Red Lion protesters wanted FEMA funds used to house people experiencing homelessness in hotels. Why hasn’t Thurston done that?
The chief demand of the group Oly Housing Now, which briefly occupied the Red Lion Inn hotel on a Sunday afternoon a month ago, was for Thurston County to apply for funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “for non-congregate shelter for people who are 65+ years old or who have pre-existing health conditions.”
That language comes directly from FEMA itself, which announced a few days prior that following President Biden’s executive order, the agency would reimburse 100% of costs associated with certain COVID response measures, including non-congregate sheltering of high-risk groups. (FEMA later clarified that the reimbursement would date back retroactively to the beginning of the pandemic.)
Oly Housing Now was widely condemned by local elected officials, not only for their tactics — which allegedly included threatening hotel staff — but also for their demands, which council member Renata Rollins, herself a vocal advocate for people experiencing homelessness, called “staggeringly out of touch.”
Several other demands, such as providing sanitation resources to encampments and a call to “stop the sweeps,” were largely things the city is already doing, Rollins pointed out.
She’s mostly correct: The city hasn’t swept a tent encampment since the Fourth Avenue Bridge in December 2019, although the state Department of Enterprise Services forced the removal of dozens of RVs off Deschutes Parkway this past summer, and the city of Olympia planned to remove an RV settlement from Ensign Road in October, before the Attorney General stepped in with a letter advising that it may violate the governor’s eviction moratorium.
And yet, despite the firestorm created by the Red Lion incident, there’s been little discussion of the FEMA reimbursement opportunity, which has been available for nearly a year, and which several states, including California, North Carolina, and Delaware have succeeded in accessing to support their creation of non-congregate shelter programs that use hotel rooms to shelter high-risk populations.
Last April, King County took action to “de-intensify” its shelters as part of a broader shift in its homeless response strategy, in part by moving more than 1,000 people from high-density homeless shelters into rooms at three hotels in Renton, SeaTac, and Bellevue. It added a fourth site later.
According to a University of Washington research study published in December, it worked: Moving people to hotels reduced COVID-19 transmission rates compared to those who remained in congregate shelters — and it also improved the overall physical and mental health of individuals. The study found fewer incidents of 911 calls to the facilities and higher rates of transitioning to permanent housing.
“Providers and participants overwhelmingly found this to be a positive change,” said Christina McHugh, who leads a team of researchers that studies housing and homelessness for King County and worked as a co-principal investigator on the study.
The total cost of the four hotel shelters was $1.9 million per month at the time of the study, according to Sherry Hamilton, spokesperson for the King County Department of Community and Human Services. That roughly $22 million cost since last April was paid for out of county funds, grants from the state Department of Commerce, and federal Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), Hamilton said.
That number includes the cost of expanded wraparound services that Hamilton says are critical to the program’s success. In two instances, the county relocated entire shelters by moving people to hotel rooms — and shelter staff, case managers, and other service providers moved over with them.
“In all of the cases where we created hotel [shelters], we also had 24/7 services onsite,” Hamilton said. “So that’s part of the success of this. These were individuals who needed a safe place to be, but also needed onsite services.”
King County is now using the county general fund to continue paying for the hotels, but those reserves will run out at the end of March, according to Hamilton. She did not say if the program will end after March, but indicated in an email to The Olympian that there will be “difficult discussions” ahead if no more state or federal funds become available.
Although King County’s hotel sheltering efforts made use of FEMA reimbursements, the program wasn’t premised on that funding source, because it needed to be paid for upfront and because the timeline for repayment is unclear, according to Brendan McCluskey at the King County Office of Emergency Management.
However, King County has billed the federal government for $97 million in expenses related to non-congregate sheltering, and has already received $21 million in reimbursements from FEMA by requesting an “expedited project review,” McCluskey said. (That number likely includes other de-intensification steps the county took, such as creating a quarantine and isolation facility, implementing physical-distancing in existing shelters, and providing separate, individual vouchers for hotel rooms at other hotels besides the four that were converted to shelters.)
One crucial point for counties looking to follow King County’s example: FEMA will not reimburse for expenses paid for with other federal funds, such as CARES Act dollars, which they consider a “duplication of benefits.”
As other federal funds dry up, these complexities have made cities skittish about taking full advantage of FEMA’s offer: the city of Seattle recently declined a request to fund JustCARE, a program run by the Public Defender Association that has moved over 100 people into hotels with now-expired federal and county funding.
Kamaria Hightower, spokesperson for Mayor Jenny Durkan, told Crosscut that the city could not rely on FEMA reimbursements. “It’s not any easy resource to access,” Hightower said. “This funding is really precarious.”
Can Thurston replicate King County’s success?
In response to the question of why Thurston County hasn’t replicated King County’s program, Thurston County Public Health Director Schelli Slaughter said the county has in fact taken steps to compensate for the loss of shelter beds due to physical distancing measures.
A total of 65 households have been moved to hotel rooms long-term over the past year, according to housing program manager Tom Webster. The county has spent about $400,000 on hotel rooms since April 2020, through funding to Family Support Center of the South Sound, which currently supports 23 households staying in hotel rooms, totaling 81 people. Some of those funds also went to Safeplace, a domestic violence shelter, for hotel stays of a few days.
The county paid for the hotel rooms initially with CARES Act money, but is now using a different federal grant allocated through the state Department of Commerce.
Slaughter said that the county is pursuing FEMA reimbursements for certain COVID-response expenses that are now, since 2021, being paid for with county dollars (such as the isolation and quarantine facility) but described FEMA as a “funder of last resort.”
“You have to exhaust all other funding sources available to you prior to seeking reimbursement [from FEMA],” Slaughter said. “It’s not like there’s a grant that we didn’t apply for that we could have.”
In Thurston County’s case, they had $15.7 million in CARES Act funding last year — $6.4 million went to Public Health — as well as state grants from the Department of Commerce that could only be spent on emergency shelter. Slaughter said that federal money had to be spent before FEMA reimbursements could kick in.
Significantly more federal money was spent to fund existing emergency shelters to expand from nightly to 24/7 access ($3.1 million), as well as funding service providers to supply food, hygiene, and survival supplies to encampments ($660,000), including money for the city of Olympia to put dumpsters and port-a-potties next to encampments.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the county prioritized bringing resources to encampments to help people shelter-in-place “in a spirit of prevention,” according to Thurston County Homeless Prevention Coordinator Keylee Marineau.
“When more CARES Act dollars came in, they were distributed to make sure that those [outreach] projects can stay up and running,” Marineau said.
Asked if hotels were a possibility, Marineau said it was a good idea in theory, but to do it effectively would entail providing wraparound services over a long-term period. It’s not as simple as just putting people in hotels and leaving them there, she said.
That would require staffing. Many local service providers — some of whom have doubled or tripled their capacity since the pandemic began — have said that they’re tapped out and likely wouldn’t be able to take on such a large project.
“They are awesome ideas — I’m all for it,” Marineau said. “But if we turn this into a program, [hotels rooms] are the very, very first step. Then there’s all the other considerations. How long? If it’s a temporary situation and everybody gets 60 days in the hotel, what happens after those 60 days? Are you going to put them back in their encampment, or do you have a plan to provide them with wraparound services to get them into housing?”
Lessons for other counties
As King County prepares to scale up its use of hotels — the county recently announced plans to buy as many as a dozen to use as permanent housing — the University of Washington study offers lessons for other municipalities, even those with significantly less resources.
“We know that not every community is going to be able to up and purchase hotels overnight, but there might be design elements that you can integrate more easily into whatever your existing shelter system looks like,” McHugh said.
Beyond the intuitive benefits of a hotel room — access to a shower, bathroom, laundry, etc — the most common things people said made a difference were consistent access to food, 24/7 security, and “designated personal space.” Having a modicum of privacy and somewhere to store belongings made participants feel safer and more secure.
“All of this sort of adds up together to greater stability,” McHugh said.
This story was originally published March 4, 2021 at 5:45 AM.
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