SEATTLE — Jacqueline Martin walked through the doors of Seattle’s Navigation Center the day the homeless shelter opened. The shelter promised a wide range of resources and, hopefully, faster placements in housing for people like Martin, who had lived in one of the city’s many tent camps.
In her time there, she joined a women’s group, honed her skills as a public speaker for the Real Change Homeless Empowerment Project and remained focused on her dream of becoming an attorney.
But she, like most Navigation Center residents, has not achieved the shelter’s mission — finding housing. More than 150 days after her arrival, Martin is still living at the shelter, a stay more than twice as long as city officials say homeless clients should remain there.
The Navigation Center is a new link in Seattle’s strategy to move people out of tent camps and into housing. Enhanced shelters like the Navigation Center are beginning to replace the traditional mats-on-the-floor model that dominated Seattle’s shelter system for years. They’re designed to be more attractive to people living in tent camps, with more lenient policies about who can live there.
But a few months into the Navigation Center experiment, that strategy is proving difficult to execute.
Navigation Center clients are, on average, staying longer than the 60-day limit agreed upon between the city and the Downtown Emergency Service Center, the nonprofit contracted to operate the facility.
Of the 118 people who’ve gone through the Navigation Center since it opened July 12, 41 percent have been there longer than 90 days. Only 13 left the shelter for housing.
The DESC and city officials say the center is still in its early stages and that they are working out the challenges. They agree that people can’t stay there indefinitely.
But they disagree on why clients struggled to exit into housing within the 60-day limit. The DESC points to the glaring lack of affordable housing in Seattle, a city of skyrocketing rents and home prices.
“The community needs housing for people,” said Daniel Malone, the DESC’s executive director. “We can’t innovate out of the scale of the problem.”
City officials agree, but also note that the DESC did not operate the Navigation Center fully staffed when it opened in the summer.
The Navigation Center’s performance will be an important measure as the city plans to put $4.4 million into enhanced shelter beds next year. The shift is based on the theory that enhanced shelters, which have social services and case management, more swiftly direct people to permanent housing and open space for others.
It’s lost on no one, including Martin herself, that the Navigation Center is just the latest try-anything experiment in a city with a homelessness population that’s growing.
“It’s not perfect. It’s probably never going to be perfect,” Martin said of the Navigation Center. “But what it is is a work in progress. Just like the people that are living here.”
The 75-bed Navigation Center occupies both stories of a nondescript former office building in the city’s Little Saigon neighborhood. Clients are referred there by the city’s Navigation Team, a collection of outreach workers and police officers who connect people living in homeless camps to resources and shelter.
The building interior is mostly spare, except for a Christmas tree and festive decorations in the lobby. Recently, the artist Louie Gong held a show there and decorated the building with work by different artists.
Among the resources for shelter residents are a small batch of computers and a bookcase filled by the Seattle Public Library. Next to the shelf is a small plastic bin — one of more than 50 containers scattered throughout the building where clients can dispose of hypodermic needles.
