(Image: cleanhandscollective.org)
A pandemic has come and nearly gone and Seattle has finally put some cash behind simple but ingenious solutions to help people keep their hands clean in the city.
Seattle Public Utilities this week announced it will split $100,000 from the Seattle Water and Waste Innovation Fund for grants to power two solutions for public hand washing stations in the city.
The Real Change and Clean Hands Collective “Street Sinks” project will receive $60,000 “to implement its street sinks model in areas where they are most needed: near encampments, food distribution locations, and recreation and public gathering places. Real Change newspaper vendors will help construct and maintain the sinks,” SPU said.
Meanwhile, a project from the Makers nonprofit will receive $40,000 for its hand washing solution will will be implemented by case workers from social service provider Reach and community volunteers.
A representative for Real Change estimated that the grant would allow that group to install around 45 sinks across the city, the South Seattle Emerald reports. Meanwhile, the Seattle Times reports the Makers grant should add around 10 new stations including “water barrels inside a large steel cube, along with a circuit board, sensors, a nozzle and drain pan.”
The grants come months after the Seattle City Council allocated the money for the sinks at the height of the COVID-19 crisis and the projects could still face barriers including requirements for placement that could severely limit the deployment.
Concerns about placement and drainage, meanwhile, could be relatively insignificant compared to worries about future outbreaks. King County health officials said shigellosis, a highly contagious gastrointestinal bacterial infection, and other diarrheal illnesses spread in the area’s homeless population this fall and winter. Experts say simply washing hands with soap and water for 20 seconds can help prevent many germs causing these illnesses from spreading.
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Will these sinks actually be used by anyone? Or are they just a “feel-good” gesture by City government?
My crystal ball says they will be broken and so full of trash, needles, puke and other bodily secretions within a few weeks that they will be so gross that nearly no-one will even want to touch them. In a year or so, they’ll be quietly removed.
My expectation is that they quickly fill with trash and debris.
Oh, they’ll be USED…most likely not what they’re intended for, however.
They will be out for a month, be used as public restrooms, vandalized and the city will quietly take them away.
It is about a few loud voices shaking loose some money from the City Council to perpetuate the status quo – enabling drug addicts, anarchists and the mentally ill to choose to live in encampments in parks rather then direct them to shelters and treatment services while lining the pockets of the homeless industrial complex – not solving problems or making people’s lives better. Everyone know this experiment will be a magnet for dysfunction, huge headache for the surrounding community, and failure. Maybe that is even the point.
Yikes, looking at these comments it seems either CHS readership or their political views are changing. I for one am very excited that these public restrooms are opening.
“When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” The provenance of the quote is disputed, but the point stands regardless of who dropped it. When every available vestibule in CH is currently used as a toilet, canvas, or waste receptacle there’s no reason to believe these sinks won’t be treated with the same level of care. At one point in the city’s history this may have been a good idea that would improve QOL in the neighborhood. But the facts have changed, the evidence of how such infrastructure is treated is clear, and so a reasonable person changes their mind on the worthiness of such programs.
I’ve also noticed a definite change in the overall political attitudes of CHS comments in the past year or so. My guess is it has to do mainly with the closure of the MyNorthwest comment section and the Seattle Times’ subsequent restriction of comments to subscribers only (which has cut down their chronic white supremacist infestation considerably, though it’s still pretty bad for a supposedly progressive city’s daily paper). Some of that negative energy was bound to flow in this direction, not having many other places to go.
That said, I think the street sinks are an idea worth trying. If they don’t work out, so be it. We have to try things to see what works, there’s no other way.
If they don’t work out, alot of taxpayer money has been wasted.
If you never try out new ideas, you never learn. This could be a low cost, high benefit policy.
$100,000 is a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things anyways, I can think of way worse ways that taxpayer money could be “wasted”.
Bob: OMG there’s a homeless problem, we need to do something!
Seattle: OK, here’s some ideas that can incrementally help the situation while we work on the larger problem.
Bob: OMG what if these solutions don’t work?!? We shouldn’t spend money on anything ever because there’s a chance that something may not work out perfectly!!1!
Yet again you’ve demonstrated a large contributor to the current homeless situation: people that complain loudly about the problems and complain equally as loud about the solutions despite not offering their own.
FO: You clearly missed the COS porta-potty debacle of 2008:
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/17toilets.html