As 2017 comes to a close, Seattle and King County have made significant strides in addressing homelessness. But with 133 deaths of people without permanent homes recorded so far this year, there’s still a long way to go.
The toll of the region’s homelessness crisis has been building since early in the year.
By April, the list of people who died while homeless or without a verifiable address reached 48. In September, it passed 93, the previous year’s total.
By the close of November, the King County medical examiner’s list reached 133, surpassing the previous high of 111 from 2006.
The list is a grim indicator of what many people living without shelter and those involved in the region’s fight against homelessness both acknowledge: For all the progress made toward the goal of making homelessness “rare, brief and one-time,” the reality on the streets remains stubbornly unchanged.
With an estimated snapshot count of 11,643 — more than 5,000 of whom were living outdoors during the annual survey — King County has the third-largest concentration in the nation of people living in homelessness.
Project Homeless is a Seattle Times initiative that explores the causes of homelessness, explains what the Seattle region is doing about it and spotlights potential solutions. It is funded by the The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Campion Foundation, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Schultz Family Foundation, Seattle Foundation, Seattle Mariners, and Starbucks. Seattle Times editors and reporters operate independently of our funders and maintain editorial control over Project Homeless content.
Major cities across the West Coast are experiencing similar problems, with yearly increases in Portland, Los Angeles and San Diego.
But despite the rise in deaths and overall number of homeless people, other figures show Seattle and King County were able to deliver in 2017 on the headway promised two years ago, when both governments declared a state of emergency over homelessness.
From October 2016 to September 2017, more than 6,000 single adults and families moved from homelessness to some form of stable housing, according to recent data from All Home, the county’s coordinating agency for homeless services. The rate of people returning to the streets within a year of receiving services has been cut in half.
Kira Zylstra, deputy director of All Home, said those strides are evidence that efforts to ease access to shelter and housing programs and make performance-based funding decisions is working.
“At the highest levels, what we’ve all come to agree on is that we cannot continue to do things as we always have,” Zylstra says…..more here