“When I go back to Seattle, I still see the same people out on the streets. It slowly kills you, it really does. Having a place to live is a privilege,” said Leoule Goshu, a 25-year-old student at Harvard who was homeless in Seattle five years ago.

“Your life is reduced to the basics, and it’s a scary feeling,” he said.

Since 2005, officials in King County have been working on the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness. The project aims at dealing with the challenges that alcoholism, mental disabilities and other factors pose in trying to get people off the streets, said Nicole Macri, director of administrative services at the Downtown Emergency Service Center.

The ten-year plan is similar to a plan implemented in New York, which was very successful, said Bill Block, project director of the King County Committee to End Homelessness.

The plan aims to prevent the institutional causes of homelessness. For example, most mentally ill people are discharged from prisons onto the streets, and many foster homes also release children who end up homeless, Block said.

The ten-year plan targets what Block called “high risk communities,” or places with high percentages of foreclosure or low-income demographics.

Another tenet of the plan is to help people move into stable housing with enough supportive services to maintain that housing. Block explained that the key aspect of this plan is that it provides housing plus services and that it involves dealing with people where they are, instead of making them come to the authorities to seek medication or counseling.

The plan also seeks to address “huge societal factors” that impact homelessness, Block said. This means sensitivity to issues of race and ethnicity when providing housing for homeless families. For example, in some cultures the idea of providing housing for parents and children, excluding the grandparents, would not work, Block said.

But, not everyone agrees about the effectiveness of the plan.

Eric Wirkman, the Teen Feed coordinator at University Street Ministry opposes the ten-year plan.

“Services for youth and young adults are largely an afterthought in the ten-year plan,” he said.

The U-District has a homeless population of mostly youth and young adults, but there has been an increase in the number of older people since services downtown have declined.

Wirkman said that the ten-year plan does nothing specifically to address the institutional causes of homelessness, like holes in the foster care system that release many young people onto the streets.

He called the issue of homeless youth a glaring and systematic dysfunction within society that people don’t like to acknowledge.

Another aspect of the ten-year plan is to measure and track results, in order to effectively evaluate the plan and solve any potential problems.

“Some of the best studies have been done by the UW School of Social Work,” Block said.

Components of the ten-year plan include the Housing First program, in place at the Morrison building, as well as a project called 1811 Eastlake.

The Housing First program provides housing to homeless people first, and then encourages them to seek counseling for their problems. Job training and career building resources are also provided. 1811 Eastlake houses chronic alcoholics, who are the most expensive for the state to care for, Macri said.

“The city and Bill Block have really been touting the cost saving success of 1811 Eastlake,” she said. “It actually costs less money to house people than to keep them homeless.”

One of the downtown shelters still in service is the Morrison Building, which was once a luxury hotel.

Many spend the night at the shelter, in large rooms lined with bunk beds. They are given blankets and access to restroom facilities.

Unlike 1811 Eastlake, the Morrison Building houses mostly people with mental illnesses. The Housing First program targets the most vulnerable people: those who are unable to care for themselves, find food or even know that they have a mental illness, Macri said.

At the Morrison Building, services include the Connections Project, which provides people with laundry and bathroom facilities, computer access and classes about writing resumes and cover letters. The project provides people with services that will help them find employment, said Macri.

“There’s something innate in human beings about wanting to contribute to something bigger,” she said. “Most unemployed homeless people would want to work if they had the opportunity to do so.”

Block said the biggest problem the plan faces is that the minimum wage in Washington state is not sufficient income to afford housing. As a result, many people without the educational skills or physical capacity to earn more than minimum wage end up on the streets despite having a job, he said.

Macri hinted at further doubts of the project’s success due to lack of funding, as well as the question of whether the plan is doing enough to really solve the problem in 10 years.

“I think it’s really hard to tell at this point,” she said. “1811 Eastlake is the poster project, but the real question is: Do we really have enough projects like that to really make a difference?”

Despite these difficulties, the project has been endorsed by political figures like Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, as well as numerous other churches and committees.

“We have a pretty good sense of the reality on the street,” Macri said. “People who have had long histories of being homeless are doing well in those projects.”

However, many are still wary of the ways that the plan intends to end homelessness.

“Radical change is what needs to happen [to end homelessness],” Wirkman said. “It’s going to take a lot more than 10 years and we need to start looking at our entire way of life.”