“I never took other people’s situations as my own. In a sense, I’ve always been able to maintain a certain level of detachment. I think it’s unfair to usurp the pain of other people’s existence–it’s theirs–and me crying about it isn’t gonna make much difference.”
Longtime public health nurse Heather Barr said this in an interview I did with her on October 27, 2015. She talked about her path from hospital-based nursing to public health nursing, working in jail health, then as a TB control nurse with Public Health–Seattle & King County (PHSKC), and then with the Health Care for the Homeless (HCH) Network program within PHSKC. When I talked with her, she was working as a consultant with HCH on best practices for communicable disease control and trauma-informed care in homeless-serving agencies throughout King County. She described the high noise levels in many such agency buildings and how that added to stress for the people being served and for frontline workers. “Looking at environments (for people experiencing homelessness) and seeing how do we really replicate or reflexively make environments look like prisons.” When she began her work as a public health nurse in the early 1980s she says that it was a stated purpose of many shelters to be as harsh, uncomfortable, and uninviting as possible with the idea that that would force people to ‘move on.’ That if the shelters were too comfortable, people would “opt into homelessness.” She pointed out that helping people feel safe and supported was more likely to help them want more of that and consider other options for health, housing, and social support.
In a week here in Seattle/King County, when the King County Regional Homelessness Authority released the 2024 ‘homeless count’ for our region, with homelessness being at the highest number ever recorded 16, 385 people), alongside Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell calling for funding cuts to reduce the number of shelter beds, I hold onto hope by remembering the compassionate and evidence-based work of people like Heather Barr. We know what works to reduce the rate of homelessness significantly, but as a city, county, and country, we don’t seem to have the sustained will to make that happen.
