Businesses generally see visible homelessness as bad for business, sullying what might otherwise be ‘beautiful downtown Seattle,’ for example.
Is it possible for the public interest in ending homelessness to be profitably married to business support for sufficiently similar objectives?
If any city could do it, Seattle would be a good bet. Its list of wealthy corporations that call the city home offers an unparalleled opportunity to fly above and beyond the limitations of resource-stretched taxpayer-funded services.
Just such an experiment was announced in February 2022, involving Washington’s State’s King County Regional Homeless Authority cooperating with Seattle’s well-healed business community. (Seattle is a part of King County.)
A new private/public ‘Partnership to Zero’ has been announced that will throw an unprecedented amount of cash at one of King County’s homelessness problems.
It is clear that the term ‘homeless,’ for the purposes of this new project, is more or less limited to the chronically homeless — those often highly visible downtown-oriented folks who ofttimes show resistance to the use of existing resources, including shelters.
Partnership to Zero includes components that have proved effective in other communities. For example, it will add 15 outreach workers to help guide and support homeless individuals to a roof over their heads. It will also hire 30 people with lived experience of homelessness to become ‘peer navigators.’ The idea is that peers will be able to provide more empathic, and therefore more successful, guidance and support to those transitioning into shelter or housing.
For Partnership to Zero, 10 million dollars in funding is expected to achieve ‘virtual’ zero (less than 30 people homeless on the streets). The area of pilot will be limited to one section of the city of Seattle, and will assist an estimated 800 to 1,000 people to leave the streets and move to housing.
This more or less demands that the program will be exclusive: a limited group of potential recipients of this new service will need to be name-checked or otherwise identified to register for the project’s services. Such a limitation would seem to be an inevitable consequence when a local jurisdiction tackles a stubborn national problem.
“What’s to prevent others from flocking to the city or district to get on our expensive bandwagon?” It’s a common concern of city councillors across the entire continent. Some measures look to be essential to limit the size of a population eligible for assistance.
The articles below describe a five step program explaining how it will be designed and implemented. At the moment, it would appear that none of the 10 million dollars in funding is earmarked for any form of new housing at all, transitional or otherwise.
Whatever is needed for the shelter/housing must be supplied through other initiatives. The estimates to get to virtual zero ‘within a year’ are very much dependent on new housing and shelter supports arriving. That housing will be beyond the control of Partnership to Zero1.
Seattle’s cash-rich project may be worth monitoring in hopes of answering some questions that are being asked in cities everywhere. For example, is it possible to end chronic homelessness one part of a city at a time? And as far as outreach workers are concerned, will the peer workers in Partnership For Zero be as successful as their counterparts in other communities?
Read more at KIRO7: Ending homelessness? Seattle-area billionaires and businesses help launch new plan and at King5: New partnership could shelter all currently homeless individuals in downtown Seattle in ‘as fast as 12 months’
