During the pandemic, a nonprofit in Seattle took a different approach to solving homelessness: helping whole encampments of unhoused people themselves make a plan to get housing.
JustCARE outreach worker Kendra Tate helps Starr Draper complete paperwork necessary for her to move from a homeless encampment into a temporary home."Don't be sad," Starr Draper calls over her shoulder to her boyfriend. She's walking out of the homeless camp where they've been living together."He wanted to have housing together, and I just don't know if we're gonna last," she says.
But a more recent evaluation, completed after the team made some course corrections, told a different story. Seventy percent of participants remained housed six months after they'd been moved from a camp. Life in the camp is dangerous. There have been fires. Guns turn up regularly. Someone died a few weeks ago of a suspected drug overdose. Another woman here explains that even if there were a toilet at the camp, she wouldn't use it. She was raped once in a public restroom. She'll never risk it again."It's gonna be good," outreach worker Nichole Alexander reassures her as they walk to the car, pulling Draper's trash bags behind them in a wagon.
Daugaard had an epiphany. The only way to help people get off the streets, she realized, would be for her and her team to find housing for their entire camp.She and her team took advantage of the once in a lifetime deluge of federal pandemic aid and marshaled resources from the city, state and county. They worked camp by camp. In the last few years, they've removed 19 camps like Draper's and housed hundreds of people.
She imagines a kind of open-source model, where other practitioners would draw fundamental lessons from this program. "Poll after poll shows that people are concerned about public safety," says Lewis."When you drill down, it is pretty evident that when they say public safety, a big part of what they mean is the massive proliferation of visible encampments."
"You have to find a new supplier if your substance is a priority," he explains."Which, for a lot of people here, it is."
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