Seattle tackling homelessness

SEATTLE – A high-powered real estate attorney is putting his energy toward another kind of building – solving King County’s homelessness problem by finding a place for each of an estimated 8,000 people who have nowhere to live.

Bill Block says the county can solve the intractable social problem created by economic dislocation, drug addiction, mental illness, domestic violence, crime and lack of health care.

He gave up his law firm partnership to head the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County.

Homelessness will end, the plan says, when a roof is built over every bed.

“It can be done,” Block said. “We see it all over the country.”

The Committee to End Homelessness in King County is an alliance of government, business and nonprofits, including officials such as County Executive Ron Sims and Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. Among their goals is creating 9,500 units of housing by 2015.

They hired Block to hold them to that promise, to help government agencies and nonprofits work together and to get the money from elected officials.

Block estimates that creating the necessary housing will take about $80 million a year, which he says is less than paying all the other expenses of caring for homeless people, such as shelters, emergency room visits, court processing and jail, which currently cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year.

The committee has made headway since the clock started ticking last year. This year, it reported that 934 housing units were opened in 2005 and 2006, with 713 more in the pipeline.

Not everyone is as optimistic.

Leo Rhodes, a Tent City resident who has been homeless off and on for 20 years, is familiar with the plan and has spoken at committee meetings.

He says he chooses to stay homeless because “I’m tired of seeing the revolving circle of the nonhomeless people trying to end homelessness.”

Chronic homelessness became more apparent in the late 1970s, when the closing of mental institutions put thousands of people onto the streets, and after federal support for public housing fell in the 1980s.

During the past two decades, gentrification has driven up housing prices in many areas. Pioneer Square, for example, was filled with cheap single-room apartments in the early 1970s but is now full of offices and high-priced lofts.

Another effort to end homelessness began when Tent City set up camp in the parking lot of St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in 2000.

Dean Robert Taylor, the head of St. Mark’s, invited representatives of business, nonprofit groups, social service agencies, government, faith groups and homeless people to a conference on creating the political will to end homelessness.

That meeting led to formation of the Committee to End Homelessness, with Taylor as its first chairman, and development of a 10-year plan, mirroring efforts elsewhere in the country.

“The challenges are about money and money and money … and money,” Taylor said.

Sharp cuts in federal rent subsidies for the poor, or county spending to reduce greenhouse gases rather than to create low-income housing, could doom the plan.

The $80-million mark Block hopes to hit each year would not all be new money but is substantially more than what is being spent now. In 2007-08, Seattle plans to spend $3 million in new money and the county $7.2 million. Suburban municipalities spend comparatively less.

What if he can’t end homelessness? What if people are sleeping in doorways in 2015?

“Obviously it’s a risk,” Block said, “but it doesn’t keep me from going for it.”