Homeless count down, eyebrows up

Rick Reynolds is the end of the line in our city. He's a last chance before you're camping under a bridge or sleeping on the all-night bus loop to the airport.

Reynolds runs Operation Nightwatch, a ministry for the homeless. Each night they line up at his door to get a meal, and hopefully — if there's room — a referral to a warm shelter somewhere.

His has been a sad growth industry. Never more than now, you'd expect.

"Crisis, economic meltdown, unemployment," Reynolds says. "This is supposed to drive the number of homeless people through the roof, right?"

Only something mysterious is happening. For the first time in years, numbers at some homeless shelters have dropped.

"There are some old-school shelters wondering where all the homeless people are," Reynolds said.

The number of women seeking a stay at Operation Nightwatch's 40-bed "Tonya's Room" has dropped so much the agency has decided it's no longer needed. It will close at the end of January.

"A year or two ago we were turning away women like crazy, basically giving them a bus ticket and a blanket and saying 'sorry,' " Reynolds says. "Now we've got lots of room."

Even the bitter cold hasn't overtaxed the city's network. Al Poole, who oversees the severe-weather shelters for the city of Seattle, says they aren't as packed as they used to be.

"Our numbers are down significantly," Poole said. "We're all wondering if it's a trend, if it will last. It's certainly unexpected."

Last winter the city's 25-bed emergency shelter for women at the Frye Hotel downtown regularly overflowed with up to 40. This year there have been from nine to 17 a night, Poole said.

Homelessness has hardly ended in Seattle. Monday night, when it dropped to 21 degrees, Operation Nightwatch helped 153 people get off the street — well off its 2008 highs but still a sizable tide of human misery.

Longer-term transitional housing remains full. Others say most shelters that serve families are full, too. And no one has done a regionwide count of street homelessness since last January.

But in 2008, after a May night when all 30-plus shelters in Seattle were filled and Nightwatch turned away a record 42 people, I wrote this: "Something is ragged in the Emerald City. We've had our frenzies, with the dot-coms and real estate. Now it feels like there's an anti-boom, an echo of the others."

So what has changed?

Maybe landlords have gotten less picky. Maybe relatives have, too, Reynolds said. His idea is that there's a humanistic upside to the recession. That maybe in hard times we need each other just a little bit more. For nothing else to help pay the rent.

Poole's theory is that it might be larger economic forces. "In boom times people come to Seattle because it's an economic mecca," he said. "In bad times they leave it."

Another theory is truly audacious. Maybe the ballyhooed — and also much-ridiculed — Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness is actually working.

Now in year five, this seemingly utopian collaboration between cities, King County, churches and nonprofits has opened or put in the pipeline 3,300 housing units to try to get homeless permanently off the streets.

It also has spent its resources trying to keep people from becoming homeless — one of those softer, preventive approaches that costs money upfront and tries a lot of patience in our "we want results yesterday" world.

What's working? Nobody quite knows. It sure feels like good news anyway when we've had so much bad.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.