DESC's 1811 Eastlake - Supportive Housing for Homeless Chronic Alcoholics

1811 Eastlake
1811 Eastlake Avenue, Seattle WA

Background
Housing First principles
Awards
Evaluation
Media Inquiries
Project team, public funders and other supporters
In the news

Background

The Downtown Emergency Service Center opened 1811 Eastlake in December 2005. The building, located just north of Seattle's downtown core, provides supportive housing for 75 formerly homeless men and women living with chronic alcohol addiction. Residents benefit from 24-hour, seven day a week supportive services including:

State-licensed mental health and chemical dependency treatment
On-site health care services
Daily meals and weekly outings to food banks
Case management and payee services
Medication monitoring
Weekly community building activities

1811 Eastlake aims to improve the lives of its residents through reduced alcohol consumption, better heath care, and increased stability. It will also reduce residents' use of the community's crisis response system, reduce public nuisances and encourage residents to undertake and follow through with alcohol treatment.

Housing First

In 1997, DESC was the first housing provider in the region to adopt the practice now known as 'Housing First'. Kerner-Scott House opened that year with a specific goal to move people with long histories of homelessness and untreated mental illnesses directly from the street into housing.

Today, DESC is the only provider in this area to have converted all of its housing stock to Housing First practice. As the name suggests, Housing First practice dispenses with decades of trying either to reward people with housing for achieving some pre-determined clinical goal or trying to predict who is “ready” for housing. Instead, Housing First practice says, simply, let’s get people into housing, because it is a basic human right, and because it makes more sense to try help someone with a major mental illness, addiction or developmental or other disability once you have eliminated the chaos of living on the streets.

In the face of too little housing for too many people, our solution is simple—provide housing first to the most vulnerable—individuals who are extremely poor, who are severely, often multiply, disabled, and who have long histories of homelessness or many failures in other low-income housing settings.

See our Housing First fact sheet.

Awards

Home for Every American Award, Interagency Council on Homelessness, 2008

Maxwell Award for Excellence, Fannie Mae Foundation and the Partnership to End Longterm Homelessness, top national honor 2008. See Media Release.

Exemplary Program Award for Service Innovation, King County, 2007

Annual Award, Washington Co-Occurring Disorders Inter-agency Advisory Committee (CODIAC), 2007

Evaluation

To evaluate the effectiveness of 1811 Eastlake, DESC collaborated with Drs. G. Alan Marlatt and Mary Larimer, nationally recognized experts in substance abuse research, and their team at the Addictive Behaviors Research Center of the University of Washington .

A grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded an evaluation on the first three years of operation. This study examined the relationship between residing in permanent supportive housing in two salient domains: variables related to quality of life and the suppressed use of crisis services. We anticipate it will have far-reaching impact on the conventional thinking regarding housing this population.

Findings from the study were published in the April 1, 2009 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Read highlights from the study.

MEDIA INQUIRIES, PLEASE CONTACT
Bill Hobson, DESC Executive Director
206.515.1525 or bhobson(at)desc.org

Recognition

"Downtown Emergency Service Center has greatly improved the lives of chronically homeless individuals through its ability to provide appropriate supportive services and permanent housing for its tenants. They are a wonderful example of an organization committed to ending homelessness in their communities.”
- Bob Hohler, executive director of the Melville Charitable Trust and executive committee chairman of the Partnership to End Long Term Homelessness

"1811 Eastlake represents a new, effective and compassionate direction for helping the chronically homeless. It's called putting housing first. Providing housing for these individuals will benefit the community. It's effective, it makes financial sense and most importantly, it's the humane thing to do."
- Greg Nickels, Seattle Mayor

"Our best hope for helping chronic alcoholics is to move them off the streets and into safe and stable housing, with immediate access to treatment services. 1811 Eastlake will house 75 chronically homeless people, reducing a costly cycle through emergency and criminal justice services and improving both public health and public safety in the downtown area."
- Ron Sims, King County Executive

“From where I sit, the “housing first” model is an anti-crime program. Let’s get people off the street first and then deal with their addictions. It’s not easy to beat any addiction… Yet when we get a person housed, good things happen. This seems to be the case with 1811 Eastlake. Before it opened, the 75 residents of this housing program were regular visitors to our court and jail. Since the project opened, we hardly see them at all.”
- Tom Carr, Seattle City Attorney

Project Team

This project has received broad media coverage. Following are links to some of the articles and reports that have appeared. DESC provides these links as a service to its web site visitors. By providing a link, DESC is not endorsing any of these reports.

"Housing Alcoholics" - multimedia presentation - Associated Press (June 18, 2007)