AMID PROSPERITY, POVERTY GROWS
AN ECONOMIC BOOM ON THE U. S. WEST COAST IS LEADING TO A HOMELESS CRISIS OF UNPRECEDENTED PROPORTIONS AS THE COST OF HOUSING SKYROCKETS
In a park in the middle of a leafy, bohemian neighbourhood where homes list for close to $ 1 million, a tractor’s massive claw scooped up the refuse of the homeless — mattresses, tents, wooden frames, a wicker chair, an outdoor propane heater. Workers in masks and steelshanked boots plucked used needles and mounds of waste from the underbrush.
Just a day before, this corner of Ravenna Park was an illegal home for the down and out, one of 400 such encampments t hat have popped up in Seattle’s parks, under bridges, on freeway medians and along busy sidewalks. Now, as police and social workers approached, some of the dispossessed scurried away, vanishing into a metropolis that is struggling to cope with an enormous wave of homelessness.
That struggle is not Seattle’s alone.
A homeless crisis of unprecedented proportions is rocking the West Coast, and its victims are being left behind by the very things that mark the region’s success: soaring housing costs, rockbottom vacancy rates and a roaring economy that waits for no one.
All along the coast, elected officials are scrambling for solutions.
“I’ ve got economically zero unemployment in my city, and I’ve got thousands of homeless people that actually are working and just can’t afford housing,” said Seattle City Councilman Mike O’Brien.
“T here’s nowhere f or these folks to move to. Every time we open up a new place, it fills up.”
The rising numbers of homeless people have pushed abject poverty into the open like never before and have overwhelmed cities and nonprofits.
The surge in people living on the streets has put public health at risk, led several cities to declare states of emergency and forced cities and counties to spend millions — in some cases billions — in a search for solutions.
San Diego now scrubs its sidewalks with bleach to counter a deadly hepatitis A outbreak that has spread to other cities and forced California to declare a state of emergency last month.
In Anaheim, home to Disneyland, 400 people sleep along a bike path in the shadow of Angel Stadium. Organizers in Portland lit incense at a recent outdoor food festival to cover up the stench of urine in a parking lot where vendors set up shop.
Homelessness is not new on the West Coast. But it’s getting worse. People who were once able to get by, even if they suffered a setback, are now pushed to the streets because housing has become so expensive.
All it takes is a prolonged illness, a lost job, a broken limb, a family crisis. What was once a blip in fortunes now seems a life sentence.
“Most homeless people I know aren’ t homeless because they’re addicts,” said Tammy Stephen, 54, who lives at a homeless encampment in Seattle. “Most people are homeless because they can’t afford a place to live.” A few findings: Official counts taken earlier this year in California, Oregon and Washington show 1 68,000 homeless people in the three states. That is 19,000 more than were counted two years ago.
During the same period, the number of unsheltered people in the three states — defined as someone sleeping outside, in a bus or train station, abandoned building or vehicle — has climbed 18 per cent to 105,000.
Rising rents are the main culprit. The median onebedroom apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area is significantly more expensive than it is in the New York City metro area, and apartments in San Francisco are listed at a higher price than those in Manhattan.
Since 2015, at least 10 cities or municipal regions in California, Oregon and Washington — and Honolulu, as well — have declared states of emergency due to the rise of homelessness, a designation usually reserved for natural disasters.
“What do we want as a city to look like? That’s what the citizens here need to decide,” said Gordon Walker, head of the regional task force for the homeless in San Diego, where the unsheltered homeless population has spiked by 18 per cent in the past year. “What are we going to allow? Are we willing to have people die on the streets?”
With alarming frequency, t he West Coast ’ s ne wly homeless are people who were able to survive on the margins — until those margins moved.
For years, Stanley Timmings, 62, and his 61- yearold girlfriend, Linda Catlin, were able to rent a room in a friend’s house on their combined disability payments.
Last spring, that friend died of colon cancer and the couple was thrust on Seattle’s streets.
Timmings used their last savings to buy a used RV for $ 300 and spent another $ 300 to register it. They bought a car from a junk yard for $275.
Now, the couple parks the RV near a small regional airport and uses the car to get around.
They have no running water and no propane for the cook stove. They go to the bathroom in a bucket and dump it behind a nearby business. They shower and do laundry at a non- profit and buy water at a grocery depot. After four months, the stench of human waste inside the RV is overwhelming. Every inch of space is crammed with their belongings: jugs of laundry detergent, stacks of clothes, pots and pans, and tattered paperback novels. They are exhausted, scared and defeated, with no solution in sight.
“Between the two of us a month, we get $1,440 in disability. We can’t find a place for that,” he said. “Our income is ( about) $ 17,000 … a year. That puts us way out of the ballpark, not even close. It might have been enough but anymore, no. It’s not.”
A new study funded by the real estate information firm Zillow and conducted by the University of Washington found a strong link between rising housing prices and rising homelessness numbers.
A five per cent rent increase in Los Angeles, for example, would mean about 2,000 more homeless people there, the authors said.
“If you have a disability income, you make about $ 9,000 a year and renting a studio in Seattle is about $1,800 a month and so that’s twice your income,” said Margaret King, director of housing programs for DESC, a non-profit that works with Seattle’s homeless. “So everybody who was just hanging on because they had cheap rent, they’re losing that … and they wind up outside. It’s just exploded.”
Nowhere is that more evident than California’s Silicon Valley, where high salaries and a tight housing market have pushed rent out of reach for thousands. In ever- shifting communities of the homeless, RVs and cars cluster by the dozens in the city where Google built its global headquarters and just blocks from Stanford University.
Ellen Tara James- Penney, a lecturer at San Jose State University, has been sleeping out of a car for about a decade, ever since she lost her housing while an undergraduate at the school where she now teaches four English courses, a job that pays $ 28,000 a year. Home is an old Volvo.
“I’ve basically been homel ess since 2007, and I’m really tired,” she said. “Really tired.”
Now 54, she grades papers and prepares lesson plans in her car. Among her few belongings is a pair of her grandmother’s fancy stiletto pumps, a reminder to herself that “it’s not going to be like this forever.”
Increased housing costs aren’t just sweeping up lowincome workers: The number of homeless youth is also rising.
A recent count in Los Angeles, for example, found that those ages 18 to 24 were the fastest- growing homeless group by age, up 64 per cent, followed by those under 18.
One of the reasons is the combined cost of housing and tuition, said Will Lehman, policy supervisor at Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. A recent study found that one in five Los Angeles Community College District students is homeless, he said.
“They can pay for books, for classes, but just can’t afford an apartment. They’re choosing to prioritize going to school,” Lehman said. “They don’t choose their situation.”
Michael Madigan opened a new wine bar in Portland a few years ago overlooking a ribbon of parks not far from the city’s trendy Pearl District.
Business was good until, almost overnight, dozens of homeless people showed up on the sidewalk. A large encampment on the other side of the city had been shut down, and its residents moved to the park at his doorstep.
“We literally turned the corner one day … and there were 48 tents set up on this one block that hadn’t been there the day before,” he said.
Ma di gan’ s business dropped 50 per cent in four months and he closed his bar. There are fewer homeless people there now, but the campers have moved to a bike path that winds through residential neighbourhoods in east Portland, prompting hundreds of complaints about trash, noise, drug use and illegal camping.
Rachel S terry, an at ur opat hi cd oct or, lives near that path and sometimes doesn’ t feel safe when she’s commuting by bike with her one- year- old son. Dogs have rolled in human feces in a local park; recent improvements she’s made to her small home are overshadowed by the line of tents and tarps a few dozen metres from her front door, she said.
A neighbourhood pocket park has become a flashpoint, too: When Elisabeth James took her two-year-old grandchild there, she saw people injecting heroin.
“I’m not a NIMBY person, but I just think that we can do so much more,” said James. “We’re spending a lot of money to house people and we’re getting a bigger problem.”
Voters have approved more than $ 8 billion in spending since 2015 on affordable housing and other anti-homelessness programs, mostly as tax increases.
Los Angeles voters, for example, approved $1.2 billion to build 10,000 units of affordable housing over a decade to address a ballooning homeless population that’s reached 34,000 people within city limits.
Seattle spent $ 61 million on homeless- related issues last year, and a recent budget proposal would increase that to $ 63 million. Four years ago, the city spent $ 39 million on homelessness.
Sacramento has set a goal of moving 2,000 people off the streets in the next three years and may place a housing bond before voters in 2018.
Appeals for money have angered residents who see tent encampments growing in their cities despite more spending.
“Those are like whacka- mole because they just sprout up and then they disappear and then they sprout up somewhere else,” said Gretchen Taylor, who helped found the Neighbourhood Safety Alliance of Seattle in 2016.
Like San Francisco, Seattle has started opening 24- hour, “low- barrier” shelters that offer beds even if people are abusing drugs, have a pet or want to sleep together as a couple.
But the city’s first 24-hour shelter has only 75 beds, and turnover is extremely low.
A team of specially trained police officers and social workers has also been visiting homeless camps to try to place people in shelter. After repeated visits — and with 72 hours of notice — the city cleans out the camps and hauls away abandoned belongings.
These efforts are starting to yield results, although the overall number of homeless people continues to swell.
But the approach has its detractors. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit alleging the sweeps violate the constitutional protec t i ons against unreasonable search and seizure.
And a debate is raging about whether the sweeps are necessary “tough love” or a cruel policy that criminalizes poverty in a city with a reputation for liberalism.
“When a city can’t offer housing, they should not be able to sweep that spot unless it’s posing some sort of significant health and safety issue,” said Sara Rankin, a professor with the Homeless Rights Advocacy Project at the Seattle University School of Law.
“If someone doesn’t have a place to go, you can’t just continue to chase them from place to place.”
Above all, the West Coast lacks long-term, low-income housing for people like Ashley Dibble and her threeyear-old daughter.
Dibble, 29, says she has been homeless off and on for about a year, after her ex- boyfriend squandered money on his car and didn’t pay the rent for three months. Evicted, Dibble says she lived in the back of a moving truck and with several different friends around Seattle before winding up on the streets. She sent her toddler to live with the girl’s paternal grandparents in Florida.
She and her new boy- friend were sleeping under tarps near Safeco Field, home of the Seattle Mariners, when an outreach team referred them to a new shelter. Now, Dibble talks to her daughter daily by phone and is trying to find a way back into housing so she can bring her home.
With an eviction on her record and little income, no one will rent to her.
“I’ve had so many doors slammed in my face, it’s ridiculous,” Dibble said, wiping away tears.
Seattle’s DESC operates 1,200 so- called “permanent supportive housing units” — housing for the mentally ill or severely addicted who can’t stay housed without constant help from case managers, counsellors and rehabilitation programs.
The non- profit completes a new building every 18 months and they immediately fill; at any given time, there are only about eight to 10 units free in the whole city — but 1,600 people qualify.
Among this population, “almost nobody’s going to get housing because there isn’t any,” DESC’s Margaret King said. “It doesn’t really matter.”
There is so little housing, and so much despair. Nonprofit workers with decades of experience are shocked by the surge in homeless people and in the banality of the ways they wound up on the streets.
“It’s a sea of humanity crashing against services, and services at this point are overwhelmed, literally overwhelmed. It’s catastrophic,” said Jeremy Lemoine, an outreach case manager with REACH, a Seattle homeless-assistance program. “It’s a refugee crisis right here in the States, right here under our noses.”
“I don’t mean to sound hopeless. I generate hope for a living for people — that there is a future for them — but we need to address it now.”