The homeless continue to die on Tacoma’s streets. So what are we going to do about it?
There was a time — many years ago — when Kevin Glackin-Coley didn’t think it would take much.
There was a period in Tacoma — back when Glackin-Coley had just arrived in town as a Jesuit volunteer working at the old Nativity House shelter on 13th and Commerce downtown — when he felt a solution was well within reach.
These days, the 61-year-old director of special projects at the Tacoma Pierce County Coalition to End Homelessness can’t help but look around and realize his own “naivete,” he admitted recently.
With Tacoma’s homeless crisis exploding in front of us, Glackin-Coley knows how much worse the problem has become since he moved to town as a fresh Loyola University grad more than three decades ago, and how much work there is to do if we ever hope to get a handle on it.
As a city and a society, what we’ve let happen is shocking and incriminating, Glackin-Coley said.
“I think we should use it as a mirror to look at ourselves, and say, ‘What are we willing to accept?’” Glackin-Coley said of the number of people currently living without shelter on Tacoma’s streets, exactly a week after 38-year-old Patrick Nathan Shenaurlt was shot and killed at the downtown encampment where he had been staying.
As we assess the current state of Tacoma’s homeless crisis, Glackin-Coley’s perspective is one of many we should pay attention to, capable of providing the helpful long view and also the urgency that the situation demands.
In all his years working with the homeless in Tacoma, Glackin-Coley has trouble remembering a fall quite like this.
Since November, at least five people experiencing homelessness, including Shenaurlt and 68-year-old Thomas Hutchinson, who was found near the 1400 block of Tacoma Avenue on Nov. 20, have died outdoors or living in their cars, Glackin-Coley noted. While the Pierce County Medical Examiner’s office has yet to release a cause of death in Hutchinson’s case, the local homeless advocacy group Tacoma Housing Now has said Hutchinson used a wheelchair and died from exposure.
Clearly, lives lost add to what should be evident before our eyes:
There has been plenty of talk and numerous good faith efforts over the years to expand services, shelter space and housing for people experiencing homelessness. But the lack of coordinated, short- and long-term response — to provide a road map, a north star and the leadership to get there — has allowed the problem to fester to a point where tents line our parking strips and people are dying outside.
Yes, there are a million reasons the situation is complicated. The city can’t, and shouldn’t, shoulder the burden alone. The county and the many local jurisdictions who have been more than happy to view homelessness as a big city problem are equally complicit. The work of lifting people out of homelessness and addressing the root causes of what brought them there is an incredibly messy inexact science.
COVID-19 has blown holes in budgets far and wide.
Still, when all of us — as people and government officials — look at the misery and suffering that’s all around and keep driving or keep our head down, this is exactly what we should expect.
“Apparently, as a community we’ve become accustomed to — or we’re OK with — people living on the streets. Apparently, we’re becoming comfortable with people dying from living on the streets,” Glackin-Coley said. “I don’t think we should be comfortable with either of those things, particularly when we have resources.
“There are empty buildings. There are empty parking lots, where people could park in their cars. There are buildings where we could house people safely.
“We just haven’t had the committed will to do that.”
While the time Glackin-Coley has spent working to solve Tacoma’s homeless problem should be enough to fill him with pessimism and doubt — skeptical that we’ll ever commit ourselves to the kind of bold action he and others have long advocated for — he remains an eternal optimist.
Perhaps he learned it from being a Cubs fan, he joked.
Or, perhaps that’s the only way anyone could keep at it for as long as he has without burning out.
Later this month, on Dec. 21 — which is National Homeless Persons Memorial Day — the Coalition to End Homelessness plans to convene a “Safe Shelter Summit,” which will include mayor Victoria Woodards’ office.
Glackin-Coley said the purpose of the summit will be “not to spend a lot of time talking about the issues … but to come together and say, ‘Here are some concrete things we could do in order to address this now.’”
For local businesses and nonprofits, that could mean identifying vacant buildings that could be used as shelter space. For the city, it could mean providing portable toilets, hand-washing stations and drinking water for people living in encampments.
For everyone, it means doing what you can.
Faced with a crisis, that’s where it starts, Glackin-Coley said.
That’s where it has always started.
More than 30 years ago, Glackin-Coley said, he remembers pulling shifts as a 20-some-year-old at the original Nativity House, where Tacoma’s homeless population of the mid-1980s would gather — many of them Vietnam War vets.
He recalls how the small staff would count its blessings if it had “fresh onions to put in the soup” that day.
Deep down, he still believes we can fix this, he said.
He has to.
More importantly, so do we.
This story was originally published December 12, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
