Initiative to end homelessness in Seattle ends less than 2 years after it’s created

SEATTLE — An initiative to end homelessness in downtown Seattle has come to an end.

The goal was to get nearly everyone who was homeless downtown into housing within a year.

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) announced Tuesday it’s winding down its ‘Partnership for Zero’ initiative because of a loss of funding.

The program has faced funding issues from the start.

The city council denied it funds to get it off the ground. So last year, Amazon, the Ballmer Group, Microsoft, and Starbucks donated a combined $10 million to the program.

The Homelessness Authority said the initial grant funding for the project has now expired. Nearly 40 workers are now facing layoffs.

The KCRHA said it’s taking steps to implement the lessons learned.

“KCRHA was created to help unify our homelessness response system—to support and coordinate the system in service of one shared path forward. The ‘Partnership for Zero’ pilot represented an important opportunity to implement a new way of approaching homelessness response as emergency management, and that approach can be applied to future efforts. At the same time, in an environment of limited resources and urgent need, KCRHA’s focus needs to be on the core functions of contracts, systems administration, and implementation of the Five Year Plan—supporting our provider partners working across King County,” said the KCRHA.

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