In November 2015, Mayor Nancy Backus convened Auburn’s task force on Homelessness. They developed a list of recommendations and consensus items on how to address the city’s current condition of homelessness that will be brought to the city council. The overarching purpose of this project is to engage students in assessing these recommendations and developing strategies for carrying them out.
Homelessness is a complex issue that affects a city in its entirety. This project aims
to analyze and evaluate the Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness and lists potential
action items that could work towards mitigating homelessness in the City of Auburn.
As well as providing a preliminary assessment of each of the 61 action items the
task force identified, we drafted the most applicable and practical action items
into potential policy recommendations. Next, literature was examined concerning
various homelessness policies and applied to the City of Auburn’s context to create
working recommendations for aiding those experiencing homelessness in Auburn.
We propose two overarching sets of policy recommendations based on the action
items developed by the Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness. The first set of
recommendations seeks to create a campaign that would 1) familiarize the residents
of Auburn with the causes of homelessness and humanize those experiencing
homelessness to gain support for future assistance endeavors and 2) improve
interagency communication between various institutions. This campaign seeks to
combine enhanced public knowledge of situations surrounding homelessness with
a more responsive, integrated social service ecosystem in order to build advocacy
and capacity. The second set of recommendations involves utilizing different
housing policy models to identify space and potential funding to sustain affordable
housing in Auburn.
Read the final student report delivered to the local gov/community partner.
Livable City Year Contact Info
Teri Thomson Randall
Program Manager
terir@uw.edu
206.221.9240
University Faculty Contact
Kyle Crowder
Sociology
Professor
kylecrow@uw.edu
(206) 616-1203
Local Government / Community Contact
Nancy Backus