my name's bill block on the project director of the committee to end homelessness in king county that's the broad coalition of nonprofits governments faith communities businesspeople and homeless and formerly homeless people who have come together to implement the ten year plan to end homelessness in king county and before we start it's useful to think about what it means when we talk about homelessness and when i started this work i was speaking with a friend of mine who speaks a different language and his word was different than ours his word was without fixed abode and the penny sort of dropped it's not whether or not you have a piece of tin to keep over your head or whether or not you've got a mat on the floor whether you've got a place the center of your life to deal with the problems that all of us deal with and when we talk about homelessness in king county we talk about the people on the streets and there are about twenty five hundred people on the streets actually twenty seven hundred in the last count literally on the streets in ten in cars under bridges there about twenty five hundred people in emergency housing that's often the kind where you come in at seven o'clock at night and lights out of ten and you have to get up at five thirty in the morning and leave with all your belongings and then there are about thirty five people mostly families that you can stay for ninety days or sometimes as much as two years but at the end you have to leave so that's about eighty eight hundred people and that's a very hard number to wrap your mind around and i'll give you a an oral within a demonstration in a few minutes on what that is but the good thing is that it turns out people care when we started this work united way did a survey across king county and they started with the question what are the three most important issues facing king county and the answer came back education transportation and homelessness and they asked the question homelessness is too big a problem to be solved agree or disagree and eighty four percent of can county disagreed and they said if you gave agencies the money they're asking for could they end homelessness and fifty seven percent of king county said yes and then they asked the question i think is behind that they said have you or anybody in your immediate family ever been homeless and twenty four percent of king county said yes it's something that affects all of us and when we look at those and when we look at those eighty eight hundred people who are homeless of those who are in emergency shelter in transitional housing twenty seven percent are kids under the age of eighteen about half are in families now a lot of the people on the street are single adults but there are still a lot of people who are young who are in families who are unattached adults who are just like you and me who are homeless so how did the ten year plan come about in king county that actually started from st mark's cathedral they hosted tent city and one of the things that tent city teaches people is that homeless people really are just like you and me they just had some really bad breaks and the dean of st mark's cathedral the dean robert taylor said we should get together and make a plan to end homelessness and there were then going on elsewhere in the country some ten plans to end chronic street homelessness but robert said no we really need to address all homelessness and it took a long time some people like to say that in seattle king county process is our most important product they worked from two thousand to two thousand and five to create the plan but it came together it's an eighty six page roadmap on what you need to do what you need to do in terms of prevention you need to do in terms of housing and services to end homelessness and when we talk about ending homelessness we don't mean that no one will ever become homeless what we mean is that we prevent homelessness as much as possible and when someone does become homeless we rapidly help them move back into stable long term housing we don't warehouse people in emergency shelters that's what ending homelessness means so what are the principles of the plan principles of the plan are first of all prevention prevention means both short term economic support for the people who are feeling the ravages of the recession means job training for young moms who currently in a minimum wage job can't afford housing for themselves and their kids but it also means not discharging people from our institutions into homelessness a third of everybody in king county jail is homeless and if they're sent back out on to the streets with no supports and no housing there right back in we know that when we discharge people into housing with services that people stabilize and that behaviors change those people who are homeless in king county jail most of them are mentally ill they're in for minor crimes they're not in because they're criminals they're in because they have a mental illness and we need to stop sending them back out onto the streets we need to stop discharging kids from foster care into homelessness i don't know how many of you have raised an eighteen year old but suggesting that an eighteen year old go out and find first month's rent and last month's rent in the deposit and they're on their own is not a recipe for success we need to stop discharging people from our psychiatric and our physical health institutions into homelessness right now people can come out of western state hospital with a week of medication and no place to go so that's part of prevention also the other big piece is combining housing and services if i say to you when you're dealing with alcohol addiction and you're living under i five when you're clean and sober i'll house you it's not going to work if i say here's housing and if you remember to make three phone calls and one of them is actually an old number and has been disconnected and you take a bus on every tuesday and thursday if you remember you can get treatment that's not going to work either we've learned that combining housing and services really does work it's dealing with homelessness through our emergency systems is very expensive they did a study of the fifty highest utilizers of harbor view in the sobering center alcoholics who had been on the streets for years and they cost an average of fifty thousand dollars per person per year in emergency services we created a facility called eighteen eleven eastlake which said you have to behave in the building you've got to behave in your room you got to be able to street but whether you're drinking is not the issue which i'd like to tell people are actually the rules in my house too and to house the people who were the most vulnerable the highest utilize the emergency services people who everyone said they don't want to be housed they've been on the streets for twenty years they feel the program six times they they started with a list of the highest utilizers they went down in rank order to fill seventy five b they only had desk seventy nine people and the people who came into the facility dropped their emergency service usage by four million dollars in one year they compared the people living in the facility eight hundred eleven eastlake to the people on the wait list who looked just like them people on the wait list cost two thousand five hundred dollars per person per month more than the people living in one thousand and eleven eastlake and that's including the cost of their housing and services so the second big reason for ending homelessness is that it is much more effective than dealing with people who are emergency services so what have we done we have created in the last four and a half years over thirty three hundred units of housing to help people leave the streets and get the services they need are prevention we're touches about five thousand people a year now but to fully explain what we're up to i need to go to one other piece of the plan we have gradually over the last four years created a coordinated funders group and the coordinated funders group is really an envy across the nation we brought together the city of seattle king county seattle housing authority the county housing authority suburban cities representation the gates foundation united way and building changes and we all sit down in a room and say what do we want collectively to create in our system and there's one notice of funding availability out to the providers there's one application there's one grading around and we put together the housing the services the prevention all of what we want in one package as opposed to being piecemeal and fragmented and uncoordinated and that's allowed us to be very effective and that the five priorities of the are first of all to continue production our goal is very ambitious our goal is ninety five hundred units over ten years to give you a comparison portland's goal is twenty two hundred then versus four thousand san francisco's is three thousand so we're very ambitious we've already done thirty three hundred units in this recession it will be hard to keep at that pace but we hope we will the second is to open up housing to people who are blocked right now if you haven't a vixen on your record you have a bankruptcy on your record you have an old felony you probably can't get house so we have the landlord liaison fund which goes out tells landlords they'll get twenty four seven response this is a person who is vouched for there's a big guarantee fund and they opened up the doors that are held by over ninety landlords in over  hundred fifty buildings to people who otherwise would be able to an able to find out the third is to create coordinated entry for families and one of the things she know about the system is that it has traditionally and across the country been very fragmented and the family right now goes from door to door of provider in an endless circle knocking on the door to see when the next unit might open up and they go around and around across the county we're creating a system where they can go one place they can have their needs assessed they go on one lists one placement list and the first right unit that opens up for them is where they get to go in maybe a unit that substance abuse treatment or maybe they don't need that then they shouldn't be in that program they should be in a different program that may have job training so tailing the services to people really becomes possible with that sort of system we're also doing coordinated entry for chronically homeless single adults so that when we open a new facility like macdermot court up in lake city we look across the county and say who are the right people who need the help that this building has to offer so those are some of the things we're doing we have combined housing and services in a variety of ways to reduce criminal justice involvement to reduce physical health issues to address the most vulnerable people as well as to address the families in  d we know that housing plus services plus mental health services job training services credit repair services are what are necessary to help somebody leave homelessness but one of the things we also have to keep in mind is the fact that our overall housing crisis makes it very difficult for a number of people to stay housed right now in king county somebody has to earn over eighteen dollars an hour in order to afford the median priced housing now if you're a single mom with two kids earning minimum wage that is not going to be enough to afford housing so in addition to everything else we've talked about in the ten year plan in terms of combining housing and services and getting people back on their feet and stable we as a region need to address the housing crisis and we need to make sure that the suburban cities accept the sort of density that allows lower priced housing we need to make sure that we preserve the lower priced housing we have so that's sort of a a much broader but nonetheless important issue in addressing homelessness in our region and in our nation when we speak of homelessness and we speak of eight hundred people being homeless on any given night in seattle king county twenty five hundred in emergency shelters twenty seven hundred on the streets thirty five hundred in transitional housing it's hard to grasp what that number means so i want to give you an oral with an a not a know a sound demonstration of it may be a little odd to ask someone on television to close their eyes but i'd like to do that so that you just listen to the sound and what the sound is of a hundred people who are homeless so if you close your eyes and listen i want you to listen to the sound of me that's one little ball bearing dropping in the number of people in my family and the number of people who are in a club i've got so that gives you a sort of baseline now listen to the number of people who are homeless on any given night in king county that number of men women and children who are homeless on any given night in king county so one of the things that's been very useful in working to end homelessness is the willingness of the voters to address that the seattle low income housing levy which was in november one hundred forty million dollars for housing passed by sixty seven percent even in a recession the king county voters have paths the vets and human services levy that is helping veterans and families and the mental illness and drug dependency sales tax which make sure that people get the treatment they need everything from young adults who are missed often to the elderly who are very vulnerable so people in king county understand that to build a healthy community for all of us even the most vulnerable need to be helped and we find out in cities in faith communities in political groups on both sides of the aisle across the county so where do we go from here we need to continue the strong production of housing we need to continue to find the service money that's necessary to help people and frankly the state budget cutting people off basic health cutting people off the what's known as the security lifeline for people who are disabled and can't work will not make it easy but we do need to find those fans we need to continue to prevent people from becoming homeless because once you become homeless everything else becomes harder a we need to continue to build the political will be understanding that our community is one in which we should not see families living in their cars in the parking lot of big box retailers we should not see an older vet who is mentally ill wandering on the street talking to himself with no place  not here ten years ago from texas where there wasn't as ubiquitous as it is here you can just kind of freak me out to be able to walk the street and there's you know mentally ill people  accept them for they are don't go to them with your agenda just go and be a human being because to be compassionate you know i heard a saying once alive these are the small things done of great love will change the world and i believe that so whatever you can do it doesn't have to be giving money to be giving your time besides the hard work that families put into finding shelters the calling every day several times a day even with all that work that they do a lot of times it is the lack of the drive it's the make up of the family i had one family two parents two children no substance abuse problems no domestic violence and the mom said nancy we're just a normal family we can't find shelter lately the waits have been two months to get into a shelter and the face of a homeless family is any face and it's almost a full time job to be homeless and while that family is waiting for a shelter or some someplace to call home or to sleep imagine just for a moment if you were in that situation you had no money no money coming in no place to go home to no place to go to to close the door on the world even for a minute you're not even sure where you're going to go the bathroom next where do you store your clothes for tomorrow what happens to your special trinkets we all have whether it be a piece of jewelry your child's drawing that they made for you years ago a gift from one of your parents as a child what happens to those items mentally wind do you regroup physically when do you get to rocks and emotionally when person or a family or a girl or a generation or a culture or race it's not long or something minimal it's no longer a third world country problem it's no longer you know i mean if it's really more like a horse or like an epidemic it's happening here at home in my community in my blocks in my city my family my friends you know it's it's it's a bigger thing so if it's that big to me and so obvious and it's and it's causing you know the state in the governments to be involved here in this cause in people arise and make an issue about it then shouldn't we start now actually in our local looking for solutions you know immediate solutions whether it's state solution to whether it's you know across the whole state you know i mean if we can do  that their world countries to provide supply them fly him over and ship a member of it and build houses and build schools with donations i don't see why we can't find an immediate solution here if we can tax people want to build bridges and on a lottery and everything why can't we find somethin like that you know i go to i've seen you know i've been to food shelters i pick the food i pick the bread there's company there's organizations donating all of these things for us and they're showing the w an effort to actually help at all level imagine what a corporation with a billion dollars can do i mean just something like that even not even a billion dollars to cup or hundred thousand i mean tents you know i've see homes in in alaska you know being built in less than a month and two hundred to four hundred people have in a house in less than two weeks and it is possible with the technology and the capability we have now to build so many houses in our all these empty houses we circulating people to to a certain category you know in it doesn't it it's not that way anymore it's not longer raised in our culture it's no longer the blue collar of all you know the rich people or the poor people who are all being affected the bottom line is and if you really don't see the problem then you're choosing not to see the problem because it is there you're ignoring lee intentionally ignoring it on purpose to not be a part of it or make a change with it or change it because you're not really seen with your eyes anymore you can you just walk into or like it's doesn't mean anything and if you do in there and we're human then then you start saying that about yourself or you don't care you don't care about your neighbor you don't care about your mother or your aunt your uncle because that's who it is if it is that's who it is that's my family that's your neighbor as your coworker and it could be you tomorrow and if it is then why would you want to do that you know i won't do that to you you know i hate to say it but it takes a catastrophe to bring everybody together and that's not what you want in on and i've seen it nine eleven brought everybody together nothing mattered in the world but everybody was helping each other it was a devastation in her everybody there was a catastrophe but nothing mattered at that point all you saw was people helping each other doing everything they can begin to matter what race color age nothing matter and everybody was happening to the cause we were all a part of it and this is what it's going to be in a symbol and it's becoming that way so you know i just hope i guess i was hope in and i have faith to then you know there will be solutions for this and i will be a part of it i know that because i've been through it so i see ideas i have ideas i have i've worked with organizations i'm part of organizations that work and do these things in collect donations and give to the homeless and feed the people one thanksgiving day is not only the only time you can do it show it to kids do it othertimes to do go down there and take sandwiches down there go to the wood dollar store and buy gloves and mittens in for a dollar or twenty bucks and you can give a nice to people and it doesn't take very much effort and you're wasting these twenty dollars on lottery or whatever give them hats and scarves and gloves and don't expect nothing in return see how you feel do it all year you know not just once a year not during christmas not during easter were people that are just struggling in tears are looking for somebody to help and when you look at me just nothing i am somebody that has value has feelings or has a heart on us all and i'm still breathing and still alive and i still need to you know get called just because i don't have a house or a job and i look dirty it doesn't make me any different than you that has a suit or pair and i've been there and and i understand and i  seen people are homeless for a whole variety of reasons the downturn in the economy has affected a lot of people many of the people who've come here to family village in the last twelve months or directly because they lost their job either one or both parents  maybe their single parent homes we also have had many people who also have had medical issues and lost their home because about accidents and certainly some people are feeling issues of domestic