Staffing Support Services: Lifestyle Choice?

Yesterday's meeting of the Single Adults Subcommittee of the CEHKC was interesting. There was a long discussion of the use of carrels for interim and long-term housing, meaning partitioned off living spaces. So, more privacy than side-by-side mats on the floor or beds next to one another, but less than walls and locks would provide.

Bill Hobson, the director of DESC, said that a part of the permanent housing at 1811 Eastlake consists of carrels, and required approval from the Seattle Department of Planning and Development (DPD) in 2000. Three thoughts.

1) I didn't know about the carrels. I thought all the units were studios. Huh.

2) I thought that it would have been the Department of Design, Construction and Land Use (DCLU) that had to approve. After the meeting I looked up the DPD on the internet and found out it's the new name of the DCLU. Who told them they could change their name any time they felt like it without notifying the rest of us? What, keeping me informed isn't a high priority? When did I lose my citizenship? Who is it that's so important that they're spending all their time informing them and don't have time left over to tell peons like me? Oh, sure, they can tell Bill Hobson.

3) Why did the DPD/DCLU sign off on the carrels as permanent housing, when homeless people have been trying to get deals like this for decades and always been turned down? I will try to learn the answer to this question sometime in the near future.

In another vein, someone raised the concern that as more and more low-income housing is lost in Seattle, we may find ourselves without housing for the staff members of our housing projects.

So, the fear would be, we'll solve homelessness in the sense of putting the existing homeless all into housing by the time the ten years are up, but then all the staff needed to supply the services at that housing won't be able to find housing.

So we'll have to start a Ten Year Plan To House The Staff Required To Make the Ten Year Plan To End Homelessness Work.

King County will get CEHSSSHPKC: the Committee to End the Homelessness of Supportive Services Staff of Homeless Housing Projects of King County.

Since I was once a janitor for a homeless shelter, I might be asked to serve on a population subcommittee of the CEHSSSHPKC. I could serve on the SASWHABHTS: the Single Adults Staff Who Have Also Been Homeless Themselves Subcommittee.

Of course, Mike Lowry and Ron Sims will know more about my needs than I will, so they will have the all-important votes on the Governing Board of the CEHSSSHPKC. But I will get a stipend, so everything will even out.

Alternatively, it was suggested we could hire more (or mostly) homeless staff, so no one new would be made homeless. Of course then they'd have to change the name from the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness, to the Ten Year Plan to Implement SHARE/WHEEL's Mission.