What is the face of homelessness in South Kitsap County?
Is it that man dressed in tattered clothes asking for funds at an area intersection? An abandoned woman with a couple of children to feed and no place to live? Or is it a well-dressed and decidedly middle-class family suddenly hit — like a shot in the dark — by their breadwinner’s unexpected job loss?
Kirsten Jewell, a human services coordinator for Kitsap County’s Department of Human Services, says all of those scenarios make up the mosaic of people who, through their own set of personal and family crises, find themselves without proper shelter.
She is leading an effort to get a better understanding of the people in Kitsap County who are dealing with homelessness through a revised Homeless Housing Plan.
The plan originated in 2005 from a piece of Washington state legislation passed that year, called the Homeless Housing and Assistance Act. It mandated that every county in the state address the issue of homelessness by creating its own housing plan.
The Department of Human Services is revising the Kitsap Homeless Housing Plan, a comprehensive plan addressing the needs of those without shelter and proposing strategies to assist them.
Over the summer, Jewell and her colleagues have met with governmental groups across the county — including the Port Orchard City Council July 28 — to brief them about feedback and data they’ve collected so far during their information-gathering effort.
Jewell said the department chose to revise Kitsap’s plan this year so it could better align with other city and county comprehensive plan updates. She said the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development also is updating its community development block-grant funding plan.
“We want to align with all of these planning efforts to be consistent,” she said.
The county’s homeless housing plan is scheduled to be finalized and ready for another round of reviews this fall by governmental groups.
“Over the next year, our elected leaders, service providers and stakeholders will identify some of the action steps we will have in that plan,” Jewell said. “That’s going to require a lot of people to participate in this process from different sectors to figure out the details of how we implement some of the action items.”
The reasons for homelessness in this otherwise prosperous, stable community are complex and not easy to either define or address, she said.
While some people who find themselves homeless are afflicted with mental illness or other chronic conditions that often defies easy solutions, many Kitsap County residents without a home are victims of socio-economic factors. Jewell said the recession created a new class of homeless people with no previous history of job loss.
Many homeless people are part of the working poor who live in an environment in which minimum-wage incomes can’t stretch to ensure they have a roof over their heads.
“Even though the unemployment rate is declining as a whole, a lot of the jobs here in Kitsap County are not considered living wages,” Jewell said.
“We need greater economic development to create a greater base of employment opportunities for people here,” Jewell said.
But as Jewell reminded, a comprehensive plan is a roadmap to success. But, ultimately, it will take adequate resources for it to be successful.
“That’s our biggest obstacle — not enough resources. Over the last five or so years, we’ve seen shrinking state and federal investments in homeless and affordable housing programs due to the recession.
“Coming up with good solutions is one thing, but being able to carry them out requires resources,” she said.
The Independent will address other aspects of the homelessness issue in coming editions. Next up: Identifying the numbers of those affected isn’t an easy task.
