KING COUNTy — The King County Regional Homelessness Authority unanimously approved its five-year plan on Thursday.
The plan includes around $250 million of spending in 2024, the majority of which will be used to addressed temporary housing, building out more shelter options, and helping with outreach. That number sits far below what the KCRHA’s former CEO Marc Dones floated in the early stages of the five-year-plan, when they said it would cost between $1.7 billion and $3.4 billion annually to end homelessness in our region.
In the first two years of this plan, the KCRHA will focus in on a handful of priorities, including housing and shelter, building out a real-time tool that indicates the availability of beds across all shelter types, improved responses to severe weather events, and better data collection.
“The full plan provides a roadmap and a set of action steps to achieve progress on each of these three levels, unifying and coordinating the homeless response system so that it is more transparent, accountable, and effective at reducing unsheltered homelessness,” the KCRHA said in a written release.
Dones stepped down as CEO in mid-May, after serving in that role since the inception of the KCRHA in 2021.