I was invited to speak on Jan 23, 2025 at a community event in Shoreline, WA on the topic of homelessness, with the goal of raising support for Camp United We Stand (a county sanctioned homeless camp for which my wife and I volunteer). The event was attended by various church leaders and by the mayor of Shoreline, WA. I gave the first speech of the evening.
Here’s my speech in full:
Hi, my name is Scott MacDonald and I’m a fairly average person in a lot of ways. I grew up not far from here in a very small home near the intersection of 185th and Ashworth, which my father bought when he was very young and newly married, despite not having graduated from high school.
I started my career in tech over 30 years ago (where I still work), so I’ve been fairly successful in a lot of ways. I’d first like to touch upon my personal journey.
I grew up in the lower-middle class, put myself through college working as a janitor, and while I attended a church, it emphasized building our church community rather than the broader community at large. Hence, I did not think too much of the homeless problem when it started cropping up in the 80s. There are many varied opinions on homelessness and I’m not proud to say that I’ve probably held most of them at some point of my life, such as:
- The homeless are lazy – if they’d get a job, they wouldn’t be homeless.
- They are mostly drug addicts that wouldn’t accept help either way.
- They are mostly mentally ill, so there’s not much that we can do for them either way.
It wasn’t until 2017 that I really started to think abut the problem in any way, and as I started my personal faith journey, my thinking started to change. My wife discovered that the First Methodist Church in downtown Seattle (next to the Pacific Science Center) hosted a weekly Sunday morning breakfast for the homeless and were always looking for volunteers. We signed up and this was my first real experience interacting with the homeless. Our volunteer schedule wasn’t consistent and they cancelled it during covid, but we became more active when they started up again in late 2020. Eventually we became regular volunteers and recently I became one of the leads that helps run it. I’m not a Methodist and I’ve never attended their church, but I do have keys and I know their alarm code.
I don’t think that giving people one meal a week really changes their lives, but it allowed me to help change my life.
From this I learned that some people are pretty bad off – mental illness is real and drugs are a factor, but half (or more) of the people were not impaired in this way. In fact, I was surprised to learn that almost half of these people had some type of job and were looking to get more hours.
Just last week I talked with a man who recently graduated from culinary school, but was working on a road construction crew looking for a job in a kitchen.
Another time a man one man was talking to his employer on the phone and asked if they had room for his friend to work as well, and they said yes. His friend was a 40ish year-old man and his excitement exceeded my kids on Christmas morning – he just kept exclaiming “thank you Mabel, thank you!”
We became aware of Camp United We Stand a little less than 2 years ago through my wife’s participation in an interfaith group. She connected with Lisa and learned that they had a postion called “laundry angel”, where she takes home some laundry once a week, washes it, and returns it the next day. My wife has been doing this for almost two years now.
We also learned that they were building a shower. I’m semi-handy so we volunteered our garage. It turns out that the shower we built had some requirements very different from a normal shower project – it had to be light weight, break down in pieces for easy moving, and you need to be able to wash the entire thing with a pressure washer. It took Christopher and I awhile to figure it all out and we certainly made a few mistakes, but the camp has had a shower for the past year now, and I’m very proud of my part in that. We used a lot of foam and resin. I was humbled when I learned that the camp accepted a new member who hadn’t showered in a year and a half, and the shower we built ended that streak.
Recently I wrote about the homelessness problem on my blog, and while researching I was surprised to learn that Seattle has the 3rd largest homeless population in the country (much bigger than San Francisco) despite being the 17th largest city. For comparison, the greater Houston area has over twice the population of the Seattle metropolitan area, but the number of homeless in Seattle is nearly 5 times as many. There are many theories as to why this is, but the only one that makes sense to me is due to the housing shortage.
While my dad was able to buy a small home while very young with no high school diploma, my daughter has been an engineer at Microsoft for 6 years and has saved a considerable amount of money, is engaged to a man who also works in tech, but they have no idea when they will ever have enough to buy an actual house. As you may have noticed, nobody is building the small starter homes like my dad bought so many years ago on Ashworth. Has anybody seen a new home hit the market for under 1.1 million? We bought our 1974 split level in Bothell in 1996 for $170,000 and today it would probably list for around $800,000.
Likewise, my son graduated college and lives with his girlfriend in a 700 square foot apartment in Woodinville that costs about $2,000 each month (and you need first and last month’s rent plus a deposit to move in). It’s no wonder that you cannot afford an apartment earning minimum wage.
Why does Houston have 5 times less homeless people than Seattle? I lived in Houston for 7 years and I can tell you that it’s not because everybody there is gainfully employed and much richer than their Seattle counterparts. In fact, I’d say it’s the opposite – they have a very large population of poor people, but they have real estate to match. They have some very large neighborhoods that are not desirable to live in, but the housing in those neighborhoods is very cheap.
My wife and I don’t take many vacations, but last month we took a safari in Africa. We had a free day in Nairobi and since I’m a little weird, we arranged for a tour of their Kibera slums – the third largest slums in the world. Area wise it is fairly small – just 2 ½ kilometers squared, but it is densely packed and very impoverished, and it is only a few miles for their downtown area. It occurred to me that this would never happen in Seattle. Instead, a billionaire would buy up the area, build luxury condos, and create a token building for low rent housing.
Camps like Camp United We Stand are very important for the people that live there. They provide a sense of community and safety, and give people space to live. Just having a place to sleep without being constantly harassed is a great benefit that I’ve never really had to worry about. They have a semi-heated common area with chairs and a table. They can shower and have their clothes laundered so they can more comfortably interact with other members of society.
The members of the camp live in varied circumstances. The average age of the camp is around 55 and many of them have some form of disability. Many are experiencing homelessness for the first time. The camp is not for everybody – they require that every member follow certain rules and volunteer for certain duties. It would be great if the camp could accommodate more people, but that leads to logistical issues and can lead to a less cohesive community.
The camp is very beneficial for the broader community in many ways. It keeps people off the street and allows many an avenue to ease back into society.
As a friend of the camp, it also provides the average person with a way to become more involved and to help the homeless population. While the camp represents a miniscule percentage of the overall homeless population, it is very difficult to serve the people living under overpasses and camping next to the freeway. They each have specific needs, but it’s hard to get to know those people and to fulfill their needs as they are always moving around.
Likewise, if I built more homeless showers and left them in public places for the homeless to use, they would simply get trashed because the people using them have no sense of ownership. By putting a shower in a camp, however, it becomes their shower – they use it and they care for it. Likewise, in Kibera they found that public restrooms were not respected. But if they built restrooms to serve 100 families and then they put locks on those restrooms and only those 100 families had the key, the restrooms were well taken care of.
Seattle can learn from Kibera, where 300 NGOs are active but not making very much difference. Projects meant to serve the entire population are often too broad to succeed, whereas much more targeted projects tend to succeed. Likewise, projects meant to help each of the 16,000 homeless people in Seattle also frequently fail, but if we can break that big population into many groups of smaller populations, the projects targeting those smaller populations have a much better chance of succeeding. In computer science, this is referred to as “divide and conquer” and is the basis for handling large data.
Growing this camp to serve 16,000 people won’t work, but creating many smaller camps has a much better chance of working.
It also gives community members a way of volunteering in a way that they can see their efforts impact the lives of real people.
This camp is doing a lot to help people and I’m proud to be a small part of that, but it’s still a little disturbing to hear that it has a few woman over the age of 70 (including an 84 year old woman experiencing homelessness for the very first time) and they have to live in a tent with no locking door, only a cot to sleep on, and is constantly surrounded by moisture. Anybody that camps knows that most condensation inside a tent comes from your own breath, so moisture is a hard problem to solve.
I’d love it if there was a way to provide a slightly better experience for at least some of the residents. I love the idea of the little 8’ x 8’ houses with locking doors, but I also recognize that those are difficult to move between churches when the camp moves. I’m sure that people have explored various options and I’d also love to do so.
To finish, I want to thank the many churches who support the camp by donating space, the government officials for supporting the camp and allowing the camp to exist, and all of the various volunteers who make the camp work.