Last year, Seattle and King County, following the lead of a similar national effort by the Bush administration, crafted an ambitious "Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness." Less than a year later, federal and local budget cuts, far from ending homelessness, will be creating more of it when a number of Seattle homeless shelters are shut down March 31.

The disconnect lies in the emphasis, at both the federal and local levels, on creating permanent housing for the homeless rather than bouncing them from one shelter to another, with expensive stops in jails, emergency rooms, and social service programs along the way. Politicians have finally realized that it's actually cheaper ("more humane" wasn't a good enough reason) to house the homeless than to let them rot on the streets. But the problem is that until that new housing is built, the homeless still need the shelters.

Not according to the city of Seattle. While no money is even being spent yet on creating new housing, on March 31 funding will be cut for a number of area shelter programs, particularly those that don't provide "wraparound" social services as well. The Central Area Motivation Project (CAMP), the Church Council of Greater Seattle, and the Seattle Indian Center are among programs being cut entirely. Other well-established programs, like the Downtown Emergency Service Center, are being cut sharply. And perhaps most alarmingly, the city's largest shelter provider, SHARE/WHEEL, is locked in a separate dispute with the city that will likely result in the March 31 closing of all of its shelters--14, plus a Severe Weather Shelter for Women, totaling 300 beds a night. That's out of only 2,500 shelter beds in all of King County, serving an estimated homeless population of some 8,200 on any given night.

The core of SHARE/WHEEL's dispute with the city is a program called Safe Harbors, which the city has begun to implement over the last several years in response to new federal regulations and which is required under the local Ten Year Plan. Safe Harbors is a computer database of homeless people who use the shelters or other social service programs, ostensibly intended to gather data on what services the homeless use and what their needs are. A person seeking a bed in a city-funded shelter is now required to answer Safe Harbors' questions. In the process, it creates files on each person, including storing and tracking such highly sensitive information as a person's Social Security number, disabilities, any mental health conditions, domestic violence history, and drug and alcohol use.

SHARE/WHEEL has refused to implement the Safe Harbors program at its shelters, claiming (rightly) that it is a grotesque and unnecessary violation of the privacy rights of the homeless. (Certainly, it's hard to imagine any other constituencies of a federal program being required to give up such personal data.) In addition, because SHARE/WHEEL's shelters are self-managed by the homeless themselves, a person volunteering information for Safe Harbors would literally be giving to another homeless person such sensitive information as whether they are fleeing an abusive spouse.

SHARE/WHEEL has its extensive city contracts, worth about $250,000 a year, in the first place largely because the self-managed nature of their shelters means that with little paid staff or other overhead, their per-bed cost is only about $2.50 a night as opposed to $11 for the next cheapest shelter operator in the city, the Salvation Army. But because of this empowering egalitarian structure and a history of rabble-rousing, SHARE/WHEEL has never had good relations with the city. The organization itself began in the wake of the 1990 Goodwill Games, when, in an effort to spiff up the city for international visitors, Seattle swept the homeless out of downtown. SHARE/WHEEL was born from the tent city that resulted, erected near the Kingdome, and the group has continued to run tent cities around Seattle and King County since. It is threatening to erect three new tent cities in Seattle parks (one downtown, one to the south, and one to the north) if it loses its shelter funding. No tent cities have been attempted within city limits during the administration of Mayor Greg Nickels, but City Attorney Tom Carr has already informed the group that he will consider such efforts a violation of the city's anti-camping laws.

And there things sit. As the March 31 deadline approaches, negotiations between the city and SHARE/WHEEL have broken off, with the city having made several compromise offers but SHARE/WHEEL claiming that all of them would still have collected enough data on an individual that, especially cross-referenced with other social service data collection, individuals could still be identified and tracked. According to SHARE/WHEEL, the federal requirement on which Safe Harbors is based requires only the compilation of aggregate data, which they have offered to the city. But at present, talks are stalemated. SHARE/WHEEL has already laid off its few paid staff, and is soliciting donations, trying to recruit allies (particularly peace and justice groups), and making preparations for its tent cities to spring into being next month. "We're going to go ahead with it," says board member Peggy Hotes.

Along with the other budget cuts coming on line at the end of the month, and cuts to Medicaid and subsidized federal housing programs that will throw still more people onto the streets, a lot of people may have to use those tents. It's a funny way to end homelessness.