By Sarah Owens and Michael Livingston
City Council adopted the final 2021-2026 Strategic Plan Update Monday night without discussion, thus approving the 2021 action plan to reduce address homelessness, supposed to be the City's No. 1 priority area. (The draft plan called for "Reducing Homelessness", but after receiving comment that the proposed activities were hardly designed to achieve that result, the City fell back to its old standard -- addressing homelessness, which tends to mean addressing complaints about people experiencing homelessness.)
Readers will recall that there was a work session on draft Plan back in January. See "Council's 2021 Homeless Policy Agenda" (19 January 2021). There are a couple of new problems with the Final version in the No. 1 action/priority area, "Addressing Homelessness."
Year One Activity, item B. In the draft Plan, this activity read simply, "Continue to pursue a housing-first support model" which could be interpreted as continuing the City's Homeless Rental Assistance Program (HRAP), which would be a good thing. The new language is nonsensical. Transitional housing is a housing readiness concept and a term of art
that has a specific meaning. A lot's been written about it, but here is
one source. Neither transitional housing, nor tiny homes, nor tent camps, are
consistent with the Housing First (should be capitalized) model. Persons enrolled in a housing program from the streets may require
shelter for a few days or weeks, but it is confusing to refer to this as
"transitional housing." In any event, housing isn't "transitional" if a permanent housing
placement isn't realistically available as part of the "transitional"
program when stabilization has been achieved. Tent camps are not "housing", tiny homes (unplumbed, unheated wooden
tents) are not "housing", nor are they best/evidence-based practices. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development doesn't even recognize them as shelter.
For the City to make pursuit of tiny home villages
and supervised tent camps a one-year priority is a pretty big policy shift that should have been debated versus being sneaked in to the final draft like this. The City's excuse is that the changes were based on a "
community survey" of 247 self-selected participants, begging the question how "strategic" the City's homeless crisis planning truly is. One suspects that Council and community are conflating pandemic and homeless response policies. If Council is hell-bent in the direction of tiny home villages
and supervised tent camps even after pandemic restrictions are lifted, they should consider Olympia, Washington's experience with mitigation sites, described in the
Outsiders podcast produced by KNKX Public Radio and The Seattle Times' Project Homeless.
Objective: Homelessness Prevention. Neither the objective nor its description makes sense. First, prevention programs focus on people who are not homeless. Prevention does nothing to address the City's top priority area, which is homelessness. There is nothing wrong with describing prevention as "Develop[ing] a long-term, regional strategy to address
upstream factors that increase homelessness", but such a strategy simply will not "eliminat[e]
homelessness by 2050." Focusing on prevention is what Salem has done for 40
years, and it has given the City a chronic homeless population rate
that's at least twice the national average.
Council should insist that the City's homeless action plan statements be approved by a reputable homeless services professional engaged in implementation of mainstream homeless policy prior to submission. That this did not happen suggests the City is not serious about "addressing homelessness." Notably, Mayor Bennett did not mention this plan in his March 10 State of the City address, though he did touch on individual elements as he plowed through a long list of any and all 2020-2021 anti-poverty efforts for which the City could take some amount of credit. All in all, there is very little about Salem's 2021 homeless action plan that deserves to be called "strategic."
No comments:
Post a Comment