want to escape the condition they find themselves in. There are good programs and policies that can help and do help some. Each time a camp is cleared a few do escape through this help. Yet the camps still grow and fester in a new spot as most prefer this life. This because these camp occupants are enabled and encouraged to camp as it is easier and preferred to do than anything else.
Sounds like a pretty good argument in favor of accessible abortions.
In spite of louder voices getting amplified most people can obviously understand that not everyone should be entitled to live in extremely high cost of living areas without being able to support themselves
The loudest voices insist an area cannot declare itself free from providing human services just because they've decided their living costs should be extremely high.
If I had to choose between moving somewhere else and taking a shit in the middle of a crowded sidewalk I know what my choice would be
God forbid you ever have to walk my Lenin shoes (it's a song lyric not a personal attack)
If you think being homeless counts as “living in a high cost of living area” then I think you are part of the problem.
When was the last time you had to try to sleep on the street or get by without even the basics of food, shelter, & water?
As someone who was homeless most my life, I can answer this. That person made a good point. They put drug addicts who are the MAJORITY of the homeless population in housing that middle class folks with jobs can't even afford. Sorry but that's fucked up. That isn't right. I've slept in alleyways and at bus stops to get out of the rain. It has nothing to do with shaming the person because of their correct opinion on the matter. It's so weird how people do that..."well when was the last time you blah blah blah". Well what about you dude? I highly doubt you've been though a pinky finger of shit I've been through on the streets of California and Seattle. But I agree with homie that got all these libtards pissy due to the truthful of his/her comment. Y'all need to pull your heads out of your asses. The self righteous act you have is quite the fake one.
Totally agree. Police often shuffle homeless people around by telling them about places like Seattle and making them sound glamorous. If it’s not addressed on a federal level, people will keep on flooding in. The vast majority of homeless in Seattle aren’t Seattle natives, or Washington state natives (from what I’ve read.)
What does this mean?
If you ask all these homeless where they are from, most are from out of state. They migrate here because we accommodate it. It’s a federal problem that red states tend to frame as a blue state problem.
Well that's why they say that. If you're gonna enable it then it's your problem. Just like the immigration ordeals. Texas is sending them to new York cause the ignorant progressive left policies accommodate them. Same thing.
Exactly, this has to be a federal, and nationally addressed issue. no one city can do it. This is exactly why we have a federal government, to handle the things that cities and states can't handle on their own.
The problem is that people work dead in jobs that have no future and don’t plan adequately for the future. They don’t save up and inflation has gone crazy so their ability to handle unexpected financial stress is minimal to none. The stress then causes them to do drugs and it goes down from there.
This.
I think this is disingenuous. Yeah it’s a problem nationwide but it is also FAR more of a problem in Seattle and other west coast cities
But at large this is a systematic problem that the whole
countryworld has.
It really doesn’t. Nowhere I’ve traveled has this level of the problem.
It’s a specific combination of high housing costs and lack of government funding.
i mean yes it does affect all 50 states, but this is mostly a west coast/big cities who haven’t built a lot of housing problem, there are meaningful changes that we can make on local levels but it will involve breaking the power of nimbys and the homeowner lobby
I think you are oversimplifying the issue of homelessness.
I can tell you what's not going to help- continuing to give out 100s of millions of dollars to any organization that says it's to help homelessness with no strings attached, no concrete goals, no audits, and no accountability.
When did we stop auditing the organizations we give money to?
When politicians realized they can steal money by "helping" the poor.
We should elect an auditor.
When did we start?
When we signed contracts with them.
“Michelle McClendon, project manager of the Third Avenue Project, said much of the inflow comes from local encampment removals.
“When encampment remediations happen, everybody goes downtown,” McClendon said.”
Wait…. So constant encampment removals aren’t helping reduce homelessness? omg
Camp removals are more about safety. I don’t think anyone thinks they are reducing homelessness.
Thank you for saying this sensibly. This right here.
How does simply moving homeless people from one encampment to another down the street make them or the rest of us more safe?
It disrupts the predatory actions of drug dealers, breaks up groups that have developed cultures of violence and rape, and allows an area to be cleaned up from fecal and drug contamination
It also reduces the long term harms to local small businesses, as it allows shoppers to return to areas that were harmed economically by the presence of the camps.
Strawman argument. The intention of sweeps isn't to "reduce" homelessness, and neither the city, nor any serious person, is claiming that.
Nobody ever claimed that sweeps solve homelessness. What they claimed is that they reduce the impact of homelessness on that immediate area, usually after the impacts have serious health or safety consequences for the residents of the encampment or their neighbors.
This is a strawman that has been thoroughly mutilated on this sub in the last 5 years. But it's still a strawman
So like the name implies, it’s a costly way of literally shuffling the problem from one neighborhood to another endlessly. Maybe we should spend that money and time on literally anything else to get people off the street in that case.
Okay, you got several billion lying around to solve the problem? The city sure doesn't.
The city could have the money if they were willing to tax the immense wealth that exists in our city. The same wealth that has largely contributed to the housing and homelessness crisis we face.
But regardless, I’m comparing the impact of the $30 million we spent last year on sweeps to the impact that same money could make if we used it to put up people in hotels, build tiny homes, hire addiction counselors… literally anything that does more than simply rearrange deck chairs on the titanic.
Your examples are all temporary solutions that don't solve homelessness either. $30 million can't even build a tiny small shelter let alone long term supportive housing
$30 million dollars can’t build a tiny house? Dude, they cost the city $15k each to build.
And I didn’t say that would solve homelessness, I said if we’re not going to do the full spend necessary to solve homelessness let’s not burn the limited resources we have on shit that doesn’t work. $30 million a year spent entirely on tiny houses would have an exponentially greater impact than flushing that money on sweeps.
A tiny house is not longer term supportive housing. It also does absolutely nothing to prevent more people from falling into homelessness. As a supposed participant in the homeless services industry, you should be aware of that.
You are right, it didn't say it would solve homelessness. But you also only listed other solutions that similarly just rearrange deck chairs on the titanic, to use your metaphor.
How does getting someone into a stable living situation not improve their chances of exiting homelessness? You need to log off and literally do any amount of research on what the evidence says works to address homelessness, because you’re so confused that you’re are talking with your whole chest directly out your ass
A tiny home is not a stable living situation. See Nickelsvilles.
Can a supportive housing site contain tiny homes? Sure. The physical structues are somewhat less important that the services provided. But $30 million isn't going to pay for those services.
No one saw this coming. At all.
I remember when people were celebrating the jungle sweep in 2016. Then those same people were shocked and outraged wondering how we got here when a few tents popped up at the giant sequoia the next week. But as soon as that can got kicked Ballard commons started to fill and the RVs rolled in. A year or 2 later encampments were normalized downtown and in neighborhoods even tho the jungle was back in action.
An epic can kick
The Jungle was undermining the structural stability of I-5. What was the alternative, let the freeway collapse so as to avoid disturbing the people illegally living under it?
Nah thats not true, you're exaggerating one of the concerns into something real for an argument. That has always been one concern, that a good size fire could undermine the integrity. It still hasn't happened all these years later even tho there's been multiple fires under the freeway and people continue to camp there today.
It's also a concern that a tanker fire could undermine the integrity, but there's still tankers driving on it everyday
Building housing helps to reduce homelessness. Sweeps don’t.
No one is claiming that sweeps end homelessness. The problem is that encampments get bigger and bigger and eventually there is a shooting or stabbing or an RV fire, etc and the whole thing needs to be cleared. Letting encampments grow unfettered with blocked sidewalks, environmental hazards until we provide free housing for anyone that needs it is not practical. Even if we could build 10,000 rooms of free housing, how do you provide security/enforce rules to former homeless in housing and prevent them from using drugs and trashing the place and harming others?
There is no single solution - and multiple things need to happen, including: 1. Build housing - don’t ever stop doing this. Make cities denser. 2. Ensure that there are well paid jobs for people by developing economy. 3. Bolster economy by welcoming more people. (1 and 2 help with this) 4. Enforce the laws. 5. Tax - so that we can have money to support people and do things listed above.
Downtown is where all the service providers are located so it's still better than letting them live in highway off ramps near Northgate
Because the Seattle Times' preferred candidates won the city council and they have no interest in solving the root causes of homelessness as it would require higher taxation on the city's wealthiest to provide services to those they consider subhuman and developing more housing in their precious neighborhoods.
Awfully convenient that suddenly it is an unsolvable problem now that the folks they endorsed to solve the problem are in power.
It makes me sad reading this as someone who has been in this position but also reminds me why I'm 8 years clean
What do you even do once you put them in free housing? Hire security? You’re going to have people breaking the law, doing drugs, messing the place up. I feel like mental hospitals would be better at that point because you can control that stuff.
Breaking up encampments don’t work but they’re a breeding ground for trash, crime, and disease. You should see these people when they come to the hospital. Hammers to the head, face smashed in and no witnesses. Breaking up encampments displaces then but you can’t have encampments. And I’m not sure free housing is the only thing you need to do
The security is absolutely destroying the housing providers. The cost of security is a lot and providing housing for homeless individuals isn’t exactly a ton of margin there.
They're pro encampment, then move away when they get uncomfortable around it. I've seen it happen a lot.
Everyone's pro-encampment until there's one right outside their house.
Yup, pro-encampment as long as they are not harassing my families.
Harassing your families. Well, that sucks. But where would they go? You are not solving the root cause. let's wait for the long term resolution. Please be patient.
Breaking up encampment DOES work. It rids the immediate area of drug use, theft, violence, disease, and fire hazard. The only problem is that it isn't followed up with arresting all of the squatters. If they're flight risks because they are vagrants, bail bondsmen won't bail them out. Reforming prisons to minimize detention costs while retrieving more value out of prisoners in the form of more comprehensive penal labor would reduce the per capita cost of incarceration relative to the cost of emergency services provided to deal with homeless people.
Why wait until they break the law? If we return to the poor houses era, we could successfully leverage the destitute until they provide enough resources to pay for their own incarceration.
/s
Help addicts through the first stage of getting clean by force; then give option of getting their life back by living in free housing + deaddiction, or, jail.
Housing is always the start. Every single country that has fixed this has had a housing first policy.
It would mean bringing back vagrancy laws and arresting all of them. They would have to be assessed, involuntarily committed for treatment or put in an apartment with a counselor that visits apart from anyone they know.
No one in the U.S. has tackled this since the county farm was likened to slavery.
That's not true. All the countries with successful housing programs had two decades of successful opoid management programs first. They reached over 60% of their target population. We barely hit 30%. On top of their health care benefits for being Europe.
With how bad usage is here, it'll take a quarter century of dedicated drug response before we could even tackle housing. Good luck having democrats in power long enough to invest in a robust project that long.
Yes, you'd need security and either tiny, disposable buildings or regular wellness checks.
We don't have sufficient rehabs, we don't have sufficient mental health resources, we have no centralized shelter network, CEA doesn't fucking work, there are too many paperwork gates to getting affordable housing, we don't even have enough affordable housing, homeless families have no targeted resources where adult male relatives can stay with the family, senior housing won't let adult children move in with their parents, too many of the shelter systems are run by religious orgs who get to make rules like "no icky gays".. Gosh, I wonder why shit isn't getting fixed?
Where does the city spend $100 million dollars a year on homeless services?
Idk, ask the city. Obviously not in the right places.
We could have unlimited access to everything you mentioned and it wouldn’t mean fuck all to the people who choose to live in filth and do drugs in public parks.
You are not informed or intelligent enough to be commenting on this subject. I was homeless in Seattle and I know more about this than you.
Cope.
Audit the homeless industrial complex.
It's insane to me how we're essentially saying the same thing but you can't keep yourself from dehumanizing homeless people who've been so mistreated by society they decide not to live by society's rules. If that tactic worked we wouldn't have so many imports from outside Seattle.
People dehumanize themselves with their own behavior.
I’ve grown to realize these non profits are part of the problem. Their incentives align against ending homelessness and frankly more towards increasing the problem. I’m sure there are good people working there but when the incentive structure is to not end homelessness that still ends up winning at some level.
The city itself needs to do more and stop outsourcing.
If they solved the homeless problem then they would stop getting money and lose their jobs. They have no incentive to solve it.
If I could be the benevolent dictator of Washington, I would put a set price on a project (ie fixing homelessness) and a reasonable amount of time I think it could be done in. You get that amount of money whether you take the entire time to do it or if you solve the problem in a day. You get paid in increments based on the time spent on the project and are paid out the remaining amount allotted to the project at the time of completion. I bet lots of problems would get solved very quickly if the executors of said project had a time limit with incentives to solve it quickly.
Yes homelessness is a difficult problem. But allowing individuals to get high, rot, die, and use drugs in your major thoroughfare and tourist spot is a choice.
Wait was enabling them not a good idea??
At some point people need to realize these issues are at the national level and can’t really be affected by local legislation outside of punitive measures that will just keep them moving along. The issues are clear …
American capitalism is broken. A sufficient amount of wealth has been sucked up to the top from the bottom.
There have been national cost cutting measures for the mentally ill over the last few decades.
The drugs today make addicts nonfunctional quickly. And the drugs are pouring in as WW3 sides begin indirect warfare.
Too many people making money off the homeless crisis to shut it down. They’ve turned it into an industrial complex not unlike the prison system.
I've never met anyone with a working knowledge of homeless services who believed there was a fortune to be made providing them.
King County has $168mm budgeted for its 14,000 homeless residents this year..that’s about $12k per person. That money doesn’t all funnel to state employees like social workers. Most of it goes to contractors and privately owned companies to “solve” the problem.
Plenty of references out there about the homeless industrial complex in the US being big business.
https://civicfinance.org/2022/08/24/exposing-the-homeless-industrial-complex/
https://austin-network.com/austin/breaking-down-the-homeless-industrial-complex/
Furthermore… King County has proposed it can end homelessness with $8bb plus a recurring $3.5bb/year. So not including that $8bb startup fee the county wants about $250,000 per person, per year to end homelessness in King County. That math ain’t mathin…
Edit: I’m seeing a varying number of homeless people in King County. But even if that 14k is double that’s still a ton of money spent per person on trying to solve homelessness.
$12k per person sounds like a pretty good deal considering that jailing someone is like $30k+
Both are examples of industrial complexes.
These articles do not indicate anyone is getting wealthy providing homeless services.
Now you’re just arguing in bad faith… the first article is titled “how homelessness has become big business.
The second article’s first paragraph includes “The author, Ray Bramson, is Chief Impact Officer at the nonprofit “Destination Home,” a tax exempt organization that collected over $62 million in contributions and grants in 2020. The CEO of this organization made a reported $335,404 in that year, and one of the directors made a whopping $754,871, of which a hefty $693,186 was “base compensation.””
Disagreement over interpreting details is not bad faith.
An organization with a $62 million budget paid it's executive officer $300k and you conclude fraud?
If so, tell me how much a for profit business with $62m in yearly revenues should pay its executive officer.
More bad faith arguments..no one said fraud.
But you said “no one is getting wealthy providing homeless services”. And now I’ve shown you an example of a director earning 3/4 of a million dollars in one year while working for a non-profit/tax exempt business. There’s no other way to interpret that than that person is getting wealthy in his role.
For anyone wondering.. $750k per year puts you above 99.7% of the population.
So to recap…by bringing my original comment up..”Too many people making money off the homeless crisis to shut it down. They’ve turned it into an industrial complex not unlike the prison system.”
Edit: I love that this guy is like yea…the CEO should get paid that exorbitant amount of money because he runs a company that handles a lot of cash…while simultaneously claiming he doesn’t know anyone trying to get wealthy off homelessness.
And honestly what is more likely, a horrific housing crisis met with an unaddressed mental health crisis met with a rampant opioid crisis and an anemic social support system results in a lot of people unhoused and uncared for. Both the invisible homeless who couch surf, work jobs, and live in cars. And the chronic homeless who are not able to function in society without dramatic assistance.
Or there is a big conspiracy where big non profit is just keeping this thing going.
Yes, just look at those fat cat social workers living it up in their 4 bedroom homes (that they rent with 5 roommates)
Lol no us workers at the bottom don't see the money. But the program directors and clinic managers and city managers are loaded.
Seattle has spent a billion dollars on homeless over the last decade…do you really think all that money is going to social workers alone?
Who exactly do you think is getting rich off of homelessness, save for a few dozen nonprofit CEOs and city directors making a nice 6 figure income that an entry level Amazon hire can make?
Do you think that only non-profit companies are contracted to work on homelessness?
You answered your own question tho…. From the article below…
“The author, Ray Bramson, is Chief Impact Officer at the nonprofit “Destination Home,” a tax exempt organization that collected over $62 million in contributions and grants in 2020. The CEO of this organization made a reported $335,404 in that year, and one of the directors made a whopping $754,871, of which a hefty $693,186 was “base compensation.””
https://civicfinance.org/2022/08/24/exposing-the-homeless-industrial-complex/
For a cool $25.5 billion over five years we can end homelessness in King County per the King County Homeless Authority! For reference, King County has about 14,000 homeless residents. That’s about $364,000 per person per year.
Edit: I’m seeing varying numbers of how many homeless are in King County…but say the number is double the 14k…that’s still $182k per year per person to “solve” the problem.
Homelessness has nothing on the people making money from the drug war. And without people making money from the drug war we wouldn't even have a drug war
We will never even make a dent in ending homelessness until we stop lumping thousands upon thousands of people into one homogeneous group called The Homeless. Also, children, drug addicts, and mentally ill people don’t have bootstraps.
This. There are many causes of homelessness, but we don’t seem to want to do anything to help until someone is homeless. King county is fixated on a housing first policy. That only works if the person being housed is capable of helping themselves, and can get a job etc to be self sufficient.
If they have mental or drug problems, then it probably won’t, but we can’t force treatment, so they won’t get any better.
What do you mean by work? Housing first can get people some stability, which can give them the freedom they need to tackle their other issues.
Does it always? No.
But it definitely work some of the time.
The real answer is to heavily bolster mental health screenings and support, with early intervention.
But that costs money. Maybe we just put them in the woods.
Part of the issue is that even if someone who is unhoused has a pocket full of money, they may still be unhoused!
Getting an apartment without steller credit, without excellent references, without rental history, and without a co-signer if any of those things aren't up to snuff, is REALLY hard.
Well, be in this vicious circle until someone decides we have to remove the barriers to housing. Yes, we have too few housing units, but even if we had enough, with all the barriers in place, we'd still have tons of unhoused.
30 years ago, I could show a landlord a fist full of dollars and they'd give me a key, and take my money. That's just not a thing anymore.
There are still landlords like that, but they mostly only exist in black and grey markets because of costs.
When I was looking for housing a few years ago I found some. They were doing illegal sublets, housing people in buildings that weren't legally dwellings, and greylegal shared-housing things.
Which shouldn't be a thing. This is slum-lording. And even then, there still aren't enough of even these terrible dwellings.
My last job I managed a team of entry-level technical support analysts, 7 of them. Three had gig worker jobs or afterhours jobs in addition to their normal 9-5, of the 7 of them, THREE lived in AirB&Bs. Those employees made pretty decent money but were on the edge of income requirements, but all had shaky credit or bad rental histories for a variety of kind of silly reasons. They had to work those gig jobs just to afford the AirB&Bs.
Take a step down in the employment ladder, a friend of mine was a grocery manager. She had a large number of minimum wage staff who lived in tents or cars. They made little to no money, couldn't afford AirB&B, didn't have the income, rental history or credit history to rent an apartment. Not even a cheap one. She saw a number of these employees fall into drug and alcohol abuse eventually. They didn't have those issues when they were hired... they were drug tested as a condition of employment.
Barriers to housing is really really rough.
It’s been a problem in Seattle since the Great Depression, why would anyone think they could just magically end it? Pretty sure every solution has been tried and failed.
It is very hard to do things when you don't want to do them.
We've tried nothing and we're out of ideas!
You guys only say stuff like this to get positive affirmations on social media right?
Seattle spends $100 million dollars a year on the homeless crisis and the problem only gets worse as the number goes up.
Homeless industrial complex. If you want more of something, subsidize it.
So your solution is to spend less money and ignore the problem?
No more money until people can present some feasible metrics of tracking progress on the issue. We desperately need a massive audit of the spending.
So no solutions, got it
Where does the city spend $100 million dollars on homeless services?
What do you mean 'where'? Like... geographically?
There couldn't have been an audit if I didn't know about it.
- "Moderate" Seattle
An audit of a city budget would be publicly documented, where’s it at?
Literally took me 3 seconds on google. You can see how every dollar is allocated. https://www.seattle.gov/city-budget-office
How the budget is allocated and how it’s actually spent are two different things
We've tried throwing endless money at every progressive scheme and it only gets worse!
“We’ve spent 1/10th the amount every expert says we’d need to spend to fix this and the problem keeps getting worse? Wtf?!?!!!”
It’s like taking your antidepressant once every week and blaming your psychiatrist for you still feeling like shit.
For $100M a year, we could build 500 houses on public land and therefore house 1k-2k homeless people permanently. So the problem mostly gets solved in a decade. That should be the baseline for the efficacy of any alternatives and if the alternative doesn't do better than this then it's not worth doing.
Do take maintenance on those houses into account.
Not going to argue against redirecting the vast majority of our homelessness spend to permanent subsidized housing.
Spending $1billion in annual spending on homelessness is a complete non-starter. That kind of spending would bankrupt nearly any individual city in the US.
The city doesn’t want to “end” homelessness it would put too many out of work. It’s part of the system to have a problem that can’t be solved.
If you think that it wouldn't take lots more permanent employers to end homelessness....
Homeless people have jobs. Housing is unaffordable, you can’t work more and get a house when earning the least amount someone is willing to pay you
As a bleeding heart liberal, I’ve got no other recommendation that makes any more sense than a one way ticket out of town.
It’s so hard, gawl!
“American city struggles again with anything they can’t fix by throwing money at it”
No way really?!?! /s
For those that need to hear it…. No one who can make the change really cares… they feed you false promises to win your vote. That’s all they care about. They don’t care about you, the homeless, or anything but their pocketbooks.
I currently live a block away from pike place, and in the last 6-12 months alone I have seen half the buisness(bars,mini stores, restaurants) close due to a overwhelming increase of homeless crime and presence. Started with like a few here or there but now every alley is packed with them breaking into the buildings daily. Our building alone has lost over 21% of residents in the last 4 months directly due to feeling unsafe with how much homeless there is. The only good news is a few diamond parking lots have been taken over and honestly I hope they keep the spot! Fuck diamond parking lol! Now I know there are plenty who would want help. But the vast Majority we are “seeing” do not. I’m right near a clinic and homeless facility that gives out food,clothes,phones and money etc. therefore the homeless tend to congregate near, because there is actually limited supply or a time window. If I have 25-100 daily care packages but 5000 homeless who want it. There’s going to create the system of sleep and stay as close as you can so you can make sure you are able to get in line. Without more funding and locations you’re dealing with the entire community camping there, causing all the local businesses to suffer. Constant theft means open less hours or carring less items. Less people come to the area to spend money due to wanting to avoid the danger or seeing trash everywhere. So businesses close. They need to provide locations outside of the city with a vastly stronger infrastructure to help with mental illness and getting clean. I know I sounds harsh but part of society is giving up a few small freedoms (paying taxes with a portion of income, not allowed to murder, not allowed do just do what ever that could harm others, aka drinking and driving doing drugs at work) and we get security of a military, laws, cops, jobs, and safety. If you are not going to provide anything of benefit to that society and only bring negatives, like turning our children’s parks into camps with broken glass and trash, or litter the streets with trash, obstructing streets, attacking citizens with no real consequences(if you break the law and are arrested but don’t have a home they can’t put you in jail because people who can pay money to they system will go in and homeless are not profitable.) Another systemic issue!!! It’s not a matter of herding them around it’s about finding a solution, clearly I’m not in a position to offer a better one. But it seems at a glance all the money for homeless is just spend on the people’s salaries holding the jobs “helping” in Seattle the person running it makes 300,000$ and qualifications was being friends with the people in government… as I’m probably one of the most jaded and desensitized to the homeless issue, and even I don’t think it’s just their problem. For instance I talk to a good amount with my job in asking them to leave but treat them like people. Some lost everything because of an accident and even had insurance but medical costs were so high. Or taking care of a family member or crippling student loans with the only way out being death… veterans who saw combat mental illness and yes some addiction and gambling but you be surprised how many were due to medical expenses, or a bad marriage and getting shafted. And once ur homeless good luck finding a job without an address or 3-5 years of stable work history with no more than 1-3 months of unemployment. Also it fucks with you mentally being homeless dealing with people fucking with you in your sleep. I have had to remove women from under a stairwell crying because she had not slept in days because men touch her in her sleep. These shelters have strict hours of closed at 7/8pm so if you have a later shift job good luck… limited spaces maybe 25 beds for 300 people. Miss that curfew due to traffic or flat tire or anything and new you don’t have a bed and back to the bottom of the wait list….
People act like it's this big complicated problem and for individual cases it is, but homelessness correlates exactly with the rising cost of housing. Stop that rise, and the problem will solve itself. Drugs, mental illness, yeah these are problems too, but do you think drugs and mental illness were not problems in Seattle in the 90s? Was there a significant homelessness problem in the 90s? Dedicate the resources to making housing readily available and affordable and we'll solve the problem. It will be at the cost of property values though, those will need to go down, which is why no elected official in Seattle or any other major city will propose this.
Fentanyl was not a problem in the 90s
In the 90s Seattle was infamous for heroin
Fentanyl is like heroin x100
in terms of potency yes but not in terms of effect, the overdose risk is higher but its not like its more addictive. the opiate crisis is not worse right now than at various points in the past, it's just more visible
That's the part I don't get, personally. The city is acting like it's rocket science to reduce homelessness. And to reduce homelessness without reducing housing scarcity at all, actually might be something akin to rocket science. Like that's a tough problem.
But we know what the primary issue is. So why not address that? Like you said, property values are why not. It's just so fucking sad. We're willing to kill our city to make like a few hundred people super rich.
Controlling the cost of housing is communism. Stepping over homeless people to get your $35 cappuccino is normal functioning capitalism. Why do you hate my freedom?
Any plan to address “homelessness” that doesn’t at its core have increased taxation as a way to funnel more money to the bottom of the economic ladder is doomed to fail. That’s just the truth. Homelessness is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself
It’s a symptom of the problem of the drug crisis
That’s part of it, but many times drug use is a result of people feeling undervalued, put upon, and unsuccessful in life. A social safety net that allies people the fullness of life without constant slave-like working conditions would alleviate much of the drug problem
Thank you for taking the mask off and telling us you are primarily interested in class war, not solving homelessness.
The homelessness crisis is caused primarily by addiction. Your mentality is a huge part of the problem. We need to enforce laws that would help people break the death spiral of addiction they're in, followed by easy access rehab and sober housing.
It doesn't work. I worked for those programs. All the money stays at the top. And none of the clients actually want help. You can only hold their hands so much. I had maybe 1 in 100 people take treatment seriously. The rest disappeared and we're never reachable again, died, or relapsed. It's fucked.
Good for you working a really rough role. Your clients were people were referred to treatment again after jail time? IMO part of the picture there is a "vibrant" drug encampment scene - returning to that is the path of least resistance. If no easy place to crash with a drug dealer nearby is available, folks might take their other options more seriously.
Edit: Actually let me update my guess to be that your clients were referred to treatment after arrest and a day or so in jail. I think people need enough time incarcerated to really sober up and start treatment while detained.
My clients were referred to us post overdose. It was a part of an EMS 911 program. Some I would try to contact with treatment options before and after jail. Lot of encampments. And pretty much anyone and everyone who overdosed whether it was a first time or a 100th time for them. The jail treatment program was starting up when I had left my role, but I didn't envy anyone trying to run that as the bureaucracy behind it was a huge mess.
It was rough but I really enjoyed the role. It was nice to bring more hope and understanding to the people suffering addiction and their families that took it so personally. Had a few people call and say their lives had been saved and that was just a wild thing to hear. Me, the office assistant, saved lives!
The program drastically changed and I had a new manager who treated me like scum. I still have nightmares about management and the underhanded shit they did, and my own health spiraled out of control. I was on track to get a master's degree but that simply won't happen now. It wasn't the job I left, it was management. I work retail now as I need low stress. It sucks. I can't afford life now. Just trying to get healthy in every possible way. Once you lose it though, it's not easy to get back.
(I speak for myself only and my experiences and opinions and not in place of any organization's words).
Wow, you were doing really important work. It's tragic that your skills are not being used in that field! Is there no way that you and the world can reap the benefits of getting back there?
If you are game to share I and those I encounter would love to know what bureaucracy was hobbling the jail treatment program, and why your terrible manager was allowed to drive you out of the field. This was a nonprofit not government?
I agree! And also, the rich need to pay more into the social contract. It’s not that complicated. Many many sociological cross tabbed studies link less addiction in a society to a higher well being services for those at the bottom of the ladder. And before you “unmask me” (🤭)me as some kind of Bernie leftist, I’m pretty wealthy! The fact that o pay no income tax in this state is appalling. Tax me. Please.
No income tax gives you more flexibility to target your philanthropic donations to nonprofits that you believe are making the most difference. I trust you out-do Christians and donate over 10%?
Comparing foreign cultures, of different sizes and diversities, is hard enough on its own. But sociology is less science and more a religion at this point, with far left critical theory ideology at its core. It's hard to take conclusions at face value with so many biases, assumptions, and filters on acceptable results.
This is where the Libertarians always think they got you, because a core psychological profile of Libertarians is that always think they are the smartest people in the room.
Ad-hoc, Opt-in charity has its own data-tracked bias. Why do you think all of these tech dorks are always spending their money on stuff “for humanity” like going to Mars? Because it’s sexy and they’re interested in it! Tragically, many people don’t care about schools in primarily brown neighborhoods, immigrants with food insecurity, and updates to traffic patterns. The unsexy needs are where taxes are needed the most.
The part of taxes that is a feature and not a bug is that, actually, we don’t get a say. We leave it to the people in government, presumably subject matter experts in their field, to be the stewards of our money. I, I guess unlike you, mostly people trust the hard working people in government. That’s a difference between citizens that has gone back to the founding of the Republic, and that’s fine.
But please, don’t Concern Troll me with your Well, Actually nonsense. Please save for someone far dumber.
I personally agree the issue is structural and primarily one of inequality, which more progressive taxation could play a role in solving, depending on where the money is spent. But you jump from that to "class war"
That's a surprising jump in logic. Care to explain? Do you consider all additional public projects (e.g. library expansions, city-run food banks, public infra-construction in low-income neighborhoods, and charities) "class war"?
Take u/TheMysteriousSalami at their word: they see homelessness as a symptom of a problem: insufficient taxation or redistribution from the top of the economic ladder to the bottom. This is the classical Marxist critical theory class war perspective. Blame every problem on the ruling class, use every issue as a wedge to advocate for the proletariat.
And in the process, ignore the facts: that the people suffering the most on our streets are there because they have addiction and/or mental health issues. So we get more on our streets, overdosing, while tons of tax money is wasted trying to cater to people until they overdose. All because this ideological view insists on seeing them as economic victims, and not people with medical conditions that need treatment.
Huh boy. It must be exhausting existing so far inside your own ideology
Where was I wrong?
Again, there is merely co-occurence of both homelessness and addiction in some (not even close to majority!). That these are casual, the result of an individual's choices, and somehow explain the macro pattern we see requires exhausting mental gymnastics. On the scale of this many people and the extent of their network interactions, it's requires a particularly pessimistic or authoritarian/punitive framework to assume that so many of them are choosing to overuse drugs and that is causing them to lose/fail to find housing. Of course this energy is well spent not in service of truth, but to justify the pre-existing distribution which is why we hear this lie repeated nauseatingly in mainstream media paid for by those in power.
I hope we can agree no one wants to live outside of comfortable, private housing. The body is naturally drawn to consistent water, food, heat, and security. So why there are many without is highly manufactured. Plenty of people use drugs, are even addicted, and yet are stably housed.
There are no obstinate people who repeatedly self-destruct and would refuse all support. Some have good reason to refuse shelters, but that doesn't mean they'd say no to a house.
Until we have a universal guaranteed wage and health insurance, there will be those who simply don’t have enough income to afford a roof over their heads.
Homeless is a business and business is booooming!!!!!
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I think the reality is that ending homelessness is never going to happen due to a city or a county or even due to state legislation. To address the problem of homelessness it needs to be addressed at the federal level. It is an epidemic that affects everybody in all 50 states. There are things that we can do locally that would improve the situation locally. But at large this is a systematic problem that the whole country has. No matter how well we fix the problem in Seattle, in King County or Washington the problem still exists around us and therefore would still be a problem and would still affect us. This is not me saying we shouldn't do anything but it is just an acknowledgment that what we can do at the local level will never fully solve the problem. I think a lot of people think there is a magic wand that could be waved to fix this problem and I'm here to say it's not that simple.