Homelessness Response Blog

Last week, the City completed a cleanup of the Spokane Street corridor, where growing encampments were creating public health and safety concerns. The City’s approach included repeated individualized outreach to move people to safer locations, connect them with services and store personal belongings, followed by cleanup of garbage and debris left behind, then mitigation to discourage future camping. The entire effort went smoothly and as planned, with 46 people moving to safer alternative living spaces, including the City’s Navigation Center, the Compass at First Presbyterian 24/7 enhanced shelter, Peter’s Place and UGM shelter.

A pile of garbage and debris on Sept. 11, the day before the cleanup began.

There are as many as 400 unauthorized encampments in Seattle. The City focuses on closing encampments that pose the greatest risks to public health and safety. While many people living in encampments may not be involved in criminal activity, large encampments like what had developed along Spokane Street tend to attract negative behavior. This puts already vulnerable homeless individuals at further risk of impacts from public health and safety concerns. Specific incidents in this area include the RV fires earlier this year, which posed risks to individuals living there and critical infrastructure, as well as a recent shooting that left one individual dead and another charged with murder. Additionally, while the City has worked with campers to manage their garbage, trash accumulation continued to be an ongoing issue in this area. During last Tuesday’s cleanup effort, there was one location where the accumulation of human waste and dead rodents was so extensive that a specialty biohazard cleanup vendor was called in to remediate it.

As with all encampment cleanups, trained City outreach teams approach each person living on the streets with the goal of helping them successfully transition to a safer living location. Per City rules, we make legitimate offers of alternative shelter that is available immediately. If they accept, we will assist with transporting people and their belongings to those spaces. These include indoor shelters, including the new low-barrier 24/7 Navigation Center and Compass at First Presbyterian shelter, managed encampments, or even reconnecting with family or friends. With this approach, the Navigation Team has had a 37% success rate of helping people move from these hazardous locations to safer alternatives over the last six months. That is a great record for this very hard work.

Spokane Street outreach results
The City’s Navigation Team has been conducting repeated, personalized outreach in this area for months, getting to know the people living there and working to find solutions that meet their individual needs. Overall, the City’s outreach to individuals living along the Spokane Street corridor over the last seven weeks resulted in 46 people moving to safer alternative living spaces. As of Monday, Sept. 11, the day before the cleanup began, 21 people had accepted and relocated to alternative shelter following repeated outreach efforts since early August. Over the four days of last week’s cleanup efforts, Tuesday-Friday, 25 people relocated to alternative living spaces, including 22 who completed intake at the new 24/7 low-barrier Compass at First Presbyterian shelter.

Additionally, City field coordinators collected and stored personal belongings at the owner’s request and those items left unattended that appeared to be useful (e.g., tents, clothing, shoes, books, bikes, etc.). In total, the City stored 30 55-gallon bins, six bikes, three items of luggage and 6 large items over the Sept. 12-15 cleanup. Belongings are stored for up to 70 days and may be recovered by calling 206-459-9949 and providing an accurate description of the items. The City will deliver belongings to the owner upon request.

Needles and other discarded items collected during last week’s cleanup. Crews are trained and outfitted to take required precautions when walking within and cleaning these locations.

Maintaining a safe work zone
On Tuesday, Sept. 12, as scheduled, the Navigation Team arrived to conduct outreach and make final offers before the area was to be cleared out and cleaned. As with other large encampment cleanups, the team set up a perimeter to establish a work zone for the safety of all of those involved. The only people allowed within this zone are the people camping there, the officers and outreach professionals who are working to hopefully transfer them to alternative living spaces, the field coordinators who are assisting with storage of belongings, and the cleanup crews. Around 15 protestors arrived, and some chose to enter the established work zone. Sgt. Eric Zerr of the Navigation Team spoke with the protestors at great length. He indicated they could continue to observe, wave signs, talk to the homeless individuals, etc., from outside the perimeter. Sgt. Zerr gave the protestors nearly an hour from the time the perimeter went up until arrests were made; the individuals arrested were giving a final 15-minute warning and all but two complied with exiting the work zone and were arrested without incident for trespassing.

On Tuesday, Sept. 12, the City will begin efforts to remove illegal encampments along the Spokane Street corridor from Colorado Avenue South to Airport Way. The approach includes individualized outreach to move people to safer locations, connect them with services and store personal belongings – which has been occurring for weeks – followed by cleanup of garbage and debris left behind, then mitigation to discourage future camping. The City expects the work to last at least through the week, and potentially into the following week.

Outreach and referrals
As with all encampment removals, the City’s approach began with repeated, personalized outreach, with the City’s Navigation Team offering alternative shelter, services and storage of belongings to all people living unsheltered along the corridor. Over months of conducting repeated outreach in this area, the team has gotten to know many of the people living there and has been working to find solutions that meet their individual needs. Since a courtesy notice of the impending closure was posted on Aug. 23, the team has returned multiple times to offer outreach, including a multiagency collaboration on Aug. 28 that resulted in five people moving to alternative living spaces that day and a number of others connecting with services such as mental health support and medical attention.

The Navigation Team is able to refer individuals to the new Compass at First Presbyterian 24/7 enhanced shelter, in addition to other available shelter and encampment spaces.

Approach and approximate timeline
The area has been divided into four zones to be addressed separately:

Zone 1: Airport Way to Sixth Avenue
Zone 2: Sixth Avenue to Fourth Avenue
Zone 3: Fourth Avenue to Second Avenue
Zone 4: Second Avenue to Colorado Avenue

Monday, Sept. 11, will be a day of outreach only. On Tuesday, Sept. 12, the Navigation Team will begin outreach at 8:30 a.m. Field coordinators will be on hand to provide storage of personal belongings. Other City crews and contractors will be ready to remove all bio-waste, garbage and debris from a zone as soon as campers have moved out of that area. Once a zone is clear, the City will install temporary fencing.

While the Navigation Team will conduct outreach along the entire corridor as necessary, the closure and cleanup will address one zone at a time. As Zones 2 and 4 have the greatest number of people, tents and structures, they will be addressed first and are expected to take the longest. The tentative schedule is:

Tuesday, Sept. 12: Begin Zone 4
Wednesday, Sept. 13: Finish Zone 4 and begin Zone 2
Thursday, Sept. 14: Finish Zone 2 and begin Zone 3
Friday, Sept. 15: Begin Zone 1

Should the cleanup extend into the following week, the City will repost appropriate notice around the impacted area.

As noted above, once a zone is completely clear, the City will install a mix of temporary and permanent fencing along the corridor. Several sections will be fenced off to protect infrastructure and/or to limit access to certain areas for authorized individuals (e.g., maintenance crews). The temporary fencing around several blocks under the Spokane Street Viaduct (installed following the removal of the RV encampment at the west end of Spokane Street in April) will be extended west to Sixth Avenue, though it will still allow entrance for commuter parking, which is an intended use of those rights-of-way.

Monday morning, about 20 outreach professionals representing eight organizations joined the City’s Navigation Team to conduct comprehensive outreach to those living unsheltered along the Spokane Street corridor from Airport Way to First Avenue South. In addition to the Seattle Police officers and REACH outreach workers who comprise the City’s Navigation Team, participating agencies on site included DESC-HOST, Healthcare for the Homeless, Metropolitan Improvement District (MID), Mary’s Place, Pioneer Human Services, Valley Cities, the Union Gospel Mission and the Salvation Army. Other agencies, such as YouthCare and Veteran’s Affairs, were available in an on-call basis.

Over months of conducting repeated outreach in this area, the Navigation Team has gotten to know many of the individuals living there. During these contacts, the team has identified a number of challenges within this population that present barriers to people moving off the streets, including chronic mental illness, substance use disorder, sex work/trafficking, legal issues, and a lack of employment and housing/shelter. To better serve everyone, the City is teaming with organizations that specialize in meeting those individual needs.

Monday’s collaborative approach saw the workers dividing up into multidisciplinary teams – each with medical support, experts in substance abuse or mental health treatment, general outreach and law enforcement – that deployed at various points along the corridor to ensure every person was engaged and the appropriate resource made available. The team serving the most densely populated section of the corridor also had outreach workers specific to the needs of veterans and families. Each team started by asking everyone three questions: Has anyone engaged with you yet? Are you a veteran? Have you received a coordinated entry housing assessment? Beyond that, the outreach workers used their expertise to work with people to determine their individual situation and needs.

On Aug. 28, 40 professional outreach workers and police officers teamed up to provide collaborative, individualized outreach along the Spokane Street corridor.

To those interested, service offers were immediate, including substance use recovery options, mental health treatment, coordinated entry housing assessment, relocation to appropriate alternative living arrangements, reconnection with family or other support systems, disruption of ongoing sex trade including exploitation of vulnerable individuals. The City’s field coordinators were also available to offer storage of personal belongings for anyone who accepted a referral to a treatment program or an alternative living arrangement.

All 66 individuals found residing along Spokane Street from Airport Way to Colorado Avenue South were contacted multiple times. While just the beginning of targeted outreach to this area, this effort saw several positive outcomes, including:

– Four people transported to the Georgetown encampment.
– One person transported to the Navigation Center.
– Three individuals placed on shelter/Navigation Center waitlist.
– One veteran connected with outreach toward working on obtaining ID and housing.
– Three females are now working with Mary’s Place toward shelter and housing.
– Four people connected with mental health support services.
– One person connected with case management to work on getting ID.
– Five individuals received medical attention.
– Two individuals were provided with legal assistance.

An Outreach Worker’s Perspective

The City’s outreach coordinator who organized Monday’s effort, Jackie St. Louis, MSC, LMHC, offered the following reflections on this and every day of outreach:

“We’re tired of you guys,” one man said as we arrived at the encampment. I contemplated responding before deciding not to do so. The reality was that we all were. If there is something that outreach workers and homeless individuals have in common, it is that they are well acquainted with the humanness of fatigue.

The location is Spokane Street beneath the viaduct, where 40 social service professionals and police officers have gathered to outreach the community that calls this location home. Many of the workers have been there before and have established relationships with the residents. In spite of the consistent outreach efforts, the majority remain. Some want to stay with their community of friends, others simply are not willing to go to shelters, and others report to wanting to remain outdoors as it is their chosen way of life. And there are also those who want to just be left alone.

Many are ambiguous; uncertain about what they really want and unable to elaborate that conflict in a way that helps the worker to design a plan of action. Nonetheless, this is part and parcel of this kind of work: it’s about coming alongside someone and being there even when there appears to be no coherent plan.

Outreach is persistent work, it requires tough skin, sensitivity to the needs of others and a willingness to brave weariness in the hope that this will be the day when the decision is made to discontinue living outdoors. And so the team prepares: each team member self identifies by specialty. Those competencies include mental health, substance use, medical, case management, family support. These are the resources that will be offered on this day.

People often inquire about the job of an outreach worker. Though hard to elaborate, outreach can be conceptualized as surfing: it is the challenge of maintaining solid footing at the apex of the wave and through the dip that is sure to follow. Outreach is designed to be the entry point into the continuum of care. For many who are engaged by outreach workers, this is their sole means of being connected to the larger service provider network. In addition, the challenges related to navigating a potentially complex service providing ecosystem can at times discourage those who need it most from doing so. Outreach workers are first responders, emotional support partners, case managers, family reconciliation partners and advocates.

Outreach workers conduct persistent engagement with the goal of relocating individuals to living arrangements that are safer and more supportive than being unhoused or in an encampment. This is an intricate process that can span from a day to years. Outreach workers are often challenged with having to balance their desire to consistently engage from a person-centered perspective with the external pressures that arise from the realities associated with encampments such as trash buildup and public safety concerns. Outreach is rarely a linear process, and the occasions when people readily and immediately accept alternative living options are few.

It would be safe to say that outreach is the process of knowing that you’re going to fail more than you have success, but choose to believe that those whom you serve make it worth confronting those challenges while maintaining the hope that together you will beat those odds.