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Tune in now to hear the Seattle council& #39;s frustration with the mayor& #39;s office explaining what "non-congregate" shelter means, when what they asked was whether the mayor& #39;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& #39;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& #39;s virtually nothing new here; it& #39;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& #39;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& #39;t have at my fingertips right now."
