A city-hired firm is working in homeless services scene. But did it need a new provider?

BREMERTON -- Trisha Munson’s hands were full of items from her packed lunch as she walked along MLK Way, stepping over orange peels and bags of belongings, dogs barking in the background. She handed the food to a homeless 17-year-old, who’d been sitting on a sleeping bag outside the Salvation Army on Sixth Street with a few companions. She’d just spoken with them at length about drug treatment, withdrawals and services that may be able to help.

Munson is an outreach worker with Commonstreet Consulting, a Seattle-based firm that has been engaging with Bremerton’s homeless population since December 14, 2023. The firm was initially contracted for a month-long pilot program by the Bremerton Police Department to take on some outreach efforts, and in January landed a year-long, $212,000 contract with the city. Munson and her six co-workers have put high focus on outreach at MLK Way and Broadway Avenue, two areas of downtown Bremerton where encampments grew during 2023 before being cleared, but have potential for repopulation as people continue to gravitate to the area.

Commonstreet specializes in relocation, title work, property management and acquisitions, which led them into the world of homelessness response, property management specialist Brendan Perko said. Commonstreet acts as the homelessness response management team for the City of Fife and for WSDOT’s Gateway program on Highway 167, which runs from Puyallup north into King County. The firm is also contracted for community outreach and engagement with the City of Everett and works with 30 municipalities on 325 Puget Sound Energy properties. Commonstreet launched its homeless response program to offer resources while clearing encampments they were encountering on right of ways so as not to “shuffle around chairs on the Titanic and displace people.”

This is its first venture into Bremerton.

“We want to connect every single person that we interact with resources, ideally, and then keep properties clear,” Perko said. “There is no one in the area doing that.”

Since late January, Commonstreet has made 213 unique site visits, reported Perko. The firm has documented 72 “meaningful connections,” 15 connections to services, five connections to shelter or housing and eight individuals actively engaged in a plan forward.

Commonstreet has been initiated into the city’s web of established homelessness and housing service agencies as a “hub” or conduit to existing resources. About two months into their contract, Commonstreet’s presence as an outsider has raised questions about the most effective solutions to a growing homelessness crisis that is outpacing its resources.

The balance between law enforcement and outreach

Commonstreet was brought in to “help the police department enforce the City's anti-camping ordinance,” said Bremerton Mayor Greg Wheeler. “They're also working to connect individuals with the proper resources.”

Though Bremerton hosts service providers specializing in housing, mental and behavioral health, substance use and transportation, Commonstreet is unique in its connection to the Bremerton Police Department.

Commonstreet uses Bremerton1, an online form the city administers to accept resident concerns, to respond to reports of encampments or homeless-related issues. Citizens, police officers and public works, can use the Bremerton1 app to log reports with a pinned location and issue description to create a call list for Commonstreet to respond to. The firm keeps detailed notes on all interactions and uses a connected software to document incident reports.

The firm is tasked with curbing sites where encampments begin to develop, enforcing the city's ordinance, passed last September, on unauthorized camping. While Munson and an accompanying Commonstreet worker do outreach, a third worker scouts 15 to 20 known sites for signs of repopulation, Perko said.

Since the clearing of MLK Way and Broadway Avenue on November 1, when the Salvation Army opened its overnight shelter, campers have been disbanded “like kicking a bees’ nest,” Perko said. So far, Commonstreet workers have been involved with mostly asking people to leave private property, and haven’t had to post any encampments for clearing.

A main staple of Commonstreet’s program is “to try to get people into an adequate resource for that particular situation,” Perko said.

But, Commonstreet’s dual charge as enforcement and outreach has raised concern.

Existing service providers question new contract

“You can't do outreach and enforcement with the same team – it just doesn't work,” said Anton Preisinger, director and founder of Northwest Hospitality, during an interview at the Hospital Hill encampment in Silverdale that Kitsap County’s HEART team cleared on February 28. “It takes six months to build up a good relationship with trust… and it takes one bad encounter to lose all that hard work. It hurts the whole ecosystem of outreach when you have a team working for the police department.”

Kelsey Stedman, a member of the all-volunteer group Rock the Block, which worked extensively with the MLK Way encampment residents and others last year, remains “cautiously optimistic” about Commonstreet. She said she admires the firm's work connecting unhoused people with resources in neighboring counties, but doesn’t want to see people displaced by the Bremerton's camping ordinance. That's why she only corresponds with Commonstreet on encampments the firm already knows about, and won’t reveal sites that may develop.

Commonstreet can alleviate police response to homelessness, Wheeler said, which can free up officers for community policing, traffic patrol and detective work.

Outreach should not be a police officer’s job, Bremerton Police captain Aaron Elton said. He serves as the city's liaison with Commonstreet.

“But, we have for so many years taken on that responsibility because we're kind of that stop gap and we've done the best we could,” Elton said.

Commonstreet workers typically are not accompanied by police officers during outreach or enforcement, which can foster a more comfortable and conducive interaction with unhoused people who may have had bad experiences or outstanding warrants, Perko said. Commonstreet workers will bring along officers in cases of potential danger, because “when they're there right next to us, it sends a signal.”

The need for a Bremerton resource 'hub' 

The Bremerton Police Department hired Commonstreet for a pilot program on its own, and from the police budget initially, because it determined that despite many homelessness service providers, none served as a “hub” and universally documented the city’s homeless population, Elton said.

Commonstreet is slowly beginning to make connections with other agencies in the city on-site or through one-on-one meetings in consideration of collaboration. Munson herself said she has worked with people from Kitsap Mental Health Services, Rock the Block, Catholic Community Services and the Kitsap Public Health District.

Before giving away the food supplies on MLK Way, Munson and Perko spoke with Salvation Army’s social service director Eric Harrold inside to get a contact for a Department of Licensing mobile unit to connect some of their folks with IDs. Harrold, Munson and Perko have established a working relationship and freely text one another to ask questions and share contacts.

There are key providers that Commonstreet hasn't made connections with yet, however.

Kitsap Mental Health Services hasn’t had any official contact with the firm, said spokesman Mark Hughes. Preisinger hadn’t heard of Commonstreet until after their trial program had ended, and said “If I was running an outreach project in a new area, the first thing I would do is contact all the people who are active in that area.”

“We already have a hub of resources,” said Tony Ives, executive director of Kitsap Community Resources, who also doesn’t have a relationship with Commonstreet. KCR directs homeless people and those in need to resources with coordinated entry. “We (the city’s service providers) talk every single day, all of us… if they want to be part of that, we're a team and we're not working against anybody. That is the hub. We are the hub.”

When Kitsap County conducted its Point in Time homeless count in January, Munson met Rock the Block, a volunteer organization that had aspired to be a resource hub months ago, when Stedman invited Commonstreet to come along with her group as they set out to contact known encampments. Stedman and Munson have maintained a working relationship, coordinating on servicing individuals, since then.

“We have a bunch of spokes… different shelters and all these different resources, but really what people need is intensive case management that can meet (unhoused people) where they're at,” Stedman said. “Rock the Block was really interested in being that provider, but couldn't get funding to do that” and the group’s work slowed significantly when the MLK Way campers were dispersed.

Stedman is impressed with Commonstreet’s expertise and progress and wants to see them succeed as the “hub,” but she was discouraged to see the job going to an outside agency that wasn’t already familiar with Kitsap County’s service providers. She wondered why the city hadn’t solicited a contract to those agencies if it had determined a need for a resource hub.

For Wheeler, there was no competing with Commonstreet’s services and verifiable track record, because no other agencies or organizations serve as both outreach and enforcement. And when the homeless crisis became more and more apparent on MLK Way in the summer, Wheeler believed that the city needed another agency to coordinate an effort toward tracking and documenting how unhoused people were falling through the cracks with agencies that already exist.

“When you're working with people who are unhoused or experiencing homelessness, you can't build walls – It has to be about building bridges... this is a team effort,” said HEART team coordinator, Jarrod Moran, who has been impressed with Commonstreet so far and met with the team to discuss their similar roles and share contacts. “Another learning curve for me was learning the different great organizations that the county has.”

Commonstreet will meet another wall, however, known well to service providers in the city – a lack of resources.

To duplicate services, or provide those lacking 

Eric Harrold feels the city’s lack of diverse housing resources when he looks outside and sees juveniles wandering the streets that the Salvation Army where the number of overnight guests has been swelling recently. He knows the lack of resources when he looks at the Kitsap County 2024 Comprehensive plan and sees a need for approximately 32,950 new housing units by 2044 across all jurisdictions for a predicted extra 70,000 residents by then.

“There has to be mental health services, there has to be chemical substance use treatment centers, there has to be housing” with wraparound services like case management on-site, Harrold said. “What are you going to do if you don't increase the ‘end’ resources…then (Commonstreet) are just going to be nice folks that we get to talk to every day, and they're not going to be effective.”

On top of a need for comprehensive housing, the county is in need of a medical detox facility, said Rock the Block member Dawn Michele Wilson.

“Most resources across our state, across our nation, right now are severely overwhelmed and there's a bigger need than there is help,” Munson said. “One of the daily tasks I have is fitting a square peg into a round hole. And that's what it takes to get solutions oftentimes – just having another person out there who's dedicated to exactly what we're doing.”

Commonstreet is essentially duplicating the coordinated entry system already served by KCR, and even the Kitsap Rescue Mission, whose housing solutions center refers unhoused people to specialized shelters like the Benedict House, Pendleton Place, George’s House and more, Harrold said.

Unhoused people, who are often dealing with mental, behavioral and drug-related issues, have a hard time keeping up with appointments with service agencies though, Harold said, so a difference in the “hub” model might be crucial. While clients must go to KCR and show up for appointments themselves, Commonstreet can connect homeless people to resources by reaching them where they’re at, and at least help them along.

As Munson worked her way around the Salvation Army, speaking with almost every unhoused person she came across, she reconnected with Jeremy White Eagle inside to fill out an application. The middle-aged man was in a wheelchair, having lost his right leg, and has been on a waitlist to get into Pendleton Place for two years.

Tasks like filling out an application for the Benedict House, which will shelter him a few days, can take White Eagle many days with his ADD and drug addiction, he said. He hasn’t had success with other providers until Commonstreet pushed him along with small deliverables to keep him accountable in his journey towards housing.

Once White Eagle gets into Pendleton Place, he’ll have time to heal from an infection in his leg, keep track of his medication and get refuge from the drug scene.

While Wilson is happy to have more hands at work when service workers like herself are exhausted, she wonders why money is being spent to duplicate services that are already achieving similar success stories. “We're a small little community where we already had the outreach teams doing the best that we could with the resources we have, so what does this outside larger entity for profit feel that they're going to be able to do?”

“Not duplicating a lot of (services) I think is important,” Salvation Army Captain Lance Walters said. “I think (Commonstreet) has a lot of relationship building to make where there's already been a lot of relationships with a number of groups already formed with the people in those different areas.”

Commonstreet may not be native to Kitsap County, but with offices in Spokane, Tacoma, Seattle and Salem, Oregon, it draws from a wider pool of resources that can be used, if applicable to an individual’s situation, Perko said. That could be an asset in not overworking local agencies.

“In terms of homelessness response it's a would-you-rather game,” Perko said. “Would you rather have no resources or two or three people who do the same thing?... I'd rather have redundancies.”

And just like White Eagle’s success with Commonstreet following his engagement with other Bremerton service agencies, redundancies may just be what gets the job done.

“If somebody has burnt some bridges with other people because of their behavior or they're just not in that place to really follow through, no matter what the agency has been doing – for Common Street to be there and focusing in on those individuals and those relationships and maybe being the human that's there in that moment, that's an opportunity to build hope,” Walters said.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Commonstreet Consulting enters Bremerton's homeless services scene