Homelessness - Colleen Echohawk

Candidate homelessness link

• Announce a Deputy Mayor to focus exclusively on homelessness.
• Establish a Rapid Emergency Housing Headquarters run out of the Executive Offices on the 6th floor of City Hall.
• Recruit a team of emergency housing experts to coordinate hotel and property acquisition, purchasing, on-site support services, data analysis, external relations, and applications for philanthropic grants, state dollars, and federal funding.
• Coordinate an all City response by creating an interdepartmental team with one representative from every City department to be chaired by Colleen Echohawk and the new Deputy Mayor of Homelessness.
• Appoint a Mayoral designee to the Emergency Operations Center.
• Draft and execute a contract with the Regional Homelessness Authority to set up a coordinated team of 100 outreach workers with lived experience.
• Identify and begin negotiations with hotels, tiny homes, modular housing manufacturers, and property for safe lots for temporary emergency housing.
• Make a Citywide call for a Volunteer Corps to help plan, implement, and assemble emergency housing and services that will facilitate true mutual aid.
• Launch a capital campaign to have large corporations, funder collaboratives, civic and local philanthropic organizations, and foundations share the responsibility of funding and executing this plan.
• Temporarily activate Seattle’s Emergency Operations Center to coordinate interdepartmental and multi-jurisdictional communication and response.
• Begin moving unsheltered people into hotels.
• Deploy outreach workers to circulate throughout the community.
• Issue an Executive Order to suspend the 72 hour rule for removal of vehicles until we establish safe lots with access to food, case management, and services.
• Aggressively expand emergency housing at scale by procuring tiny homes, modular housing, and sanitation stations for safe lots.
• Start developing a real-time By Name List for every single homeless person in Seattle.
• Expand on-demand mental health and substance abuse treatment.
• Create a transparency dashboard and produce reports to track progress and stay accountable.
• Update existing surplus City property inventory for emergency housing and permanent housing.
• Develop a government to government emergency task force to coordinate a regional response with Tribes, the State of Washington, neighboring counties and cities.
• Begin identifying and negotiating to purchase hotels outside the downtown core for retrofitting for temporary and permanent housing.
• Begin bringing safe lots online no later than March 1.
• Begin construction and deployment of emergency shelters no later than April 1.