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The Renton City Council is getting ready to take its final vote on legislation that would evict homeless residents from the Red Lion Hotel in two stages and effectively ban homeless services in the city. Public comment is starting now.
The first speaker supports the shelter, saying it will create "a great chaos" in people's lives to kick them out. "Many of the clients came from South King County"—a counter to the contention, which we'll hear again tonight, that homelessness is "a Seattle problem."
King County Regional Homelessness Authority implementation board member Harold Odom, who was homeless for 12 years, says he's "surprised" Renton is considering a near-ban on homeless services given how many homeless people there are already living in Renton.
"We do know that it's possible to come out of that pain, but it takes community support... These are not broken people. We do not throw them away. We help them with love. ... Some of them might not know love until we show it. And you're not showing love now."
Dr. @SimhaReddyMD, another member of the homelessness authority implementation board: When someone lacks a place to stay, they end up in the ER, and they need places like the Red Lion to recover their health.
The city should be asking not why should Renton accept a homeless shelter, but "what is the emergency shelter deficit for Renton... and how do we meet those needs most appropriately?" Reddy continues.
LaMont Green, like Harold Odom a member of the Lived Experience Coalition, points out that people who are homeless in Seattle often end up there because their own cities, many of them in South King County, don't offer homeless services.
The contortions people are going through to demonstrate their standing to speak in favor of the Red Lion are intense, and a direct result of council members' suggestion in previous meetings that non-Renton residents have no stake in discussions about (regional) homelessness.
"How big is the list of people who are not allowed back into that hotel?" asks a guy whose name I did not get, then suggests it's 100 or more. He says he was a landlord who provided housing for a guy that "had mental illness" and "caught the place on fire."
He says services should be required at the Red Lion, and "the real help they need." Services are provided at the Red Lion, including "the real help they need."
Oh. He wants to force them into rehab. Cool theory, bro. "Its' a state and federal issue that the little city of Renton probably doesn't have the ability to go ahead and take care of it for the entire region."
Former King County Council member Larry Gossett says the reason the county established a regional authority is they wanted a regional mechanism for the cities and county to "take a more strategic and unified approach" to the issue.
It isn't just people who are "sick in some way" who are homeless, as the last speaker suggested, but people who can't afford to "keep a roof over their head"—and that number is about to balloon as eviction moratoriums end.
"Fifth generation" Renton resident and Renton Chamber CEO Diane Dobson says the city didn't get a chance to "collaborate on an advance approach" to the emergency shelter set up literally in response to a global pandemic no one could have anticipated.
"Businesses are to be commended in accepting the burden of responsibility" of homeless people living at the Red Lion and those who have been "barred" who she and others have asserted are now roaming around downtown Renton.
Dave McCammon (again, I may be spelling this wrong) has lived in the area since 1958 and that the decision to move people from an overcrowded hotel in downtown Seattle to Renton was "done to assist Seattle in their ongoing problem," i.e. homelessness.
He says the Red Lion is designed to allow people to engage in their preferred "lifestyle"—typically a word used to describe the disease of addiction as if the hell of addiction was a fun party.
Keith Jackson, a homeowner in Renton, says "it is our job" to help the most vulnerable people in the city in the absence of some perfect solution that will fix everything overnight.
The next speaker, who says he wants the city to treat the Renton Red Lion residents as human beings, paraphrases Jesus, from Matthew: "[What] you do unto the least of us, you're doing it unto me."
Jonathan Hemphill, a member of the KCRHA governing committee, says homelessness is "a moral crisis... when we talk about the homeless population, who we are talking about is not 'others.' They are our fellow citizens, they are our neighbors."
Like other speakers, he notes that it isn't that Seattle just naturally has a lot of homeless people, but that people from other places, like Renton, end up in Seattle because there are no services where they live.
It's a self-fulfilling, self-justifying cycle: Ban services, shelters, and the lowest-income housing, and they'll go to cities that have those things—thus justifying the position that "those people" are the problem of the cities you drove them into.
Marvin Rosete, a local Democratic Party candidate, says the city's "generosity" has been strained, and inaccurately describes the Red Lion as a "rehabilitation facility." "What will be next afterwards?" he asks, if the city allows the Red Lion to operate.
He claims that 600 school children who are homeless in Renton got "pushed to the back of the line" for a bunch of homeless people from Seattle who got "dropped on our doorstep." Yikes.
Just a reminder, again, that no one asked for or anticipated the COVID pandemic, which made crowded congregate shelters unsafe and uninhabitable.
The next speaker, Linda Smith, says the people living at the Red Lion have been Renton residents since early 2020. She describes the trauma of growing up and having to live in a barn because of poverty. "Please rethink this decision from a solutions focus and a human need basis."
Craig Keppler (not sure of spelling) says he has two properties adjacent to the Red Lion. "The Red Lion hotel is not the place for a homeless shelter of any kind," he says, and blames the residents (not the global pandemic and economic crash) for people ending their tenancies.
