Tent cities may multiply

One of Seattle's biggest emergency-shelter providers is planning to close its facilities in March and open three new tent cities because of a funding dispute involving the privacy rights of the homeless.

SHARE/WHEEL, a cooperative of homeless people that runs 13 indoor shelters and two tent cities in King County, has been notified that it won't get funding from the city of Seattle this year after refusing to feed client data into a city-run database.

That database, called Safe Harbors, is required by the federal government to give unduplicated counts of homeless people nationwide. But to SHARE/WHEEL, which is losing about $274,000, or half its annual budget, the database is an unnecessary and expensive version of Big Brother.

"It's not only the information being provided, but it's who you are providing it to," said Ted Hunter, lawyer for SHARE/WHEEL, which stands for Seattle Housing and Resource Effort / Women's Housing Equality and Enhancement League.

SHARE/WHEEL plans to protest at a City Council hearing Thursday, hoping to persuade the council to refuse to participate in the national database. But in case that strategy doesn't work, it also recently asked City Attorney Tom Carr to renegotiate a legal agreement signed in 2002 that allows just one tent city in Seattle.

If SHARE/WHEEL opens additional tent cities without city permission — as the group first did in 1990 during the Goodwill Games — it could have an impact on its fund-raising, Carr said.

"There's not many people who want to help a radical organization ... breaking the law."

According to an analysis by city staffers, the loss of SHARE/WHEEL's shelters would result in a net reduction of 189 beds in April, when the organization loses its funding. That amounts to more than 10 percent of the available beds for the homeless in Seattle. "The short-term effect of this may leave some homeless individuals without shelter," the staffers wrote.

SHARE/WHEEL staff members declined to be interviewed, but Leo Rhodes, a homeless man and spokesman for the group, said that a loss of shelters is why the organization is already looking for sites the size of half a football field in and around Seattle. Locally, 39 homeless people died outside this year, and there are shelter beds for only about one-third of the estimated 8,200 homeless people in the county, he noted.

"We don't want to, but if they're not giving us space inside, we need to take it outside," said Rhodes, who has lived in tent cities off and on for a year.

In 2004, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began requiring recipients of housing grants to collect names, dates of birth, ethnicity and gender of people who use homeless shelters.

Seattle had already been at work on such a database, called Safe Harbors.

It is a key element of a new regional plan to end homelessness in the next 10 years, in part because grant-writing foundations require such hard data, said Alan Painter, the city's lead staffer on homeless issues.

"We need to know who we're serving, what works, what doesn't," he said.

The city would protect client information the same way it did in working with HIV/AIDS patients in the 1990s, he said. Individual data would be encrypted and could not be fed into the national database without agreement from the homeless individuals and the organizations that sheltered them, he said.

Other homeless-shelter providers also are uneasy about Safe Harbors, but only SHARE/WHEEL has declined to participate.

Sue Sherbrooke, chief executive of the YWCA of Seattle-King County-Snohomish County, said she understands the need for better data but dislikes the potential invasion of privacy.

"We believe the threat it poses to client safety and the cost of compliance outweigh the value of the information that will be gathered," she said.

SHARE/WHEEL agrees, said Hunter, the group's attorney. Last year, it provided nearly 94,000 "bed nights" to the homeless. Its shelters are in donated space, provide no meals and are managed by other homeless people.

It also doesn't have anyone at its shelters who can input data. It doesn't have many computers, nor secure phone lines.

"How many times has a non-homeless person tried to end homelessness, and how many times have they done it?" said Rhodes, the SHARE/WHEEL client.

"The homeless are saying 'no' now, and people won't listen."

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com