All must have a home

The fact that thousands of Seattleites lack a safe place to call home on any given night is immoral. As a city, we must do better. During my campaign for city council I used the opportunity to advocate for what is right.

As a child in the Reagan era I remember seeing people living in the streets in downtown Seattle and wondering how our wealthy society could allow so many people to go without. In the years since, the structural problems that cause homelessness have grown more intractable and federal spending priorities have shifted. However, just because solutions are difficult doesn’t mean we should give up.

Homelessness is symptomatic of a larger crisis of community that allows us to ignore the growing inequities around us even as we struggle to acquire more stuff, regardless of the impact on the environment or our quality of life. However, if we work together, we can provide homes for our neighbors and build a more livable city. We just need the political will to make measurable progress.

My commitment includes the following four steps:

Make housing more affordable. The centerpiece of my campaign was making Seattle more affordable by a) adding housing in core neighborhoods and b) improving transit so that more people can get around without the expense of car ownership. By creating more housing supply, the overall cost will decline. There’s an opportunity to build collaboration between housing advocates and also do the following:

• Ensure that public subsidies provide housing for low-income residents. Lower the threshold for public subsidy from 80%+ of median income. Exceptions should be allowed only to jump-start more building in areas where it wouldn’t otherwise occur.
• Insist on a net gain of housing units so that low-income residents aren’t displaced by development.
• Implement inclusionary zoning so that larger projects include housing designed for workers and families.
• Improve transit to reduce the overall cost of living in Seattle. Use modern debit cards (ORCA cards) to provide free or reduced fares for low-income residents. 

Ensure quality temporary shelter. I want to live in a city that doesn’t need temporary camps for homeless residents. However, in the meantime we should have clear guidelines to facilitate “Nicklesville” and other encampments as a short-term measure.

• Act with urgency on siting. It’s shameful that the city council has delayed action repeatedly.
• Ensure 24-hour shelters for everyone who needs a spot, especially places for domestic violence survivors and their families.
• Ensure shower facilities for homeless who don’t reside in shelters.

Work with private and nonprofit partners. Government must do what no one else can. This means facilitating the many service providers to make progress toward King County’s Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness.

• Consolidate the efforts of nonprofits and developers to facilitate collaboration. We all need to give up some turf and focus on shared goals, not the process to get there. This will help us get better results with the resources we have and provide an opportunity to leverage more resources.
• Work with service providers to build capacity.

Address causes of homelessness. We should give our neighbors a helping hand, not try to fix them. We should provide housing and also focus on prevention.

• Work on strategies to alleviate the many causes of homelessness: shelter, employment training, education, mentoring and health care.
• Measure progress without forgetting that the goal is providing shelter, not measurement itself.
• Address the unemployment and health care problems that leave a disproportionate number of racial minority residents homeless.
• Ensure strategies are tailored to each segment of the homeless population, including youth, chronic homeless adults, families and immigrants.
• Advocate in Olympia and Washington, D.C. for health care funding, progressive tax reform and anti-poverty initiatives and other progressive policies.