By Eric Ruthford 
This series was produced by Seattle Post Globe and funded by the Spot.Us community.
Dara Kommovongsa’s ordeal started with unemployment in the Tri-Cities, hitchhiking from the Tri-Cities to the Seattle area, then couch-surfing. Eventually she and her 5-year-old daughter found themselves out of luck when they were made to leave the apartment where they were staying because the landlord said there were too many people. It was Thanksgiving time. She did not have anyone to turn to. Dara could not get food stamps because she had no permanent address. For the same reason, she couldn’t get state-sponsored health care.
"It took a few days to get over my initial shock of being homeless and on the streets with an asthmatic child in tow," said the single mom.
She spent the next several weeks sleeping in the doors of storefronts and sitting at bus stops. One December night, her daughter complained that she was cold, as she had several times before. She reached out to touch her mom. "Her hand was ice cold," Dara recalled.
Their troubles were just starting and aren’t unique: The King County Committee to End Homelessness estimates that 24,000 people in King County become homeless at one time or another during each year. That’s akin to just about every resident of SeaTac being homeless, or more than enough people to fill KeyArena. This despite the fact that in 2005, with fanfare, The King County 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness was adopted by the Metropolitan King County Council.
The plan now is about halfway through its work and has provided new services for the homeless. But it has yet to show much progress in reducing the number of people seeking shelter or reducing the time it takes for them to get in to stable housing. It’s clear that it’s going to fall short of what the general public might expect from the term “end homelessness.”
The plan envisions building or converting 9,500 units of housing and getting people into stable housing immediately after they become homeless rather than have them wait months or years in shelters or hotels to find a place to live. Almost half of the units are completed or committed, but there’s little change on the street: Demand for emergency shelter remains high, and shelter managers are often turning people away due to lack of space. The new units are great for those who can get into them, but persistent high housing prices and high unemployment are keeping the homeless population large, and holding down recovery efforts.
A coalition of government and non-profit leaders wrote the plan in 2005 when the economy wasn’t exactly great, but it was growing, and they envisioned changing and expanding the methods used to serve the homeless. If there's one way to describe the new way of serving those who have lost their housing, it's that agencies know that they need to help people like Dara find permanent homes so they can have "me time." To recover from being homeless, people need the space, time and stability to really live normal lives, not just survive. Sustaining them in an emergency shelter is not enough.
Dennis Culhane, a researcher on homelessness at the University of Pennsylvania, said that homeless shelters are a broken system that does not solve homelessness.
"It’s really a 19th-century-type throwback institution, a la the ‘poorhouse.’ There’s nothing remotely modern about it," Culhane said. "It's essentially a subsidy for housing that's substandard, when you could directly pay for people's housing."
Culhane said that a future without homelessness is one in which few people stay in shelters after they have a housing crisis: Rather, they receive emergency cash payments to help them keep their housing or get rapidly re-housed. And if people do need to stay in a shelter, it should only be for a few days, never more than a month. Is that where our county is headed?
The Modern Phenomenon of Homelessness
With her daughter’s hand so cold that December night in 2003, Dara went to a Taco Bell drive-thru just after it closed and looked for change that people had dropped on the pavement. She said it took two and a half days to find enough for bus fare for her and her daughter. They got on the 194 bus for a trip to Seattle, which, she discovered, was a bus that a lot of homeless people rode in winter (before light rail eliminated the route). That’s because it was a long ride, it was warm, and it ran late into the night.
Dara looked to several different Seattle homeless shelters to see if she could find a place to stay for her and her daughter. They got turned away at each. No room. Finally, they ended up sleeping under I-5 at 7th and James for a few days. A group of hoodlum passersby tossed a beer bottle at Dara, bruising her elbow.
Knowing that the shelters were full, Dara tried to find someone else whom she could "double up" with, and an acquaintance recommended her to an elderly man who lived in Seward Park who needed someone to cook and clean. Mom and daughter moved into his house to discover he suffered from multiple-personality disorder and alternated between being acting elderly, middle-aged and teenaged. Dara did not view this as a good place for her child, either, and kept trying to get into a shelter.
The notion of "ending homelessness," as the 10-year plan to end homelessness sets out to do, isn't the easiest thing to imagine. There's little that the community can do to prevent people from being poor. There still will be people who lose their homes after a job loss, health problem, domestic violence or substance abuse. Homelessness has been with us as long as people have been living in cities. But U.S. cities saw a sharp increase in both the number of people who were becoming homeless and the length of time they were remaining homeless in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Bill Hobson is the executive director of the Downtown Emergency Services Center, a non-profit agency that provides both emergency shelter and permanent housing to the homeless. He remembers a time when homelessness was a smaller problem.
"When I first came to this state when I was as a professor in the 1970s, I remember winos in the alleys, not chronic homelessness," said Hobson, 70, pictured at left, who has been the executive director of the DESC since 1987.
"I think we’re raising a generation of young people to think that homelessness has always been a feature of America."
Articles in social-sciences journals try to explain the reason behind the spike in homelessness that never went away, but most authors end up giving a number of factors that came together during the recession of the early 1980s: High unemployment, urban redevelopment that demolished "skid row"-style hotels and other low-income housing, cuts in mental-health services, an overall increase in the cost of housing in U.S. cities, and cuts in public-housing funding. The pattern of closing mental health hospitals from 1950 to 1975 was a factor, but not a primary cause. Despite stereotypes, one 1980s study of homeless populations found only 15 percent had been mental patients in a hospital, and only a few of them had been in state-run facilities.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, cities increased funding for homeless shelters, thinking that protecting people from the elements long enough for them to make it on their own would be enough to solve the problem.
Dara finally landed in a shelter. About a month after becoming homeless, it happened: Providence Hospitality House in Seattle offered her and her daughter a space in its 30-day shelter for moms and children in crisis.
Dara and her daughter moved from there into a transitional housing project. Transitional housing usually provides tenants apartment-like living, plus regular visits from social workers. Rent is government-subsidized. The idea is to provide a place where people who have been homeless can live while they get jobs, get their lives together and move on to getting a regular apartment of their own. Transitional housing has a time limit ranging from three to 24 months. After that, tenants usually have to move out. That deadline is supposed to create an incentive, although critics say that the extra stress of having to move out makes it harder to recover from being homeless.
As she moved, Dara enrolled her daughter in school, but quickly found that she was behind the other children academically and developmentally as the girl had not had the time to study while homeless. The other children in her second grade picked on her. They could tell she was different.
"She would come home crying every day," Dara remembered. "They would tie her hair to the chair."
Dara moved from the transitional housing unit to her own apartment, which she was able to keep until the landlord raised the rent, and then she ended up again in transitional housing. During the time she was moving from one place to live to another, she gave birth to a second daughter.
The obstacles that Dara would continue to face in an effort to find housing could be used as a list of things that the writers of the 10-year Plan to End Homelessness wanted to change in the way that people in King County recover from homelessness.
Dara spent about four years going from shelter to transitional program to shelter before finally in 2007 getting into stable housing – a subsidized apartment in Seattle's Yesler Terrace (pictured at left), which requires her to pay 30 percent of her income as rent. The 10-year plan seeks to build or convert 9,500 units of housing so that there will be more places that people like Dara can go – and keep. Also, the plan seeks to minimize the use of transitional housing, which is more expensive per month to run than emergency shelter or permanent independent housing, according to a recent study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It showed that in Washington, D.C., it cost between $2,496 and $3,698 to house a family in emergency shelter for a month. But it only cost $1,251 to house a family for a month in permanent supportive housing.
The 10-year plan puts a big emphasis on reducing the use of shelters and transitional housing and increasing the use of permanent supportive housing like Dara’s place in Yesler Terrace.
Not everyone agrees
That change isn’t popular with everyone. Mike Buchman (pictured at left), communications manager of Solid Ground, an agency that runs transitional housing and emergency shelters in the Fremont and Sandpoint neighborhoods of Seattle, said that it was wrong to put so much focus on one end of the spectrum of care.
“The 10-year plan is not doing an adequate job of supporting emergency shelters' needs,” Buchman said. “You can’t simply build enough housing for the people who need them and then that’ll be that."
For the city, reducing tax dollars for the shelters has proved difficult. Al Poole (pictured at left), division director of the Homelessness Intervention and Block Grant Administration at the Seattle Human Services Department, said that after the 10-year plan was written, the city tried to move $600,000 in city funding from homeless shelters to longer-term housing solutions. But the outcry generated by the proposed change prompted then-Mayor Greg Nickels to restore funding to the shelters.
Focusing on getting people who are homeless into housing before dealing with their underlying problems – mental illness, substance abuse or domestic violence – can make it easier to deal with those problems later. It also can reduce costs. This approach is known as "Housing First" in the homeless-service provider field. Culhane co-wrote a study in 2002 of a Housing First program in New York City in which the city built 3,700 units of supported housing for severely mentally ill people, and tracked the residents' use of health services, homeless shelters and the corrections system. Before being housed, they used an average of $40,500 per year in services. After they got into housing, they used fewer services, for an average savings of $16,200 in costs.
Running the supportive housing cost about $17,200 per unit, per year, meaning that the program on net had a cost of $1,000 per person to society, which Culhane said made it a nearly break-even proposition while freeing up medical and law-enforcement resources that could be better used to serve the community.
Ending homelessness is “smart business”
Studies such as Culhane's and others made city leaders across the country realize that shelters and jails are an expensive, ineffective way to deal with homelessness. They decided they needed to take a more direct approach toward affordable housing for people with extremely low incomes. In the middle of the last decade, cities across the United States began writing 10-year plans to end homelessness, most of them aiming at 2015 or somewhere close as the year that they believed it could be accomplished. The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, a federal government agency, encouraged the development of these plans.
In these plans, solving and ending homelessness is more than just the "right thing" to do. It's "smart business." It’s a way to reduce costs both to the community and the people who go through homelessness. People who have homes are more likely to succeed in getting and keeping a job, and children who have homes are more likely to succeed in school.
King County's 10-year Plan to End Homelessness made it a goal to make 9,500 new units of permanent housing available for the formerly homeless. About half of them will be built by local government and non-profit agencies, and half of them are existing units in the open market that formerly homeless people will be able to get through rental subsidies. According to Bill Block (pictured at left), the project director of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, the county has 4,111 units of housing built, under construction, or "in the pipeline," meaning that the money's been committed for them.
Most of these housing units require that residents pay 30 percent of their income in rent and utilities, with the remaining cost of the rent being made up by a government subsidy. Considering that in the Seattle area, fair-market rent for a one-bedroom apartment in 2009 was $820 a month, according to HUD statistics, it would require someone to have a wage of at least $15.75 an hour to be able to spend 30 percent of his or her income on fair-market rent.
Most people who are homeless are considered "extremely low income," a HUD designation meaning that they earn less than 30 percent of the average median income. So it is difficult for them to get into housing unless one of these subsidized units is made available for them.
Virginia Felton, spokeswoman for the Seattle Housing Authority, which rents out 6,100 apartments and other housing around the city, said currently the waiting list for public housing in Seattle stands at 11,000 people.
The Housing Authority is planning to build more units of housing over the next few years, and Yesler Terrace, which houses many extremely low-income tenants, is one area it is looking to redevelop. The 28-acre site was built in the late 1930s and has about 1,200 residents in 561 apartments. Felton said that sometime in the next 10 to 15 years, the Housing Authority would like to replace the current Yesler Terrace buildings with mixed-use buildings that have 3,000 to 5,000 apartments and neighborhood commercial businesses such as grocery stores and dry cleaners. The number of subsidized units would remain the same or be increased, Felton said, but they would be mixed in with apartments that could be rented or bought on the open market. All current residents would be able to get one of the new units, she said, provided they were in good standing.
At a park by their home in Yesler Terrace (above). Below, examining a slug from the backyard of their home. (Photos: Mike Kane)
Dara Kommavongsa is in one of the apartments at Yesler Terrace, where she and her two children, now ages 12 and 5, tend to a garden and enjoy their own small yard. If the Housing First approach toward re-housing people becomes available to everyone who needs it, it means that people like her will not have to bounce between homeless shelter and transitional housing program for months or years, like she did. Rather, they will be able to go straight from losing their home to getting a unit like hers.
When Dara was living on the streets and in homeless shelters, she was depressed, and did not have time to think about her own health.
"I was sick a lot of time when I was homeless,” Dara said. “But that didn't matter so long as she [my daughter] was in shelter and safe. That was enough."
Dara called the shelters and the transitional programs a blessing because they proved such an improvement over couch-surfing and living on the streets, but they're not the best places to return to a normal life.
"It is kind of like a holding tank,” Dara said, “because people could be utilizing their time more effectively and productively. In a shelter, you have certain times you have to be there and curfews, and you must receive your kids when they come home from school." The amount of time it took her to meet basic needs for her and her daughter during that time made it all the more difficult to find work, she said.
Having the apartment that she knows will remain hers long-term allows her to use her time better, Dara said. "Being homeless takes a big emotional, physical toll," she said, and when she was homeless, she was focused on survival. "Now, my time is about education, self-sufficiency, striving to be better than what I was before. Now I can help with my kids' homework. Time is essential."
Service providers interviewed by the PostGlobe about the King County 10-year Plan To End Homelessness seemed enthusiastic about the new services available for the homeless because of the plan, and about the cooperation between service providers and government. However, few predicted that homelessness could be ended in King County by 2014, and none of them could think of a homeless program that would be able to close for lack of demand.
Shelters are still turning away people who need a place to stay, and none of those interviewed has seen a decline in the proportion of people of color who are experiencing homelessness, an outcome that the plan predicted by 2010. (See "Status Update" sidebar below.)
So far, a combination of federal, state and local funds have built or committed nearly half (4,111) of the planned 9,500 units of permanent housing for the formerly homeless, according to Bill Block (pictured at left), project director of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County.
Block said he still believes that homelessness can be ended by 2014, but it depends on additional federal funding.
A challenge in gauging progress of the effort to end homelessness is that it's easy for government leaders to talk about what government is doing. But ending homelessness is about a change on the street and at the doors of emergency shelters, and there is not much data that can show a dramatically changing picture of homelessness in King County, if there is one.
The Homeless Management Information System proscribed by the plan is not complete. Its databases can provide information on 12,963 homeless people for 2008, and that dataset only has information from 68 percent of the agencies that serve the homeless in King County. The information system was required by HUD as a condition of getting federal funds, and the plan to end homelessness envisioned that it’d be complete this year. The system is supposed to show if the county's services are making progress in reducing the numbers of people who become homeless – and the length of time they stay homeless.
So far, it's only able to provide a partial snapshot, not a story of progress in the efforts, making it difficult to say how much the homeless population is benefiting from the new style of services.
Another snapshot of the homeless situation is the One-Night Count of the homeless conducted by the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness each year. The coalition's volunteers found a 5 percent reduction in the number of apparently homeless people outdoors, from 2,827 in 2009 to 2,675 in 2010. Block said this was a sign of progress in a recession when other cities are seeing an increase in street homelessness.
2010_ONCStreetCount.pdf (Download of numbers)
Bill Hobson, executive director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center, said that he's been encouraged by all of the new housing that's been built since the 10-year plan was adopted, but he does not have much hope that 2014 will have any improvement that can be called "ending homelessness."
Demand for space at the Downtown Emergency Service Center's shelters, which serve 300 people a day, has remained high. He said that in 2009, the program ran at 98 percent occupancy, often turning away people who needed shelter. The main problem, he said, is that the 10-year plan can't control the things that lead people to become homeless.
"The Department of Corrections understands that they shouldn't release a guy when he doesn't have a place to live, but legally, when his term is up, he's got to be let go," said Hobson, pictured at left. He does not expect that the DESC will be able to end any programs, adding, "9,500 units of housing is not enough, but I thought it was better than nothing. I thought it might reduce the number of people on the street, but as years have gone by, and we do our point-in-time study, basically it's the same."
Despite the continuing high demand for emergency shelter, there are a few bright spots in the overall picture of homelessness that show some effect.
One is the Downtown Emergency Service Center's permanent housing building at 1811 Eastlake, which serves 75 chronically homeless severely alcoholic people. At 1811 Eastlake, residents are allowed to drink alcohol in private. Staff members of the DESC recruited residents by seeking out homeless alcoholics who regularly turned up at Harborview Hospital's Emergency Room. The idea was that if the residents had a roof over their heads, they would reduce their alcohol use without the restriction of house rules, and they would not end up at the hospital, in a detoxification center, a sobering center, or in another homeless shelter as often.
Hobson said that 1811 Eastlake costs about $1 million a year to run, with funding coming from federal, state and local governments. It's an intensively staffed site, with the King County division of mental health and treatment providing certified chemical dependency personnel.
A group of University of Washington researchers studied the records of the residents at 1811 Eastlake (pictured at left) and found that before they moved in, they were using $4,066 in public services per person per month. Their burden on the system fell to $1,492 per person per month after they were living at 1811 Eastlake. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2009.
Hobson said that the success and the publicity caused by 1811 Eastlake has made it the subject of so many inquiries from representatives of government and law enforcement agencies from other parts of the country, he's had to put limits the number of delegations that he allows to come visit.
He also said that he has to caution people not to talk about 1811 Eastlake as saving the system money, as it's tempting to think that the new style of services is going to be cheaper.
"Until Harborview can lay off a physician, it’s not a real cost savings. It’s a preservation of a resource,” Hobson said. “The next cardiac (patient) at Harborview is not going to have to compete with 75 drunks for service."
One other bright spot in the homelessness picture is that there seems to be a decline in the number of homeless single women seeking shelter. Al Poole, of the city's Human Services Department, said that in the winters, the city will open additional severe weather shelters when conditions are especially cold or rainy. The nights when the severe weather shelters are open are a good gauge of the overall size of the homeless population because that's when those who are most resistant to shelters will want to come indoors.
Two years ago, the severe-weather shelter that the city opened at Third and Yesler for single women was full, with 40 women. Last winter, the severe-weather shelter had only 18 women.
Poole said that he does not expect to see any emergency shelters’ programs shut down before 2014.
"One of the fallacies of the 10-year-plan was that it was written when the economy wasn't robust, but it was OK. It's kind of like when I bought my first house, the real estate agent told me my income was only going to go up," said Poole, pictured at left.
The recent national debate over health-care legislation gave Poole some perspective about the overall public willingness to solve a problem such as homelessness.
"I don't think everybody in America is wedded to the idea that everybody is entitled to a place to stay, just as people don't think that everybody has a right to health care," Poole said. American individualism has made it harder to sell the need for these kinds of services, he said. "'Lifting yourself by your own bootstraps,' is something that didn't happen, but it's still how people think."
One of Poole's colleagues, senior planner Andréa Akita, also at the Human Services Department, said that even though it doesn't look like homelessness can be ended soon in King County, writing a plan with such a high goal was still a good thing. "If we hadn't had a bold statement, a bold goal, we wouldn't have done as much as we have."
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STATUS UPDATE
The King County 10-year Plan to End Homelessness, written by a committee of government, law-enforcement, non-profit and business leaders of King County, sets out several goals that they believe the county can achieve by 2014. It was adopted by the Metropolitan King County Council in 2005. It sets out a number of results that people will be able to see by certain points in the plan. Below are those markers, plus our status update for 2010:
By the end of 2010:
Status: Shelter managers report high demand for both family and individual shelter beds. The Seattle Housing Authority has a waiting list of 11,000 people looking for public housing.
Status: Homeless service providers, while encouraged by the number of new units of housing becoming available, haven't seen a decrease in client numbers.
Status: The annual one-night count of the homeless conducted by the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness recorded a 5 percent drop from 2009 to 2010 in the numbers of apparently homeless people on the streets.
Status: The Safe Harbors Homeless Information System in 2008 had 68 percent of homeless service agencies in the county providing data, which provides a partial portrait of the population of the homeless. But little data about how long people stay homeless is available. Also, homelessness data for 2009 is not available.
Status: All service providers interviewed for this story said that the proportion of people of color experiencing homelessness has not changed.
By the end of 2013:
By the end of 2014:
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Sidebar: MONEY SPENT ON HOMELESSNESS
The plan to end homelessness relies on building places to live – so where are they? The recession has made it more difficult to build low-income housing recently because investors used to like to go into a partnership with low-income housing developers during flush times and get tax credits for doing it.
"Now, people don't have as much income to shelter, so they're not pursuing those tax credits as much," said Virginia Felton, spokeswoman for the Seattle Housing Authority.
Strike No. 2: The legislature has reduced its allocations to Washington state Housing Trust Fund, a major source of capital funding for low-income housing. The state legislature slashed money designated to the fund from $200 million in the 2007-2009 budget to just $130 million in the current budget, said Sean Harrington, Resource Allocation Program Assistant for the Housing Trust Fund.
On the other hand, the $145 million Seattle Housing Levy passed last November is a source of capital funds for low-income housing – in it, $104 million was designated for rental production and preservation, most of which will go to low-income housing for those earning less than 30 percent of median income.
And here’s where some other money for the homeless comes from:
- In King County, $29.3 million has been spent since 2005 on housing for the formerly homeless, funding 979 units of housing, according to Dan Riebli, Manager of the Asset Management Team at the Housing Trust Fund.
-In operating expenses, City of Seattle spent a total of $35.2 million on homeless services in 2009, with $25.2 million going to intervention services – shelters and transitional housing. The other $10 million was spent on prevention services and on permanent housing. Altogether, the city has spent $136 million on homeless services since the plan was completed in 2005.
-The King County government spent $2 million on emergency shelters, $4.7 million on transitional housing and $17.3 million on vouchers and operating support in 2009. Cheryl Markham, program manager at the King County Housing and Community Development Program, said that county funding had remained steady for shelter and transitional programs, and that the county is looking to expand funding for permanent housing. For both the city and county, the operating funds used on homelessness came from a combination of local tax revenue and federal funds.
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ABOUT THE SERIES
Reporter Eric Ruthford's story was underwritten by your donations via Spot.us, while photojournalist Mike Kane's photos of Dara Kommovongsa and her family are made possible by your donations to Seattlepostglobe. All other photos are from the web sites of the officials and organizations depicted.
Eric sought answers to these questions regarding the 10-year plan to end homelessness in King County: Now that the time period is half-way through, what benefits are evident so far? Will the new way of addressing homelessness -- by providing permanent housing instead of overnight shelter -- actually end homelessness, as planned? Having written for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other newspapers and worked as a homeless shelter's financial director, he is uniquely suited to explore this topic.
Mike Kane is an award-winning freelance photographer specializing in documentary, editorial and outdoors photography and photojournalism. Until its closure in 2009, he was a staff photographer at the Seattle P-I and before that a Hearst Fellow at three newspapers.
Originally published in two parts at Seattle Post Globe
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