Home Base

The crisis of homelessness in our community requires innovative solutions.

One program is tackling the problem by preventing it from happening in the first place.

Home Base is a partnership between the Seattle Mariners, United Way of King County and the King County Bar Association that disrupts the status quo by preventing the leading cause of homelessness - evictions.

In King County, over 30,000 people experienced homelessness over the course of 2018. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty reports that evictions are the number one reason why someone loses their home.

A September 2018 study by the King County Bar Association and Seattle Women's Commission found that 87% of eviction filings were because of nonpayment of rent with roughly three quarters of those cases involving an average of $1,237 or less owed to the landlord.

Home Base works to keep thousands of people facing eviction in their homes by:

• Providing legal representation through scaling up the King County Bar Association's volunteer attorney program, the Housing Justice Project, which helps low-income clients facing eviction;
• Making flexible funds (provided by the Mariners and administered by United Way) available to clients to pay back-rent that is owed;
• Offering the guidance of a caseworker to prevent the person or family from facing eviction again.

The King County Bar Association recruits volunteer attorneys to appear each day at the King County Courthouses in Seattle and Kent to assist some 2,000 people each year facing eviction. Data show that the top reasons cited for nonpayment of rent are lost employment or income, medical emergency or death in the family. In most cases, eviction was initiated for one month or less in late rent. And state law allows evictions to be filed in as little as three days after rent is due.

With the help of the Bar Association's Housing Justice Project, clients are often able to negotiate payment plans and lease extensions, keeping them in their homes and avoiding an eviction on their record. But the program was limited in the number of people it could serve due to:

• Lack of emergency funds to pay back-rent;
• Lack of trained social workers to help tenants address issues that led to housing instability;
• Lack of awareness of eviction prevention services.

Thanks to a $3 million founding donation from the Mariners, Home Base launched in March 2019 with funding for legal services, flexible emergency rent support, social workers, outreach and program management and evaluation. Over the next three years, the goal is to increase funding for the program to over $12 million, making it possible to help even more people in need.

When people have access to emergency funds and legal representation, we all win - landlords receive what they are owed, tenants stay in their homes, and that means fewer people living on the streets.