City gets advice on ending homelessness
A federal expert offered a Spokane task force some advice on Friday and a few words of encouragement to help it along its 10-year quest to end chronic homelessness in the city.
“The homeless and the buildings we house them in are not a burden, but an asset,” said Paul Carlson of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
With planning, architecture and enhanced property management, housing the homeless can become a boon to economic development, said Carlson, Northwest coordinator for the U.S. Council on Homelessness. He cited two Seattle neighborhoods, where subsidized apartment buildings coexist with high-end condominiums, as examples of how creating low-income housing can actually improve neighborhoods.
In a slide presentation to about 20 members of the Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness meeting at the Spokane Housing Authority offices, Carlson showed photo after photo of new or refurbished “work force” housing units – often built with the help of federal tax credits – nestled among some of Seattle’s most-desirable addresses.
In one photo, billionaire Paul Allen’s new condominium project, under construction in the Cascade neighborhood, rose next door to work force housing elegantly built several years ago when the land was still cheap. Across the street was a church-run men’s shelter.
“They used to call it the Denny Triangle,” Carlson said, a blighted neighborhood northeast of downtown known for parking lots and decaying industrial warehouses, bordered by Denny Way to the north and Interstate 5 to the east.
Carlson also pointed to numerous attractive Seattle Housing Authority buildings in the plush Belltown area, including one that is now paid off despite its low rent. It was built in the 1990s using federal Section 8 project-based rental assistance.
Across the street, a green area once known as “needle park” for its drug addicts has been transformed into a “doggie park” for residents to walk their pets.
In the same neighborhood, the stately Josephinum Hotel now houses the wealthy in the top four floors, as well as middle-class and low-income renters on lower levels. On its main floor, the Fair Start Restaurant employs the recently homeless.
Such projects – made possible by a variety of tax incentives, federal grants and philanthropy – occur when developers sell neighborhoods on the idea rather than battling with residents, Carlson said. Even residents of Spokane’s South Hill are likely to support these projects, he said, when they see simple but beautiful architectural designs.
Affordable housing is an investment in the community, Carlson said.
“They always think we’re coming with our hands out, when in fact we’re coming with a checkbook,” he said.
But the real payoff will be tallied in human terms, when the poor find jobs and are able to work in the neighborhoods in which they live.
In January 2004, the last year for which numbers were available, 8,416 individuals received a variety of services for the homeless in Spokane, according to a report by the city’s Human Services Department and the Spokane Homeless Coalition.
Housing-based enhanced property management, Carlson said, brings social services to the poor rather than concentrating the poor in “homeless villages.”
Ask the homeless what they need most, and they will probably say “a job” or an “affordable house,” not a shelter bed or welfare, he said. Such services are necessary in an emergency, but they are not a strategy to end homelessness.