City Hall has subscribed to the ideology of housing first. This is a wonderful approach to stabilizing clients, so they are ready, able and receptive to support services. As a former mental health counselor in a triple locked facility for children with severe mental illness in downtown, I see gaps to an only housing first approach that leaves many folks without options. Some unhoused residents are ready to move from living in a tent to an apartment with rules and regulations. For others, this immediate transition may exacerbate PTSD or retraumatize residents. We can fill in housing gaps while we both wait for housing to be built and for clients to be ready and that means “meeting the client where they’re at”. As your next Councilwoman, I will implement my plan known as the Incremental Ladder of Housing Success (ILHS). Here’s how my plan would work:

• Secure a government owned (or privately owned) land where unhoused residents can live at destination locations with basics they do not have living on creeks or in parks, such as security, PO Boxes, showers, garbage services, restrooms.

• Work with service providers, non-profits, and churches to provide counseling, employment training, education, to get our unhoused residents back on their feet.

• Slowly acclimate residents to different types of housing, transitioning them from their tents/cars/etc. to tiny homes, rehab, mental health care, and various forms of permanent housing including permanent supportive housing.

This is a plan that addresses individual resident’s needs and is a solution in the interim making the lives of unhoused residents incrementally better while we wait for affordable housing units to be built. We can immediately stop some of the extreme suffering experienced by our unhoused neighbors living in tents.

You can read more about the Incremental Ladder of Housing success on my Medium page here.