For folks living in Jefferson County, Washington, few people are doing work more noble than Sarah Rogers. She works at Dove House Advocacy Services as the shelter manager and domestic violence advocate. While earning her associate’s degree in psychology and bachelor’s in social science from Washington State University, Rogers volunteered at Dove House and decided to stay.
Rogers cares deeply about her community, which shows in her commitment to doing this challenging work. Like many other professionals in Jefferson County, Rogers is concerned about the inadequate income and lack of housing for folks living here. Although she fills a vital gap at the Dove House, she wishes the community worked harder to be accessible for everyone who wants to live in it.
What is your role at the Dove House?
I wear a few hats. My role is the shelter manager and I’m the lead facilitator for our prevention program and also a domestic violence advocate.
What experience do you have working with families and youth experiencing homelessness? What is your role in helping them find housing?
I have four years of experience doing that, anything from helping them find housing to connecting them to resources. We are advocacy-based counselors, so we talk about the trauma they’ve experienced … we also do the minor things leading up to housing too, so if somebody needs IDs, or they need to find a job first — or whatever they need to get the housing — we help them with that … even finding clothes for a professional job, helping them record their hours, or filing L&I (Labor & Industries) claims. There really isn’t anything we don’t do.
What is the main barrier you notice for people trying to get into housing?
There are not even houses out there. The ones that do pop up are way above the pay grade of a large portion of the people who work here in town. So [many] people who work at Safeway are not full-time. They do not make three times the rent out here, and that’s what landlords are asking for.
If you have a rental out there for $1,700, you actually have to make $5,400 a month in order to rent it … the apartment across the street is actually pretty affordable. It’s not greatly affordable but it’s lower than what we have seen … like $1,200-$1,250 a month. I had a couple who’s been living on the street apply, and they got denied because they don’t make $3,600 a month … I don’t know how much you make, but I honestly don’t make enough money to afford any of these houses either. I don’t make anywhere near that.
We’re seeing studios for $1,000 and above, we’re seeing two-bedroom apartments for $2,000 … The majority of the people here do not make that kind of money. There are not even jobs here to supply 90% of the population with the money to afford the rentals that are available.
For most low-income, subsidized apartments here, the list to get in is about 300 people long. It’s like two and a half to three years of waiting. If I have somebody in my shelter, like a homeless family of three, and they have income and we can get them on the list for the subsidized apartments, they still have a three-year wait. But most shelters only have a 90-day stay period.
We don’t ever dismiss somebody into homelessness. If somebody leaves, it is generally to another safe place to stay — whether it be a rental, a place they can stay with a family, or a subsidy or something. We don’t ever say, “Your 90 days is up, get out!” We don’t do that.
Have you noticed a relationship between the foster care system and homelessness?
There’s a huge gap there, for sure. A lot of foster care kids, when they turn 18 and age out of foster care, there’s nowhere for them to go. There’s no transitional living. And again, in our area, there’s just no housing, period. These kids [are] expected to just fend for themselves, and they can’t. They haven’t learned those skills yet. What we’ve learned with youth is that their brain doesn’t actually stop growing until they’re about 24, so we’re kicking them out into the real world like six years too early.
We were talking about bringing host houses here, which could help the youth between 18 to 24 or 13 to 24. Once they leave foster care, they can go into a host housing situation or an ADU [accessory dwelling unit] situation where they have supportive living and someone can kind of show them what it takes to have a job, to save money, to rent. Fromm ages 13 to 18, their number one worry is school and just trying to survive the foster care system. They need that little extra filler that stops them from falling into the cracks.
So far, I don’t know of any host houses that have actually popped up in the area. We were trying to bring it out here but … it’s kind of up to the public to be like, “Yes! I want to be a host house!” It doesn’t seem like we’ve had any movement.
If you had a magic wand, what would you want to see in terms of resources for youth experiencing homelessness?
If I could have anything I wanted? Can it be a multiple-phased thing?
Yeah, absolutely!
If I could wave my magic wand, I would take Fort Worden and I would turn it into a four-year university with student housing. I would also have 15 to 20 host houses for 13- to 24-year-olds. I would love to wave my magic wand and build two 60-unit low-income housing [developments] out here, two- and three-bedroom. I’m not done yet! I would also like 10 acres of yurts and tiny houses, with full plumbing and hookups. I would like somebody to manage those who doesn’t have a bias against renting to youth.
You’re a professional, I’m a professional. You would think that, out of anybody, we would have the cherry pickings. But we don’t! Every year we lose possibilities of fresh medical staff coming in, or fresh social workers. We miss out on all that new education because there’s nowhere to house anybody. That’s why we have a lack of therapists in the area.
We’re missing out on all that fresh education, all the new standards, best practices, because we don’t allow it to come into our communities with no housing. But on my street … we’ve got two new people building multimillion-dollar homes made out of nothing but windows and big fancy staircases, while the rest of us are barely making enough to survive, and are one paycheck away from our landlord raising our rent and being homeless. It’s crazy!
The gap is really pretty remarkable.
It is remarkable. When I looked up Airbnbs in the area, we have like 30 houses that are now Airbnbs or Venmo hotels for the summer. It’s really just that this community seems to put more into collecting tourist dollars than it does helping its own community members to be successful. It’s sad.
I saw a pretty heated Nextdoor thread about people saying, ‘Why are you choosing to do an Airbnb rather than helping young families and low-income people?’
Yeah, it’s kind of worrisome. In order to have a robust community, you need younger folks to come here, put down roots, have kids and fill the schools, right? But there’s nothing to draw those young folks here. And there’s nothing to keep them here, wanting to put down roots, if we can’t make the situation better. If you can’t get a house that’s affordable, and a school that fits your needs, and have a job to fund all that? Yeah, it’s kind of scary.
Since this interview, the Pfeifer House became operational offering low-cost housing to young adults between 18 and 24 years old. Olympic Community Action Programs, or OlyCAP, also started programs specifically to help young people between 13 and 24 years old access housing. The Olympic Angels is another program available to foster youth in Jefferson County.
