[ Program staff spend weeks getting to know people in homeless
encampments like this one. In addition to housing, they find out what
the people need. ]
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ONE CAMP AT A TIME, A SEATTLE GROUP IS TRANSFORMING ITS APPROACH TO
HOMELESSNESS  
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Katia Riddle
April 11, 2023
NPR
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_ Program staff spend weeks getting to know people in homeless
encampments like this one. In addition to housing, they find out what
the people need. _

JustCARE outreach worker Kendra Tate (left) helps Starr Draper
complete paperwork necessary for her to move from a homeless
encampment into a temporary home., Katia Riddle for NPR

 

The breakup is swift.

"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.

It's been raining. Draper is tiptoeing her way through the mud. She
carries two trash bags, one filled with clothes and the other with
food. It's all she owns in her life now, so she takes the bags and
leaves the boyfriend. The unhoused travel light.

Draper has been in this camp in Seattle for over a year. In that time,
people from the outside world have come around now and then: the cops,
the public health officer, the social workers. They've made various
offers of assistance. But lately there have been new people from a
nonprofit, a team called JustCARE, who've offered her something far
better: a way out of this place for good.

Program staff spend weeks getting to know people in homeless
encampments like this one. In addition to housing, they find out what
the people need. Medical care? Food assistance? Methadone? Then they
give residents a choice: Work with them and move into the provided
housing or find somewhere else to go. Staying is not an option. The
camp is going away.

Most take offers of help.

Draper, 42, is going on this day to a short-term housing unit. The
plan is to eventually graduate her to permanent housing.

Other municipalities across the country have tried to create housing
solutions for unhoused people, often at taxpayer expense. Many of
those programs have failed. JustCARE has evidence that the program
works.

Initial results weren't promising. The first evaluations, which were
conducted by an outside research group from the University of
Washington, showed only 20 percent of participants were still housed
six months after being housed through the program.

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.

If JustCARE creates a successful program, it will come at a time when
homelessness is overwhelming larger cities across the West. Unhoused
people are colonizing streets and whole neighborhoods, driven there by
unrelenting housing costs, exacerbated by an ongoing opioid crisis and
lack of mental health care.

The issue fosters a widespread sense of betrayal in cities like
Seattle.

Homeless people feel betrayed by municipalities and social service
systems they think leave them no choice but to live in the dangerous
dark and cold. Businesses and residents feel betrayed when human feces
and needles are a regular feature of their sidewalks; they watch as
longtime customers turn away rather than try to shoulder their way
past tents. Taxpayers feel betrayed when they vote for leaders
promising solutions that never materialize.

SEX IS CURRENCY FOR MANY WOMEN IN HOMELESS CAMPS

If the JustCARE program works for Draper, she's going to be on her
own.

"I've always been pressured to have some man in my life," she says.
"I've never had a career of my own." She describes leaving school in
10th grade, drifting for a while and eventually finding herself in an
abusive marriage, which she fled. Substance use has been a constant.

Draper is slight and quiet, but when she speaks she is direct. She
landed here — in an industrial part of the city, a few miles from
downtown and under an overpass — after a fallout with a different
boyfriend. He promised to return. He ghosted her. She waited for him
for months.

Among the people in this program, men outnumber women 3 to 1. Sex is
currency out here.

"You get bullied," Draper says. Among other things she's traded for
sex: food and for a warm, dry place to sleep. It was hard at first,
she says. But she learned the hustle. Then it was easy.

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.

"This is a chance to focus on myself," Draper says. "A new start."

"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. "When you get there, you're gonna like it. I promise."

"I believe you," Draper says with a shaky voice. "I just gotta get
through these first few days."

MANY FEEL LEAVING THEIR HOMELESS ENCAMPMENT IS IMPOSSIBLE

Seattle is battling one of the more intractable homeless crises in the
country. There are at least 40,000 unhoused people in King County. Not
all live in camps. Many fall into an invisible population: those
moving their cars every night so as not to be found sleeping in them,
staying in shelters or crashing in their buddy's basement. County
officials say the number of _unsheltered_ people — those living in
tents a few feet from the interstate or in broken-down cars without
heat — is 20,000 at minimum.

These are the people the JustCARE program helps.

"Never before have I seen so many people living so far from the
structures of society," says Lisa Daugaard, the architect of the
JustCARE program. Daugaard is also the co-executive director of the
Public Defender Association. In these homeless camps, she describes a
world that exists in parallel to the rest of society, one that turns
on the sale of drugs, sex and stolen goods. It's a world just as
foreign to most as another country.

It's a country that is hard to leave. There is a term among those who
study this issue: scarring. The longer people are unsheltered, the
more difficult it is to acclimate back into society. Many never will.

Daugaard was already running a program serving the unhoused population
when COVID-19 hit. A well-known advocate in Seattle for police reform,
she received a MacArthur "genius grant" for her work to create
alternatives to the criminal justice system. As in many urban centers
in the West, the housing crisis escalated alongside the pandemic.
Homeless camps sprouted like mushroom patches all over the city.

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.

"We're stepping all the way in," she says. "Whatever is going on for
this person is my problem."

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.

This strategy has changed her staff's orientation to homelessness,
Daugaard says. Other social programs, she says, are predicated on
providing pieces of the solution and hoping it results in systemic
change.

"You start to hold yourself accountable for the outcome in a very
different way," says Daugaard of her team's new approach to their
unhoused clients. "I'm in it with you, and you live with us now. And
if we don't have a good answer, we have to find one. Because the
ramifications of not finding one are unacceptable."

THE PUBLIC IS SOMETIMES AHEAD OF THE POLITICIANS ON FINDING SOLUTIONS
TO HOMELESSNESS

So far, JustCARE has been paid for through a series of one-time
funding streams and commitments, including pandemic relief. Daugaard
and her team are now making the case to city, county and state
officials to take on the financial burden.

Truly reducing the number of unhoused, unsheltered people in Seattle
would require JustCARE to scale up significantly. Daugaard concedes
her program is not positioned to grow exponentially. She imagines a
kind of open-source model, where other practitioners would draw
fundamental lessons from this program.

"What JustCARE has really done is centered on the interest of all the
people who are affected," says Seattle City Council member Andrew
Lewis. He describes two highly visible, problematic camps in downtown
Seattle that JustCARE removed. This success earned them allies,
including from the business community.

Lewis has been a champion of the program, defending it against attacks
from the former mayor. He envisions a Seattle in which this kind of
work is widespread. "We're going to have to have a dedicated funding
stream for this the same way we do with any other essential public
service," Lewis says. "We can create a new system that really
fundamentally changes how we resolve urban disorder in America. And I
think it'll start here in Seattle."

That cost could be in the millions; the price tag per person annually
for this program is in the tens of thousands. Advocates like Lewis are
quick to point out that these costs have to be considered in light of
many unseen costs of homelessness including emergency room visits,
jail, lost tax revenue and the emotional toll on the entire
population. Those who study the economics of homelessness say pinning
down an exact amount is difficult, but multiple studies
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average person who is homeless costs society between $30,000 and
$100,000 per year.

"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."

Establishing funding that preemptively designates money to combat
housing insecurity is the challenge. He's yet to forecast how that
would happen. "I think the public is willing to pay what it takes,"
Lewis says. "The public is ahead of the politicians."

Starr Draper worries about feeling lonely in her new home after living
in a Seattle homeless camp for more than a year.  Katia Riddle for
NPR

THE PROSPECT OF A HOME CAN BE FRIGHTENING FOR THOSE WHO'VE BEEN
HOMELESS FOR YEARS

Starr Draper's new, temporary home is a 20-minute car ride from the
homeless camp where she's been living for more than a year. But it's a
ride out of one dimension and into another. When she arrives, staff
warmly welcome her. The building that is clean, airy and bright.

Ten minutes, later she's sitting down to do her intake paperwork.
"Drug of choice?" asks outreach worker Kendra Tate. Her pen hovers
above the paper she's helping Draper fill out. Draper pauses. "I just
don't want to get in trouble," she says.

Tate puts the pen down and looks Draper in the eye. "I want you to
understand that this program is designed to help you re-enter society,
no matter what. We're not judging. We're not trying to change you. We
offer clean needles here. Whatever you need, you ask."

"Wow," says Draper. "That really takes a big weight off."

Johnny Bousquet works with JustCARE to oversee outreach in facilities
like these. He says these first few days of transition are a critical
period. People feel uprooted and disconnected – homeless camps can
be treacherous, but they provide community. Then there's the issue of
addiction.

"You have to find a new supplier if your substance is a priority," he
explains. "Which, for a lot of people here, it is."

Ninety-nine percent of the people served in the JustCARE program
report struggling with substance abuse disorder or mental health
disorders or both.

For people using fentanyl, he says, that means coming up with $20
every two to four hours. Funding an addiction is a full-time job. Or,
as Bousquet puts it, "That's a f***ing big deal." Bousquet has been in
rehabilitation himself 15 times.

There are rules. No smoking in the rooms. Masks are mandatory. The
most significant restriction: Residents are not allowed to have guests
in their rooms. This constraint can put them at greater risk for
overdose, but Bousquet says it's a calculated tradeoff for this
vulnerable population. "Anything that's out there in the streets can
come in here." Instead of getting high in their rooms, they encourage
guests who choose to use substances to do so in an open tent that sits
across the parking lot.

"Never use alone," reads a sign pinned to a bulletin board in the
lobby. It includes a phone number and this admonition: "If you're
going to use alone, call us. We will never shame."

After completing her intake paperwork, Draper makes her way to her new
room. She's not feeling good, battling nausea. The room is clean and
spacious, but it's quieter and emptier than she's used to. She's more
alone than she's been in years.

She has big hopes for this transition. She talks about getting a job
and reconnecting with her adult children. For now, she's sitting on
the bed, taking in her new view of Seattle from her third-floor
window.

Before she unpacks or does laundry or gets to know anyone else in her
new home, she's planning to take a shower. She's most excited about
the indoor plumbing.

"No more flashlights," she says with a sly smile. "No more rats."

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