A Year to Help Seattle's Homeless

365 days to go...

I’ve decided to spend a year doing everything I can for Seattle’s homeless. My hope is to inspire some of you to join me, in ways large or small.

I’m an outsider in this community - I’ve never worked for a food bank or shelter, participated in local government, or covered the homeless beat for a newspaper. Fortunately, Seattle is blessed with many of these incredibly high-caliber people already. But I think there’s a gap in coverage of how much impact an individual can have on this problem, and what the best levers are for folks like you and me to pull.

In that area I have some experience. As a reformed management consultant, I know how to research the impact of investments, and describe them so a reader with little experience or time (read: a senior executive) can understand. I’d like to try to fill this gap and show Seattle how much of a difference each of us can make, and how. Hint: I think it’s a lot. Should anyone reading this happen to feel inspired and think the impact worthwhile, I’d love to have you join me for a shift or donate alongside me. If you do, please let me know by sending me a picture of your gift receipt or volunteer hours and I’ll track them as part of the overall impact from this blog.

I’ll spend my time volunteering with several nonprofits helping this population, and making donations where I think it can have the biggest impact. During the year, I plan to volunteer at least 300 hours and give away one year’s compensation. I’ll share my thoughts about the specific impact of my time and money, measured in hot meals, dry nights, evictions avoided, jobs obtained, and leases signed.

I will help as much as possible and quantify the impact of my efforts - ideally measured in people off the street - in each of three broad buckets:

• Diversion: It is less expensive to keep someone from becoming homeless in the first place than to lift them out of homelessness once they are there. It is also, obviously, vastly less disruptive to them. I'll be supporting organizations such as Ballard Food Bank and Mary’s Place making one-time payments for rent, utilities, car repairs and hospital bills when there is evidence that, absent this one-time help, the individuals may become homeless.

• Food Banks and Emergency Shelters: I’ll be working with Ballard Food Bank to help them feed their community, and with Mary’s Place and ROOTS emergency shelters to help house families and young adults, respectively. These organizations help people who are already homeless, but they also play critical roles in preventing and shortening homelessness. For instance, providing a source of free nutrition may free up rent dollars for a family and keep them housed. Or a clean shelter may allow someone to keep their job and significantly shorten their period of homelessness.

• Outflow: In 2024 there were 16,868 homeless individuals in King County according to the annual point in time count. I’ll be working with a few different organizations to try to get at least a few of them housed. I’ll build tiny homes with Sound Foundations NW, which produces each home for about $4500 in materials and ~200 person-hours. I’ll support individuals living in permanent supportive housing by volunteering to provide a listening ear (the homeless often feel isolated) and with financial help for supportive services. And I’ll support students in FareStart’s foodservice job training program by funding a stipend to ensure they are housed during the program, and with resume support and mock interviews (I also hope to improve my cooking!).

In addition to the topics above, I’ll use this blog to share my thoughts on what is driving homelessness in Seattle. I think there are at least two competing narratives, each of which suggests a very different set of priorities, so getting this right up front seems pretty important if we want to maximize our impact.

One narrative focuses on the role of substance abuse in causing homelessness. There are few Seattleites who haven’t walked past a homeless person shooting up in front of a museum or business downtown. Logically, those who see substance abuse as the key driver to homelessness tend to favor a strong law enforcement response, with clear consequences for using or dealing.

Another narrative focuses on the role of the lack of affordable housing in causing homelessness. Again, one look at current rents in our town confirms that it’s hard to find an apartment that’s affordable on a low-wage job, even given the rapid increases in Seattle’s minimum wage to its current level of $20.76. Those who see affordable housing as the key driver are more likely to favor the construction of affordable housing (i.e., some houses which cost 30% of a family’s pay rather than what the market will bear) as a big part of the solution.

It turns out there’s a lot of research that’s been done to understand what causes homelessness, though it tends to be somewhat academic and hard to read. I’ll try to simplify this research and make it more accessible. I hope this will help contextualize what we’ve all seen with our own eyes and better clarify the “full story.”

One more thing. My 13 year-old daughter Natalie suggested “you have to have some romance in it or something” to make the blog more interesting. Apparently my vision for gripping analyses of rental assistance programs wasn’t quite the page-turning content she gets excited about. I know this topic can get a little serious, so I think her advice is excellent. Fortunately, I have a great source of romance in my life. So you’ll be hearing from time to time about Jen, my exceptionally beautiful spouse who is supporting me implicitly with her encouraging words and explicitly because, well, half of this is hers.