NR

I had been doing a lot of work on homelessness. I worked at City Hall briefly, five years ago, and was asked to write a report on the city’s response to homelessness and my report found some really stark things. At that time, there were 23,000 people experiencing homelessness. Now there are 37,000 — the number has gone up by 14,000 in five years, which is a staggering increase. My report found then that the city was already spending over a hundred million dollars responding to homelessness, but that there was very little coordination across departments. Departments were moving homeless individuals around from the street, to parks, to libraries and, most frequently, to jail.

The bulk of that hundred million dollars was being spent to put people who were experiencing homelessness in jail and, most often, they’d be in jail for three nights and then released. It’s a policy that was both incredibly cruel and incredibly ineffective. My report also found at that time, when the city was spending such a huge amount of money on homelessness already, they had only hired nineteen outreach workers for the city and county together. The outreach workers are really the people who are tasked with ensuring that people have access to the services they needed. It’s a gross underinvestment in compassionate, evidence-based responses to homelessness.

I left City Hall, had twins and took some time off from the workforce, but I started a homeless coalition in my own neighborhood. We are a volunteer-run homeless coalition, and now it’s one of the most active homeless coalitions in the city. We started trying to do outreach in our neighborhood, getting to know people, trying to understand the barriers that they face in getting back into housing. We realized once they were experiencing homelessness, it was incredibly difficult, almost impossible, to get back into housing and impossible to get access to the kinds of services that they needed.

The system that we have to respond to homelessness is not one that was designed to help people. In our whole area there was not a single walk-in shelter bed. If you wanted to speak to someone about health issues or mental health issues, none of that was available. As a coalition, we said that we wanted to create services locally in a place that was really lacking in such resources.

We went to our city and said we’ve identified locations where you can create these kinds of drop-in services. We see that this is a desperate need and the city really didn’t do anything, so we did it ourselves. We created a one day a week drop-in center, which has since expanded, where we have a case manager, where we have showers, show a movie; we rent a van and pick up people from encampments throughout that area, bring them to the site and then drop them off afterwards.

When I looked at the system that I saw in front of me and the city’s slow response, I decided to run because I was doing this work, and the other members of the homeless coalition were doing this work, while we had other jobs and families. If elected representatives shared the sense of urgency that we felt around these issues, we would have a very different system in place in response to homelessness, but also to the broader housing crisis.