As Redmond residents rightly push back against a permanent supportive housing project, Seattle media has taken sides. As usual, they’re on the wrong side again.
Permanent supportive housing is often confused with affordable housing projects. It is actually a fully subsidized housing program offered to the chronically homeless. The free apartments are coupled with wraparound services to address the root causes of an individual’s homelessness and their inability to keep a job.
While permanent supportive housing programs, under the housing first model, claim to bar drugs, they do not search rooms for illicit substances. The on-site stafftheir residents are drug addicts. They just won’t judge them for it. Plymouth effectively helps users get high under the “harm reduction” model, which provides clean drug paraphernalia to mitigate the risks of spreading disease.
“What makes this testimony even more concerning is that Redmond isn’t proposing a tent city encampment, an RV lot, a methadone clinic or any of the other more controversial projects in the human services arena. It’s an apartment building designed to get people out of the shelters,” he wrote, portraying his ignorance.
Both Westneat and Hocker use the same argument to shame critics. Westneat quotes a formerly homeless drug addict who complained that you can’t tell the homeless not to set up tentsnot to live in apartments. Hocker included council public comment from a woman who repeated virtually the same thing. That this argument impresses local media isn’t shocking; their reporting indicates they think they’ve caught critics in some “gotcha” moment of hypocrisy. But it’s not hypocritical.
Residents in Redmond are right to push back. They’re smart enough to know that this housing project will be nothing but trouble. It will, like it has in Seattle. The progressives who most favor these policies are themselves the red flags.