February Research News
This month a report was circulated throughout Seattle news outlets discussing the "revolving door" between Seattle's homeless population and jail. Commissioned by several Seattle neighborhood districts, the report highlighted the heightened recidivism rate for King County's homeless. Read more below:
Report: Seattle needs reform to end revolving door between jail and homelessness
The report, commissioned by the group and released Monday, lays bare just how much overlap exists between jails and the streets and how little is done to prevent a return to either.
The picture it paints is one in which people repeatedly cycle between jail and homelessness, with very little done to prevent returns to either. According to the report, addiction is at the root of almost all of the offenses.
In Seattle, the most recognized effort to reduce this intersection between homelessness and jail is the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program (LEAD), a partnership between outreach workers and police officers that offers low-level offenders alternatives at the point of arrest.
In Seattle, 1 in 5 people booked into jail are homeless
As Seattle grapples with a homeless crisis, the number of homeless people continue to make up a disproportionate number of arrest-bookings by police. According to its own data, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) in 2018 booked just over 1,000 homeless people into jail a combined 3,211 times. That means one out of every five bookings last year was of someone struggling with homelessness, despite the homeless making up about 1 percent of the city's population.
Fact check: Actually, Seattle doesn't know how many people it's getting off the streets
Earlier this month, Mayor Jenny Durkan said during her State of the City address that in 2018, the city helped "more than 7,400 households move out of homelessness and into permanent housing." But that’s not entirely accurate, as was first reported by Erica C. Barnett.
That 7,400 number? It actually represents two different things.
It includes more than 1,800 households that were already in permanent supportive housing – housing with on-site support services for people who are formerly homeless and face significant challenges – and were able to maintain that housing throughout the year.
And it includes more than 5,600 exits from services like shelters or housing voucher programs to permanent housing.
Who’s falling into homelessness, and how: King County hopes better data leads to better help
The count has become increasingly sophisticated in the past three years, but it counts homelessness only on that night — just over 12,100 last year, up from around 11,600 people in 2017.
Since 2011, when there were 11,400 episodes of homelessness in King County, the number of people flowing into homelessness has increased every year, nearly doubling by 2017, and the count of newly homeless people (those who have not accessed homeless services in the past two years) was up 67 percent.
King County and Seattle have also seen another number on the rise, one that indicates positive change: households that left homelessness for some kind of permanent housing. That happened nearly 6,300 times in 2017, compared to 2,500 times in 2012, a 148 percent increase, even though the county is now “being more conservative about how we’re determining if someone is permanently housed,”says King County's chief of performance measurement and evaluation for homeless services, Jennifer Coldiron.
Service providers need to look critically at the systems that lead to homelessness, like the criminal-justice or mental-health systems, rather than focus on why individual people are homeless, said Jeff Olivet, CEO of the Center for Social Innovation, which is researching the intersection of race and homelessness in roughly a dozen U.S. communities, including Tacoma and Pierce County.
Ending Homelessness: How New Orleans Reduced Their Homeless Population By 90 Percent
In this article, Martha Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, tells Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson the strategy to tackle the “unprecedented explosion” of homelessness in the city following Hurricane Katrina was threefold.
Assemble a solid outreach team that “was willing to go anywhere and do anything to rescue and rehouse a homeless person.”
Put all their effort behind gathering a rent assistance fund. “We went directly to Congress,” she says. “We were very fortunate to get some resources together to actually be able to provide rent assistance and house people in what apartments we could find.”
Their team took a “Housing First” approach, which is “simply the idea that you accept people as they are,” whether they are sober or not.