by DCG
Homeless in King County: “Not a failure”/Q13Fox photo
In 2005 King County (Washington) created a 10-year plan to end homelessness. They established the Committee to End Homelessness in King County (CEH), charged with implementing the goals of the Ten-Year Plan: prevent homelessness whenever possible; move people rapidly from homelessness to stable housing; increase the efficiency of existing systems and improve collaboration; and create the public and political will to end homelessness.
Since then, statistics show there has been an increase in homeless citizens:
- January 2006: 7,910
- January 2010: 8,937
- May 2018: 12,112
Despite the increase in homeless in Seattle and King County, a former director for the CEH claims that he doesn’t believe the plan was a failure.
MyNorthwest.com did an interview with Bill Block, the former director of the CEH who said, “I think we’ve accomplished a lot of things for the people we’ve actually need helped,” Block said. “I think we weren’t prepared for the degree to which the mental health system would expand using homelessness as their discharge, or the criminal justice system, or the chemical dependency system.”
And since under his leadership the plan was not a failure, he had to find someone to blame: the federal government.
He said, “In all other developed countries, the national government is responsible for ensuring that there’s an adequate supply of housing for low-income workers,” he said. “And this government stopped doing that in the early ’70s. And that’s a major difference between us and England, or France, or Germany, or the other developed countries.”
Read about the whole interview here.
If this is Block’s idea of success, I’d hate to see an ACTUAL failure.
The only success I see is keeping the industrial homeless complex alive via taxpayer dollars.