To help people living in cars, Bellingham hopes to entice a group to take this on
The city hopes to entice a nonprofit or faith-based organization to offer a place for people who are living in their cars to park overnight.
To do that, Bellingham officials will consider funding to help someone open and operate what’s known as a safe-parking program in partnership with the city of Bellingham.
The city will put out a request for proposals and, depending on the response, come back before the City Council around April for a decision that will include whether to provide partial or full funding.
If it opens, the first such program in Bellingham might serve 20 to 30 people, according to Rick Sepler, Planning and Community Development director for Bellingham.
Safe-parking areas were among the different types of temporary homeless shelters that the Bellingham City Council approved in October 2018. The number of people allowed in safe-parking areas would be capped at 100 people citywide under those rules.
RVs would be banned from safe-parking areas in Bellingham because they would allow multiple people inside, where it’s difficult to monitor what’s going on, city officials have said.
Despite allowing safe parking and creating a template to show how such a program could be set up, the city hasn’t had anyone step forward to do so.
That could be because faith-based communities, which provide a number of services to help those who are homeless and rely on volunteers to do so, are too stretched to take on another project, according to Sepler.
But city dollars might be an incentive because it could allow an organization to hire someone to coordinate volunteers or to oversee the program, Bellingham officials said.
“This is a stop-gap measure. It’s not intended to be a long-term measure,” Sepler said to The Bellingham Herald, noting the need to find transitional or permanent housing for people who are homeless.
The plan would be to offer safe parking in one location, see what the need is and see if the program works, according to Sepler.
“We think it’s a tool, one of many tools,” Sepler said. “It has to be both cost-effective and useful.”
As for how much it would cost, there’s a rough estimate of zero dollars — if it’s run entirely by volunteers — up to $205,000 a year, based on a budget from one lot operated by the city of Seattle.
Sepler described that as a “back of the envelope” estimate, saying how much such a program might cost would depend on proposals submitted to the city.
The Bellingham City Council voted unanimously on Jan. 27 to initiate an effort to find a partner for a safe-parking program.
“Even though this is not housing, I still think it’s a form of shelter that we need to support and has been supported elsewhere. People will be living in their cars whether we help them or not,” City Council member Michael Lilliquist said during the Jan. 27 meeting.
Council member Dan Hammill spoke about people being able to feel safe in a supervised parking lot.
“This is not a perfect solution but so many of the choices that were given on this dais are not perfect. They’re what we have to deal with based on the amount of money and resources that we have,” Hammill said during the City Council meeting.
Safe parking
Bellingham isn’t alone in considering safe parking to help people who are struggling because of a housing crisis.
Safe parking is being explored or created by municipalities on the West Coast, including in Washington state, as a temporary option for those who are homeless. The idea is to allow people a place to park the vehicles they’re living in and access services in the hope that they can get back into housing.
Safe parking also has been rated as an important service by the Homeless Strategies Workgroup, which is made up of service providers, homeless advocates, as well as county and city officials, including from Ferndale.
It not only provides a feeling of safety for those who are homeless and living in their vehicles — with all that they own — but such spaces also give people access to restrooms and a place to throw away their trash, advocates said.
“It just makes it safer and cleaner,” Mike Parker, director of the Whatcom Homeless Service Center, said of safe parking.
The scope of the problem is such that:
▪ In Los Angeles County, an estimated 16,500 people live in their vehicles, according to a July 1 story in The Christian Science Monitor.
▪ In King County, an estimated 2,147 people live in vehicles, according to its 2019 Point-In-Time Count, an annual census of homeless people.
▪ In Whatcom County, about 67 people live in their vehicles, according to the 2019 Point-In-Time Count. It’s a population that homeless advocates believe is under-counted. They’re among the estimated 700 people in Whatcom County who are homeless.
Sepler said about half of the people who were counted live in RVs, which wouldn’t be allowed in the safe-parking program the city hopes an organization will operate.
Anecdotally, Parker said the Homeless Outreach Team sees a lot of people living in their vehicles.
Having people in one spot also will make it easier for service providers who are trying to help people who are now spread out in the city, Parker added.
