How to really help homeless people with DESC’s Daniel Malone

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Seattle Nice. I'm David Hyde with Erica C. Barnett of Publicola. Hi, Erica.

[00:00:17] Hello.

[00:00:18] And political consultant Sandeep Kaushik. Hi, Sandeep.

[00:00:22] Hey, David.

[00:00:23] And we've got a very special guest today, the executive director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center, Daniel Malone. Thanks for being here. Actually, Dan or Daniel?

[00:00:32] Oh, my stage name is usually Daniel at work for work purposes, but, you know, either one works.

[00:00:38] Before we get going, I know that Sandeep has something to, if the right word is confessed, to disclose.

[00:00:44] Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've mentioned before on the podcast, I, for some weird reason, am allowed onto the board of DESC, which is our state's largest homeless housing provider and shelter provider.

[00:01:00] And I'm currently the board chair. And therefore, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Dan Malone is one of the, he's one of the kingpins of the homeless industrial complex here.

[00:01:14] Oh, Jesus Christ.

[00:01:16] We're getting off to a great start.

[00:01:19] Sorry, I'm making a Chris Rufo joke.

[00:01:22] No, but let's get into it.

[00:01:25] So, Dan, obviously, thank you for coming on and lots of stuff to cover, lots of issues around homelessness to talk about.

[00:01:32] But let's start with King County RHA.

[00:01:35] It's gone through a lot of turbulence over the last couple of years, and there's a reset going on at King County RHA.

[00:01:44] So how are you feeling about the relationship between the homelessness services community and King County RHA right now?

[00:01:53] It's a pretty transactional relationship that has been in that mode for a little while now where we're interacting with one another based on contracting matters for the most part.

[00:02:09] And to their credit, I think KCRHA leadership and staff have worked really hard to get processes improved and get contract payments made in a timely way and get contract documents done.

[00:02:27] There had been a period there where there were some really significant lags that were proving to be problematic for a lot of organizations.

[00:02:34] But in terms of like planning and vision stuff, there are a new set of conversations happening now that there's a new CEO at the Regional Homelessness Authority.

[00:02:47] And those are kind of exciting and interesting to have.

[00:02:50] But the bulk of the relationship, I think, is really around just getting work done on a day to day basis and dealing with the contractual elements of that.

[00:03:00] Yeah, as somebody who covers the RHA, my observation has been that, you know, a lot of stuff is kind of devolving back to the city of Seattle, that there's no new money really coming in.

[00:03:14] You know, everything is staying pretty steady.

[00:03:16] And it is described there's a new agreement between the city and county to govern the agency that describes it, you know, essentially as an administrative agency, which is not at all the way it was sort of hyped up and sold.

[00:03:31] Initially, it was supposed to be this kind of visionary agency that would create a new homelessness system.

[00:03:36] And I'm wondering, do you, you know, I don't know how much you want to speak about your opinion of this, but do you think that that initial project was, you know, maybe a little overbroad or, you know, do you think that it's on the right track now?

[00:03:49] Well, I mean, I think you're correct that a key part of the vision for it was getting everybody on the same page about what the overall plan was going to be, creating a plan and carrying out a plan that different people across the King County, different kinds of organizations and government folks and so forth could all agree to.

[00:04:17] And if we're getting away from KCRHA having a role in driving a lot of that kind of activity, then it does become very much like the other sorts of government departments that homelessness service providers like us do business with.

[00:04:37] And that can be fine, but it does, I guess, call into question why we would need to set that up when city of Seattle, King County, other governments are fully capable of conducting funding competitions and carrying out contractual business with nonprofits.

[00:05:00] I wanted to ask, I mean, it seems like when it was set up, the obvious reason was that people felt like we needed a regional approach to homelessness.

[00:05:09] We need a statewide approach.

[00:05:11] We need a national approach to homelessness, but at least let's try to get more of a regional approach to homelessness.

[00:05:15] But it hasn't really worked out that way well, in part because people in other cities in King County don't share the same ideas about how to address homelessness as people in Seattle do.

[00:05:26] And I don't want to cite Utah as a model for cooperation because obviously Washington's a different case and what happened in Utah was very different.

[00:05:35] But Utah did do a good job of building consensus around the kind of permanent supportive housing that you advocate for.

[00:05:43] And so my question is, in talking to people and understanding this issue so well, what could Seattle do, if it's not KCRHA or through KCRHA, to build a stronger regional or statewide consensus around things like permanent supportive housing?

[00:06:02] Well, that's the $64,000 question.

[00:06:04] How do we get into agreement about what to do?

[00:06:07] I think a big challenge that we've got is that the problem is so severe in so many places that it produces a lot of upset and anger, understandably so.

[00:06:26] And that produces a lot of pressure to do something right now.

[00:06:33] And I share the urgency.

[00:06:36] People are suffering.

[00:06:37] People are dying.

[00:06:38] And we really need to address their needs immediately.

[00:06:42] And we also need to plan for a real long-term solution.

[00:06:47] And we're still in a set of kind of debates or arguments that, frankly, we've been in for probably a couple decades, which is, well, should we spend money on the temporary alleviation of suffering?

[00:07:03] Or should we spend money on the things that we know will have long-term effect but are more expensive and going to take longer to put in place?

[00:07:12] And, you know, I think we have to do it all at the same time.

[00:07:17] And there hasn't yet been agreement that we can put together something at scale where we are going to do all of it at the same time.

[00:07:26] Ultimately, you could wind down the emergency type stuff, the shelters and the suffering alleviation kinds of programs once you don't need them anymore.

[00:07:39] But you can't wind them down while people still need them in order to harvest those resources and put them into the long-term things.

[00:07:49] And I think that's been one of the mistakes that has been made along the way of saying that, well, let's create a system that's focused on housing people permanently.

[00:07:58] And there's some money being used for other things.

[00:08:02] And so let's just take that money and start using it for that.

[00:08:04] And that has caused a whole lot of consternation and disagreement among a lot of people.

[00:08:10] It seems to me that there's a pendulum that swings back and forth in the city and region between the sort of emergency shelter front door and the, you know, get everybody into housing right away front door.

[00:08:21] And I think Partnership for Zero, which was the sort of ill-fated effort to take people off the streets downtown and put them directly into, you know, housing with these rapid rehousing types, you know, subsidies.

[00:08:34] I think that's a good example of the pendulum swinging really far in the direction of let's just house people.

[00:08:39] And I wonder, do you have any, you know, I don't know exactly what the question is, but I'm just curious if you have any hope or thoughts about, you know, that pendulum sort of resting in the middle at any point.

[00:08:50] Because it seems like every few years there's a new move in one direction or the other by whatever, you know, group of elected officials are in office right now.

[00:09:00] And then the next group of elected officials comes in and says, well, that didn't work.

[00:09:04] So what is the sort of strategy, if there is one, to stop that pendulum from swinging the way it does?

[00:09:12] Well, not having elected officials have to run for re-election every few years would be the thing, right?

[00:09:20] Fascism.

[00:09:21] Yeah, fascism.

[00:09:22] That'd be it.

[00:09:25] Because, you know, these are long-term problems and need long-term solutions.

[00:09:31] And elected officials don't have long-time horizons before they got to show that they accomplish stuff.

[00:09:37] So it's just a difficult dynamic from that perspective.

[00:09:41] Well, I don't know if this is actually getting at your question, but it's that people don't actually need shelter in order to – by shelter, I mean the term of art in homelessness world, like emergency shelter.

[00:09:58] They don't need to go through emergency shelter in order to prepare them to live in permanent housing.

[00:10:04] We could move everybody directly into permanent housing.

[00:10:08] Some of them are going to need a ton of support to be successful in it, but it's all possible.

[00:10:14] The model's been proven.

[00:10:16] But the reason we need emergency housing or emergency shelter is because there isn't enough housing for everybody.

[00:10:23] And I think we sometimes get stuck on the idea that the reason to do emergency shelter is to prepare people for permanent housing.

[00:10:31] And I just reject that.

[00:10:34] I don't think that's right.

[00:10:35] I think that has been kind of a discredited notion for some time in this system.

[00:10:42] So Eric was just talking about the pendulum swinging a lot, and I think we've all kind of seen that.

[00:10:48] And so pulling back for a little bit of a bigger picture spotlight, I joined the DESC board in February of 2015.

[00:10:58] So I'm, you know, coming up on my 10th anniversary on the board, right?

[00:11:03] So on the one hand, Jesus fucking Christ, what happened here?

[00:11:06] You know, like on the other, you know, I have that perspective of having watched the sort of homelessness response in Seattle evolve, change quite a bit over those last 10 years.

[00:11:22] Right. There was the Barb Poppy era where, you know, during when Ed Murray was mayor, bringing in a kind of national outside consultant to kind of push forward a program to make all sorts of changes about holding providers accountable.

[00:11:35] And that's how we were going to get we were going to squeeze greater efficiency out of the system.

[00:11:39] That was the problem with it, right?

[00:11:41] To, you know, an era where, you know, well, let's go down and take these new models.

[00:11:47] They're being pioneered in San Francisco around the NAV Center.

[00:11:50] And that may be the model for how we do kind of enhance shelter.

[00:11:53] That's the way we're.

[00:11:54] So, Dana, talk a bit about bigger perspective.

[00:11:57] How has our homelessness response evolved over these last 10 years?

[00:12:02] And are we evolving towards something or is it what Erica is saying?

[00:12:06] We're just kind of, you know, we're kind of yo-yoing back and forth.

[00:12:10] Well, it's fundamentally a downstream response to a problem where, you know, to extend that metaphor, we're kind of plucking people out of the river over and over again.

[00:12:24] But we're doing nothing to stop people from falling in the river way upstream.

[00:12:30] And, you know, that metaphor, I think, is relatively apt for what's going on here.

[00:12:36] Because the observations are that more and more people are falling into the river.

[00:12:42] We've built up more and more people downstream to pluck them out of there.

[00:12:48] And so it's been this mode of growth primarily.

[00:12:51] We can stop those people who are pulled out of the river from falling back into it by providing them with housing and supports.

[00:13:00] And that's been proven.

[00:13:02] But other people then are the ones falling in to the river.

[00:13:07] And we have to keep this downstream response at a very robust state because of that.

[00:13:16] So, you know, I think that's been the main thing over these last 10 years has just been one of growth.

[00:13:23] The problem has just fucking re-exploded beyond a high level that it was already at.

[00:13:31] It's become that much larger.

[00:13:33] And, you know, we have this issue with, you know, I think you're observing that the, like we were talking about with the elected officials, that people come in and they're looking for new things to do about all this.

[00:13:50] And my observation, I sort of lump all that stuff together and call it flailing because it's a huge problem and it's a real problem.

[00:14:00] And I'm glad on the one hand that there is so much interest in dealing with it.

[00:14:05] But fundamentally, people are looking for shortcuts.

[00:14:09] And I don't think there are any shortcuts to be had with this stuff.

[00:14:12] So in my estimation, almost every elected official has underestimated what homelessness was going to do to their tenure in office.

[00:14:23] It was going to be a much bigger issue than they maybe anticipated and that it was going to be a hell of a lot harder than they anticipated.

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[00:15:21] I don't know.

[00:15:22] Danny Westney just declared victory.

[00:15:24] And said that we've reduced tents by 65%.

[00:15:28] Guys, I know this isn't in the script, but when you're talking about flailing, that's what I think of is, you know, the mayor's approach to homelessness has been largely to clear tents out of downtown so people don't see them.

[00:15:39] That doesn't mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't mean that, you know, there's been a massive reduction in actual homelessness.

[00:15:47] It just means that people are somewhere else and probably less visible.

[00:15:50] And certainly, you know, I work downtown.

[00:15:53] They're certainly not downtown in the same number as they used to be.

[00:15:55] But is that a sign of progress?

[00:15:57] I do think it's worth noting that the.

[00:16:01] The mayor, county executive, others have been vocal supporters of additional resources to get housing for people.

[00:16:15] And so a lot of people have exited homelessness into permanent housing.

[00:16:20] And by and large, those folks are not going to go back into housing.

[00:16:24] I mean, to homelessness, excuse me.

[00:16:25] So so that's that part is good.

[00:16:28] But that that that isn't why, you know, numbers look to be down.

[00:16:33] The numbers may not be much different at all.

[00:16:36] But I do worry that sometimes the public assumes that it's a it's a static group of people.

[00:16:44] I think it's a highly dynamic group of people.

[00:16:47] It's not the same individuals on December 31st who were in homelessness January 1st.

[00:16:54] But there's a lot of churn, a lot of people exiting homelessness and a lot of people falling into it at the same time.

[00:17:03] And I don't think that the moving the tents around is contributing to the exits.

[00:17:08] But some people definitely are exiting homelessness.

[00:17:11] And I really wish that the King County Regional Homelessness Authority report about the, you know, the point in time count earlier this year had made that a lot clearer to people.

[00:17:26] Because the way I think it came across in the in the news and the top line from the report itself was that, oh, gosh, the numbers are just up.

[00:17:38] And so the public was left believing that, oh, all we did was add this number of people to this static group of people who were already stuck in it.

[00:17:51] The group of people who are stuck in it is a lot smaller.

[00:17:55] And that tends to be the people who have the much more serious conditions like serious mental illness and drug addiction.

[00:18:03] They're the ones who get stuck languishing in it and, you know, gets that much harder for those people to extricate themselves from it, for sure.

[00:18:11] But there are many, many more people experiencing homelessness than there were 10 years ago.

[00:18:16] And the other thing that's changed is housing is just that much more expensive to the point where, you know, when we talk about building affordable housing with taxpayer dollars or building permanent supportive housing with taxpayer dollars,

[00:18:28] the number of units that we're getting are kind of shockingly low compared to the reported need in those in those counts.

[00:18:35] And just speaking about kind of regional solutions, what I wonder sometimes is, and I've heard other people say the same thing, you know, why does all of the effort have to be concentrated in Seattle?

[00:18:47] Like, shouldn't we be thinking about more creative solutions where we'd get a greater bank for the buck building more permanent supportive housing in places that are a little bit cheaper than Seattle?

[00:19:00] You know, I don't mean this as kind of a right-wing question, you know, like move people out of Seattle.

[00:19:06] But just more, you know, in a compassionate way, couldn't we be doing more with our tax dollars if we were thinking that way?

[00:19:13] And absent regional consensus building, how do we get there?

[00:19:18] So that's my question.

[00:19:20] It's not that much cheaper to build housing in the suburbs than it is in Seattle, if it's cheaper at all.

[00:19:26] So I think what you're talking about is like really far-flung places.

[00:19:30] If your aim is to have the same dollar amount, you know, produce more units of housing, you're going to have to be going, you know, to distant places,

[00:19:44] which essentially means taking our population of people experiencing homelessness and relocating them someplace else.

[00:19:53] That's my basic reaction to that.

[00:19:56] That's my basic reaction to that kind of theory.

[00:19:57] If we're talking about people who are in need of permanent supportive housing, the population that you're helping,

[00:20:02] what's so wrong with that in certain cases for certain people?

[00:20:07] If we're talking about better services, more services for more people,

[00:20:11] wouldn't that be more compassionate than what we're currently doing,

[00:20:14] which is basically not serving big chunks of that population at all right now?

[00:20:18] They're just living on the street without help.

[00:20:20] I mean, David, I would love to offer people, you know, a choice of 27 different, you know, kind of places and environments to be able to live in.

[00:20:32] And because I think what people choose from a wide selection would be most likely to be where they'd be successful.

[00:20:42] You know, I mean, people vote with their feet ultimately.

[00:20:45] But since that's not really been much of a reality for us to be able to offer a wide range of choice for people,

[00:20:54] we have people saying, well, okay, I'll accept that here and I'll give it a go.

[00:20:59] And they may not end up being happy there.

[00:21:03] I suspect if we, you know, created a bunch of these kind of far-flung options for people,

[00:21:10] some would take it and would love it and thrive.

[00:21:13] And some would take it only because it was the only thing being offered.

[00:21:16] And then eventually they'd go back to the area that they came from because that's where they're more comfortable being,

[00:21:23] which they already proved by having been there in the first place, even though they were living in squalor or otherwise, you know,

[00:21:31] in really precarious kind of arrangement.

[00:21:34] So I don't know.

[00:21:36] I mean, yeah, give people the choice of where to go, great.

[00:21:41] But tell people the choice is, you know, you get to go to, I don't even know what it might be, some...

[00:21:49] Enumclaw.

[00:21:50] Yeah.

[00:21:51] I mean, it does seem like, too, I mean, one issue that gets raised in response to those kind of things,

[00:21:57] like, you know, whether it's put people on McNeil Island for, you know, offenders or whatever,

[00:22:02] or if it's just, well, homeless people, you know, shouldn't have a choice because they are living in our way.

[00:22:09] It's practically very difficult.

[00:22:11] You know, if you're a person who's going to be leaving, you know, your community that you're living in,

[00:22:16] you know, let's say it's in Enumclaw and, you know, needing transportation to places,

[00:22:22] needing, you know, services, needing to access doctors, you know, et cetera,

[00:22:26] that creates a real practical problem for people, even if they don't mind being, you know,

[00:22:31] sort of shuffled around like widgets.

[00:22:34] Yeah, I hear that.

[00:22:34] I mean, I came up recently with this proposal that's in Puyallup, is that right?

[00:22:41] Somewhere in Pierce County.

[00:22:43] Yeah.

[00:22:44] Yeah, the Pierce County.

[00:22:44] Seattle Times did a big article about, and I talked to the reporter for that article who was,

[00:22:52] you know, asking me questions about what I thought of it.

[00:22:55] And I don't know, maybe he wanted me to say something, you know, more spicy about it.

[00:23:03] But, you know, I told him, great, you know, more of everything, you know,

[00:23:08] because there's probably some portion of people who really would love that kind of option and would do really well at it.

[00:23:15] But, you know, everything we talk about, each development is for 75 people, 100 people, 200 people, stuff like that.

[00:23:24] And we have thousands of people we need to plan for.

[00:23:28] And so I don't really think of any given proposal or development as being the thing that we need to decide,

[00:23:39] is this the thing we want to do versus something else?

[00:23:43] Because it's all just a small contribution toward the overall solution.

[00:23:50] I know Sanjeev wants to jump in here, but just for the record,

[00:23:53] I wasn't suggesting, Erica, that we take homeless people and put them on McNeil Island.

[00:23:57] No, I was saying that's more of a, I clarified in my comment, I was referring to sort of, yeah.

[00:24:04] But that has been proposed.

[00:24:05] Oh, yeah, I'm sure.

[00:24:06] But in the context of my question, it's a bizarre leap.

[00:24:10] David wants to, you want to send them all to Fox Island, right?

[00:24:13] Well, I guess part of my point was just that people are, you know, that we tend to think of people as tense,

[00:24:21] and they aren't tense, they're people.

[00:24:22] And they, you know, even, you know, people with addiction, people with severe mental illness have, you know,

[00:24:28] humanity and have desires and deserve some choice in their lives as well.

[00:24:32] And how do we help as many of them as possible is a real moral and ethical question that we should be grappling with.

[00:24:37] Right.

[00:24:38] And maybe the flip side of the coin for how to get it that I think maybe the question you were asking, David, is,

[00:24:46] seems to me that homelessness is not a Seattle problem anymore.

[00:24:50] Maybe one time it was really concentrated in Seattle, but I was just in Spokane recently a couple weeks ago.

[00:24:56] There was a lot of visible homelessness in Spokane.

[00:24:59] If you go to suburban cities in King County, go down to South County, right?

[00:25:04] There's a lot of homelessness.

[00:25:07] Go to Tacoma, right?

[00:25:08] There's a lot of homelessness in Tacoma.

[00:25:11] And so it doesn't, I mean, I think part of the question here is, it seems to me we need a lot more homeless services and housing and shelter and stuff

[00:25:21] in the places where there is homelessness, which is pretty much every city in the region, as far as I can tell at this point.

[00:25:29] I think, Daniel, the point you were making is that's not going to save us a whole lot of money, right?

[00:25:33] I mean, DSC just opened our first permanent supportive housing outside of Seattle in Burien, right?

[00:25:39] Earlier this year.

[00:25:40] So, yeah.

[00:25:41] Yeah.

[00:25:42] So I don't know, Daniel, if you want to comment on the kind of where homelessness is now, right?

[00:25:48] How spread out it is.

[00:25:49] Oh, yeah.

[00:25:51] It's all over the place.

[00:25:53] And when I started my career, it was basically in Pioneer Square, you know, and it wasn't a huge issue of public concern in general

[00:26:03] because it was so limited and, you know, concentrated in one spot.

[00:26:08] And gradually it expanded from there.

[00:26:12] And now, of course, it's well beyond just Pioneer Square, downtown Seattle or even Seattle proper.

[00:26:18] It's everywhere.

[00:26:20] The reason DSC chose to develop permanent supportive housing outside of Seattle is because we recognized that there are people who need and would benefit from permanent supportive housing who aren't in Seattle, don't want to be in Seattle.

[00:26:34] And they shouldn't be relegated to have the one thing that will address their needs best of being in Seattle, causing them to move.

[00:26:43] And so we went through what was a fairly challenging process to be able to develop permanent supportive housing outside of Seattle, challenging from the perspective both of garnering the resources needed for it and garnering, you know, sort of a political feasibility of being able to get it done.

[00:27:03] And now that it's we got through all that and we were able to open something.

[00:27:08] I'm pretty happy about it because a significant portion of the tenants in that building had been living basically outside in the immediate vicinity of downtown Burien for an extended period of time.

[00:27:24] And things are going to be able to open up the time.

[00:27:50] Maybe have been alleviated a little bit there.

[00:27:55] But at least we're housing inside with a lot of support people who, you know, previously had been contributing to what was bothering a lot of other people in that community of a lot of visible homelessness in that area.

[00:28:10] And so more of that, I think, is absolutely what needs to be done.

[00:28:14] But it's quite expensive when we think about taking it to the full scale of what the need is across all these different kinds of communities.

[00:28:22] But it's doable, ultimately, if we choose to do so.

[00:28:25] Can I ask what's going on with DESC's replacement of the Navigation Center?

[00:28:31] This is a shelter in Little Saigon that, you know, was lauded as the cutting edge.

[00:28:37] Sandeep was mentioning the San Francisco model when it opened.

[00:28:41] It's gotten a lot of objections over the years, you know, complaints about people hanging around outside, police calls, etc.

[00:28:49] So now it's closing and moving and reopening.

[00:28:52] And I wanted to ask how that's going.

[00:28:54] And if you can talk a little bit about how the new location, the Nav Center 2.0, is going to be different.

[00:29:02] Yeah, definitely.

[00:29:03] Thanks for asking that.

[00:29:04] So, and by the way, when are you guys going to start arguing with each other?

[00:29:13] We're all being so polite because, like, an adult is here.

[00:29:17] I know, I know.

[00:29:18] I know.

[00:29:18] A grown-up, we've got to be nice.

[00:29:21] I thought I was going to arrive at a cage somewhere and watch something happen.

[00:29:26] And now we're just sitting on Zoom.

[00:29:28] Yeah.

[00:29:31] Oh, God.

[00:29:32] Please don't request it.

[00:29:33] I mean, come on.

[00:29:38] The Navigation Center has been, I think, a very successful shelter program in still in the Little Saigon neighborhood.

[00:29:51] Successful, especially from the perspective of being an attractive place for people who were otherwise

[00:30:02] living outside in very precarious situations and not really pursuing other types of shelter options.

[00:30:15] And so that's a win right there, that people who weren't pursuing shelter were accepting offers to go inside at the Navigation Center where they can get different kinds of support, be healthier in general.

[00:30:34] And just really quickly, Daniel, don't mean to interrupt, but can you explain sort of what's different about the Nav Center for our audience from, say, typical mats on the floor?

[00:30:44] You know, the old Morrison Hotel shelter.

[00:30:46] Like, what was the shift in thinking about shelters like the Nav Center?

[00:30:52] Yeah, it was to further reduce any of the barriers that would cause people to not want to be there.

[00:31:01] And I think the one that hasn't been talked about very much but has been among the strongest factors there is that it's more housing-like in that people come and go as they please 24-7.

[00:31:17] There's no curfew by which you have to be in by, that kind of thing.

[00:31:23] The accommodations are very basic and it is congregate, but not in huge rooms that are just jam-packed with tons and tons of people.

[00:31:35] And there's also more space overall where if some other person is annoying you, for example, you've got options where you can go to not be around that person.

[00:31:47] For at least a little bit.

[00:31:48] Whereas some of the bigger crowded congregate shelters that I'm familiar with, in part because I operated some of them for a long time, you know, they were such that we sacrificed quality for quantity and there was a lot of conflict, you know, as a result of that.

[00:32:08] So just a better environment overall.

[00:32:12] Also, people could bring their animals in with them.

[00:32:18] If they were part of a couple, they could stay together basically, although in a room that had other people too.

[00:32:28] And some people had significant amounts of personal belongings that they didn't want to ever part with.

[00:32:37] And that might have been a reason they wouldn't go to a shelter where they weren't allowed to bring in more than they could carry.

[00:32:44] And the navigation center was set up in a way that there was just a lot of space to store people's stuff.

[00:32:51] And so it was just more attractive to some people.

[00:32:56] And then they could get additional support and attention there.

[00:33:02] And we were able to intervene if things were, you know, problematic, including if situations occurred like overdoses where intervention might not have happened if they were living out in a tent somewhere.

[00:33:17] And so, you know, there were a lot of benefits there to it overall.

[00:33:22] There were neighborhood challenges from the outset, a lot of concern expressed by the immediate vicinity around it where the city had leased the space to put the navigation center in.

[00:33:38] And Erica said that, you know, some of the complaints are about people hanging around outside the navigation center.

[00:33:46] That is true.

[00:33:46] There are a lot of people around the immediate vicinity of the navigation center.

[00:33:52] I want to note, however, that those aren't people who are staying at the navigation center.

[00:33:57] Those are different people.

[00:33:59] And there's actually a set of expectations for people who stay at the navigation center that they not be part of those crowds of folks.

[00:34:08] And they adhere to that pretty well, actually.

[00:34:11] And so the navigation center gets, I would say, unfairly blamed for some of the problematic issues in the immediate neighborhood.

[00:34:27] But it is not far from 12th and Jackson.

[00:34:30] It's basically three blocks from 12th and Jackson.

[00:34:34] But the 12th and Jackson scene is not because the navigation center is nearby.

[00:34:38] It's an unrelated set of factors, but looks similar because includes a lot of people who've got similar characteristics and challenges in their lives, such as serious substance use disorder problems.

[00:34:53] And so people make that conflation.

[00:34:55] So we've got to move.

[00:34:57] The building that the navigation center is in is leased space was always known and assumed to be time limited to some degree.

[00:35:10] The stay there has been extended some at a couple different junctures since the navigation center opened.

[00:35:17] But the building is problematic in different ways.

[00:35:22] I mean, it's, for example, it's got plastic covering the entire south side of it to help prevent some water intrusion issues.

[00:35:30] It's had siding problems since for a long time, well before the navigation center was there.

[00:35:36] I just say that all because it was all part of the original conception that it wasn't going to be there forever, that the building owners were ultimately going to do something to redevelop the property.

[00:35:46] And so the city always knew that it would have to be moved at some point.

[00:35:52] The city made a plan to go ahead and move it in part, I think, responding to some of those kind of neighbor perceptions and complaints issues.

[00:36:05] And so we've been talking with the city for a year about what should we do?

[00:36:13] Where should we go to put it in a different setting?

[00:36:17] And we're still working on that.

[00:36:19] I think we're making strong progress.

[00:36:21] I don't have an announcement to make for you about where that's going to be, but I think that could be...

[00:36:27] I've asked you about that offline, Dave.

[00:36:28] That could be forthcoming one of these days.

[00:36:32] But one of the things we're going to do is, I think, keep the best of what the navigation center has brought in terms of the low barriers being a place that people really want to be with really robust services.

[00:36:50] And dialing that up a couple notches and making it especially targeted to people who have been in crisis recently.

[00:37:02] And that crisis can mean a few different kinds of things.

[00:37:06] But people who have been in a behavioral health crisis, say a psychiatric crisis that has resulted in them landing in some kind of trouble and maybe getting served through the behavioral health crisis response system.

[00:37:21] Another thing BESC does is operate a program called the Crisis Solution Center, which is a very short-term stay place where people can get psychiatric and other care to stabilize from a mental health or other similar crisis.

[00:37:37] And the biggest problem with the crisis solution center is that when somebody's stay is ending because that psychiatric stabilization has occurred and some plans have been put in place for the future, we don't actually have very many options of where they can go and sort of sustain that stabilization.

[00:38:01] All too often, people are returning to precarious situations such as the streets.

[00:38:05] And so we need something better for them.

[00:38:37] We need something better for them.

[00:38:39] We need something better for them.

[00:38:43] And that includes people who will have had recent overdose events, some of whom we will be serving in the relatively near future at the Opioid Recovery and Care Access Center, the Orca Center that we're building in the Morrison to receive people in the aftermath of an overdose.

[00:39:07] So it's just been in recent times in particular that shelter space for high needs people has been essentially not there.

[00:39:22] And so, or there's never been a part of a pandemic.

[00:39:25] And so, or there's never any capacity in it, available capacity for new people.

[00:39:29] And so that's what we're working on of making this shift in the navigation center to something that is even more targeted to that.

[00:39:37] And we've got good buy-in from the city of Seattle to make that happen.

[00:39:42] We're really happy about being able to fill at least some of that gap that currently exists in the overall emergency shelter environment.

[00:39:55] It's a good moment, I think, to talk a little bit about where we are in terms of our overall mental health crisis response.

[00:40:03] Right.

[00:40:04] There was a period during the pandemic when it seemed like the entire system got completely overwhelmed, right?

[00:40:10] And Daniel, I know you remember telling me during that period, like, it used to be when you had somebody in mental health crisis and DSC housing and you call 911, you'd get a response, right?

[00:40:21] Sometimes it'd be a few hours, right?

[00:40:23] Maybe it's later that day, but somebody would come out to try to, you know, help assess the situation and respond to the person in crisis.

[00:40:30] And that extended to, like, on average, 11 days.

[00:40:35] You got somebody, you know, countywide was 11 days.

[00:40:39] Like, you were saying sometimes it was two weeks or more would go by before there was any kind of response.

[00:40:44] You know, the system was completely overwhelmed or dysfunctional.

[00:40:48] So where are we at now?

[00:40:49] Yeah, just to clarify, specifically what you're talking about is evaluations for involuntary treatment for people in psychiatric crisis who are not safe.

[00:41:02] They're a danger to themselves or others due to that crisis.

[00:41:08] And that system is still overwhelmed.

[00:41:11] Things have improved to some degree.

[00:41:13] But the main thing is that there is a bunch of new investment committed.

[00:41:18] We just still have a ways to go before all of the potential of those committed investments are going to be observable.

[00:41:30] So, you know, there are some additional psychiatric treatment hospital beds that have been brought online.

[00:41:38] Like UW has a new psych hospital in North Seattle that is up and running.

[00:41:46] There is a new crisis stabilization center in Kirkland that has opened.

[00:41:52] But mainly there's a ton of money available to create more of these kinds of things.

[00:41:58] It's just going to be a while before we see any of it.

[00:42:02] And so, meanwhile, there are still a lot of people who are having these kinds of symptom flare-ups, mental deterioration,

[00:42:15] and not having that successfully addressed where they are in the community,

[00:42:23] and ending up meeting criteria for involuntary commitment, but they're not in the hospital because that system is still overwhelmed.

[00:42:35] And I guess I should hesitate to say, look, committing people to the hospital is terrible in a lot of ways.

[00:42:42] It is absolutely necessary when matters of safety become super acute.

[00:42:49] But it isn't the best way to care for people by any stretch.

[00:42:53] And so I do think that ultimately we'll have better ways of caring for people in the community,

[00:43:01] more response that can go to where people are and help address things before they get too bad,

[00:43:07] more of these centers that people can go to before things get too bad.

[00:43:11] That's really what's going to help us overall with this situation when that stuff is fully up and running.

[00:43:19] But meanwhile, we still have a lot of people who are in the community somewhere

[00:43:28] showing signs that there are major reasons to be concerned about safety,

[00:43:34] and that is not being handled immediately because the system doesn't have the capacity to handle it right now.

[00:43:42] So I remain quite concerned about it.

[00:43:45] There's been a lot of pushback, I think, nationally, but also locally,

[00:43:49] to one of DESC's kind of primary concepts, which is harm reduction,

[00:43:54] which is, of course, related to housing first.

[00:43:56] And those two terms have become kind of toxic symbols for the Republican Party.

[00:44:02] But, you know, even just in Seattle, I hear them being kind of bandied about by the city council

[00:44:07] as, you know, we need to do something other than just this harm reduction stuff or just this housing first stuff.

[00:44:13] And, you know, I wonder what impact this has had on DESC, specifically, you know,

[00:44:19] your ability to expand, improve programs.

[00:44:22] And, you know, is there a path forward to convince some of the local naysayers that,

[00:44:28] you know, harm reduction and housing first is actually an effective strategy?

[00:44:33] Yeah, this has been a really difficult period where there's kind of a concerted effort from different places.

[00:44:48] There are local versions of it, but there's some actors on the national stage who have really been attacking

[00:44:57] these concepts, as you say.

[00:45:00] And they've got resources and they're pretty slick.

[00:45:03] So that has been troubling to us.

[00:45:08] It's largely a kind of misinformation campaign, a propaganda campaign, where what they do is they have two principal components to the argument or the criticism.

[00:45:23] One is that housing first became a policy priority.

[00:45:31] More resources were put into it.

[00:45:34] And yet homelessness grew.

[00:45:37] Therefore, housing first has contributed to homelessness.

[00:45:42] And I think that is just an utter misread of what's actually happening.

[00:45:47] I liken it to, you know, somebody decides to put two and two together and they come up with 22, where you can sort of see how they did that, but it's still wrong.

[00:45:59] Where what that conception does is it totally ignores the fact that housing first is only capable of getting people out of homelessness and improving their lives and having them not return to homelessness.

[00:46:15] And it does that very successfully.

[00:46:17] There's a very strong body of evidence that it works for those people who get it and that it actually works quite well for people with quite significant challenges and conditions that many people would say are, you know, not able to be helped.

[00:46:37] So I remain totally dedicated to this as the proper strategy to use for people who have already been experiencing homelessness for long periods of time and have really complicated disabling conditions.

[00:46:53] But then they're ignoring the fact that the reason homelessness has grown anyway is because more people keep falling into homelessness like I was talking about before because, you know, the rent is too damn high to, you know, sort of summarize Greg Colburn's work.

[00:47:08] But the other side of what they say is that, look, there are problems that happen to people being served in these housing first and other harm reduction kinds of services.

[00:47:22] And, you know, therefore it must not be worthwhile.

[00:47:27] It's actually hurting people or something like that.

[00:47:29] And, you know, the best thing we can do to refute that kind of argument is to show that while housing first and harm reduction programs are not capable of solving every problem or issue that might exist in people's lives,

[00:47:49] when you study them closely and you compare the effects of those programs to a, you know, business as usual,

[00:48:01] basically when you compare what happens to people with similar needs who don't get that kind of support,

[00:48:07] you find that the outcomes of the people who got the housing support are way better than the outcomes among the people who didn't get the housing support.

[00:48:17] And so things like medical emergencies go way down and the incidents of needing emergency medical services go way down for people in housing.

[00:48:30] But some people then look at things like, well, look at all these EMS visits to this address of a housing first program.

[00:48:40] And yeah, there are still some needs of people who are living at that address.

[00:48:47] But if you didn't have them living at that address, you would have far more incidents with them.

[00:48:55] It would just be spread out over a wider geography than is happening there.

[00:49:01] So if you could go a little deeper on one aspect of that, which is addiction, Erica was kind of getting at that pushback from Sarah Nelson.

[00:49:10] One of the things she talks about is she thinks we need to have more sober housing.

[00:49:14] But my question is just sort of more general.

[00:49:16] Like what should the city's priorities be for trying to help people who are still struggling with addiction despite getting access to housing,

[00:49:25] including permanent supportive housing?

[00:49:27] What programs are working?

[00:49:28] What are we doing right?

[00:49:29] And what are we doing wrong?

[00:49:30] What do we need to be doing when it comes to addiction?

[00:49:33] Well, we need medical science and psychiatry to cure addiction, I guess, is what we really need.

[00:49:43] But given that all the efforts thus far have left us in this state where people who struggle with addiction very often struggle with it for quite extended periods of time

[00:50:00] and don't achieve abstinence from substance use very often, at least it doesn't stick after an episode of what we call treatment,

[00:50:14] then we have to do other things to recognize that people are still going to be among us and still need a lot of help and support.

[00:50:22] And I think there are tons of things we can do.

[00:50:24] And at DESC, we are doing many of them.

[00:50:26] For example, we have restructured how we deploy our substance use disorder professional treatment staff at DESC.

[00:50:39] DESC is a licensed substance use disorder treatment provider.

[00:50:43] And we have actually placed the bulk of our substance use disorder professional staff in our housing facilities

[00:50:51] to be more readily connected to the tenants who live there and ensure we've got much closer connections to people who could benefit from some of the counseling

[00:51:05] and other kinds of services they can get from those staff.

[00:51:09] And then in the current moment, of course, with so many people using fentanyl and having opioid addiction issues,

[00:51:19] we have really amped up our treatment responses to that,

[00:51:26] the gold standard of which is to get people onto medication support for those,

[00:51:33] because that particular type of addiction is very responsive to some pharmaceutical interventions.

[00:51:39] And their new form, buprenorphine is one of those pharmaceuticals that really helps people with opioid use disorder.

[00:51:49] And it's been on the scene for quite some time.

[00:51:52] But more recently, a new delivery method of it has come onto the scene where it's available now instead of a daily dose,

[00:52:03] it's available in what they call a long-acting injectable form where you get a shot.

[00:52:09] And it's in your system for an extended period of time where you get the protection of having that.

[00:52:17] It reduces cravings, so people are using less.

[00:52:20] And even if people do choose to use fentanyl or other opioids,

[00:52:23] it provides a lot of protection against going into overdose.

[00:52:28] And so it's literally saving lives.

[00:52:31] And it's super popular.

[00:52:33] One of the most exciting things that's been happening lately is that people are seeking out this medicine

[00:52:41] when they hadn't been seeking out it as strongly as they were before, even though they knew about it.

[00:52:48] And so our medical teams at DESC, doctors, nurse practitioners, and nurses,

[00:52:55] who are delivering our medication for opioid use disorder program to people,

[00:53:02] are saying that the biggest challenges they have is that they can't keep up with demand.

[00:53:06] We literally have people bringing their friends to say, hey, they want a shot too.

[00:53:13] And I love it.

[00:53:15] I wish we could meet all the demand.

[00:53:17] But it has been a real bright spot in an otherwise awfully bleak period that that is happening.

[00:53:25] Hey, an optimistic note.

[00:53:27] Should we end on an optimistic note?

[00:53:29] Bright spot.

[00:53:32] Thanks so much, Daniel Malone, for being on the podcast.

[00:53:36] Appreciate you having me.

[00:53:37] All right.

[00:53:37] That's it for another edition of Seattle Nice.

[00:53:39] He's Daniel Malone.

[00:53:40] She's Erica C. Barnett.

[00:53:41] He's Sandeep Kaushik.

[00:53:43] I'm David Hyde.

[00:53:43] Our editor is Quinn Waller.

[00:53:45] And thank you so much for listening.