12/19/2022
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RangeMedia
The Washington Post
Biden aims to cut homelessness 25% by 2025
NPR
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RangeMedia
Valerie Osier
CIVICS | And our dissent for the Spokane County Commission's consent agenda
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It’s officially “let’s table this until the new year” season. Spokane City Council has no meetings this week, and the County Commission only has one special session on Monday. BUT, we have to unpack an item from last week’s County Commission meeting, thanks to a little consent agenda item from last week.
Spokane County Board of Commissioners
Jailbreak: County officials have been talking about building a new jail to replace the two in use for at least the last 15 years and now Spokane County residents will get to vote on it in November after county commissioners voted to put it on the ballot last week.
You say, “But RANGE, why wasn’t this in last week’s CIVICs newsletter? That seems like an important item!” And to that we say: you are absolutely right! It would have been extremely helpful — and some might even say in the spirit of open public meeting laws — for our county commissioners to explicitly say this is what they were talking about rather than, once again, tucking it into a consent agenda item that completely (purposefully?) masked the nature of what would be discussed.
If you recall from past articles, consent agendas are usually meant for routine and procedural items — think signing paychecks and paying vendors for road salt.
There is no public comment about consent agenda items because they are supposed to be routine. Except Spokane’s county commission has made a habit of using this part of the agenda for objectively non-routine things, like declaring an emergency at Camp Hope.
The jail item first came up in the Dec. 12 Strategic Planning Meeting agenda as “Public Safety Sales Tax Resolution'' with a 20 minute time slot. These agendas don’t get agenda packets with more information, so that’s all you get.
Then it showed up in the Consent Agenda for the Regular meeting as, “In the matter of calling an Election within Spokane County to be held on Tuesday, November 7, 2023, and submitting to Electors a Proposition to impose a Two-Tenths of One Percent (0.2%) Sales and Use Tax equal throughout Spokane County, as authorized by RCW 82.14.450, the proceeds to be used by the County, Cities and Towns within Spokane County for Criminal Justice, Public Safety, and Behavioral Health purposes.” The full resolution and ballot language reads largely the same, never mentioning a jail.
The commission did pull this item off the consent agenda for discussion during the meeting and Commissioner Josh Kerns opened up by saying, “I will be straight up front that one of the items that we plan to include in the revenue generated from this is a new jail or community corrections facility.”
He goes on to say that the county has plenty of data for voters to make the decision, the maintenance of the current jail is expensive, functionally obsolete and unable to meet all the needs of the programming needs to reduce recidivism and diversion.
Kerns and commissioner Al French voted to put the measure on the ballot following no opportunity for public comment. (Commissioner Mary Kuney was traveling on commission business and not present).
Later that day, the county sent out a news release announcing that the measure would be put on the ballot and offering the most detailed information so far on what the measure will pay for: “If approved, these funds will be used to construct an improved Community Correction Center facility with the ability to hold more inmates, offer programming and behavioral health programs, realize operational efficiencies, and require significantly less maintenance and capital improvement costs for years to come.”
The decision was made in one of the last meetings before new commissioners are sworn in. The two new commissioners are both Democrats and expected to shake up the formerly all-Republican board.
For some background on this long simmering issue here’s a shameless plug for Luke’s 2012 Inlander deep dive into the debate over building a new jail. Watch the commissioners make their comments about the jail item here. Listen to early RANGE episodes on the jail here.
Special meeting: OK, now onto next week’s actual meeting! The county commission is set to have a special meeting Monday morning to talk about the 2023 legislative agenda for the county and talk to legislators whose districts fall in the county. See a draft of the legislative agenda here.
Agenda here
Monday, Dec. 19 at 9 a.m.
1116 W Broadway Avenue, Room 100
Watch via Zoom here
Spokane Public Library Board of Trustees
TikTok on the clock: You can always count on the library people to stick to their meeting schedule. The Board of Trustees’ agenda isn’t the most detailed, but from what we can see, they’ll talk about a bond construction project update with construction company Hill International, an overview of social services offered at the library and launching a new TikTok.
Agenda here.
Tuesday, Dec. 20 at 4:30 p.m.
Central Library
906 W. Main Ave, Spokane
Canceled: The Spokane City Council got their budget approved last week in a unanimous vote, so this week’s meetings are canceled. This includes the Finance and Administration Committee.
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The Washington Post
Biden aims to cut homelessness 25% by 2025
President Biden released a plan Monday that aims to reduce homelessness in the United States by 25 percent in the next two years.
The 100-plus-page plan, which officials said includes input from communities around the country and feedback from hundreds of unhoused people, comes as homelessness in the nation reaches crisis levels. New York’s mayor last week announced plans to force unhoused mentally ill people into treatment, while the mayor of Los Angeles has declared a state of emergency.
Released through the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the plan details that homelessness is rising after “steady declines” from 2010 to 2016. More than 1.2 million people experienced “sheltered homelessness” in 2020, the most recent year data was available.
By another measure, more than 580,000 people were homeless on a single night in January 2022, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development performed its annual “point-in-time count” — a method some advocates say underrepresents the number of unhoused people. In addition, according to the plan, more homeless people were unsheltered than sheltered for the first time since data collection began.
The plan set out how the Biden administration would combat homelessness by, among other measures, battling racial inequity, encouraging the construction of affordable housing, facilitating communication between federal and local governments, and preventing homelessness in the first place.
In a statement included in the plan, Biden said it “will put us on the path to meeting my long-term vision of preventing and ending homelessness in America.”
“Every American deserves a safe and reliable place to call home,” he said in the statement. “It’s a matter of security, stability, and well-being. It is also a matter of basic dignity and who we are as a Nation.”
The plan said homeless people are wrongly blamed for their situation. Instead, systematic failures — including economic inequality and racial discrimination — have created a country where “in no state can a person working full-time at the federal minimum wage afford a two-bedroom apartment at the fair market rent.”
“Homelessness is largely the result of failed policies,” the plan said. “Severely underfunded programs and inequitable access to quality education, health care (including treatment for mental health conditions and/or substance use disorders), and economic opportunity have led to an inadequate safety net.”
The plan offered a sweeping, if sometimes vague, path to creating that safety net. The administration committed itself to “Housing First” — the idea that people should be housed before underlying problems such as addiction or mental illness are addressed.
“The fundamental solution to homelessness is housing,” it said. “When a person is housed, they have a platform to address all their needs, no matter how complex.”
The plan also criticized the “criminalization” of homelessness that has resulted in the arrests of unhoused people or the removal of encampments.
“[S]ome have resorted to clearing encampments without providing alternative housing options for the people living in them,” it said. “Unless encampment closures are conducted in a coordinated, humane, and solutions-oriented way that makes housing and supports adequately available, these ‘out of sight, out of mind’ policies can … set people back in their pathway to housing.”
In an interview, Jeff Olivet, executive director of the Interagency Council, said hundreds of thousands of people escape homelessness each year — but a higher number become unhoused.
“If we don’t implement strategies that stem that inflow, we can’t bail out the bathtub fast enough,” he said.
A focus on prevention and racial equity is key, according to Olivet. Communities of color are harder hit by homelessness in what has become “a life-or-death public health crisis,” he said.
“I know there will be pushback, particularly on any conversation about race or structural racism,” he said. “Pretending it doesn’t exist doesn’t make it so.”
Steve Berg, chief policy officer for the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said in an interview that the plan offered “an overall approach to the problem.”
“There’s a lot of specificity that’s missing,” he said. “Who is exactly going to do what to make this happen? That is not the role of this particular document.”
Berg said targeted efforts to fight homelessness among particular groups, particularly juveniles and veterans, had shown success, while, for example, homelessness among people with disabilities remained persistent. He welcomed the administration’s decision to distill “best practices” into the plan, but thought it was too soon to judge whether the Biden team would achieve its goal by 2025.
“I am completely convinced that it’s possible,” he said. “Whether it will succeed — it’s sort of hard to tell.”
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NPR
David Hernandez, 62, crawls into his bed made with cardboard boxes in Los Angeles last week. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has declared a state of emergency to grapple with the city's homeless crisis.
Jae C. Hong/AP
More people than ever are being moved out of homelessness in the U.S., just over 900,000 a year on average since 2017. The problem is that about the same number or more have lost housing in the past few years.
The Biden administration's latest plan to fight the homelessness crisis, released Monday morning, calls for more action to keep people from losing their housing in the first place.
"We've gotten very, very good at providing supportive housing for people," says Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which developed the plan. "We've not done a great job as a nation of turning off the faucet."
The new plan includes a range of ways to boost the supply of affordable housing, as well as increase the number of emergency shelters and support programs. But its biggest change is a call for the "systematic prevention of homelessness," focusing on those who are struggling to keep them from losing their housing. It sets an ambitious goal to reduce the number of unsheltered people 25% by 2025, and calls on states and local governments to use it as a model.
After a steady rise since 2016, the number of people experiencing homelessness has stabilized, according to data also released Monday. There were 582,462 on a single night in January this year, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That's only slightly more than the previous full count, in 2020, before the pandemic disrupted the process.
Over the course of this year, more than a million individuals and families were without housing at some point, and they were disproportionately people of color, a disparity the plan aims to address.
Most individuals were out on the streets rather than in shelters — a shift that's raised awareness of the crisis but has also led to more communities cracking down on encampments and criminalizing sleeping or even sitting in certain public spaces.
Olivet and local advocates credit the array of federal financial help during the pandemic for preventing a sharp spike in homelessness. But with much of that aid now gone, they warn the numbers might go up again.
The latest data also shows big differences among certain groups. The numbers of unhoused veterans, families and youths are down. The numbers for single adults and those with disabilities are up.
"Where we invest, we see success," Olivet says. "Where we don't invest, that's where we see the numbers rising."
"We're losing. ... It just keeps getting worse"
Paul Downey has worked as an advocate fighting homelessness for three decades, and says the focus has always been how to help those on the streets get into a shelter, get services and get back into permanent housing. What there hasn't been, he says, is "a lot of discussion about how we stop it from occurring in the first place," even though "it is the obvious thing."
Downey heads the nonprofit Serving Seniors in San Diego, where a recent count found a quarter of those unhoused are 55 or older. Over the past year there, on average, for every 10 people moved out of homelessness, 13 others fell into it for the first time.
"We're losing, right?" he says. "No matter what we do, it just keeps getting worse and worse."
Downey had an "aha moment" about prevention when he surveyed hundreds of seniors last year. The vast majority said just a few hundred dollars a month could keep them off the streets. He took that to local officials. Now both the City of San Diego and San Diego County have a pilot program to subsidize rent for at-risk seniors and others by up to $500 a month.
Downey says this is a bargain compared with the estimated $35,000 a year it costs for one person experiencing homelessness in San Diego, factoring in the actions of police and other first-responders, the criminal justice system and hospital emergency rooms. He plans to study the impact of the rent subsidy pilot and hopes it's a model that can expand.
"It looks like a good economic solution in addition to, of course, being a good human solution," he says.
An unhoused woman protests as police prepare to break up a small homeless encampment in New York earlier this year. Most individuals experiencing homelessness are now on the streets instead of in shelters, a shift that has raised visibility of the crisis but also has led more places to crack down.
Seth Wenig/AP
Reaching those most at risk of losing housing is the challenge
At the nonprofit Friendship Place in Washington, D.C., there's a steady stream of unhoused people coming for hot coffee, clothing, snacks and help getting placed into housing. With a severe national shortage of affordable housing, Chief Community Solutions Officer Sean Read says it's key to find "the creative solutions, like, three steps before the full-blown emergency."
It could be paying parking tickets, getting a driver's license reinstated or a car repaired.
"If you can do an $800 car repair that keeps them in work that is then able to pay the $2,000 a month rent, you've addressed the issue earlier on at a lower cost," Read says.
But identifying those most at risk of losing housing can be a major challenge.
Los Angeles County is trying out a computer model, developed by UCLA, that tracks data from eight different agencies. Caseworkers reach out to those who are flagged as struggling and then spend several months offering financial assistance and other support to stabilize the situation.
Olivet, who helped write the Biden homelessness plan, calls that a "sophisticated and interesting direction for us to go" and says the federal government can also do a better job of screening for risk. He says one focus should be groups most vulnerable to homelessness — people leaving prison, addiction or mental health treatment, or foster care.
"At those critical moments of transition, we have an opportunity. We know where people are," Olivet says. "We could bridge that in-patient, or incarceration, or foster care experience straight into housing. It does not have to result in shelter or living in a tent."
Prevention also means "more housing, more housing, more housing"
The administration's report cites an array of reasons behind the homelessness crisis, including: a lack of public funding for affordable homes, a severe housing shortage — especially for the lowest income renters, record-high rents, wages that haven't kept pace with those soaring housing costs, and more climate-fueled weather disasters that destroy homes. Starting last year, the worst inflation in decades only compounded the struggle for many.
Read of Friendship Place says preventing homelessness in the long term clearly demands "more housing, more housing, more housing." And Downey, the advocate in San Diego, says the process for building it has to be faster.
Serving Seniors recently opened a new place with 117 units — and even with donated land and a big chunk of money, it took seven years.
"We had no major impediments," Downey says. "It just took that long to grind through the system, to layer the financing that is needed to be able to build the housing."
Among many other things, the Biden administration's plan on homelessness includes ongoing efforts to make it easier to use federal tax credits to build low income housing, and encourages communities to rezone for denser development.
President Biden has also called for more federal funding for affordable housing, but Olivet of the Interagency Council on Homelessness says states and localities have to step up. In November's elections, voters in a number of places across the country did approve more funding to build or subsidize affordable housing.
Separately, the Biden administration also says it will work with a number of places nationwide to help reduce their number of unsheltered people. There's no extra money, but federal staff will join with local officials, using their expertise to help navigate the 19 different U.S. agencies that can provide support.
The specific places have not yet been named, but officials say the program will launch next year.