Images courtesy of KOMO News
Seattle city leaders get an update on efforts to clean up one of the areas most notorious for drug dealing and other crime.
What’s known as the “Third Avenue Project” is a partnership of community service organizations and local government agencies taking aim at the area between University and Stewart Streets and between Second and Fourth Avenues, not far from Pike Place Market, which has been plagued by crime for decades and more recently by significant homelessness, as well as sales of drugs and merchandise stolen from nearby stores.
One of the groups helping in that zone is “We Deliver Care”, which provides a 7-day a week presence from 6:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M., where they talk to people and refer them to services as part of the effort to reduce the crime. They’re also able to de-escalate situations to avoid some of the calls to 911 and, according to the update, they can even de-escalate by breaking up some of the groups in the area as they refer people to services.
We Deliver Care’s Dominique Davis says training people with these experiences to talk to people on Third Avenue has already gone a long way. “They have embedded themselves so deeply into that community,” Davis says, “they know everybody’s name. They know who everybody’s connected to. They know their background, their history. Like, they know each other. And the people that are in the streets that we are serving know them.”
Others updating city council members say they’re starting to see the new cocktail of fentanyl and xylazine, or “tranq”, that’s now the drug of concern, so they’re worried about what’s coming in the next few months as they begin to see real progress. They say they’re still freshly-established, so it will take more time to make bigger strides
It was a similar story of needing more time as council members also got an update from the city’s “Unified Care Team”, which not only cleans up homeless camps and refers people to services but which guides outstanding issues to the appropriate group or department to deal with them.
Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington says in a little more than a year since the Unified Care Team got started, “the team has completed over 200 unique site resolutions, providing more than 1,800 shelter referrals in 2022; by the middle of 2022, 93% of our parks were fully-accessible and open to the public for their intended use; and this year alone, we’ve received more than 9,000 encampment service requests.”
They’re now shifting to a neighborhood teams approach which will include building relationships with community members business owners in 5 regions across the city.
Washington says one of the big hurdles is not enough shelter space and resources to match the number of people who need help. She says that’s a problem the King County Regional Homelessness Authority is tasked with solving, but she says the KCRHA has also only been up and running for about a year, so Washington says they’ll need more time as well.
