By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Esther Peratrovich misses her mother. She died.
It’s difficult for Peratrovich to talk about. But she does.
“Her favorite things to do were always outdoors,” Peratrovich recalls, as she looks through her phone for an old picture of herself and her mother on a boat, fishing for King Salmon. Some of her dark hair falls across her face.
“She loved being outdoors and it was a lot of fun. It didn’t matter that we took all the kids (my seven siblings). She had the most patience in the world. When we were younger, we didn’t have a choice. We had to go and do whatever she wanted us to do. And now that I’m older, I’m actually grateful for those memories.”
Peratrovich’s mother died in a car accident in Alaska in 2017. Peratrovich was in the car, and a friend of hers was driving. Peratrovich thinks he must have started to fall asleep at the wheel on a particularly dangerous stretch of a winding, windy road. While her friend was gravely injured, Peratrovich walked away without a visible scratch. But she can’t remember a thing. All she knows is that she lost her best friend that night.
Peratrovich has been living in the city’s homeless shelter, the Navigation Center, since July 6, 2021. She is fairly vague on the details of the intervening time between her mother’s death and her arrival in Seattle, but said that she initially came to the city to try to get in contact with her brother, after their father died in October 2020. She had not heard from him, and to go without contact with any of her seven siblings was unusual, she said. She had also made the decision to leave her now-ex-boyfriend, with whom she had been with for 15 years.
Since then, Peratrovich has been working to get completely sober—she’s currently on suboxone, which people with substance use disorders use to wean off fentanyl—so that she can transition from the Navigation Center to an independent living situation. She is doing it for her own kids.
“We have five kids,” Peratrovich says, referring to the children she shares with her ex-boyfriend. Peratrovich’s children currently live with their father in Alaska. She says that she has been working since 2021 to get sober so that her children can have a safe and stable living environment. She describes the work she and her team at the Navigation Center are doing to get her stable, permanent housing, and while it’s involved—think filling out forms, questionnaires, getting documentation in order—Peratrovich says it’s worth the wait.
And that’s the thing about the Navigation Center: It’s not just a homeless shelter. It’s meant to get people into permanent, stable housing.
Run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), the center itself has existed in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District (CID) since 2017. It has not been without controversy and complaints from neighbors and residents. Recently, the City of Seattle announced that the Navigation Center would be moving to a new location. The Navigation Center’s Communications & Community Relations Manager Claire Tuohy-Morgan told the Northwest Asian Weekly that, as of May 28, there has not yet been a timeline or location settled upon for moving the center.
The center itself can house up to 74 people at a time. According to the Navigation Center’s records, as of April 2024, the center has served 706 people in total, 75% of whom were chronically homeless upon entry. In that time, the center has discharged 627 people, 200 of whom went to permanent housing.
When compared with the thousands of people experiencing homelessness within the Seattle city limits, these numbers seem to be a drop in the bucket. But it’s just about the best option there is, says a former DESC volunteer and active homelessness advocate, who, for privacy reasons, requested they go only by the initials “A.J.”
A.J. specifically volunteered with the Crisis Solutions Center (CSC), the emergency arm of DESC, until 2022. The CSC exists to receive people in crisis who would otherwise go to hospitals, jails, psychiatric units, or be left alone. The people who go to the CSC go there voluntarily, A.J. says.
A.J. highlighted that the Navigation Center has long been viewed by some in the CID as the direct cause of an increase in crime and people experiencing homelessness in the area. They said that this is not true and certainly not so simple.
“The politics of homelessness can be complicated. … It can be difficult to see all the dynamics of a regional crisis,” A.J. said, especially one that has persisted for decades, and can trace its local origins back to the early 1900s.
Broadly speaking, they said, it is easy to pin crime and an increase in homelessness on what can be perceived as a visible representation of it—in this case, the Navigation Center—especially when homelessness is misrepresented.
Citing the recently published book, “Homelessness is a Housing Problem,” A.J. outlined the findings by the University of Washington housing scholar and data journalist who wrote the book.
“The only things that line up with homelessness are the supply and demand for housing,” A.J. explained. “Even in West Virginia, for example, there has been the highest poverty and the highest drug use, but the lowest homelessness. And it’s not because they’re all coming here. It’s the fact that inequality with housing shortage means the rents are going to be priced too high.”
A.J. gave the “musical chairs” analogy.
“When you have someone on crutches like musical chairs, they’re more likely to lose.”
“But the reason that somebody is left standing, instead of somebody else, is the lack of chairs. And you see that with the disabilities—mental illness, addiction, and others—that can precede homelessness, and also be caused by it, and … people with disabilities are more likely to be in the lowest economic spectrum,” A.J. continued. “And then you end up with the perception that they’re choosing homelessness or their disabilities.”
With regards to traditional shelters, A.J. said, there are many reasons people experiencing homelessness do not want to go to them, and instead prefer to live in encampments.
“People ask why anybody would choose to live in that camp,” A.J. said. “It’s easier to create warmth in a tent than to create privacy in a room where everyone can hear any loud noise, odor or smell, or what have you.”
Navigation Center Director Dan Williams also highlighted the issue of housing and corresponding misconceptions about the Navigation Center in his interview with the Northwest Asian Weekly.
“At the time and establishment of the Nav”—the Navigation Center—“we all experienced and noticed that housing had become unaffordable for too many in the metro area, causing many folks to become homeless,” Williams said. Like A.J., he said that there was a specific subset of people who did not want to go to a traditional shelter and who preferred to live in encampments, for a variety of reasons. Homelessness had continued to grow exponentially, and resources had been decreasing, Williams said.
This has not changed. According to the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Point-in-Time Count data released earlier this year, the homelessness crisis has gotten worse. Readers should note that according to a 2017 report by the National Homelessness Law Center, the HUD’s count significantly underestimates the number of people experiencing homelessness in the United States. It is unclear whether this has changed.
Williams did not pretend that the Navigation Center was the answer to the crisis, but he did push back against the idea that it is easy to get out of homelessness, once a person is in it, and that it is simply a matter of willpower. Every situation is unique, he said, and the problem has been compounded by the increasing opioid epidemic—none of which has been caused by the Navigation Center or exacerbated by it.
“Issues with open-air drug dealing and use in that area actually precedes the Nav by decades,” Williams said. “And for me, it’s really unfortunate that the attention is so focused on the Nav, but less so on looking into the root causes and correlations of the long-term, systemic issues that has created the landscape for this larger problem to prevail in the area.”
As for moving the center, Williams said that the current location was never meant to be permanent, and that DESC has always been prepared to eventually move the center. He also said that a change of location may increase safety for the center’s staff.
“With all of the recent shootings, and the staff running out to save lives, and the opioid epidemic—it has actually created a quite challenging dynamic for safety for the staff at the Nav,” Williams said. “We would really like to continue doing the work. But we do understand that safety has also been a major issue for us, and our staff and trying to find creative ways to keep them safe.”
Williams also said that the Navigation Center’s staff has recently been pursuing other pathways for permanent housing and ongoing wraparound services, given the rise in opioid use and mental health disorders.
While the median length of stay at the Navigation Center is 3.5 months, this varies dramatically by person, Williams said. Peratrovich’s own situation shows this, too. The waiting list for housing can go on for years, Williams said, particularly when there is such a shortage. Finding affordable housing in and around a city as expensive as Seattle is almost impossible, particularly when people make just a few hundred dollars per month.
A.J. has strong feelings about the City of Seattle’s approach to people experiencing homelessness—specifically, the fact that the City “sweeps” people, and leaves them no place to go.
“I don’t know what the city has in mind. But if they want to continue displacing people from camps every day of the week, they need more and better places to go,” A.J. said.
The Northwest Asian Weekly repeatedly tried to get in contact with both a neighbor of the Navigation Center and a vocal opponent of it, but neither responded to requests for comment or interview.