ActionPlan

Pathways Home: Seattle’s Person-Centered Plan to Support People Experiencing Homelessness
costs, background checks and documentation procurement. Diversion is an efficient and cost effective
strategy to prevent individuals from becoming homeless. In the first six months of 2016, 58 families
have been successfully diverted from the homeless system using an average of $1,533 per family
assistance. To date, this program has primarily focused on families; however, due to its successful
outcomes, investments will expand diversion to all populations.
Long‐Term Shelter Stayers Pilot
Nationwide, there is an effort to address those individuals who have become nearly permanent
residents in shelter and have been very difficult to engage in housing solutions. The Closer to Home
Initiative was developed in 2004 by the Corporation for Supportive Housing to attempt to evaluate
creative solutions to engage and house people whose combinations of circumstances and long histories
of homelessness have left them stuck in the shelter system. This evaluation concluded that long‐term
shelter stayers, even those with significant barriers, could be successfully engaged in housing with the
proper level of engagement and supportive services. 12 It is clear that addressing long‐term shelter
stayers is essential to increasing shelter bed availability. A small number of individuals are using a large
percentage of our community’s shelter resources. Providing them with housing will free up significant
additional shelter resources.
In 2015, Mayor Murray budgeted $410,000 to address the impact long‐term shelter stayers were having
on the throughput of emergency shelters in Seattle. This project was matched with $410,000 from
United Way King County (UWKC) and was used to secure approximately $3 million from a Federal
McKinney grant for the Scattered Site Permanent Supportive Housing Project, a regional effort to move
235 long‐term shelter stayers into permanent housing with long‐term rent subsidies and case
management. This project, awarded in June 2015, is an expansion of an effort conducted in 2013 that
moved over 80 long‐term shelter stayers into housing. Many of them were placed in new homeless
housing units that came online during that time. The success of the long‐term shelter stayers project has
been impacted by the design of the project and the available housing placements attached to it. The
defining assumption was that all long‐term stayers would require the level of service intensity of
Permanent Supportive Housing and that has not been shown to be true. The project must be retooled
to ensure a variety of housing options are available to this population in order to move them into
permanent housing and free up a large amount of capacity in our shelter system.
Family Rapid Re‐Housing Pilot
In 2014, the City of Seattle, King County, Building Changes and UWKC invested approximately $3 million
to house as many as 350 homeless families in King County through Rapid Re‐housing (RRH). RRH is a
Housing First approach designed to help homeless families quickly exit homelessness with a
12
Final Report on the Evaluation of the Closer to Home Initiative, Corporation for Supportive Housing, February
2004, http://www.csh.org/wp‐content/uploads/2011/12/Report_cth_final1.pdf
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