housing

The following press release for the new documentary “Behind Closed Doors” is from ChangeWA. ChangeWA and Ginny Burton are friends of Discovery Institute. Our work on homelessness is featured in “Behind Closed Doors” in an interview with our program coordinator Caitlyn McKenney. ChangeWA has teamed with filmmaker V Ginny Burton to produce “Behind Closed Doors,” a shocking 30-minute documentary which exposes the unsafe and drug-filled conditions within King County’s low-barrier housing and provides strong evidence that these are not conditions where formerly homeless individuals “can get their lives back,” as King County Executive Dow Constantine has repeatedly promised. Burton’s interviews with residents and workers from several of King County’s housing projects reveal that most residents continue to use illegal drugs, Read More ›

I was critical of sociologist Matthew Desmond in my last two columns, but I do appreciate that he based his research in Milwaukee. The Midwest is often overlooked in discussions about homelessness. Journalists more often write about California, home to about half of all unsheltered homeless people in the U.S., and New York, flush with immigrants. “Housing First” became a familiar slogan partly because of journalistic near-sightedness: High housing prices in some coastal cities make it easy for coast-based reporters to argue that finances are central to the homelessness problem — but the middle of the country looks very different. Fact: 60 U.S. cities with more than 100,000 residents — many in the north central sector stretching from Buffalo to Read More ›

Seattle’s nonprofit affordable-housing providers are finding themselves in deep water. According to an Alex Fryer column in the Seattle Times, the City of Seattle has recently given $14 million in emergency funding to affordable housing nonprofits and developers in an attempt to stabilize them and mitigate their losses. The article reports the financial losses of several nonprofit housing providers due to non-payment of rent, costly evictions, vacancies, and behavioral challenges with tenants. However well-intentioned the efforts to finance nonprofit housing have been, the properties have been plagued by policies that strip tenants of accountability at the cost of landlords and a legal system that seemingly stonewalls attempts to remove non-paying or destructive tenants. But the problem isn’t isolated to urban Read More ›