transfer a kind of transformer career into account academics here at the university of washington and i just finished up a doctorate in anthropology here studying vehicle residency and so i've actually been doing research on this topic for the last nine years as part of that i actually purchased an r v early on nine years ago in ballard and had stayed on the streets looking at how tickets were being applied and what was happening there i also worked as part of the safe parking programs and helped to start the work with those a part in programs for two years here in seattle and worked with about seven hundred people who didn't get into housing in those programs and then also was served on the executive and governing board for all home to understand how this sort of issue care tasked with ending youth homelessness in the university district including our own university students that we know all too well are over represented as well in terms of homelessness  residency i also have a lived experience of homelessness including for about six months in my car it was a long time ago and it was in a different city it was in my hometown of richmond virginia so i know th s from direct experience i've worked with many many teens and also women who purposely choose to live in their vehicles because of safety issues a lot of  previous childhood sexual abuse sentiment partner violence and it's a very real thing very best role so i am passionate about this topic also a homeowner have raised a family here i'm now raising helping to raise a granddaughter i care passionately about seattle and our history of trying to do the right thing by each other and that includes our homeless citizens thank you hi everyone my communities and i'm really passionate about being here tonight because i'm pretty much using my life as a platform to be picked and prodded ask any questions it's what i've learned most about my work especially during my time in college i worked out i also should mention i worked at roots for four years so coming from lived experience coming from working in social services and also coming with a very strong indigenous perspective in the lands on life i'm learning about and we're hoping to teach what it means to me in there and bring into the conversation identities what we go through it i daily lives in how to connect this to the homeless conversation and really understand that the homeless community is our community  good to see good to see all of you here familiar faces and new faces started out of the faith community and many others plymouth housing and we owe a lot to those many pioneers in the faith community we started in two thousand and one and in two thousand and four i became director and our main goal was education and advocacy we did workshops that each year that brought hundreds of people together and had great speakers but around twenty million ninety two thousand and ten around the time this young man started down there we noticed that the system which we spent a lot of time in the system i helped write the ten year plan i went to all their meetings as this young person here also helped write that and organize it so it's good to see you but we began to see that there was really no direct work happening around vehicles and there was a lot of harm happening and in two thousand and eleven the council wanted to capture twenty five million dollars in outstanding parking fines from all of you good people if you're homeless probably not you but otherwise we were paying our tickets but they didn't include any remedy or mitigation for those living in vehicles and at that point it was becoming very evident so we started the seattle mitigation scofflaw mitigation project and we work with parking enforcement very cooperatively and with the municipal court so that we're really almost able to say that in those years since we started two thousand and eleven no one really lost their vehicle who didn't get it back if they had erroneously towed it now that's a giant band aid on a broken system and we continue to work on that but that alongside of that we worked on getting safe parking started with the road housing program we've worked on helping and i was living in lynnwood so i helped edmonds unitarian and others start programs in snohomish county st john the baptist in covington can't united methodist like washington united methodist which has the most vehicles of anybody all safe parking programs out of faith communities because we have laws from the federal government that allow faith communities to start things easier and thankfully in seattle it is really easy because of mayor mcginn and his staff really push that and that includes houses and other projects like that so i continue to stay involved and each year i go is it time to stop doing this and i need a replacement with one if you volunteer tonight so thank you for coming and this is a long conversation i've just finished the new system that's coming in the regional authority will need a lot of voices to cover all these gaps you should start getting informed there's a web page you can link the all home  and find that find out what they're doing the council members will be passing and her local agreements in we need all the other cities in the county to do this on paper it looks great it hopefully will include addressing vehicles because last year we had more than half of the end sheltered living in vehicles and this year the number went way down and statistically i am very skeptical but we know it's a problem you see it so safe parking one of the options and it's a courageous thing to  do well good evening my name's theresa most kate i am seattle city council member city y and i am in position i got elected in two thousand and seventeen and for anybody who was in this room it was a very hot day that we had a debate right over there  appreciate the opportunity to come back and i want to say thank you to university high's you heights and to root for hosting this event and to all of you for being here what really makes me excited about being part of this discussion as i look around and i see a lot of people who've come to city hall before who have met with us in our offices and also right here in community to talk about solutions the reason i'm excited about this conversation is i believe we're all interested in finding solutions and helping to be part of the network to help solve the crisis a little bit of the reason that i think we're all interested in solving crisis is because we see this as a public health issue my background is in public health i used to work for the department of health community health and washington i work for children's alliance fighting for health care for all kiddos and then at the state labor council fighting for health care for everyone if you don't have a home it is very hard to be healthy if you don't have your health it's hard to keep your home in your job and so for me this is directly related to the health of the individuals who are sleeping outside and sleeping in their cars it's directly related to the health and the psyche and the population health of our community when we see people sleeping outside even if we were housed and we're driving to work or we're riding on the bus and we see people sleeping outside and we know that it's hard for them to be sleeping outside perhaps needing access to counseling perhaps in the access to health services and most importantly access to a safe place to call home that hurts us as well as those in the community who see that and it's really bad for the health of our local economy we spent a lot of time talking about how seattle's a growing city people want to come here they're coming here for good living wage jobs are coming here to start businesses they're coming here to seek refuge from extreme climate in other parts of the country and they're coming here as immigrants and refugees because we say we're a welcoming city but we haven't yet built the housing that we need to welcome the twenty percent population growth that we've seen over the last ten years that's one hundred and fourteen thousand people who've come to our city since two thousand and ten and we haven't kept up with the housing demand so i see these issues interlinked and i see the core of them being directly  connected to the health of individuals our population and the health of the local economy i'm also really excited to be here to talk about that family element because we know it's really hard to get back on your feet if you're being separated from your family and a lot of us think about the crisis on the border and people being separated one of the reasons that individuals don't go out of their car and into shelters is because in some of our shelters you get separated from your loved one if your kiddo can't stay with you or you can't stay with your husband or your wife and the opposite sex and sometimes sleeping in your car is one of the only ways to keep your family together that's a critical element to think about why people are sleeping inside and we have to offer them are alternatives to sleeping in their car we have to offer them enhanced shelters meaning a place where people can stay together with their loved ones and keep their belongings often they're sleeping in their cars because it's the only place that they can keep their last the longings so the alternatives to sleeping in their car something we have got to work on as a city and even if they are in a shelter even an enhanced shelter where you can have a case manager and have a shower and have a locker and stay with your loved one you're still homeless right so the solution to homelessness is housing immediately we need more enhanced shelters and in the meantime as we build those as we open more and hopefully protect places like routes from getting shut down we have got to recognize that one of the more public health like approaches to helping to serve those who are currently homeless is to recognize that when they're sleeping in their car this is the last place of refuge for them to be with their family to keep their belongings and to be safe as was mentioned i don't see this is a long term solution by any means but i'm really excited to talk with you all because i think we're all interested in those short medium and long term solutions and that's part of the conversation will have tonight so i look forward to position for another four months and with that i take the responsibility of understanding of the city has had so many conversations done so much work and so much really good has been a leader in a lot of these issues and how do i keep me you know i think about my mother when my mother was she was a victim of domestic violence and all the time that she kind of try to find ways for us to be safe you know where we were we try to find  temporary shelter when wherever we could or with family or or with friends my father after my parents divorced my father would actually sometimes on weekends we would sleep with him in the car in the two thousand mazda  and i still remember the back of the camper fast forward one time when i was visiting my mother and she one of her neighbors next door senior citizen just immediately left the building and mother tells me the story that she finds her sleeping in her car a block away and when mom invites her inside the house and provides a shelter for the night so the reason why i say and mention all this is because all of us in the pathways to homelessness are much more complex and nuanced than any of them really then than as policymakers we have to really just take a consideration of really mean all hands on deck about all the different solutions that are necessary to help do what we can and ensure that we can provide stability here so many individuals and families in crisis now personally you know i  volunteer because of you know i believe that i have privilege and because of that privilege as an able body person i i can do what i can to try to do volunteer or be of service to my community and so that's what really what drives me in my passions my work and i try to encourage other young people to getting gage get involved and do what they can as well so that all of all of us in this room can do what we can to help improve the lives and outcomes  for anyone that's in crisis or any thank you all for sharing that i think it's really important to know the period sitting on the panel i think that's really always a valuable so i thank you for all for sharing that so before we move on there was a young man that was supposed to join us beenz and he was able to write a statement that i'm going to read and then we'll start the process so vince is a resident of any parks apartment a lehigh a portable housing building who used to live in his vehicle he was planning to here tonight to share a story but was called in to work and he wanted us to share his statement below ever when my name is vince was living in my car at the beginning of april this year work hours had become slow and i had a car payment due along with the rent i had to make a choice whether to make a payment on my car or put the money towards the roof over my head and at the time i decided to make a payment on the car because that's what got me to work i then started sleeping in my car and couldn't figure out how it's going to get back on my feet i was grateful to be in my car during the rainy nights it was very uncomfortable and something i hope not to experience again when day i reached one day reach to miss krishna richardson daniels from the tech center when i mentioned about my homelessness she immediately or assured me that he would be fine a few hours later i got a call to meet with shelby from true hope i then met with the staff and i was given a key to a tiny home which by the way i was not expecting at all i was that true hope for about twenty nine days when i was told that they had found me an quick i now live in denny park apartments and it's been a blessing to live there without the great commitment of communication with these ladies they would not have a place to live to be living in and thank you so much so i think it's important to note that that  his voice is here and it's kind of a hold that in that space as we continue this conversation is really important so the next question i have for you it lends to kind of what you've already brought up and by the way you should have prompted some questions but if these are questions being written down as policymakers in influencers what would you do to fix the situation and how relevant is it to provide parking as a solution and the situation being homelessness by the way is so one of the things that i found this research that i thought was interesting and it's echoed by just about everybody on this panel so far is that so many of the people that i've met are living their vehicles are using their vehicles as a form of fordable housing and these are so many people are people who have had to choose between as you mentioned the story the car payment or their home and using the vehicle to work it may be the last vehicle maybe their last major possession that they're holding on to when they've lost their housing it may actually be a way that's a step off the street but one of the really interesting things is that for very many many people who are living in their vehicles they don't see themselves as homeless at all they see themselves as having a percent of people who've been sheltered so this isn't a new number this is something that's been going on for quite some time but really it's been for the last couple years of those numbers have risen and part of it's due to improved accounting methods but part of it's also just due to need more and more people who are living on the streets who are living in their vehicles and what we see is that right now you know in two thousand and eighteen there were three thousand three hundred people who were documented living in their vehicles across king county and that was a minimum that you know the reality was there really wasn't a parking spaces for really just about any of those people very few at least and so without that parking space for that person to exit the street there's really no exit from the situation at all and that's for the community that's for the business owners for the property owners and for the person in their vehicle when we see what's really kind of fascinating is that everybody in that those groups i just mentioned are sort of aligned around that same idea these are people who don't necessarily want to live in that public parking space but there isn't a place for them to park their home and so without the place to park their home to actually connect into the systems that provide housing long term housing we can use their immediate possession that they own now their actual piece of property that they see as home their primary shelter we can use that is something that we can leverage into permanent housing but if we have a space for that vehicle to actually park off the street we can do that we can actually start to use that property as a way that isn't an anchor around someone's neck but it is actually something that's beneficial that can be that that that stepping stone between being living in a parking space on the street and actually getting into permanent housing so the need for parking space in our system i think that honestly what the solution we need to look at and this may sound radical but we need to have a full system wide integration  parking spaces into our shelter models because we have as we know he had to for half of the people who are living on the streets of seattle are living in their vehicles and if we really want to address homelessness if we want to want to end homelessness for all then we need to address that half of those people as well so i so what i'm talking about is not some new thing to give these person this group a privileged advantage but really to include them in the systems of care that we provide for all of our neighbors knight but it echoes a lot of what graham's just saying is that she's highlighting a very noble they call themselves the rubber train and kind of going back to our original tramp skerrick which our national parks going around to where the jobs are including like amazon warehouses that they really do not consider themselves homeless and then reflecting on that there's one woman in the book who says that that she's realizing as she's saying that that she herself is looking down on those homeless people but it really problematize is the issue of vehicle residency and also puts it within a national and very st homeless official homeless in same popper was edward moore back in eight hundred and fifty six found on the beach in belltown i do want to just mention that seattle has this amazing even though we're  considered kind of unchurched you know we have like some of the have have traditionally not had super high membership in churches at the same time the churches have had outside  outsized impact on social justice issues in our town plymouth i mean lots and lots of congregations and the other thing is just like looking at this from a historical perspective and a kind of a higher level thing and i go to the public health perspective that's my my terminal degree is international health and that is why it is we are known worldwide as being very innovative in a lot of our social justice and public health interventions including like the eleven building where we fall down is we we don't scale them up for some reason and they just don't catch on they catch on in other parts of the world i was in edinburgh this past fall and people are adopting the eight hundred and eleven bill i mean they're asking me about it and saying well aren't there like more of them in seattle and like no you know it's fighting back so just something for us to think about is what is it about our potentially are over processing and debating things to death where we don't take a really good  quick so you're talking about a good public health intervention can you describe someone what that means in terms of this particular initiative why is this a good public health intervention why is this relevant well i think if  did not read the seattle times article today on vehicle residency i encourage you to read it the person i'm representing here is quoted in the as well and that is again coming from a public health perspective  and from a harm reduction perspective that this exists and for a reason because it is basically low income housing and people have a say to a certain extent over where where they're where they're standing but it is a public health issue in terms of sanitation in terms of safety for overdose in terms of fire these kinds of issues i mean we had that you know back in the depression with hoover as well so of taking those into consideration working with people with the current lived experience because they are the experts and so often times we leave out we don't have people work my perspective we don't have enough people in policy and in the public positions who who have the lived experience and who are open with that and have that inform what they're saying but we definitely do not actually say to people who are having whatever these experiences are you're the experts in what's going on for you let's actually hear from you everything and we want data driven solutions that's what i think of when i think of public health data driven solutions so from my perspective when i think about you know how is a safe lot of public health intervention how is it a harm reduction intervention one really great example of this is in public health you want to meet people where they're at if you want people to eat healthier food you try to get them healthier food in their local grocery store not just shame people when they come to the doctor and say you've got to eat better if you want people in communities to get more exercise instead of saying join a gym what we do in public health is we try to make more walkable communities more sidewalks more safe routes to school that's what i did when i was at public health if we want to meet people where they're at in terms of treating folks in the crisis of homelessness we know from ongoing conversations because of data driven reports that the best way to help folks get inside and get housed is to know where they're at when people are sleeping outside and they're sleeping in a tent like the people that i bike by every day along the railroad track down there on east original way and let's say one day there they are and the next day they're moved right because it's not a safe place to be sleeping by the railroad tracks and there's a lot of public health concerns with folks sleeping around there when they're moved the folks that have been working with them let's say from youth care or their case manager they've come to try to tell them guess what we got to a place to live and they show up  that tends not there i've heard folks that used care and other places like mary's place say that they've been working to get people in housing for months if they've built relationships and they know them and they've created this trust and they come in with and i say guess what we got to your health card here's the health card and they show up and their tents not there anymore one of the really important things about having a safe place to stay at night is to know that your case manager and the folks who've been working with you to get you health care to get you housing and sometimes a job know where to find you so that you're not constantly moved and you're not having to deal with the trauma of also being moved but that we know where you're at and we're going to treat you where you're at in a safe place that's a really important element for us helping to stabilize folks and get them inside and one of the reasons that i just said in case they need a job it's important to remember that here in seattle what we've seen and time and time again with our data with our reports is that somewhere between twenty to forty percent of our homeless population has employment it might be part time it might be seasonal it might be temporary but what they don't have is a place to call home and a place to take a shower so that they can keep their job so one of the really really important things for us to do from that public health intervention model is to know where we can serve folks know where we can treat folks and then know where we can help find them when those houses the new units are open that many of our nonprofit organizations and city are working on again this is not a solution just like the band aid approach is not the solution to a broken leg or a broken system but these the little ways in which we're treating folks and helping to stabilize them help with the public health model of treating people where they're at and not having to reinvent the wheel every time she's people around it's not only good for the health of those individuals but it's fiscally wise as well the folks at youth care and mary's place and others have talked about how much time they waste trying to find those people that they've built relationships with when they've been moved from corner to corner it is more effective and efficient and a more humane way for us to help make sure that people can get off the street if we know where they're at and can help  like to see change in service providers working in isolation homelessness is a system that we all can identify but the solutions and these all of these great innovations often take off in isolation but there is always a history of someone who's done it before or tried these ideas before so from that lens i would like to see us before taking action really doing the research and finding where other providers and advocates are before we come into the communities and that's my that's when i see long term goals i still feel that short term solutions such as vehicle residency are very important anything that addresses the immediate safety me homeless families homeless individuals like i was myself this is where i can switch the lens to my experience last summer i remember walking hot days all day long and then mostly just spending my time by the water because i didn't have the money to publicly occupy any stationary space and i didn't have a vehicle so i could only imagine and i was carrying my bags i also witnessed many mothers with strollers who were in the same situation so getting in the lens of yes homelessness as an individual or family there are things to see and identify there but also as a community what policies are already in place that prohibit people from feeling safe to even walk the streets there's constant stresses and pressures that come with that so thinking about that i think residency is really important because it keeps us safe  i i have not experienced so much violence physical violence more than i had during my time of homelessness and that was just six months and i feel like my time was only amount of six months because i had worked out routes i had been to college i had done all of these things before becoming homeless so i had a pre planned of who i got to get out of this domestic violence situation let me go back to where i work and then i know i can work my way out from there most people don't come with that knowledge and so when we talk about community i think it's it's it would be so pivotal to have that space especially at somewhere like you heights that's already known historically rooted  and so from short term to long term short term we're getting we're providing that in assessing that and that immediate safety long term using that time to get to know the families and talk and build that trust and vulnerability is talk about those issues that create the system of homelessness as a whole because it's all broken down into different facets there's all there's many different identities intersections that are working together and i think the more that we are able to be occupy the same spaces as providers and those experiencing it we can get down to the root of ok where are we seeing it show up in our own lives and how can we reflect a better environment for everyone i think things i want to also address policymakers and solutions thank you for mentioning short mid and long term we've had that list out for a long time it's not exhaustive but we have to start somewhere on short term and the system seems a little resistant to that the thing i say a lot lately is it's not a menu it's a recipe we have a lot of task forces that pick two or three things off a list of thirty or forty choices thinking we're going to change for the better sometimes we change it for the worst so we have to get out of the habit of having task forces that make recommendations and have it selected off like it's a menu we need all the recipe parts three too much space is off limits that goes for tents and vehicles and i mean public and private space we have enough space in seattle to do an adequate job of housing the vehicles we have right now and begin to provide outreach but as you've mentioned we don't know where they are half the time because they have to move every seventy two hours for it a line was originally we have cities that make it illegal to sleep in your car overnight on a public right away but we want to force that law because we don't have enough shelter to send them to so officers who we work well with in this city are now at risk of having to make a moral decision in these other cities everybody needs to have a line to law around this vehicle issue and we need the vehicles because we don't have enough shelter graham has is right that this is a shelter for many people we do want healthy shelter though you know there's a something from the mayor about getting rid of really unhealthy ones and i'm ok with that but i think i've likened it to opening the door to the emergency room for a bleeding patient that you just let in it's hardly enough to do that let's see five innovative in collaborative we have not been innovative we have not been collaborative and i mean that both w seattle and regionally and then last it's about the people too much of the conversation that i'm hearing lately is always about the vehicles or the unsightly vehicles or where they're part and then we're going to take the vehicles where the people going we just do not have outreach to the people right now we're not creating what hud used to call the pathway to stability the people are really what matter and we need to get our eyes back on the prize and i just want to touch on the public health issue tell him that we got you into a place or got to a parking space and the whole group of people would be removed and it made it so difficult to do it and working with parking enforcement often parking enforcement officers are stuck in a rock and a hard place because they don't want to do that work and they know they're hurting people but they they have a job to do and they don't lose their jobs and the reality is is when it when we come to there's two things that i haven't heard mentioned about public health and one of them is is really important i don't think we can't wear rose colored glasses about this we have to be honest there's dumping there's garbage there is deconstruction of items that are you but often done for scrapping all of these things are done because there are ways that people produce capital the ways that people are producing money so that they can survive their forms of income their ways that they create connections with other people within their community but all of these are on done because again the vehicle is parked in this public space there is no other place for this vehicle and there's no garbage can generally next to that vehicle so you see this large accumulating massive of objects which is which you could kind of expect that any human settlement where you're going to get kind of everything that we all make in our houses because these are houses these are homes and it gets to the nd piece about the public health thing that i think is really really important we often overlook is that funneling everybody into shelters and that kind of resonates i think with people who've done this work but one of the interesting things about people living in vehicles is that for many people there are parts of pop subpopulations that don't have a place in shelters so again it's the family who has the adult the male that's over the age of thirteen it might be somebody who's eighty five years old in terminal hospice right they might be dying of cancer and there's no place for that person really in the shelter system right and so the problem is is that we have these large numbers of people who really don't have a fit within the current emergency and in the housing system and so because of it there really is no way it so they are seeing this vehicles are optimum for a shelter because it is the only form of shelter they can't afford the housing they don't have the permanent income to get into it and honestly because there isn't a natural space in the shelter system they're not even really being funneled into that anyway because there's not a spot for them there and that's a really important public health piece thank you to them so i went to grad school  happened is that we raise the temperature around the conversation of homelessness and i see this contention and what i'm trying to really hope and try to amplify is is you know the process yes we need it but we also need to be able to move a quicker about the solutions with regards to what we can do individually and collectively we know that you know santa barbara has a similar approach that in a small group is a decentralized parking spots with case management someone has done it  thirteen open beds shelter beds a night that is just being cognizant and aware of the fact that we don't have enough space we haven't created enough space for folks who are in crisis so you know i want to get in the conversation but i'll leave it th ose right on and this is something that we have been working on his time on council and something that i've been working on for the last eight months i think that we as public policy makers have not done a good job of saying what has worked and what we could do better identifying the areas where we know we can invest more or that we've invested and we've shown to be working but what we really need to do scale up what i want is a dashboard that we can show you each month how are we doing many people have leased or how many open beds were there a night versus how many people are sleeping outside that is basic data that we should be able to access as public policy makers that you all should be able to access the public to know where those dollars are going and frankly so that we can share that with the press who's constantly asking us those questions i am very frustrated by the lack of a dashboard or a monthly metric system that we can share with you so we've been asking for this information the request to have the number of beds open on an average night has been something i've been asking for for eight months and abel's correct that last month we saw a report that said on average night there was only thirteen beds open but i want to put a caveat on that only five to six of those beds were in the enhanced shelter model that we're talking about where people actually really feel safer where they have a case manager where they have a locker and they're not being asked to pick up their stuff at six in the morning and line up again at six pm or they're not being separated from their loved ones from their kiddos from their spouse and they're allowed to stay together the difference between an enhanced shelter is that it has the case manager the bathroom the shower the locker versus the basic shelter which is a matter on the floor roll out to matt in the middle and i roll it up early in the morning it's no wonder that people feel like they can't get stabilized with that kind of basic shelter but combined thirteen beds on average in night of the enhanced shelters there's only five to six beds five to six beds and how many people do we have sleeping and shelter tonight around five thousand five hundred so the math once we see those numbers in the stark comparison between how many people are outside versus how many enhanced shelter beds that we have or just even mats on the ground it is no wonder that we see so many people continuing to live outside and i promise you i know abel's are going to be working on this with us as well we're going to keep asking for that data to better paint a picture of what the need is where we're doing well because we know when we get people in that enhance shelter but there are five times more likely to get housed than if they were just on a mat on the floor we know the data as you said shows that those enhanced shelter shelters models people get stabilized faster so we have to end the cycle of people getting kicked out onto the street because they're not getting stabilized and then also do the math to see that right now with our current system we can't possibly shelter all those folks who are sleeping outside so the question i is now that we've talked a little bit about this and we've kind of seen some of the perspectives from the different panelists what would you like the solution to be what do you want it was up to you and you were the world and it was your turn to say this is what's going to happen what would that solution be anybody more homes and more and more homes promote more case management again you know what when i started this conversation i talked about just a different past and just the difficulties in the nuances of life and that in itself i think it's  something that we have the mindful of and you know trying to meet people where they are i mean whether that's you know escape in a situation that's not healthy being more saying these items the chamber of commerce they had a report that came out late last year i should say i'm sorry early two thousand and eighteen and it said in the region the total calculation of the dollars that we need in king county is four hundred and ten million dollars a year and then it went on to say we need two hundred and five million dollars just in the city of seattle to bill the number of houses that we know we need for the lowest income and low wage working families that's a significant amount of money so we have to recognize that the dollar amounts not just from my calculation or yours according to the chamber's own report we do not have the dollars in hand right now to build the housing that we need task force we are going to create a cross governmental entity a public development authority that will actually be looking at how we coordinate policies how we coordinate revenue and how we make sure that the various organizations that are serving homeless folks are having to jump through hoops after hoops and then repeat that again with our county so that's going to help but that alone in terms of those efficiencies is not going to solve the crisis as we get additional dollars in hand and work with our state partners for additional really have to recognize that the vast majority should be going into building housing as the chamber of commerce's report said but in the meantime we also need to build those enhanced shelters and couple that with health services not everybody who is homeless needs mental health counseling or substance abuse counseling right twenty to forty percent of folks have a job but sometimes people who've been homeless for so long and self medicating and so we also have to recognize that as we build housing we need those case managers to help stabilize house folks and the health services whether it's counseling or other services to go with it but the vast majority of our funds and i would suggest around eighty percent is what we had originally calculated the money should really be going into the building of the housing because right here in our city we know this area expensive i've lived here for i'm now thirty nine and i've been in seattle for over thirty years right i grew up in olympia we know seattle's always kind of been a little bit more expensive in two thousand and twelve we were about thirty five percent above the national average when it came to the cost of housing right now six years later we're one hundred and thirteen percent over the national average and we have seen the consequence of that lack of affordable housing in terms of people getting pushed into the street and also pushed out of our city not being able to afford their homes frankly sometimes because a lot of the revenue comes from property taxes so our seniors our families who are living on the margin on fixed incomes it's really hard to keep your home sometimes when that's the only revenue source that we're looking at  one of the things we have to do is build more housing both middle income and low income housing with an emphasis on the capital construction for our lowest income and at the same time to also invest in health services and those enhanced shelters that's that's the goal  i think we're in year four could be five of the state of emergency this is the least known fact about i mean i can't think of another state of emergency that hasn't looked like a state of emergency than this one because if we had an earthquake or a tornado i mean we would be doing a lot that we're not doing here and that means we need the innovation and collaboration all the items have to be on the table for a while we need we need to be able to persuade people who feel very like seattle's their home that maybe there's another place nearby that will provide better safety for you so we need a lot of what we call a program of companionship we need people to walk with others and say well let's try this out living over in say renton you know and get used to the neighborhood and get you know people won't go i think one of you mentioned the isolation factors enormous of being homeless and the loneliness is enormous and the friends you make aren't always the best friends but you make  because you're lonely so we need better engagement from the general public and we need that led by those who are elected and other directors who can use some of their volunteers but we're not acting like this is a state of emergency and  is i mean i spend enough time around people who are at risk to see it with my own two eyes and i haven't lived that but i am in the midst of the lived experience often enough that we should be ashamed of ourselves you know when i say that both his clergy and as a human being we should just be ashamed of ourselves for letting this exist and i know people don't want this to exist but if we start saying it's a state of emergency what are we going to do we might actually do something different and bro to the solution is also meeting people where they are not only the homeless people experiencing homelessness but especially those who aren't something that i study a lot now especially with all of my inner twining work in communities is education something that we all have in common is that we've been a child before going through some sort of education system and so what i envision what i hope to establish one day is a chain of education centers one by one based within community homes because that's been said before more homes are necessary and i know that you know there are built over night but i know there's enough people invested in education at all levels all accessible levels and with that one with education you build the esteem of a person for them to see possibility for themselves and so i come from i and i don't come from a policy background all of the women of my family they own daycares they own baking businesses they held roles that raised families and so with that i would i would call for more homes being built but with the intention of why they're being built and putting education at the center  and i agree with most most everything people have set up here so far and i would add from my perspective it's not just homes it is also community connections that's that's our university students who have helped keep places like roots staffed and going and we need more of that the service learning in the education about it the other thing that i really feel passionately about is more prevention and so more upstream we know that there's intergenerational homelessness and trauma that gets passed on so that if we are not not to say take it away from an aged person who's dying of cancer but we need a lot more of our money going to effective programs for families that are really struggling to be good enough parents good enough families for  again this is this is about affordable housing right this is what this issue is is what what we see is that and so much of this is it may seem surprising but is this labor market shift that we've seen happen in this in this community over the last several decades and that what we see is that many people who are living in their view are displaced that these are people who have lived in these communities these are our neighbors who have long time been in parts of our communities and yet they cannot afford to live here anymore and so they use these vehicles as these forms of affordable housing to maintain the connection to the city to the jobs to the social services to their families to their medical networks to the v a all the services that they've come to rely upon for decades but they now cannot live near because they can't afford to anymore and i think we all know that all too well because we've seen it and you know i didn't really what it comes down to is we we had this tendency to always try to look for sort of a silver bullet solution because it's easy because if we just had a one size fits all thing that all we got to do is invest in that and it's done but that's simple it's too simple and as a matter of fact i think it alienates for us from the issue because we all know that we're not simple people we're all very complicated people we have very complicated lives and very complicated problems and there is not one silver bullet solution that would fix all of our problems for anything a lot of us and  the complexity of that connects with our own complexity and why it might so what we need to do is we need to think about this not just in terms of the the long term development of housing though obviously we need that it's also an immediate relief of things like parking things how do you get that person off the street that connects to that long term development not just it's just the one answer because it needs we need to find the way that we get the person in there and what they're getting in them into so what i think we really need again is this full size  hit that in consideration are we talking five to seven beds that are available there are virtually none of those when it comes to parking spaces so there really needs to be we need to take this not as a thirty parking spaces here twenty parking spaces here we need to really be looking at this as a full system wide issue and really it needs to be needs to be regional because it's interesting it's not just about one single city if we put a law in one place it moves people over to the next place and it's we need to be working all together on this and we really need to be focused on that the the needs of a housing st model which is a little bit jargony for those who don't know it but really what it says is that not only do we help people sort of process through the traumas that they're experiencing when they're in public space by exit in them from a public space that once you're out of those traumatic environments you can start to process through those things but not just that but it focuses on the needs of the subpopulations themselves and it recognizes that there's a big difference between somebody who might be a senior citizen between a youth and young adult between someone who might be a queue or somebody who might have a felony background or a sex offender background or a family and so by trying to put all of those people into one spot it doesn't work right we know that and it would be unconscionable to do that anyway so we need to recognize that part of that is this distributed model right we need to be looking at how do we settle people in our communities where they're at help them to reintegrate back into their communities and ultimately i think that there's a really exciting model out there that is just sort of getting some some word something called incremental housing i don't want to get in too much here but part of what it suggests is people actually building out their housing themselves and investing into it investing into the community and partnering with public and private organizations to help do that and so i think that what could be exciting model would be to think about how do we leverage these pieces of private property the shelters these homes these vehicle homes rather they are right now to be that transitional space into permanent housing where can we find places we can help people actually be part of building up that housing so that they're part of investing in their community that they're building that equity in their community so that they're part of that settlement so they feel invested and they and they feel that love towards their community that we all do so ultimately that's what i would like to see is i'd like to see us not look at this as a single small little issue we need to look at this up to half of the people who are living in our street are currently  represented are extremely underrepresented in our services and we need to have a massive change to fix that that's a good segue the current system relies on data being data driven having reports come most of the people living in vehicles are not in the home most management information system so when we look at the numbers that have been published by the count us in and all the other places that's not all the homeless people and so that's the true crime against the homeless is we're not even representing all of them in what we say publicly and privately so we really need to scale up our outreach get folks into that system or somehow otherwise identify them because we don't understand well enough what's going on out there and we're reporting on bad