As County Opens More Non-Congregate Shelter to Prevent Spread of COVID-19, City Plans to Remove Two More Encampments

by Erica C. Barnett

(This article previously appeared on The C is for Crank and has been reprinted with permission)

Nearly two years after King County first announced that it planned to open a modular shelter for people experiencing homelessness on county-owned property in Interbay, the project is almost ready to open for a new purpose: Providing non-congregate shelter for between 45 and 50 homeless men over 55 from the St. Martin de Porres shelter, run by Catholic Community Services. The modular buildings, which are essentially trailers with windows, fans, and high-walled cubicles to provide privacy and protection from disease transmission between the four men who will share each unit, were originally supposed to be dorm-style shelters housing up to eight people on beds or cots.

The project, which will include eight individual showers, 10 single-stall restrooms, laundry facilities, a dog run, and a community room with a meal delivery area, cost $7 million, up from a 2018 projection of $4.5 million. Operating the site will cost around $2 million a year.

King County has focused much of its response to homelessness during the COVID-19 emergency on moving people out of mass shelters — where, County Executive Dow Constantine pointed out Thursday, "we're likely to have runaway infections before you know it" — and into individual hotel and motel rooms or other non-congregate temporary housing.

Centers for Disease Control guidelines say that cities should not remove encampments during the COVID-19 emergency unless they can offer each person "individual housing," not space in congregate shelter, to prevent the virus from spreading. "Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse throughout the community and break connections with service providers. This increases the potential for infectious disease spread," the federal guidance says.

"The work we've gone to move people out of congregate settings and into hotels has been remarkably successful in terms of preventing the spread of the virus," Constantine said. "We continue to test [people living in] relocated shelters who are in hotels and would be in facilities like this, and we are finding very little if any transmission of the disease." At the Red Lion Hotel in Renton, which is serving as temporary housing for people who had been staying in the Downtown Emergency Services Center's main shelter in downtown Seattle, 177 people have been tested for COVID-19; zero have tested positive.

The city has focused its response to homelessness on adding more congregate shelter spaces so that people living in mass shelters can sleep further apart, and on providing referrals to shelter for people at the encampments it removes, which the city says are limited to those that cause a public health or public safety risk. On Thursday, Mayor Jenny Durkan took issue with the notion that the city and county had adopted different approaches. "There is no 'or' here," she said. "We are taking every approach we can and adding significant additional financial resources from the city to make sure that we are bringing as many people inside as we can."

The city's Navigation Team, a group of police officers and Human Services Department staffers, has removed at least two large encampments in recent weeks — one outside the Navigation Center shelter in the International District and one at the Ballard Commons park. In both cases, the city said the encampments posed a public safety and health risk, because people were congregating in violation of state and city orders. In the case of the Commons, the city said that a hepatitis A outbreak that has sickened 17 homeless people in the Ballard area endangered the safety of people living in and around the park.

"The CDC guidance made very clear that our number one priority would be outreach to people experiencing homelessness, to provide them hygiene, to provide them information, and to try to bring them inside," Durkan said. "But if there are areas where there is a public safety or public health [issue], we will try to mitigate against that threat."

The city has said that there were beds in enhanced shelters (24/7 shelters with amenities such as case management and the ability to stay with partners or pets) available for every person living at the Commons, although the city's official count of 40 residents is significantly lower than estimates provided by both people living at the site and by homeless service providers at the Bridge Care Center across the street. "Before we remove people for public safety or public health reasons, we're working on an ongoing basis to offer people the opportunity to come inside," Durkan said.

Next week, the Seattle Human Services Department's Navigation Team will remove two separate encampments in the International District. On two recent visits to both sites, I counted a total of at least 80 tents, the vast majority of them on South Weller Street between 12th Avenue South and South Dearborn Street. Durkan did not respond directly to a question about whether the city had sufficient enhanced shelter beds for 80 people. "We will continue to do our best, and we will make offers to everybody who we try to relocate. We want to put compassion first but it has to work with the policy of public safety and public health in the middle of a pandemic," she said.

The Public Defender Association has offered to place people displaced when the city removes encampments in hotel rooms through its new Co-LEAD program, which is aimed at reducing recidivism by providing case management and temporary non-congregate housing during the COVID-19 crisis. The city did not take them up on their offer, although Durkan has signed off on the program in principle and name-checked it during Thursday's press conference. Given that the International District encampments are scheduled for removal starting next Tuesday, it appears unlikely at this point that the people living in these encampments will be candidates for Co-LEAD either.

Featured image by Erica C Barnett.