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(upbeat music) - Hello, everyone.

Welcome to Northwest Newsmakers.

I'm David Kroman and I'm filling in for Monica Guzman today, who's taking a well-deserved break.

Today, we're going to focus on homelessness, an issue that's been a concern and a vexing problem for many of us in the region and frankly around the country.

Got lots of questions for our guests tonight and I'm sure you will, too, if you have something you'd like us to address or ask, type in your question in the chat area, on the right of the screen, anytime during our conversation.

Make sure it's in the running for our Q&A segment at the end of the show.

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With that, I want to introduce our guest.

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority was established in 2019, a major step toward the long goal of finding, quote "regional solutions to homelessness".

After helping to establish the new authority, Marc Dones was selected as its first CEO last year.

Dones' past work has included research on racial inequities among those experiencing homelessness, including how quote "network impoverishment leaves, communities of color, more vulnerable to becoming homeless".

Marc, welcome to Northwest Newsmakers.

- Hi, thanks for having me.

- Appreciate you being here.

So starting with the basics for people who might get lost in the complexity of all this, can you just explain what exactly the King County Regional Homelessness Authority is and how it's different from the way homelessness was addressed before.

- Sure.

So the authority is a consolidation of all funding and policymaking authority around the homelessness crisis system.

And that is significantly different from how we have done things historically.

The reality is, is that, I had the privilege of leading the team that did the report that then led to the crafting of the authority.

And at the time that we wrote that report, which was in late 2018, there were four major government agencies that all claimed primary responsibility for ending the crisis and on some issues as many as six.

And so, the just putting it all under one roof in a real and substantive way with the funding authority, with the policy authority is a big change.

- What was the sort of weakness of that previous system?

Why was that something that needed addressing?

- The reality is that like when we do crisis governance, that is different than normal governance.

And, I think that the...

If I'm just gonna be totally honest, I think that like we've approached the response to homelessness as if it is, we say the word crisis.

We say the word crisis a lot, but we don't use crisis response protocols, which are defined, those are real things.

And we have approached homelessness as if it can be solved via this sort of traditional administrative planning cycles that government is used to in its other spaces, instead of crisis operations, which there's a defined chain of command.

There is clear decision-making authority at each point in that chain of command, there was an iterative feedback loop between sort of what is the on the ground situation and those decisions that they remain informed.

Those are all fundamental theories of crisis response, and that is not possible in a deeply fragmented system.

- And so can you define your role in this?

Do you see yourself as kind of more of a coordinator of the different cities in the region, or are you kind of more of like a real driver of policy?

- I think it's both.

I think that my work I've often referred to myself as chief cat herder, and that I think is because, I take the orientation to this work that is about, a community making collective decisions.

But I also think that it is possible to do that in a way that is still clear where the decision is, who's signing off on the thing.

And so while we fundamentally believe and again like, in theories of crisis response that iterative cycling between who is doing the work and who is making decisions at the strategy level is really critical.

Like when you lose that feedback loop, the decisions become theory.

They are not at all connected to what is happening.

And, again, just to like link these things, we talk about sort of doing things like encampment strategy.

And like really ensuring that folks who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness are able to get inside and have access.

You can build a plan for engaging folks who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness on October one and by October 30, it's not usable.

Like full stop.

And so unless you have that real time on the ground knowledge, you can't make the right decisions.

And so, I do think there's that cat herding aspect because of it bringing everyone together and getting everyone oriented and focused in the same direction, that's organizing work at its core.

But there is also that element of ensuring that like, we are clear as a region, sort of like where we're driving and why we are driving there.

And the authority is designed to fill that role.

- And I wanna get to some of the benefits and also probably challenges of doing that a little bit later, but I did wanna touch on the recent election, because it was exactly a week ago at this point.

And homelessness was, I think a lot of people understand homelessness was a big part of that election and polling backs that up.

Not to get too political for you, but I guess when you're looking at the results of that election and what people were responding to, what kind of message do you think voters were sending?

- I don't like to get too into electorate tea leaves in part, because like, I'm an anthropologist by training and my first question, or my first response is a question, which is like, well, who voted?

So like that's always an important distinction.

I think that like stepping outside of the election and just thinking about the community broadly, I think the message is really clear that like people want, they want something different and they want something that works.

And they want like accountability and transparency in whatever that is.

And, I think that we on this team support those things and strive to embody them in the work that we do daily.

I think that, like what folks, and I've tried to articulate this before, but my experience engaging with community members and just in my life is that we often do this thing where we inside situations of crisis and human suffering, we try to make heroes and villains in a way that is, it's unnuanced and it's unhelpful.

And so the reality is that, I think people are really tired of living in a community that requires them to potentially understand how to deescalate someone who's having a psychotic episode while they're trying to buy milk.

And I wanna be really clear, like I went to school to know how to do those kinds of things, but like, I went to school to know how to do things.

So my comfort doing them should not be, like that level of skill shouldn't be the sort of bar for entry in order to walk around your neighborhood.

Simultaneously, no one should have to live outside.

Like these two things are still fundamentally... Two things can be true And so what I experienced in the community, what I think people, when homelessness is brought them to the polls, What I think that they have attempted to communicate is we need to actually address the suffering that is outside because that suffering is not, there is a symmetry to it.

When we let people suffer in that way outside, it creates a community impact and a community level of suffering that I think people are no longer really able to abide.

- Yeah.

That's fascinating.

I guess, I also wanna talk more about that, but sort of sticking slightly with the Seattle lens and the election, I guess I'm just curious, what can you just tell listeners or viewers, I suppose, what you expect the relationship to be like between this authority and yourself and Mayor Elect Harrell, how does that relationship work going forward?

- I mean, my hope and I think Mayor Elect Harrell shares these views is that, it's a positive and collaborative relationship.

I think that the authority, the role that we should play is we are the planning and execution body around homelessness.

And what that means is, people should come to us, including mayors all 39 of them and say, "Here's the help I need.

Or here's the outcome I'm trying to get to."

And then it's our job to develop the plan and to run the plan, resources allowing.

But I think that it is absolutely appropriate as a function of democracy for elected leaders to say, "Here's what people need.

Here's what people wanna see."

And then to ask us to develop and execute on those strategies.

I do think that we need to be honest.

And there is no overnight solution.

There is no silver bullet.

We are profoundly behind.

I mean, there is no other way to say it.

And the sort of one time expenditures, just to bring us out of the hole we're in, could easily surpass a billion dollars by any analysis, our own in-house consulting firms writ large have come up with similar numbers.

And so the reality is, is that our annual budget, while people may feel like it's a lot of money is not that amount of money.

And so it isn't going to suddenly skyrocket us out of the 30 years of underinvestment that we're trying to move out of.

It will allow us to coordinate responses, to be clear about what results are expected, where they are expected to be accountable to those things.

But the reality that I think mayors in the region face, that I face in this job is there is no overnight, there's no silver bullet it's grind, it's a grind.

- So I'm sprinkling a few audience questions in, we're also gonna have a more kind of live Q&A later.

But you talked about encampments, tentcampments and that comes up a lot as you alluded to, it's a big area of concern for both the people living in those encampments and the people who cross their paths.

So this person wanted to know, I mean, could you put a realistic timeframe on how quickly people might see improvements and the people who are living in those encampments might have greater access to places to go?

- It depends on, from my perspective, from the plans that where we're going, it depends on where, and I'm gonna be very honest.

The reality of the resourcing that we have.

And frankly, again, when we talk about like, what does it mean to deploy these resources with a clear strategy is that, in candor, I think there's been a little bit of a boil the ocean attempt, and that does not work.

Not on this budget.

And so what the authority has indicated in our, talking about the work that we would like to do downtown and just sort of that broad place-based approach is that we would like to have specific areas of focus, like geographical areas of focus.

And where we say we are focused, we would like to see significant results.

Where we are not focused, I will not promise you significant change.

It is unrealistic and in candor it would be a lie.

And my job, unpopular as it may be given the day, is to tell you the truth.

And where we are not focused, our assertion at this point is like, we won't stop helping people, but the sort of dramatic reductions and the language that people use around like a visible change, there's no way to promise that, where we are not focusing the resources of the system.

And so the timeline for that is then dependent on the sequencing, like literally where you are.

And we're doing our best to sequence things out based on need, not based on anything else.

So it's, where do we see the most people experiencing unsheltered homelessness and literally like triaging and sequencing out like based on, so that we are actually, again, doing crisis response to human suffering in a like really data-driven way.

If there was more money, we would do it all faster.

- And I'll segue that into the authorities kind of first major big policy proposal is to raise $27 million for downtown focused facilities and outreach.

And so can you just talk about why that made sense to be, in your view, why that made sense to be the first kind of major policy rollout and specifically in downtown?

- By our initial analysis, there are about 800-ish people who live sort of in and around the Downtown Corridor in a semipermanent way, unsheltered.

And for a sort of neighborhood in the Seattle Metro area, that is the, by our current analysis anyway, the largest concentration of people.

Additionally, because of the way, like literally the geographic sighting of things like the King County Jail, Harborview, et cetera, a fair number of folks who are sort of semi-permanent in the Downtown Corridor have really significant needs.

And the mortality rate for someone experiencing unsheltered homelessness, and also living with schizophrenia is roughly 35.

And so, it is unethical, immoral, inappropriate to say that that is acceptable.

And that we as a government agency are cool with that.

Those folks need our help and they need our help now.

And so the proposal that we outlined to create high acuity shelter capacity, and to build a more robust ecosystem of connection to services and supports was really focused on ensuring that we could do that work, that we could do it with fidelity to known best practice, and that we could do it on a timeline that again honored a crisis as opposed to more traditional frameworks of governing.

- I've heard you say before that basically for people struggling with say schizophrenia or severe mental illness and substance abuse, there's basically nothing right now.

Is that about right?

- Yeah.

Well, I mean, and it's a little staggering.

Because like the behavioral health system is the bay of both health system, we don't oversee that.

I just, I wanna be really clear.

Anyone is asking any of those questions, just so you know, I won't be able to answer them.

But to the extent that you are experiencing, chronic homelessness and living with schizophrenia, have a psychotic spectrum illness of any kind, the reality is that the shelter system is not set up to provide you with the supports that you need, full-stop.

And so very frequently, we see those folks go into various shelter placements, and they're back out within 48, 72 hours because the shelter cannot accommodate the needs that they have.

And I wanna be really clear.

I use that framing because I don't think it's appropriate to frame it as this person is too disruptive to be here.

I think what we need to be honest about, is that the system has not created the level of support necessary for that individual.

- And so going back to your role as chief cat herder, as you said before, can you just start to talk about the challenges between creating a regional approach that's broad enough to include cities across the county, but also ensures that what you're doing is based on evidence and data and best practices as you referred to rather than sort of just purely fear or emotion?

How do you kind of capture those two things at once?

- I think the way that I often do that, a lot of my conversations start at the outcome.

What are you trying to do?

And what I find is that when you start with, where are we going?

And again, that's why I'm saying that, I think our role in the region with the mayors and the electives broadly is like, tell me where you wanna go.

And the ability to then generate an evidence-based and data-driven path to that destination is absolutely possible.

And you can metric it.

Again, you can build accountability into it.

You can build transparency into it.

And I often find that when we start with where are we trying to go, as opposed to which foot do we put in front of us first, the conversations are much easier because we actually all agree.

That's the thing about my job that is on the good days fun is that I get to talk to a lot of people who actually want what's best for this community.

And really believe that there is a different world out there possible.

And have pursued sort of various roles in government in order or in nonprofits, in order to make that world a reality.

And so when we start with that understanding of, okay, most of us actually all wanna go the same place, then walking backwards into what things do we need to get to in order to, or rather what things do we need to do in order to get there actually is not a tremendously complex process.

The other thing that I would just say is that, and this I think is true of complex systems broadly, the more that we design with a menu in mind, rather than a single pathway, the more successful we are likely to be.

Homelessness is extremely complex.

There again, there is no silver bullet.

There is no like, oh, this is right for everybody or this is wrong for everybody barring a couple of things.

There's some things that are wrong for everybody.

But that I think is also allows us to have consistent, yes and conversation, as opposed to a sort of like, well, there is the single path and we're prescribing it for every single individual.

That I think is unrealistic.

And fortunately I've not had anyone frankly say like, this is the case of universally.

- One thing we've heard a lot from city hall are about tiny home villages.

I know that you have been skeptical of their use and their approach in the past.

Can you just explain a little bit more about why?

- I think I'll clarify.

I'm not skeptical about tiny home villages as like a concept.

What I am skeptical of and have asked, to hold in reserve until there's been a review, is the significant expansion of the model.

So again, in keeping with menu, as the thing, like tiny homes absolutely do work for some people.

What I think has become troubling for me and I think others would agree, is that it has become a default to the, what are we gonna build next?

More tiny homes.

And that is the thing that I am not clear on the data-driven backing of.

What I would like to see is based on, again, the data that I reviewed is a higher throughput in the tiny homes that we currently operate.

Meaning that when you look some of the lengths of stay, they're quite long.

And my question, and it is a question, is, is that right?

Or could we be doing more to support people to move on from a tiny home and into a more permanent solution?

And, I think, and again, I'm just gonna be very, very candid.

My job is to be candid, so it's nice, but I'm gonna be very candid.

But like, part of that is a question about, is length of stay the right measure.

Those are questions that we can debate and we can debate healthily in a way that gets us to the metrics that best support people, which should, again, always be our goal.

So from my perspective, again, just for everybody watching, it is not the question of does the authority or does Marc Dones want to raise every tiny home village to the ground?

It is simply the question of, should we build eight more of them?

And it's that last piece on which I have doubt, it is not the existing stock that I question whether or not it is useful for people.

- Fascinating.

Throwing in another audience question, a lot of people talk about quote, "solving homelessness or ending homelessness".

I think of the ten-year plan to end homelessness.

Do you believe that this is possible?

And if so, what path actually exists to quote "solve homelessness"?

- I think I like this question because it allows me to double down on my favorite thing, which is like optimism.

Like we shouldn't do stuff we don't think we can do.

We should say that it is possible to end homelessness.

We should also understand that in saying, and this gets to the second part in saying, it's possible to end homelessness, we are also saying, we're gonna spend a lot more money.

We're gonna do a lot of things differently in order to get to that outcome.

But this agency and the team that we're building here believes that ending homelessness is possible and that this community deserves more.

That people who are experiencing homelessness deserve more than managing homelessness.

That's not a job I want.

I don't wanna show up every day and manage an ongoing crisis to a sort of like acceptable margin.

I think that like, again, in crisis governance, we show up to end the thing.

Crisis response is deployment based.

You go, you do it, it is done, you leave.

That's what I'd like to do here.

I don't wanna be in this job in 10 years because it shouldn't exist in this way.

But again, what that means is that the investment has to align with what I believe is actually the community desire.

I don't think that if you talk to anyone like on this I think all polling does agree of all sub populations and samples.

If you pull any random person or like, hey, what do you wanna fix?

Like most people are like, "Well, a lot of people live outside and that seems pretty bad."

And so I think it's upon...

It means that our local appropriators at the cities and the county and at the state and at the federal level, all need to do the things that we hear our community asking us to do.

Our agency feels very clear on like, again, there are evidence-based ways to do this.

What's missing is the clear and resounding investment levels necessary in order to get it done.

And what is difficult and what, again, I just think people should be really clear on is like, we are way behind.

So there is no like, oh, you got 50, more million dollars this year that makes up for the, again, billion dollar deficit, we're running from 30 years of underinvestment.

And so that is the kind of stuff that like, when we look at audacious legislative agendas, that's what we should be looking for.

- When the authority was sort of first getting set up, there was some debate around whether it should be given the authority to levy new taxes to raise new revenue.

I'm curious, can you talk about that?

Where, if we're talking about money, where should that come from?

I mean, should it be taxes?

Should it be philanthropy?

Should it be sort of rallying businesses together, all of the above?

Can you just sort of weigh in on how to raise that money?

- I mean, unsurprisingly, given the other things I've said, I'm very yes and (indistinct).

I think that there, I personally, and this is the great thing actually about voter levies is you can decide.

I personally would vote for us to spend more money on this issue.

And, were that ever crafted and put to the voters in that way, I think again, I personally would support it and we would see what everyone else thought.

I think that in the sort of private and philanthropic sector, I also think that those are folks who I think are from my understanding and from some of the conversations that I've been able to have keen, frankly, to kick more money into solution making, but have had less faith in the previous system's ability to deliver on frankly, what would be done with those investments and to what scale, et cetera, et cetera.

And so, I would say that, the only way we get to a place where we're spending the right amount of money is to weave all those strategies together to get to that right amount of money.

At this point, again, we're so far behind that there is no single thing that is going to write that check.

It's about putting all the things in the pot and getting as close as we can.

- One question we receive a lot is related to people living in RVs or in vehicles.

Does responding to vehicle based homelessness require kind of its own unique response?

And if so what does that look like?

- Oh, no 100%.

And I will say that like vehicles have to be typed in and of themselves.

People living in RVs have different needs than people who live in cars or in vans.

And I've had the pleasure of doing some street outreach with some folks who work specifically with folks living in vehicles.

I've visited a lot of safe parking programs.

Yeah, no, it absolutely requires a different response.

And what I would sort of offer up to folks is like, when you are experiencing homelessness and you have any type of vehicle, that vehicle is like your lifeline.

It is your mobility, it's where your stuff is stored.

It's really important.

And most of our system shelter or otherwise is not set up to absorb your vehicle.

So if you go to shelter, shelters don't often have like big parking lots, that's not a thing.

They may have parking for staff maybe.

Similarly like, if someone... A lot of permanent supportive housing for example, is developed without parking or without adequate parking.

And so there are just not a good entry points into the supportive service array for people who are living in vehicles.

I will also say, oftentimes those needs are different.

People have medical needs often that are brought on by living in the vehicle that require a different kind of attention.

So it just absolutely it's a different landscape with regard to need and requires its own responses.

And again, just so everybody is clear, they're not mysterious.

We can build those things, but it is a portion of the system that is hugely underdeveloped.

And so again, it would be like, well, how are we paying for it?

- I wanna get to some reader questions here in a second, but you did just say something about health.

And one thing service providers have have raised is that a lot of the homeless population is getting older and sicker.

Can you just address that?

What's the kind of and it feels, to some of those people like we're facing this kind of cliff.

What is the prognosis there?

I mean what can be done to care for these folks?

- I think you're right.

And I would actually, I would split apart portions of that.

So I would say there is the population that we have failed who have experienced chronic homelessness for a decade or more.

And the research is also varying on this.

Experiencing homelessness ages your body and in a rapidly accelerated way, because it is so hard.

And so some of the folks who we see out there, who we think, gosh, that person is super old just by looking at them, they're not.

But, we have failed people long enough that they are experiencing incredible health hardship.

And then there is another population and COVID has accelerated this where a lot of our seniors and folks who are living on fixed income with various chronic conditions have been destabilized in their housing and are entering homelessness for the first time.

The number of elderly folks that I talk to in shelters has skyrocketed in the last couple months, more than I've ever seen in my entire career.

And many of them, when I asked folks like, "Hey, how is this your first time experiencing homelessness?

Where you're coming from?"

For many of them, they're 60, 65 plus, and this is the first time.

And that is because of a pandemic and because our housing market is out of control.

So the reality is, is that the response patterning for those folks who have that level of need is different than permanent supportive housing.

Permanent supportive housing might be right for some of those folks but to your point, some of those medical needs are more acute and require a higher level of assisted living care.

And the homelessness system has not really generated anything, frankly, above permanent supportive housing historically.

And so we will need to do sort of a multi-system assessment, of like who's on first for this?

Is it us as the homelessness system?

Is it the aging and disability system?

Is it, sort of at the Medicaid level, a new classification inside long-term services and supports?

How do we do this?

I think is a policy question, but it absolutely needs to be answered because we cannot just say to people, again, 65 plus 70 with these chronic conditions, well post shelter, which is time limited, there is a plan for you.

- So moving on to some reader questions.

So these are questions that are coming in as we've been talking, filtered to me from the team behind the scenes.

So let's see here.

So from Beth Mattern, she asks, "Are there homeless people on the advising committee of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority?

- So both our governing bodies, the implementation board and the governing committee have people who have, or in some cases are currently experiencing homelessness.

We have folks with lived experience on staff.

I have lived experience of some systems.

And then we routinely, as I mentioned, like in terms of like doing outreach and stuff, we routinely just like go talk to people who are experiencing homelessness, who are living either unsheltered or in shelter settings.

And I wanna be clear like that is again, a significant shift towards running a crisis shop.

Where like you actually have to have that kind of input and feedback routinely in order to make the right decisions.

- This may be sound like an obvious question, but why is that important to have those perspectives?

- Because the situation sort of on the ground, so to speak and the experience of the thing that is being delivered can change quite rapidly.

So for example, going back to the seniors.

So the data lag on seeing the rise of elderly folks in shelters, it probably would have taken me, three to six months to see what I saw in one, by just going to places and talking to people.

And it allows me then to, like, I was able to answer your question, because I saw it the first time I began to like, sort of wrap my head around it was August, September.

Like if you just asked me that, and that was not our sort of way of doing things, I would have said, like, gosh, what an interesting question.

And then I would have like advanced for 20 minutes about a (indistinct).

But I'm able to give these concrete answers to things and say, yes, no, maybe because that loop is there and is connected.

It's also an equity and justice issue, of just like, are we making sure that people most impacted by things are close enough to them to have input, real substantive input into how they work.

- From Barbara Miller her question kind of gets at, I think some of the breakdowns you were talking about before of when we talk about people experiencing homelessness.

How much of that is, are folks who might be struggling with severe mental illness or substance use?

And how much of that are folks who just lost a job, went through a divorce, couldn't afford housing?

Do you have a good sense of that breakdown?

- No.

And I think the overlap is substantive.

And part of that is because we don't do a good job of documenting and understanding onset patterns.

Meaning, was someone's substance use or mental health issue before or after they experienced homelessness?

In many instances in the qualitative data, what you see is onset is after experience.

So it's not that someone is experiencing psychosis and so becomes homeless, is that someone is experiencing homelessness, that trauma in psychology is called the diathesis-stress model, which essentially means diathesis is a dumb, fancy Greek word for weakness.

And I do not know why we use a Greek word for that .

Really confusing to me.

I apologize.

But essentially it says that like, you might have a predisposition to something, but if the stressor never is in your life to activate it, it's never gonna happen.

And so what we see in a lot of instances is the playing out of that pattern where people apparently have a genetic predisposition, they experience homelessness, which is a catastrophic trauma, and it triggers the onset of these other things.

As opposed to, I think the popular narrative of like, I drank myself into homelessness.

We see that less.

I will say that, like, all of this often is a little bit of a red herring in the sense that, most cases of homelessness are purely economic.

Very straightforwardly, I don't have enough money.

And so we focus on a lot of these behavioral and substance use issues because they're very visible and it's very much in the popular imagination and less frankly, on the economic underpinnings of homelessness, which are, again, the vast majority of instances of homelessness are brought on by I could not pay this rent.

And the solution to that would also be straightforwardly economic.

It would be more in the way altruism, more in the way of short-term or long-term rental subsidies and less in the way of social work.

But we've really, really focused in on the social work aspect because of some of the things that we see visibly.

- You mentioned vouchers, which made me think, do you have a good sense of what's in the, Build Back Better Plan and what that would mean for King County?

- Yeah, no.

I mean like, listen, call your representatives, call whoever we should pass this thing.

It would do a lot.

The voucher allocation in the proposed legislation is significant and it would do a lot.

I wanna express and again, my job is to tell you the truth.

I wanna express concern that I have expressed to our partners in DC, that simply having a voucher is not the same as being able to use that voucher.

And income discrimination aside, the housing market is in such a state of collapse, that the question of where would you rent?

Where is the apartment you would rent?

That's actually the question that many jurisdictions are needing to ask now, before they even talk about income discrimination.

And that is certainly the case for Seattle Metro and large swaths of King County at this point.

Even with a voucher where you will go is really, that's not clear.

So we need to be having a conversation about what it means to address the supply side dynamics of housing, which is why and housing speculation, frankly, which is why the market is in such a meltdown.

And we simply have not done that regulatory work at the federal level.

- Thanks for that detour.

Back to audience question.

I like this one from Sharada Washington in Lacey asks, if you were king for a day, how would you reconstruct systems of governance to make them interconnect and support the systems you constructed?

- Okay.

So one new levy idea make me king.

Our systems need to be built around people.

So how I approach this is systems should measure their work on whether or not it promotes thriving, not whether or not it gets to some whatever arbitrary outcome they have indicated they'd like to see.

So for example, in our system, the thing that has been prioritized for years is exits to housing, which sounds great.

It sounds like a really good thing.

But I have no idea based on the data that's currently collected, whether or not that was like a good exit, a bad exit.

We know that people are often placed in housing and then come back and that's because we don't measure things like thriving.

And is it good for the person?

And so I think that like all of our governing and all of our systems need to be restructured with thriving and sort of that whole person lands at the center and then built out of that in a more organic way that would then allow us to frankly de silo in ways that were substantive.

- Thriving, as opposed to?

What's the sort of opposite?

- High school diploma.

The things that we identify as positive outcomes are ostensibly on the path to various forms of things that might be good for you making more money, whatever.

And some of those things like being inside, having a house, that's a good thing.

But there is a quality question there that we often sidestep or ignore entirely.

Similarly, high school diploma attainment, we've driven the number of high school diploma havers, way up but we have avoided the conversation about the quality of that diploma.

Which then feeds into all the kinds of variances you see in college admission.

Because colleges know that there's differences in quality.

And so they get to choose.

When, in reality that should not be the structure.

The structure should be oriented towards the thriving of the individual, which may or may not have a high school diploma in that pathway.

- This one comes from Chloe Mo who asks, where do the non-profits doing the work fit into this communication loop with the cities and in this organization?

- I think that the... We have a really robust and growing set of working groups with those nonprofits.

Our initial working groups are focused on some things that are a particular concern to us from a policy perspective.

So it's high acuity needs, vehicular needs and outreach is the third big bucket for us right now.

But we try to stay in really routine communication with those providers, the nonprofits, and particularly the staff again, who are doing that work.

That's part of that like ground level to strategy feedback.

- Sherrilyn Crowder, Seattle asks and you, I think kind of alluded to some of this before, but how confident are you in the data that you have on hand and what type of data are missing?

- The data that we have, I am confident in, there is, I think oftentimes though the question that we should be asking is like, does that data answer the questions we have?

And the answer is no.

So like if you asked me a question about things that we collect data on, I'd be able to say like, oh, that's true.

I know the answer to that.

But can we answer the questions we need to be answering?

Eh kinda.

What I would like to get to from a data perspective, we call it a by-name list.

But essentially, we need to know everybody in the county who is experiencing homelessness, we need to know their name.

We also need to know where they are, what their needs are, what the case plan for that is and like, how is that going?

That's the level of data granularity that we're after, in order to be able to really hold up transparently what's going on.

And then also frankly, hold ourselves accountable to whether or not we've had any impact.

- This question, I'm not sure who the person asking this question is, but it relates to the billion dollars in underfunding that you mentioned.

This person asks have other major cities been funding, or I suppose through your lens underfunding at this level?

And if not, why do we have what seems to be such a larger challenge in Seattle?

- Other communities have been underfunding at essentially this level.

It's always a question of scale though.

So like underfunding in Louisville is different than underfunding in King County.

And so Louisville's under investment, I don't know it off hand, I'm sorry, might be $300 million instead of a billion.

So it's this question of scale.

And I would say the answer is broadly yes.

Everybody's underfunded and has been underfunding for years and it's one of the reasons why, whenever someone is like, oh, well, like who's solved this?

Who can we look at am?

I'm always like that's not a real thing.

- People talk about Salt Lake City a lot it seems like.

- Salt Lake City, so oftentimes the community is that folks who lift up have hit functional zero for our sub population.

So it means that like they have functionally, which we do not have time to explain right now, but email me, if you wanna know, they have functionally reached zero on veterans homelessness or unsheltered homelessness.

That is not the same thing as ending homelessness I wanna be super clear and oftentimes I partner with some of the folks who lead some of the various initiatives across the country, in that space.

And oftentimes those subpopulation functional zeros are driven by administrative changes to behavior like consolidating into a single entity or appointing a command center working group or something like that, that drives a culture of continuous improvement around the activities.

But that is different from saying this community whole, full-stop, ended all forms of homelessness.

No one is outside.

That does not exist.

We have not built a policy landscape or frankly, a country that supports that outcome as a goal.

- And we are pretty close out of time so I will grab one more from Ellen, which is the sort of citizens involvement question.

How is your average citizen supposed to help?

- I think there are two main ways our average citizens can help.

One is like call your appropriators.

I just think that like, it's like, you should let folks know, particularly at the state and federal level, we gotta spend the money if we want to actually help people that's a real straightforward calculation.

Permanent supportive housing, like one unit costs about $24,000 a year.

That is significantly less than it costs to incarcerate someone, or it costs for them to live outside and cycle through various emergency departments.

And oftentimes people are like, well, that's still a lot of money.

And my response to that is like, okay, but like, let's look at our own households.

Are we running those on $24,000 a year?

No.

It's actually not that much money.

And so we need to start saying like the results we want, we need to pay for, and they need to be prioritized by our legislators because that's how democracy works.

The other thing that I would lift up is, and this is a little silly, but community conversation matters.

And the narrative in this community is quite toxic and super polarized.

And so, host a lunch and learn for your neighbors, convene your block to have a conversation about homelessness, invite us, we'll come.

But we have to start to deescalate the heroes and villains and silver bullet narratives that we're in so that we can actually do the work.

And how that happens is frankly, that is the work of again, people talking to their neighbors, not the work of an agency promulgating policy.

- Great.

Well, Marc, this has been a lovely conversation.

We really appreciate you being here.

We are out of time, unfortunately.

So just wanna say thanks so much for taking the time.

- Thank you.

And again, please reach out anyone who watched, anyone who hears and hope to chat with you all again sometime soon.

- Perfect.

Thanks and goodbye.

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