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Tune in now to hear the Seattle council's frustration with the mayor's office explaining what "non-congregate" shelter means, when what they asked was whether the mayor's office will continue resisting calls for the city to put homeless people in hotels, not mass shelter.
Tiny house village encampments, which were already redefined as "shelter" (boosting the city's apparent sheltered population without actually moving anyone or adding shelter) are now considered "non-congregate" shelter, i.e. shelter that is even better than regular shelter.
The federal COVID funding that the city is receiving will pay for already-funded tiny house villages, not for new shelter, city budget director Ben Noble confirms. There's virtually nothing new here; it's shifting money around, not additive.
An additional ~5M (for which a request for proposals is out) will also backfill funding for mass shelter redistribution sites that have already been stood up. These are not new beds, or a new type of beds—just relocated mass basic shelters where beds are set further apart.
A staffer from the budget office says this isn't the only funding; that there is another $50 million in emergency grant funding that is coming through and could be spent on the things council members and homeless advocates have been asking for for months.
A question @CMTMosqueda raises: Given the news that COVID-19 can likely linger in the air and transmit within enclosed spaces, why does the city still insist that "mass shelter, but 6 feet apart" is sufficient to keep people safe?
Mosqueda asks how many additional beds all the funding, including both new and allocated for this year, will create. A city budget staffer says that question requires "a bit of a nuanced response that I don't have at my fingertips right now."
