12/16/2022
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The Spokesman-Review
Study shows eviction protections, direct payments cut homelessness
Shawn Vestal: Trent shelter report to council charts progress, big challenges
The Center Square
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The Spokesman-Review
Study shows eviction protections, direct payments cut homelessness
By Doug Smith
LOS ANGELES TIMES
LOS ANGELES – Eviction moratoriums and cash income from extended unemployment insurance and stimulus payments helped thousands of economically vulnerable people in Los Angeles County avoid becoming homeless during the pandemic, a new study has found.
The study released Wednesday by the Economic Roundtable estimated that homelessness increased 13% from 2020 to 2022 – a higher figure than the official count – but that it would have climbed to 23% without the interventions.
“Eviction moratoriums and cash payments kept households and workers intact during the COVID pandemic,” the study said. “These two interventions worked.”
The report, “Breaking the Fall,” argues that the same measures, augmented by reemployment services, should be used to lessen another possible surge in homelessness if there is a recession next year.
An increase of the unemployment rate to 5.25% could cause an estimated 7,040 people in Los Angeles County to lose their housing over the next four years, the analysis found. The effect would be nationwide, with more than 20,000 newly homeless people in California and nearly 62,000 in the United States.
“The big thing is to learn from our successes and to keep on doing things that worked to keep people out of homelessness,” Economic Roundtable President Daniel Flaming said in an interview. “It’s in everyone’s interest to keep a problem from happening rather than deal with a tragedy down the road. Protecting people’s housing and incomes who are at risk of becoming homeless is a simpler and more productive solution than waiting until we have to provide housing for them down the road.”
The study takes issue with the findings of the official homeless count, conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, supporting critics who contend the count was too low. The agency’s statisticians estimated that homelessness overall increased by 4.1% in the county from 2020 to 2022 but that an increase in the percentage of those in shelters led to a slight decrease in the number of people living on the street.
The report detailed two major flaws in the count: glitches in the mobile phone app used to tabulate results in the field and a decrease in the number of volunteers after LAHSA delayed the count a month because of a spike in COVID-19 cases.
The Economic Roundtable, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that seeks to guide public policy with research on economic, social and environmental conditions, has extensively studied homelessness and has published prior studies critical of the methodology developed for LAHSA by USC’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.
Ben Henwood, professor in the social work school, said he concurred with some of the Roundtable’s suggestions for improving the count but defended its accuracy.
By James Hanlon
THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
Food shortages caused by inflation, lower crop yields and higher demand have led the Inland Northwest’s largest food bank distributor to stop deliveries to more than 80 food banks across the region.
Local pantries, especially those in remote rural areas, are feeling the effects the most.
“This couldn’t have happened at a worse time right before the holidays,” said Rena Shawver, director of Okanogan County Community Action Council, which serves as a liaison to nine food banks.
In 2021, Second Harvest delivered 511,000 pounds of food to the county. Shawver estimates they are now losing $100,000 of groceries a month.
Second Harvest supplied most of their frozen protein and fresh produce – the foods people most rely on for nutrition. About 25% of the population in Okanogan County uses food banks, Shawver said.
“I wouldn’t have spent some $7,000 on these new freezers,” Bill Stuber of the Chewelah Food Bank says Thursday. Now with more than one-quarter of donations cut by Second Harvest of Spokane, these freezers will depend on help from others.
BRIAN PLONKA/ FOR THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
The action council received a phone call from Second Harvest on Nov. 29, notifying them that deliveries would stop the following day.
“We were caught off guard and by surprise,” Shawver said.
Second Harvest supplies 280 food pantries and meal sites in North Idaho and Central and Eastern Washington.
Eric Williams, community partnership director for Second Harvest, said the food distribution center emailed all of its partners in September, warning that disruptions were likely coming. Then the crisis “hit hard and fast” during the second half of November.
“It has gotten really difficult to get food, and the food that you can get is really expensive,” Williams said.
So, they made the difficult decision to suspend their delivery service for at least the months of December and January.
“That affects lives, we understand that,” Williams said. “We are doing everything we can to get ahold of more food.”
Williams said it was costing about one thousand dollars a trip to fuel their semitrucks – and because of the food reductions, the trailers were only about a third full.
Although deliveries have stopped, food distribution will continue for those partners who already pick up their food directly from Second Harvest’s centers in Spokane and Pasco, but they will not be able to accommodate any new clients.
While this largely impacts rural areas, some rural partners already pick up their own food, Williams said. He also said Second Harvest’s other programs, such as the mobile markets that deliver food to rural and underserved areas by buses, will continue.
After Second Harvest, many pantries rely on contributions from Northwest Harvest, which supports more than 400 food banks and programs in all 39 counties across Washington. Jeanie Chunn, director of community engagement for Northwest Harvest, said they have also been affected by inflation and supply chain issues, but they do not foresee stopping any deliveries.
Inflation has led not only to higher food prices for pantries, but it has increased the number of people who need the pantries.
“Kind of a double- whammy,” said Stephani Smith, director of Northeast Washington Hunger Coalition. The coalition works with 17 pantries in Ferry, Stevens and Pend Oreille counties.
Outlying towns have the greatest needs and will be the most impacted, she said.
Second Harvest represented about 35% of the stock at Northport Food Pantry, which serves about 200 families near the Canadian border, said Ella Peone, who runs the pantry.
More people are using the pantry since the only grocery store in Newport closed this summer, she said. Those who can’t drive 35 miles to Colville now rely on the pantry.
Lael Duncan, a former director of Okanogan County’s action council who recently retired, said Second Harvest should have given more notice.
“I’m concerned about rural communities bearing the brunt of this when bigger cities have so many more resources,” she said.
Bill Struber, floor manager of the Chewelah Food Bank, called it a failure of communication.
“If we’d have known,” Struber said, “we would have tried to ration more.” He said donations of meat have shrunk to nothing.
Smith said some people didn’t believe or pay attention to Second Harvest’s warnings that supplies were dwindling.
“They have been feeding people for decades,” she said. “This isn’t some unfeeling executive entity. These are people whose hearts are in the right places. They’re trying to be part of the solution and they’ve had to make really hard choices.”
Smith said this might force people to work more locally toward hunger solutions rather than depending on a big outside organization.
In Okanogan County, the community has rallied together since the announcement, Shawver said. They have raised enough money and donations to get through the holidays, but this will not be sustainable month after month. The action council is raising awareness, starting more food donation sites and working with local grocers to increase food recovery.
Shawver expressed frustration with the food distribution system and said that the legislature and big agriculture should work toward a solution. “We live in an area in the United States where there is plenty of food being produced, but the systems are broken. To be able to get food into our community on a regular basis when we are experiencing shortages has been challenging.”
Williams said Second Harvest is working hard to identify more food and funding sources in order to resume deliveries. The organization hired a new staffer last week whose only job will be to find more food, and employees in other departments have been instructed to spend half of their time on it.
He encourages people to donate food or money to either Second Harvest or their local food bank.
“The point is to feed people, and it’s way less concerning how,” he said. James Hanlon can be reached at (509) 459-5467 or by email at jamesh@spokesman.com.
Shawn Vestal: Trent shelter report to council charts progress, big challenges
As the city has gone all in on the Trent shelter – and only the Trent shelter – as a response to homelessness, the project has been plagued by questions and inconsistent public statements about its capacity and other issues.
On Monday night, officials with the Woodward administration and Salvation Army addressed many of those questions in a session before the City Council. Some of the answers are summarized here.
(It’s worth noting that as of Monday, the shelter had been open for 117 days. It was publicly proposed and in the works at City Hall for almost eight months prior to that. The Salvation Army took over operations of the Trent and Cannon Street shelters after the cancellation of the contract with the previous provider, the Guardians, in the wake of admissions that a Guardians employee had embezzled $100,000 or more.)
Just how flexible is that flex capacity? Among the hardest things to pinpoint in recent weeks has been exactly how big the shelter’s “surge” capacity is – its ability to take in people during weather and smoke emergencies. The initial plan for the shelter called for 250 beds during normal times; that’s been expanded to 350 (though this figure came as a surprise to council members).
The surge capacity has been harder to nail down. It has seemed as if it was – for political purposes – being viewed as more or less infinite, a rhetorical flexibility to answer all questions.
City building official Dermott Murphy told the council the maximum number of people who could be crowded into the shelter in an emergency, based on egress regulations, is 688.
Which would be very, very crowded, with the overflow crowd sleeping on mats.
Councilwoman Lori Kinnear said, “Essentially, they’d be like cordwood.”
Murphy agreed. “Jailhouse,” he said.
But we’re not there yet:
Even if the cordwood solution was workable, the shelter isn’t ready for it yet. In fact, Salvation Army Executive Director Ken Perrine said that it wasn’t ready for even the nonemergency capacity yet.
“We’re not 100% ready to go right to 350 at this point, just simply because of the way the building is currently laid out,” he said. “The wooden beds just take up a lot more space and there’s only 245 beds there right now. We have 100 mats.”
He added, “There’s a lot more people out there than I think people realize. If they all showed up, that wouldn’t work.”
(Here would be a good place to note that the administration is required by city law to provide warming shelters during extreme cold, and it seems to be simply ignoring this, claiming its plan is to rely on existing shelters, which do not have enough room.)
Wooden beds? Salvation Army has stepped into a huge challenge – akin to trying to fix a flying airplane. Adding to the lift is the fact that it has had to improve some of the most basic elements of the operation, such as workable beds.
Perrine described problems with beds at both Cannon Street and Trent shelters.
At Trent, his organization will be replacing wooden beds with 350 metal beds and metal “pony wall” partitions. The wooden beds had been built and installed by the Guardians. In addition to taking up more space, the wooden bed frames are susceptible to infestations of bed bugs.
The problems didn’t end there. At the Cannon Street shelter, the beds are breaking regularly, Perrine said.
“The beds are not designed for adults,” he said. “They are bunk beds designed for teens.”
Additionally, too many bunk beds have been crammed into the shelter, he said.
“There are too many beds in the space for safe habitation,” he said “There is no space for meals or resource help.”
Improvements: In the 42 days since taking over shelter operations, the Salvation Army has implemented numerous steps that Perrine highlighted. He did not criticize the previous operators, but the implicit message was clear that operating standards needed to be improved.
Immediately after the Salvation Army stepped in, during the first week of November, the number of people using the shelter jumped dramatically – from an average of 160 a night to 250, Perrine said.
The organization has retained more than 40 employees from the Guardians and added 74 more. It has also added storage space for residents and office space, and is offering bus passes and laundry tickets to residents so they can have their clothes cleaned.
The efforts to establish access to services for people are in the early stages. Layne Pavey, with Revive Counseling, described it as akin to drinking from a firehouse.
Hot water: The conversion of a warehouse without indoor plumbing into a shelter has been managed with porta-potties and outdoor hand-washing stations. Showers are available in a trailer facility.
This is more or less the bathroom setup at Camp Hope.
The hand-washing stations and showers aren’t suited for freezing weather, Perrine said. The hand-washing stations have frozen during the recent cold weather – even as many in the shelter have been sick with viral, seasonal illnesses.
The Salvation Army is going to increase the showers available in outside trailers, from six to eight. It also plans to double the number of hand-washing stations from five to 10, with five of those being inside where they can’t freeze. Perrine said the service provider of the stations was still working on a solution to allow the outdoor hand-washing stations to work when it’s freezing.
Maxed out: City administrator Johnnie Perkins said the city has spent all it can spend on homelessness, and it’s time for other governments to share the burden.
“The city’s ability to go further is done,” he said. “We need support from our regional partners.”
While other cities in the region should help, the elephant in this particular room is Spokane County. The county recently contributed $500,000 to operations at Trent. That money is helping to replace the wooden beds, among other things.
That half-million was among very few significant contributions from the county in memory, and it’s beyond miniscule compared to the efforts of the city – to say nothing of the state’s $25 million investment in trying to move the residents of Camp Hope into housing.
(There is talk now racing about the community that a truly regional approach, with the support of elected officials – from the mayor to the county commission – may be in the offing. Making that happen should be the community’s New Year’s Resolution.)
It’s what kind of center?
The mayor has called the Trent site a “navigation center” built on the Houston plan. The Houston system – admirable in many ways – does indeed rely on navigation centers to help people move out of homelessness.
For purposes of comparison, here is some of what’s available in Houston’s signature navigation center, known as The Beacon: a commercial kitchen preparing three hot meals a day, served in a cafeteria; an on-site laundry service; computer and phone access; mail services; case management workers and robust on-site access to legal help, social services, medical care, treatment providers and housing navigators who work to move people quickly into permanent housing.
Not to mention indoor bathrooms and private showers. Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or at shawnv@spokesman.com.
SHAWN VESTAL
SPOKESMAN COLUMNIST
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The Center Square
A person at left walks toward the entrance of a tent used by people experiencing homelessness, Tuesday, March 1, 2022, in downtown Seattle across the street from City Hall. For years, liberal cities in the U.S have tolerated people living in tents in parks and public spaces, but increasingly leaders in places like Portland, Oregon, New York and Seattle are removing encampments and pushing other strict measures that would've been unheard of a few years ago. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Ted S. Warren/ AP Photos
(The Center Square) – The King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s initiative to house homeless people in Downtown Seattle has seen more than 30 people situated in new homes, but hundreds still remain outside.
“We still have lots of work to do, as the latest by name list shows more than 830 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in downtown,” the authority said in a year in review report.
The authority’s Partnership for Zero program is a collaboration with the organizations We Are In and the Lived Experience Coalition, along with city officials. Its focus is on the Downtown Seattle area because that represents the single largest concentration of people experiencing homelessness in King County.
A housing command center is located in Seattle’s Emergency Operations Center in the heart of the Chinatown District. It serves as the backbone of this partnership.
At the center’s grand opening in October, King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Marc Dones said that it had already identified over 300 units of available housing and had engaged with over 797 people in need.
The housing command center focuses on a "housing first" approach. It identifies permanent housing units and eligible households. The center then matches the households to the housing units. Homeless persons' needs are assessed and added to a list. Those persons are matched with housing and services in an ongoing process, based on available resources.
The authority has a team of 26 system advocates who work in the command center. They provide outreach, data collection and support for people in need. DaJenae Carter, one of the authority’s systems advocates, said some homeless persons are cautious when utilizing the command center to find housing.
“Once [homeless persons receive their apartment keys] you really get to see the happiness that a person has when they know this is their place, they know, this is my room, this is my kitchen, this is my bathroom. It’s a great feeling,” Carter said.