How the City Addresses Homelessness
In Auburn, we are committed to ensuring that individuals experiencing homelessness have access to the services and support they need on their path to stability. Working alongside local organizations, nonprofits, and community partners, we address homelessness with a compassionate, personalized, and comprehensive approach that focuses on the unique needs of each individual. Our philosophy prioritizes dignity, respect, and collaboration, while holding ourselves, our partners, and those we work with accountable for delivering meaningful, lasting solutions for those in need within our community.
Compass Housing Alliance (Don's Place) provides the residents of Auburn an opportunity to obtain stable housing, allowing them to being the process of rebuilding their lives.
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Homelessness Outreach
The first thing you notice when talking to Kent Hay is what isn’t there.
There’s no fluff, no beating around the bush and certainly no banality.
What is there is hard to crack. He’s a man of few words, and the little said is hardly minced. He prefers action with proper planning and despises meandering. He has tools and he’s going to use them; if you don’t like it, that’s between you and you.
And most importantly, he wants to end homelessness and he wants it done yesterday.
“We’ve made a lot of progress,” he says while driving to a camp along Green River on King County property between Kent and Auburn. It’s an exceptionally hot Friday morning and he’s taking a group of service providers out to meet people staying outside and convince them to come inside. “People forget because it’s still visible. Three years ago, compared to now, a lot has changed.”
It certainly has. Kent laments when he first began working at the City of Auburn in the fledgling outreach program
– then in May of 2020 as the administrator of the new department, and until just last month, as the Director – that he didn’t document either through photos or videos what he found out there.
Three years ago, finding a camp in certain areas of the city was common. And certainly, in the vast forested areas surrounding the city, where a hodgepodge of confusing property boundaries keeps doing from being done.
But today, things are a bit different. As he takes a group of workers from We Care Daily Clinics and an outreach coordinator at Orion Industries on a tour of hotspots, the camps are few and far between. And the people who are there have heard of him. They know him well and there’s a reason for that.
In contrast to prevailing nationwide outreach procedure – which tends to rely more on offering than forcing – Kent operates a bit differently. He prefers to offer services and help, and he does it habitually. He can be persistent. But when those services are declined and that help is rejected, then it’s no longer an ask.
And sometimes that means employing accountability – like asking them to leave if they don’t want to be a part of the community, he says. And sometimes that means using jail as a resource.
As a former probation counselor at Seattle Municipal Court and then an Outreach Program Administrator at the City of Redmond, Kent knows what it looks like when the criminal justice system and service providers work in tandem. Jail shouldn’t and isn’t the first option, but it must be on the tool belt. Because nobody gets a pass. Not when their life is on the line.
Kent knows that better than most. A few weeks ago on LinkedIn he shared the story of a man named Jeremy, who went from smoking 20-30 fentanyl pills a day to using powder because the pills weren’t strong enough to meet the high he wanted to achieve.
Jeremy had kids and a fiancé who he loved and wanted to be with but his addiction was too strong. “This man was begging for his life,” Kent wrote. “Begging, so that he could be in his daughter’s life though he could not physically follow through no matter how much he wanted to.”
Jeremy was eventually hospitalized and given strong antibiotics to fight infection spreading across his body due to the heavy drug use. Those were stolen and when Kent found him again weeks later, he was in horrible shape.
A few days later, Kent got a call from ICU nurse asking if he could “identify a male admitted to the hospital.” When he arrived, he hardly recognized him – all his facial hair was gone, and the only way he knew it was Jeremy was by the tattoo on his hand of a pony and his daughter’s name, and the sores on his body. He was hooked up to machines cleaning his blood. He was in a coma.
An MRI later showed that in order to save his life, both of his legs and his “unicorn hand” would have to be amputated. That never happened because Jeremy died. “Shame on us for contributing to people’s misery and death,” Kent wrote. “These laws or lack thereof are killing people.”
It’s the stories like Jeremy’s that keep Kent going. They’re the ones that motivate him in the morning, when there’s not much positive happening outside.
They’re why when the temperature reaches 90 degrees on an unseasonably warm spring day, he’s walking through the forest with a backpack and a plan. He’s going to talk to everyone he sees – most he knows, some he doesn’t. The couple sleeping surrounded by a wandering dog and a pile of garbage are going to know his name and they’re going to hear the same talk every day, whether they want to or not. Same as the man on the side of the road darting through traffic holding up an orange traffic cone.
Is he single-handily going to fix homelessness? Nobody is that naïve. But you can bet it’s going to tap out before he does.
“People ask me if I like my job, and I say no,” he says, headed to the next camp, the next person staying outside. “There’s nothing about my job I like. My job shouldn’t exist. There’s nothing nice about it.”