City and UW Tacoma want to start community conversations on homelessness next year

Starting in 2023, the City of Tacoma and UW Tacoma will host community conversations on homelessness.

The council approved $20,000 on Dec. 20 from its contingency fund to sponsor the conversations. The conversations will be focused on immediate actions to address homelessness and coming up with solutions to housing and supportive services.

The partnership led by Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards and UW Tacoma Chancellor Sheila Edwards Lange is in its early stages. A planning meeting is scheduled for mid-January.

Woodards said at Tuesday’s council meeting she believes the city can find new and innovative partnerships through community conversations. She also noted $101 million of funding to address homelessness and affordable housing was included in the recently passed biennial budget.

The $20,000 will pay for the space to convene, food for participants, materials and support for the classrooms.

John Burkhardt, communications director at UW Tacoma, said in an email that as an urban-serving campus, it is vital to the university that its students continue to enhance their learning and contribute their ideas through meaningful engagement with real-world challenges.

The City of Tacoma declared a state of public health emergency to address homelessness in 2017.

According to the 2022 Point-in-Time Count, 1,851 people were experiencing homelessness in Pierce County, but it is estimated that 4,300 people are living without housing. The number of people experiencing homelessness in the county has increased by 40 percent over the last five years. The city has more than 1,200 shelter beds.

Tacoma wants to reach “functional zero,” in which a person starting a new homeless episode has immediate access to shelter and permanent housing, according to the city’s strategic plan to address homelessness.

“Throughout my conversations that we’ve had as a council or I’ve had with residents in the city or people at the Coalition to End Homelessness or people who are working around the issues that are impacting people who are currently experiencing homelessness in our community, one thing I would say everyone feels is the status quo is unacceptable,” council member John Hines, District 1, said. “No one is happy with where we are.”

Hines and council member Kristina Walker, at-large, were co-sponsors of the resolution.