City of Olympia takes a new tack with Plum Street Village residents: Jobs are the priority | Opinion

On Jan. 1, a small but important revolution will take place at the City of Olympia’s Plum Street Village. Its 29 tiny houses for homeless adults will be under new management, with a new purpose. Valeo Vocation, a Tacoma nonprofit staffing agency that helps previously homeless people prepare for and get jobs, will be in charge.

Olympia’s Economic Development Director Mike Reid writes, “In very plain speak what that means is that all of the residents that are living in Plum Street Village are expected to be in pursuit of workforce development, career advancement, or professional education,” and the budget will be spent on “ workforce programming expense, tuition, and wages to the residents of the village.”

“This is a new and unique approach to tiny home village management for the City of Olympia” that includes “an investment in the individual resident to build or rebuild the skills necessary to be able to afford to move into independent living,” Reid wrote.

To this we say hallelujah, Happy New Year, and it’s about time.

There’s a reason this hasn’t been done for the past 20 years or more: Federal policy that rested on two pillars.

• The first was “housing first,” which is a come-as-you-are approach that upended previous requirements that people with severe mental illnesses and/or addictions get treatment and become clean, sober, and non-psychotic before they were eligible for housing.

• The second principle — also a break from the last century — was that housing should be offered first to those deemed most at risk of dying on the street. That meant people who were chronically homeless, with significant mental illness, physical illness or disability, and often an active addiction or a history of being a victim of domestic violence. A screening questionnaire rated people on how severely they were affected by these factors, and those with the highest scores were first in line for nearly all publicly funded shelter or housing.

Both of these ideas made sense when they were adopted. Before they became enshrined in federal, state and local public policies, the reverse had been true: The public and nonprofit organizations that served people who were homeless had incentives to serve those most likely to succeed: people with the fewest barriers to sobriety, stability, good health, employment and financial independence. Successful clients were the measure of the housing providers’ effectiveness.

However, that approach too often left people with severe mental illness, disabilities, and/or the disease of addiction out in the cold.

So putting the most vulnerable first in line made moral sense. There was also persuasive data that housing the most vulnerable was also cheaper that cycling them through hospital emergency rooms and/or the criminal justice system.

But in a system with chronically inadequate funding, housing first created a different problem: It meant that when people without severe problems fell into homelessness, they often languished there. And the longer people are homeless, the more likely they are to develop the very maladies that may eventually get them to score high enough on the misery index to qualify for shelter or housing.

Also, the longer people are homeless, the more alienated they often become from “the system” that didn’t work for them. Being treated as an untouchable for a long time can take a heavy toll.

So the city of Olympia’s decision to create a program for the people who are ready to work their way back into “the system” is a welcome break from an untenable either/or policy choice. It’s the policy equivalent of being able to walk and chew gum at the same time.

It leaves un-fixed two vastly larger problems: the shortage of affordable housing, and the rising costs and inadequate funding for housing, shelter and the health and human services needed by all unhoused people.

But it’s a brave step forward towards more flexible, more deeply informed and diversified solutions to the most difficult problem that bedevils our community.