Westneat: Allowing drug use at homeless camps risky strategy

When I was there on a recent weekday, about a dozen people using and selling drugs congregated behind the camp, on a street fronted by rows of town houses.

Maybe this camp was just put in the wrong place, as north Aurora has long struggled with street crime. Maybe it wasn’t managed well. Or maybe, as the city says now, there weren’t enough treatment services or professional staff.

Or: Maybe having camps in the city where people are allowed to use drugs is not a great idea?

I bring this up because Seattle is about to open another one, called Lake Union Village, at Eighth and Aloha streets in the burgeoning tech neighborhood. The proposed rule there is that residents will be allowed to drink or use drugs as long as they don’t do it in the camp’s common spaces.

Having places to send chronic street addicts is a crucial piece of any homelessness-response strategy. Seattle got mocked nationally for liberal nuttiness a decade ago when a nonprofit here built a “wet” apartment building for street alcoholics — “bunks for drunks” it was called. But this “housing first” approach — get a home first, tackle your problems second — has proved not only to work, but to be cheaper in the long run than rushing homeless addicts to the emergency room over and over again.

But central to the whole premise of housing first is the word “housing.” I’m a longtime booster of tent cities and tiny house villages as a step up from sleeping under a bridge. But they are not housing. They’re basically campgrounds.

They’re not as stable as a shelter facility or apartment building. As a result, the encampments that have been successful over the years have had some pretty strict rules. No drinking, no drugs, no late-night guests and so on.

Seattle is in a bind

It’s pretty obvious what went wrong at the Licton Springs Village. The camp itself seems to be fine. But it’s essentially a safe injection site for drugs, yet also an outdoor camp with a chain-link fence as its only barrier to the outside world. It’s not a shock that drug dealers have flocked there.

The federal government, via the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, already cautions against tent cities and tiny house villages because they are unstable environments. Given that, it seems way too much to ask for the camps to handle the issue of chemical dependency, too.

Seattle admittedly is in a bind here. They can’t send drug addicted homeless folks to most shelters, but it’s also a catastrophe to leave them on the street. Building new “low barrier” shelters takes money and time. So they’re aiming for a cheaper, temporary solution in the middle.

The first try didn’t work; the one in South Lake Union is scheduled to open next month, with extra counseling and treatment. Hopefully for the good of all it will work out better. But the worry is that by doing drug housing on the cheap like this, the city could end up giving the entire premise of “housing first” a bad name.