Posted on April 6, 2023

First, they removed the tents. Then, they added police. But the problems on Third Avenue persisted.

A few months ago, officials spun up a new effort to try to bring order to the area of downtown Seattle that arguably most lacks it.

The Third Avenue Project uses a constant presence in a few key blocks to connect people on the streets with pathways out, and to curtail behavior that’s deemed problematic to others.

This is the second initiative started in 2022 to move people occupying the streets of downtown to more appropriate places, the first being the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s Partnership for Zero, which seeks to end unsheltered homelessness downtown and in the Chinatown International District.

The dual approach is partly due to the urgency officials feel to help downtown recover.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said in his State of the City address in February, “If we don’t create a safe, welcoming downtown for everyone, everything else we do will fall flat.”

Amid a slow start to the Partnership for Zero, which began a year ago and has mostly focused on encampments on the outskirts of downtown so far, Harrell backed the Third Avenue Project.

This effort isn’t all about homelessness.

The Third Avenue Project places a stronger emphasis on public safety, trying to address the drug use, sale of stolen goods, severe mental illness and fights that characterize Third Avenue.

“Homelessness and public safety are often intertwined, but they’re not the same thing,” said Senior Deputy Mayor Monisha Harrell.

Officials designed the Third Avenue Project under the assumption that not everyone in the area was homeless. But after a few months, project staff have found more than 90% of people there lack shelter or housing. And they say access to beds is the main bottleneck to fixing the area.

The Third Avenue Project and the Regional Homelessness Authority are now integrating their efforts.

When police are not enough

Momentum for the Third Avenue Project began to build as pandemic restrictions began winding down and businesses that had closed temporarily opened their doors again. Business owners reported shoplifting, windows being broken and their customers and employees being harassed.

Reports of stolen and destroyed property around Third Avenue doubled between 2019 and 2022 and drug-related offenses rose 40%. This is in an area that has been a hotbed of disorder for decades, where about a quarter of all reported crimes downtown happen, according to data from the Seattle Police Department.

Businesses started calling Seattle officials for help, which Monisha Harrell said the mayor’s office heard “loud and clear.”

“If we can fix Third Avenue, the rest of downtown is going to fall into place,” said Seattle City Councilmember Andrew Lewis.

In March 2020, Seattle had paused nearly all encampment removals to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. During that time, the number of tents in the downtown core grew, ballooning into the hundreds.

JustCARE, a coalition of homelessness service providers, moved 64 people inside between 2021 and 2022 who had been living in major encampments in the area. The city’s Unified Care Team also removed tents while offering people shelter in 2022.

A year ago, there were about 140 tents, now there are fewer than a dozen, according to a count by the Downtown Seattle Association.

Seattle police also began stationing more officers in the area in March 2022 to tamp down on drug-related crime and violence.

But Lewis said an incident in August 2022, where a man beat another man to death in front of a police officer near Third Avenue and Pike, showed that an increased police presence wasn’t enough.

In reaction, his office met with the mayor’s office, JustCARE partners, Seattle police, the Downtown Seattle Association and some business leaders to come up with a new approach. Out of those conversations, the city signed a $2.4 million contract for the Third Avenue Project last November. The funding runs out at the end of 2023.

Another homelessness project?

Lewis said that while the Regional Homelessness Authority’s Partnership for Zero was still ramping up, “we wanted to move quicker, and at our own pace as a city, with our public safety obligations.”

Authority CEO Marc Dones said that due to limited resources, Partnership for Zero decided to work on static encampments at the periphery of downtown first. Now, with the larger encampments downtown nearly resolved, Dones said the authority would soon switch gears to connect with the unhoused population in that area who are more mobile.

Dones also said the issues on Third Avenue are “not straightforwardly housing issues.” And data backs that up.

About half the people on Third Avenue whose “behavior was of concern” are engaged in sales of drugs or stolen property, according to Lisa Daugaard, co-director of Purpose Dignity Action, formerly known as the Public Defender Association, which oversees the Third Avenue Project. Daugaard said the numbers come from an assessment of the area by outreach workers.

“The animating factor is that people need to make money,” Daugaard said. “That’s not susceptible to existing methodologies. Nobody has a program for that.”

Daugaard said the assessment also found that 20% of people who spend time on Third Avenue sleep in other places but go there to buy and use drugs.

Sean Blackwell, who works on the Third Avenue Project for case management nonprofit LEAD, describes Third as less like an encampment and more like a “hangout center.”

How the project works

Housing and shelter is the biggest need and much of the work is done by organizations that specialize in homelessness and its symptoms.

An organization called We Deliver Care patrols Third Avenue from 6 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. every day in the four blocks between Stewart Street and University Street, often extending to Second and Fourth avenues.

They ask people to move from the entryways of businesses, break up fights and administer naloxone when people have overdosed. We Deliver Care’s patrols also perform outreach.

“The major strategy for Third Avenue Project is to be present in the zone and have that presence itself play a role in changing what it feels like out there,” Daugaard said.

We Deliver Care is supplemented by a behavioral health response team from the homelessness-services nonprofit Downtown Emergency Service Center. The Third Avenue Project found that 10% of people in the area with problematic behaviors had severe mental illness. Other homelessness service agencies LEAD and REACH also meet with clients on the street and work with people on their substance use, sometimes suggesting legal substances as an alternative.

Of the 463 people We Deliver Care had connected with on Third Avenue, 92% said they needed shelter or housing. From December through the end of March, the Third Avenue Project referred 140 people to services, including 59 recommendations to the city’s HOPE team for shelter. Only six had been offered shelter.

“We just don’t have those beds or doors or homes or whatever for them to go into so there’s a daily frustration around that,” said Stephenie Wheeler-Smith, co-founder of We Deliver Care.

Daugaard said in the next few weeks, up to 10 people will move into hotels managed by a homelessness nonprofit. The Regional Homelessness Authority said it has started working with the Third Avenue Project to provide housing resources from Partnership for Zero, beginning with the people both initiatives have already made contact with.

Original Article: Third Avenue Project seeks to quell disorder downtown