Despite public perception, our region’s homelessness crisis affects our Eastside communities and is not just a Seattle problem. Supportive services, including permanent supportive housing and transitional housing, are part of a suite of proven solutions, but recent implementations on the Eastside have faced undue pushback from disgruntled residents. Providers and experts are eager to share their insights into what fuels this opposition and why these supportive facilities are crucial parts of addressing homelessness.
Supportive Housing Works to Address Homelessness
Alison Eisinger gives a slight smile as she reaches off-screen to fetch a visual aid. She returns with a framed photo of two girls on a playground, slightly obscured by her Zoom window reflecting back at me, but easy to see is the joy on her face as she explains, “I refer to these girls as my supervisors.” The girls are residents of a public housing project in New York City, the place where Eisinger lived before she moved across the country and completed her education in social work and public health at the University of Washington.
She’s now executive director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, an organization that brings service providers around the region together to “advance reasonable solutions and solid program models; to protect and strengthen the civil rights and dignity of people who are homeless and poor; and to accomplish legislative victories that promote housing, human services, and the public good at the local, state and federal levels.”
Service providers and partners in this coalition certainly have their work cut out for them. Just as the crisis has been steadily growing in Seattle, so too have needs for services increased in our Eastside communities. At the County’s most recent Point-in-Time Count (PIT) in January 2020, there were at least 1,000 homeless people in East King County — a 10% increase from the previous year. However, this figure is assumed to not quite hit the mark; in addition to being from before the economic precarity caused by Covid-19, it was thought at the time to be an undercount for the County’s suburban and rural communities, whose homeless populations are more spread out and thus harder to track. Because of this, the County has switched to an approach that combines qualitative metrics with a by-name list. New figures put the County-wide estimate at over 40,000 people, or over three times the previous figure.
Even with the older methodology, the numbers show that homelessness is far from being a Seattle-specific problem. And although the root causes of homelessness are intertwined and complex, it’s impossible to disconnect our region’s rise in homelessness from the astronomical increase in Eastside housing prices. When combined with historic under-investment in housing units affordable to people making less than 50% of area median income (AMI), a perfect storm of increasing inequality is created that only public policy can solve.
