King County Council endorses goals of the Committee to end Homelessness

In collaboration with local governments, human service agencies and faith communities, King County continues working to prevent and end homelessness, and to help those who have become homeless find a way off the streets and into permanent housing.

The Metropolitan King County Council on Monday confirmed the county’s commitment to that goal with its support of the 2015-2019 Strategic Plan of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County.

“The strategic plan provides a path to make homelessness rare and brief,” said Councilmember Dave Upthegrove, chair of the Council’s Health, Housing and Human Services Committee, in a county media release. “With poverty on the rise and a growing gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in our community, we need to stay focused on making sure that everyone has a place to call home.”

“We are daily faced with many issues of homelessness – including poverty, mental health, domestic violence and affordable housing,” said Councilmember Kathy Lambert. “We are now working on the next phase of a comprehensive plan that has more specific goals and tools. We want to make homelessness rare, short and one time and use these tools to deal with many social issues. Working together on solving these problems is important for our society.”

At the start of the century, King County joined seven other entities in the formation of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County (CEH) a unified approach to address the region’s homelessness crisis. In 2005, the committee adopted a Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness, and worked to develop an infrastructure that focused on homeless services, housing, and the effort to prevent and end homelessness.

Since the establishment of the Ten-Year Plan, CEH has helped to fund 6,314 new units of permanent housing with supportive services, for a countywide total of 8,337 units. In addition, CEH supports 2,807 emergency shelter units, 1,760 transitional housing units, and 484 rapid re-housing units. CEH also helps to coordinate the allocation of federal, state, local, and philanthropic funds to housing, supportive services, and crisis response, allocating a total of $42.14 million to crisis response, $116.77 million to household stabilization, and $23.1 million to services in 2014.

The adopted legislation builds upon the Ten-Year plan in the development of a Strategic Plan that seeks to:

• End veteran homelessness by the end of 2015

• End chronic homelessness by 2017

• End family and youth/young adult homelessness by 2020

• End single adult homelessness

The CEH’s Strategic plan will focus on three goals to achieve ending homelessness in King County:

• Make homelessness rare by addressing the causes of homelessness through action at all levels of government. CEH seeks to accomplish this through investing prevention resources in communities where the need and opportunity are greatest, and working for the preservation and expansion of housing for people at risk of homelessness.

• Make homelessness brief and one-time by ensuring that people who experience homelessness quickly receive the right services and that more people are served with existing programs. CEH will accomplish this through a series of options including: a coordinated assessment system to match people with housing, to supporting partnerships between behavioral health and social service providers, neighborhood associations, and local government and creating employment and education opportunities to support stability.

• Develop a Community to End Homelessness because solving homelessness will take more than a committee. CEH will build that community through a public awareness and engagement campaign, engaging local governments, philanthropic organizations, and community partners, establishing a business leaders’ task force, and expanding its effort to engage faith communities.