our topic tonight is the survival gap in our homelessness net as you may have noticed seattle and king county have too much housing that people can't afford and too little housing that is affordable across the country there are about four empty houses for every unhoused person i don't have statistics for king county but i imagine it's not too different our governing bodies are reluctant to create incentives for building an adequate supply of truly afford of affordable housing or for keeping rents within bounds possibly this is because most of our revenues are dependent on property taxes or sales tax consequently we have a situation in which around eighty thousand people with jobs located in king county can afford to live here and two out of five households who do live here pay unsustainab high rants every month for the nine thousand plus people who are still looking for a place to call home about half of whom are children are county's shelter system can provide places for only one thousand seven hundred four individual adults on a given night during the one night count in january two thousand and thirteen these and the four hundred and fifty five winter response beds were all filled two thousand seven hundred thirty six people were counted outdoors of these people not in shelter two hundred seventy three slept in self managed homeless tent cities and eight hundred and seventy eight were sleeping in vehicles until this year the committee to end homelessness in king county had been reluctant to put energy and money into homeless shelters though most service networks and housing programs were excessive only through the shelter system so for many reasons people have found their own alternative shelters mostly tents and vehicles tonight we'll hear stories of how people have dealt with this survival gap and after the stories will have a time for questions and answers so to begin with our first oh there was one thing i wanted to do to kind of warm us up and that was to do a little sharing in the crowd so to find out what we have in common how many of you at one time or another in your life have been housed in a place of your own whether it's an apartment or how anybody up here yeah how many of you at some point in your life have not had a place that you could call your own had to double up with relatives or live otherwise yeah it's like that trace would you like to share your story of how you became homeless good evening there my name's trey steger moe and i currently reside at the now i haven't always been a homeless person in fact when i came here in eighty seven the job market was good i was out of the marine corps i had some physical  injuries but i was able work around them had some p t s d was it the work around that worked for over twenty years supporting myself maintaining a home residence and then in zero five while working my winter job down here in seattle driving tow truck i had my leg crushed well between the other things i had picked up over the years and my time to service that final injury was too much for me to continue doing the kind of work i had been doing which was driving tow truck forklifts up on the tundra up on the north slope loading tugs and burgess so where do you go from there well i had some savings i say i'll start a business well started up in zero seven things are fine going ok and no way near the end of zero eight commie starts look bad things are tanking o nine i end up losing my place to live the tow truck down to just a service truck and it up living in net trying to maintain the business couldn't do that the truck broke down being out on the road there's no place to work on it no place can leave it parked for a while so you can go earn some money i ended up homeless was wintertime the day ended up with no truck to sleep in it was a blizzard was a real cold night but fortunately just a few blocks away from where i had formerly had a residence at the methodist church there was a place called tent city three so i made my way up there people helped me out made sure i had some warm foot gear blankets and a place to sleep that would have been for that i probably went and made it through that storm and from there i was at ten c three for a while became an evolved with the share program learned a lot about the self ma communities and ended up joining up with nichols phil what was up in lake city i managed to secure a little part time employment but that's not going to pay for an apartment or anything and so when it was time for  ville to leave lake city i had no shelter could maintain the chop it was a hospitality job can't keep yourself clean smelling good then they're going to keep you employed so since then i've been with nickels phil since the firehouse we've been down where we're at for two years now without a permit from the city council though the mayor said he went bold owes us that left us without police protection though being a soft match community we rose above this little challenge and for over two years kept a well ordered peaceful community with no support from the local government until thanksgiving day when we were flooded out and the mare's office to say that we should have some help they provided us with some pumps brought in some other stuff concrete blocks got the health department to work with us and between the health department the mares office we got the camp physically back on track though unfortunately the lack of police protection was and is still is you know of concern to us that we've dealt with our problems and that's the thing is without these encampments people die and without the encampments being supported by folks like you and by the local government it's very hard to keep them open and functioning and if we don't do that people will die so these are so important because as you heard her say most people get to their temporary and permanent housing through the shelter system well most shelter beds are full a lot of people highly allergic to bed bugs which we know there's a big problem with downtown and very of various other reasons so we find a lot of people in the  our next panelists are stacey and roger and they're going to share their story thank you my name stacy this is my husband my best friend but most of all my caretaker i was on life support last march and have been hospitalized three times since we were not always homeless we've just became homeless as of march the beginning of march actually a week prior to because we moved up here from florida and we stayed a motel on our money ran out about three months after that the reason we came up here is our youngest son started failing in life and we decided to operate ourselves and come up here and we've got him in college he's going to high line community college he's back on track everything for us since then we tried and it just didn't seem like the right fit for us so we struck out our own we were staying at the kmart on a rural the just closed and the the night before the grocery outlet was robert cross the street we got our say parking permit thank god we did because everybody else was camping there got rousted out by the police so since we've got our parking permit we've been staying at the u c c church right up the road everything's worked out pretty good for us we don't have to deal with the prostitutes on the drug dealers or just the general people who really prey on homeless people because there are a lot of people out there if you have nowhere to stay that will mess with you they'll try to rob you or take your stuff from you and we've had to deal with that and it's really not easy so when we got the parking permit the church people there are great they've become our community now they've accepted us as normal people and they have provided us with a facility to shower in we now have a warm toilet at night which is a big change for us and pretty much everything seems to be working out other than we still have challenges like condensation in the vehicle which can be a monster when it rains outside when cooking sources they're hard to find but all in all we do need everybody's support for the homeless tent cities and the say parking programs because it out there that have children in their cars you have families that have children that are sleeping on the streets and they're just not safe and without support from people like you and the city governments and the police department because the police a lot of times w pull up along and they tell you camping in your car is illegal and so you have to constantly move every out yes both of us do work to how that is not enough us she's on all kinds of medications very expensive we did we were lucky enough to find a child's parents who lets our son stay for three hundred dollars a month in their house so at least he's not homeless also but we really do need everybody's support because there are a lot of people out there that are hurting and if you just drive down the street and i use a look at the cars the windows are offered up if you stop that we have people sleeping in those cars thank you for your time to tell you what she did before she became homeless how she's been homeless and what she's doing with their time but under determined my name is gabrielle a duncan i have been homeless off and on for about two and a half years i've been in the beautiful city of seattle for almost a year now and actually came from new mexico looking for a job had the economic downturn happened my story is a very painful one and my children got into a lot of trouble with heroin the medicaid was extremely week the treatments and i was a single mom and i sold everything i had did what i could and there were a series of visits from the swat team i decided it was time to leave albuquerque and maybe go elsewhere and look for a job and i headed out this way but in the middle of all of that i was diagnosed with several diagnosis is that are extremely painful and and just a lot that goes into that that's very extensive i am a social worker went to college there you and him and so i have an education i worked with street gangs as my day job as a teacher but i started struggling with homelessness by trying to pay for everything that i just could no longer hold that together and i did not have a lot of family support i do have four older siblings and they are all attics which explains and i know why i'm not one but two of my children are severe attics and so that's kind of my story and that's how i ended up being homeless but i ended up here car camping ended up with that was what i  and all i had at that time and i came here to live in a tent city i needed that space i needed the community i needed people because people need each other and it's just a little bit it's just a little bit  it's an amazing thing to have a space where you can go and even though it leaks and the wind blows and it's cold it's yours for the time being at least at the moment because you have safety in numbers especially if you're a single woman and there's quite a few of them out there right now and it's an amazing thing the car camping piece has been a wonderful journey to go on with ellie mouth and i always she's going to make the history books i really do believe that in all of her hard work but the car camping piece to that is it's just necessary to have that own personal space and that's another way of having that and if we don't support that then you know we are not really serving humankind in the way that we could and so that's pretty much my story and thank you for letting it  nine tom combat veteran united states navy started out tent city in actually two thousand and five and i came from jail know be able to be in compliance with department of corrections that didn't work eventually my sins was revoked and i was sent to the penitentiary two thousand and five and come back out two thousand and nine x to come back out  city for and at that time i didn't know the survival in term mc i didn't know what that stuff man i just wanted to go and go to sleep that's all i wanted to do but i got food i got medical services i got things that were provided for me that i didn't really have to look too hard for they were there to really want to help after the fact probably out of all that was my probation officer was very very  willing to say ok i will put this conditionally i want you to come see me every week now mind you tensity four was in kirkland so i had to take a bike on the bus all the way to the social district every week to see her needless to say i completed my probation i have not went back to the penitentiary and i'm clean sober the last part of that this story was came to the point where i was diagnosed with cancer not once but twice i'm in remission now it has been this is been a journey so now i'm in shares work for housing program which giving back and i think  me that's cool my parents always taught me that this journey is the security and wherever i get off of this journey speaks for me and so i've always kind of now when i look at sharon are kind of chuckled and said gosh i never thought it would do you know put the tents up or you know doing a blanket washington's or whatever i was doing was shut just never thought it would you know i never ever thought of it now i tell people look you need a place to stay here here's here's you know so forth and so forth i pass out on and so at the end of this whole ride of mine always now i always say when construction business two thousand and nine and wound up having a severe stroke wound up having to go to rehab and learn how to re walk and lost my business because of the expensive medical cost lost by insurance and when i got out all i had left was my home and about six weeks later it burned down to the ground and i found myself on the street and i took it and went to ever gospel mission and i would stand there on a mat on the floor about three inches from the next guy was next to me  and because of things that i've went through my life i have p t s d that didn't work too well especially when someone flips over in the middle night near at hand lands on your chest so  having to get up and leave at six o'clock in the morning and then make sure i had my signature in my bed by seven and make sure i zoom by nine and make sure i took all my stuff out with me impacted around while i was out made it really hard to go get a job interview with a bag full of dirty clothes with me you know i mean would you guys want to hire somebody like that was always happy to see you or most of the car like family they might be mad at you but they were still happy to see you you know and we took care of each other you know i guess that's a big point i want to make is there is safety in numbers you know safety in numbers i took and wound up having a stroke there and because of someone being in error they were able and people were willing to help me as far as if i needed to get a plate of food or something like that because as with a walker again and about a month ago  i found it was time for me to go and i took and got a room in a motel and that's where i'm stand now you know and but my heart still with nichols bill and i will advocate for homeless encampments until the day i die because economically it is the only way to go it thousand dollars a month some people's paychecks are that you know not to put them down they serve a purpose but  to two years ago the coalition of share will nickel spill and real change news had declared a state of emergency in seattle and king county there are eight thousand homeless people every night in san joaquin county and less than twenty five hundred shelter beds available recent the reason one might count found over two thousand seven hundred homeless people sleeping outside without shelter and that's including four hundred fifty five winter shelter beds that's available those shelter beds go away on may first and and like i said it's so we are in a state of emergency and without shelter people die since the start of the community to end homelessness can counties ten year planter's over three hundred homeless people have died outside without shelter or by violence and only less than one hundred new shelter beds has been created since that time so there is a big need and tent cities are are reaching that gap in the need there is a lack in the lack of shelter and lack of affordable housing and our county tent cities work it's a viable interim solution to the lack of shelter and housing a well run income encampment provide safety and dignity to homeless people safety and survival a community of homeless people working together provides provide a support structure to give that that gives us stability in our lives city three started in two thousand and ten city for started in two thousand and four and nicholasville which is presently at that the women's she has been trying to look for a semi permanent locations for about four years and recognize them as a viable solution to the crisis at hand and instead of supporting our efforts often they hinder our progress they've been trying to work on passing legislation that inhibits for us from doing what we are ready to do and try to lessen what we can do and this opposition has been an enigma to all of us since we have an excellent track record and no one has been hurt by our operations in tent cities or low cost occupy the governing board body of the community to end homelessness get them to recognize encampments and tent cities as a viable solution to the crisis hand create safe zones for car campers support us this coming april twenty fourth when say two wednesdays from now for the next governing board meeting of the community and homelessness and to encourage them to support this resolution again recognize and support encampments joining us on the twenty fourth wednesday and occupied a c h k c with us we need your help there are plenty clips cards on your seats there if you haven't seen it if you guys are willing to support us please fill in the bottom part  of the card and we can care you can tear it up so we can get in touch with you guys too to update you on what's going on and uprising of opportunities where you can support our efforts so again join us as we occupy c h casey thank you and now and now the floor is open for questions our panelists would be happy to answer your questions and i believe there are also people in the audience who may have answers to there are three churches that are officially doing safe parking right now one is our redeemer lutheran in ballard they have five spaces the next one is woodland park united methodist church we have kathy olson from there in the audience and they have two spaces they take adults only at woodland park  redeemer takes families and adults and recently opened just up the road here is a safe parking program at university congregational u c c church and they have four spaces the spaces are generally kept pretty full i know that for woodland park and for our redeem friend there is a waiting list for those two sites case management is done by compass housing alliance at the university u c c we have  an intern from the university of washington school of social work who is providing case management for those people they are who wish to have case management and i know that the papers have now been signed for st luke's we don't know when exactly that will open but the papers were signed today and they will take two to three vehicles r v s are first place to take v s and on the twenty third of this month there is a community meeting at lake city christian church and they will be opening three or four spaces there as well yes so again during the reason one might count eight hundred seventy three people were found sleeping in cars and as you've just heard there's only a limited number of spots for car campers right now  recently united way really said that they were in going going to release one point two million dollars available for shelter but they were very specific diet and cam and tent cities and car campers are not going to be eligible for those funds we need your help to encourage our leaders to do the right thing and i'd also like to say the faith community is is stepping up on this one as a pilot project but we're going to need more spaces than can be supplied just by faith communities other questions behind that was that if we had at least three spaces there was some safety in numbers if we had more than five or six the concern was that it would attract a large number of people who were not in the program and it might become unmanageable so as a pilot project we're just doing that the churches don't have people who stay on site and monitor things overnight if we had some luck nice piece of public property with the skillet teas and you could have someone on site managing it either as a self manage group or with someone employed to do that we could certainly have more people at a site it's it's frightening on the street sometimes because although you can pick the spot where you park us live it's legal and stay there for up to three days you can have no control over who parks next to you and so if you have somebody who's running a drug business out of their r v and it's really loud noisy at night there's nothing you can do and they're likely to draw police attention and when they ticket they ticket everybody on the block whether you're doing anything wrong or not parking enforcement just goes after everybody yeah generally at the beginning of each governing board meeting there is a former members of the public that attended the meeting are allowed to speak only a limited number you know are allowed to speak but yes we do encourage you and everyone here to speak on our behalf and get them to encourage and support our efforts basically they usually have a list there of your sign up there if you want to speak i just would like to stay for this side of the coin that also speaks volumes to those who live on the margins or that are out there in tents and having it really hard to see an outpouring of that compassion and i got to tell you i've been in some really communities and i have never met a more caring generous beautiful people as i have here and i also have heard the flip side to that of well we're making this our problem but being human common decency and showing that to someone is not creating a problem it really isn't it's part of the solution so this is for stacey and roger i was curious if you can if you can talk because you talked a little about this parking space you have up the street if you didn't have that where where would you go where you think you're one of the options you think would be available if we didn't have the parking spot at u c c we'd probably gone from sam's club to wal mart every three days because it really would be the only place we would feel safe we tried several parking lots shoreline there was a q that let us stay but most of the stores especially in seattle will throw you out if you don't move your car every hour or two so you don't get much sleep if i didn't have to save parking i wouldn't be able to shower daily  be able to work i can actually physically walk from my parking spot to work on a daily basis so that we can have money for food gas to heat our vehicle and other things such as my medical  bills as of march first we were the first family to start the program and as of last week we did get a shower facilities i'm told toilet access and there are four families yeah we're in a way it will just depending on which place it's two to ten years so that there is really no there really is no housing right away for anyone is there anyone else who's on a waiting list and knows how far they are on the waiting list i think i'm seven thousand nine hundred ninety two in new mexico as of a couple weeks ago and i've been on that list a year and a half and even with my status of disability disabled it so yeah just not to play devil's advocate but the flip side what if nobody ca what if this committee met and we didn't really before we went down what things would come out of that meeting that would be detrimental to why we're here tonight i don't know you're saying it's important that we supported what's the downside going to be if we don't care that's that's what i'm not hearing quite yet well the downside to not having a governing bart support in term survival mechanism such as the car camping the encampments well i mean women in black that stand for people who have died outside through violence and or alone they're homeless would be standing many more wednesdays every year there'd be a lot more deaths on the c because there just is not enough indoor shelter beds and there is no drive to create more there is no driver will to create even transitional housing at a rate that has any significance to not support this is basically to do what the politicians have done for so many years here and just cast the people out into the street forget them it would be business as usual as things have been going where you have thousands out on the street in just a few lucky three few that get the golden ticket through the programs what we're talking about here is showing support to level the playing field to give everybody a chance to survive overcome their difficulties and move on and have a life not just be alive to not support is to abandon your fellow people by june thirteenth so that's one of the possibilities the something that could happen if we don't get a good turnout on april twenty fourth thank you what happens if you don't show up you'll find more people that are chronic homeless that's where you'll find because tent cities car camping you'll find people tent cities give you a place to leave your stuff ok and what you'll find there is people that ate so much drinking and drugging their day away they're actually wanting to work and get their life back together you go down to union gospel mission and find out i doubt it and if you do you're very lucky because it's someone that just came in off the boat and hasn't been here very long so they don't know any other place to be or you praying to penitentiaries given faller because of people hurting each other or likes trey said you know women  black are standing in for a lot more dead people on wednesdays because of the fact that they're dying outside with hypothermia or someone stabbed him in the middle of night because someone come by a didn't like a homeless guy you know so you know i mean this is a responsibility for us as human beings you know this is a true church i believe you guys in here i believe you're christians and you know don't tell me i'm wrong i'm not putting you down or not than but i believe i believe what christ says is that we need to love each other as we love it's i think the main reason that we need you guys support is for the longest time as homeless person i know for a fact that the policymakers the politicians to bureaucrats do you really don't listen to  people they really don't think listen to what we have to say oftentimes we are ignored or in minimalize our concerns we are doing we are providing ourselves safety and survival that desist and has not been able to afford its but we need other people to speak on our behalf because like i said as a homeless person nobody really wants to listen to what i have to say they think that we are the problem and we are not part of the solution but what we're doing in sheltering ourselves and providing us safety dignity and survival in being in a car camp or at tent city provides not only dignity to us and we are basically providing a service that like a said debt is a viable solution to the lack of shelter and affordable housing in our city and if they don't listen to was they have to listen to somebody or more people are going to board the community and homelessness sets policy and they're in charge of the ten year plan to end homelessness in king county and they set the policy that or so they have not been willing to fund additional shelters given the lack of shelters but this you know at the last governing board meeting didn't work of our of our coalition they now have been said that they were going to fund shelters and that's the shift in priorities that you know due to our efforts and yesterday to do set the policies and they have if they will only have the will the will to end homelessness they can set the policies to set in motion to stand by the guy in red shoes the homelessness is yes i've been very interested in the one person that voted against in the city council the latest of taking over a building city council and the bottom floor will businesses middle income and middle and some low income people on the top talk to him i so i met another meeting about something else just the other night he gave me a woman's name phone number that i don't have with me to refer to but contact nick and city council he's the only one that voted against that stuff he's very people oriented and just not a long winded letter but anyway just to tell him something brief about your situation and you're not just writing a little note to get attention or anything he's real people oriented  every day people who's different we're all the same one of the big issues on affordable housing just to put this in here is that sometimes developers will define affordable housing as that which is affordable to people who make eighty percent to one hundred percent of the median local income this is not the group that's really hurting in many cities there is a threshold that when you develop a property twenty percent of the housing that's created must be affordable at thirty to fifty percent or below of the median income we need to move in that direction five percent at eighty percent is not enough there's someone else which will come forward i appreciate people coming in taking the mike because that records this on that tape so we have the  question this question actually goes back to the issue of health care and my question is considering that you know you're under an incredible amount of stress as homeless people as people that are you know facing a real difficult situation and that stress and that kind of tension and not having access to preventative care and regular care that you find yourself in situations where you are getting sick more often and then when you get sick more often you need emergency care you need more care so you go get more care and that puts you in a greater debt and that's the vicious cycle goes on because the more you're sick the more in debt you are the more in debt you are the sicker you get and do you find in yourselves that you see that the medical industry is preying on people in very difficult situations the medical industry is preying upon people in crisis and they're making billions and billions of dollars off of somebody else's misfortune and i'm wondering how you guys reconcile yourself to that what do you do with that understanding and how do you you know how do you manage your own situation what are some of the the methods that you use to try to handle that do before my surgery for twenty thousand dollars and i just laughed i want to frame it because it was already paid for but they sent me this letter stating that i owed this money of course i made a series of phone calls and find out well at harborview for all this for these medicines or these pills or whatever the case may be it is frustrating i think i mean from from our personal experience seeing that and just kind of ok this is my situation over here is not reich ok i'm i'm displaced hardly ever really really like from in my case like use that word homeless i'm just placed at the moment but i'm not stupid so they think ok i'm  homeless and i'm stupid too so i they can do this to me but that was not going to happen so i had the medical part i really had it just kind of ok these are the services that i as a vet that i get that i'm going to make sure i follow up on that because i had been over charged overbuild but i had a little scruples about and then i met some veterans out of tent city that said hey you need decent numbers to call it's networking i've networked with those people  and those guys call these people call these people trust me you don't know that much money and it's weird now that i am doing some good things of my life those things came back when i got a letter i remember what my best friend but sears told me may he rest in peace makes you call this number and i still have that number and i called you know you don't know that money that's the type of graphic where but you still living that same address i said no why did the letter get you never mind i got it but i didn't have to pay it but these these networking within tent city i was able to get that medical information and make sure that these people were not trying to prey on me but i see it all the time where people go on why do why all this only when you get a chance contusion i don't know seven thousand dollars you just mentioned a couple of panelist mentioned earlier about this you've got access to utilities and i know that for some of the safe parking if you have a safe parking you  know permit or in an area you have those if you don't you have you don't have utilities and as far as i understand some of the tent cities do have access and the nichols bill doesn't and i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about just what how you get by without access to basic utilities that's something that i think folks would be interested in hearing more about well how do we get by without utilities a nickel still quite handily being a soft managed community we were managed to obtain a generator we run net for hours a day or two in the morning to an  evening that lets us power the camp phone keep that church which is our lifeline allows us to call nine one one our staff person the various other things and we also make it available for people to call for their medical appointments job interviews what have you then also why the chair runs people can charge to personal phones or electronics and some campers have even saved up money and bought their own solar panel to provide power for themselves formerly we were paying a camper to take a vehicle and go up to a church and get fresh water out of a hose for us the church of the nasseri in west seattle  fortunately a very generous man from up north run muck has a water business and he's been driving down a truckload of bottled water about once a week or so  this is a big help and that was you know done through our outreach efforts now the big problem we do have is the fact that since we don't have constant power or potable water we have no hot water for washing dishes or showers so the dish washing that people do they have to do themselves in cold water or heated over the fire and then for showers they have to make their way out to one of the service providers that such is urban rest compas center couple the freewinds and west seattle there are a couple of the community centers if you pay you can get a shower so even though it is present a challenge it's something that we've managed to work around but at the same time it takes a lot of time and energy to do a work around and that's time and energy that could be better spent moving beyond the encampment for each individual instead of wasting all that time scrabbling for just the very basic necessities of this group of people saying we've got to help and we've got to help them but there's a certain amount of you that has to have that hope that remains that enables you to move your lives forward and when you're living with the basic basic sometimes that hope is just lost it's just a whisper and sometimes you need other people to hope for you and i have to say that along that line i'm not ever going to stop laughing and i've come up with some doozies i have to tell you what i told the tide company when we had a crisis with blankets and i i wrote them and i said i hear that you have a truck that has washing machines on it you will need it to cite and help with that and they wrote me back and they said no we're sorry we can't do that it has to be only in the case of a natural disaster so i wrote them back and said i forgot does that count that's a natural disaster because some start to forget everything but they still wouldn't  take bring the tide truck but but i mean we just we have to have someone kind of i have somebody who calls me and says what are you doing where are you going to apply for housing today i didn't know her from anybody when i got here and she has such a blessing to me and if one person would take one homeless person and just check in with them and show them some kind of love take you for a cup of coffee and there's some way to match them up that's all we would need again thanks everyone for coming and if you haven't yet please fill in the pledge put your name your contact information and again join us