Seattle tackles homelessness with 'tiny house' villages and sanctioned homeless camps
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Sun, 03 Nov 2019 21:30:09 +0000
SEATTLE — True Hope Village is tidy and well-kept, but some of the items around its public space — bikes with training wheels, diaper boxes and miniature plastic picnic furniture — hint at the age of the village’s youngest residents.
True Hope is one of Seattle’s eight city-funded “tiny house villages” that have opened in the past three years in response to the city’s homelessness crisis. During a recent visit to the 35-unit village, organizer Eric Pattin said there were about eight families with kids living there.
“They’re good kids,” Pattin said. They occasionally forget to put away their toys in the common-room trailer. “Kids will be kids, you know.”
Most of the camp’s adult residents are employed, Pattin said, with many working in retail or construction. Pattin, 51, likes his own job at True Hope, which is a 30-minute bus ride from where he lives in Camp Second Chance, another village where 50 formerly homeless residents live. He’s been at Second Chance as it evolved from un-permitted squat, to sanctioned tent city, to city-funded tiny house village.
Eric Pattin lives in a tent in Camp Second Chance, a City of Seattle-sanctioned homeless encampment. He is pictured at True Hope Village, where he works. True Hope Village is one of Seattle’s tiny house villages, home to formerly homeless Seattleites, including families with children.
Pattin maintains a calm, even demeanour as he describes the pains of being homeless — passersby spitting at him while he sat on a sidewalk, hostile neighbours running him out of the forested area where he lived alone, his struggles with alcohol and meth before getting sober three years ago, or when his only shoes, the steel-toed boots he needed for his warehouse job, made his feet so cold when he wore them while sleeping under the 196th Street Bridge that he needed treatment for frostbite.
The only time he becomes emotional is when he describes where he lives now.
“Having a place like Camp Second Chance, with a strong sense of community and family, it builds up your self-esteem,” Pattin said, his voice cracking. “I’ll tell you, I’ve never been so happy in my life.”
Homeless encampments are common in Metro Vancouver, where the most prominent current example is the more than 100 tents in Oppenheimer Park. Vancouver’s park board has chosen not to seek an injunction to clear the park, but city officials don’t favour the idea of sanctioning tent cities, as Seattle has done. Earlier this month, when Coun. Jean Swanson tried to introduce a motion to direct staff to provide services to Oppenheimer campers — including sanitation, storage and electricity — it was ruled out of order. Last week, council approved a motion aiming to develop a “decampment plan” for Oppenheimer.
Tents in Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver on Thursday, September 19, 2019.
But in Seattle, where the homeless population is more than 3½ times the size of Vancouver’s, the city has sanctioned and supported encampments for people living in both tents and tiny houses. That approach has also been met with local controversy, but some, like Pattin, say it’s helping get people off the streets.
Seattle/King County’s population is 2.23 million, not far from Metro Vancouver’s 2.46 million. But the homeless populations in the two regions are starkly different: Metro Vancouver’s most recent tally found 3,605 homeless people, while Seattle-King County recorded 12,112 homeless people last year. Both numbers, officials say, are likely under-estimates.
King County’s increase in homelessness can’t be explained by rising population or poverty, a report last year from McKinsey & Company explained, but instead has increased in line with higher rent prices and the region’s strong economic growth.
“This is, essentially, the flip-side of our prosperity,” the report’s author, McKinsey senior partner Dilip Wagle told the Vancouver Sun.
Wagle’s 2018 McKinsey report poses a question: “Can a rising tide lift all boats?”
When the Vancouver Sun spoke to Wagle this month, he said, in response to that question: “In the timeframe we looked at, I’d say the answer is no.”
In the report, Wagle and his co-author wrote: “During the financial crisis of 2008, when poverty and unemployment rose, homelessness was relatively stable. But when the economy took off in 2014, so did rents. The result is a dearth of affordable housing and hence rising homelessness. And without a new approach to the crisis, it can only deepen.”
Washington state’s lack of rent control is a major reason many Seattleites find themselves homeless, said Sharon Lee, founding executive director of Seattle’s Low-Income Housing Institute, which operates tiny house villages. The tiny houses are cheap and fast to build, she says, and at less than 100 square feet each, they’re not considered dwellings under the building code.
Metro Vancouver’s most recent count found 201 children experiencing homelessness while Seattle tallied 763 homeless families with children last year. That number, though high, showed some progress — it was16 per cent lower than two years earlier.
Sharon Lee in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighbourhood. Lee is the founding executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute, a Seattle-based non-profit housing provider.
Lee believes the expansion of tiny house villages has helped some homeless families with kids to transition into longer-term homes.
The most recent Metro Vancouver count, in 2017, found 22 per cent of homeless people were employed part- or full-time. King County found 29 per cent of homeless people were employed that year, although Lee believes the actual number of working homeless people is significantly higher there.
This month, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan unveiled a proposed budget that would increase city spending on homelessness services to a record US$104 million. That’s roughly double what Seattle spent three years ago to fight homelessness, the Seattle Times reported, but still only 1.6 per cent of the city’s overall budget.
The Low Income Housing Institute has been pushing the city to add another US$6 million to that budget, which Lee says would fund 10 more tiny house villages in Seattle.
In May of last year, Seattle’s council unanimously passed a new tax on the city’s largest corporations to raise money to address homelessness. But after members of the local business community mounted an effort — backed and funded by Amazon — to fight the tax, Seattle’s council repealed the tax a month later. The tax was expected to raise US$45 million in its first year to address homelessness.
“Shame on Amazon,” Lee said. “They could have paid it themselves for everybody.”
Amazon’s revenues are more than US$200 billion annually. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the world’s richest man. By some estimates, his personal wealth increased, on average, hundreds of millions of dollars a day last year.
“It’s really outrageous that we have so much wealth,” said Lee, “and the cost of not addressing homelessness is even worse.”