Chronic Homelessness Doubling In Everett Compared To Rest Of Snohomish County

Julie Willie, Everett Community Development Director, at the community council meeting on August 11th.

There are currently a total of 21 pallet shelters on Everett Transit property behind the Everett Gospel Mission.

The city plans to use funds from the American Rescue Plan to buy another 40 Pallet Shelters.

On August 11th, Everett City Council received a briefing on homelessness in Everett, Washington. Chronic homelessness in particular. Julie Willie, Everett City Community Development Director, was appointed to lead the city’s homelessness response and led the briefing.

Director Willie said, “The increase between 2019-2020 shows that the challenges in Everett are growing twice as fast as the challenges across the country. From year to year, there was an approximately 12% increase in unprotected residents across the county, while Everett saw a 23.5% increase. And as you recall, we did not have adequate housing or resources before the pandemic. “

“Today our numbers are even higher as COVID-19 has brought additional chronically homeless people from across the area to Everett to take advantage of the limited services that are available.”

“Everett saw a new group of people without protection, living on the streets and moving between places. Clean-up operations that ensure sanitation and reduce the negative impact on our businesses and residents are temporarily disruptive to street campers, but since they have no better place to move they often return to the same campsite or move to a different area in which they have stayed before and are waiting for the next cleaning. “

“Our community and outreach team has been using a new tracking app since April and announced that they have worked with four hundred and sixty-three (463) people in the past 4 months, which anecdotally compared to the 2020 (300) PIT count number Plus of 54 percent last year. “

You can see the hour long briefing which offers a lot more context and detail. Follow this link and advance the video to the 2:05:20 mark. (You can also visit the city council’s page on the City of Everett website and view the city council archives. The meeting was scheduled for August 11. The briefing raised several concerns from the city council.

Here are some of the responses from Everett City Council President Brenda Stonecipher: “This is the topic I hear about when I speak to our residents. I mean that’s it. The only thing people care about is homelessness and they see it explode exponentially. “

“I think we need to stop pat ourselves on the back because we have a COET program because unfortunately the people at COET don’t have what they need to take the next step when they are with the Deal with homeless people with whom they interact. “In our community.”

“We don’t have enough treatment programs, we don’t have enough housing, whether temporary or permanent, we don’t have daytime housing that people can go to that is not our library or use the toilet on the pavement outside our door.” Of our business world. We do not provide the necessary resources for this problem. “

“Unfortunately I’ve been on the council the whole time and I’ve never heard the plan, and what I’d really like to know is that the groups of homeless people are here … I don’t want to … I understand. How big is the group waiting for accommodations that we can’t offer them? Who is waiting for treatment? I mean we have 453 people out there, that doesn’t seem like a huge number at the moment. It honestly doesn’t. 453 people are like less than a high school. “

“What we’re doing right now, all the strategies, whether it’s no-sit-no-lie prescriptions or moving camps, we’re just playing Whack-A-Mole. And so we have this great COET team that deals with people and I know they have had a lot of successes. I don’t want to take anything away from their successes, but it doesn’t work. We still have a lot of homelessness in our community. “

“Whatever we’re trying to achieve, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what the steps are, I don’t know what the parts are and whatever it is, we won’t make it. As a policy maker, I want to know what the 10 point plan is? Knowing that it won’t catch everyone, it will catch some of the people. Now we just have to make progress, our population is growing instead of shrinking. “

Mayor Franklin expressed her views on the situation, including the “once-in-a-generation” ability to access funds from the US bailout plan.

Mayor Franklin: “Today’s talk was about chronic homelessness. Visible Chronic Homelessness in Everett City. We’ve been hiding homelessness, families that are doubling, we have a whole host of other problems, but we have visible chronic homelessness which I think is what worries us most in our community, so I asked the team to really focus on it.

“The people on the street who are chronically homeless often have severe behavior problems and, in conjunction with the new laws of the past few years, not only made it harder for us to do so, but also for others enforce and what the city has done in the past is a balance between reach and services and enforcement, and that balance is skewed because we are unable to enforce that much, and it is skewed at the same time as the population grows. “

“Today we have people who are actually fleeing Seattle and heading north because they don’t feel safe on the streets of Seattle, and there are services that have been closed in Skagit County or East Snohomish County or elsewhere in the county that are now come to Everett because we are the urban center and have more services. ”

“For the population we have on our streets at the moment, this is treatment, shelter. These are necessary steps in order to accommodate the people and to clear them from our streets. “

“We will never solve homelessness, we will always have people experiencing homelessness, but we should be able to accommodate 450 people in the city. We will work towards this goal by truly understanding each individual on our streets and knowing what their unique needs are, what they need to get out of homelessness and get back on their feet. We will only be successful if we do so in partnership with our faith partners, our nonprofit partners, the county and all jurisdictions around us, and I think we have some momentum about this.

This Wednesday, Everett City Council will be asked to approve the purchase of 40 homes and a two-story bathroom unit for $ 477,391.31 including Washington state sales tax from Pallet. The accommodations are being purchased with funds from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

20 pieces – 64 square feet pallets
20 pieces – 100 ft pallets
40 wall heaters
40 Air Conditioners & Installation Kits
40 120 V electrical kit with 1500 W heater
60 foldable bunk beds / desk
60 individually adapted mattress toppers
1 lot – bathroom with 2 cabins
Installation fees

The city says there is capacity to expand the existing pallet project at the Everett Gospel Mission, as well as several other locations that are being reviewed, including areas outside of Everett. In addition to the cost of procuring the pallet structures, additional site work may be required. If necessary, an additional budgetary authority for the work on site will be requested at a later date.