LYNNWOOD—In the last two years, Lynnwood man Joe Wankelman has conducted nearly 600 interviews with homeless individuals throughout King and Snohomish counties, compiling evidence, and evaluating treatment and service center’s approaches. The purpose of his work is to get to the bottom of why, despite Washington State allocating $5.3 billion into the homelessness issue over the last decade, nothing seems to be working.
Wankelman’s exploration into the homeless crises began with a journey of self-discovery. After his suicide attempt in 2016, he grew deeply concerned with whatever underlying issues led him there in the first place. He yearned to uncover the source of his depression, why he felt so angry, why his first marriage fell apart and why he often looked to the bottom of a bottle to escape.
The answer, he found, lay in years of unworked trauma dating back to his childhood – growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father, who never gave him the opportunity to feel validated or worth it.
“We like to define trauma with a capital ‘T’ – the murders, the violence – but we don’t typically look at the lower case t trauma, which I’ve come to realize was abandonment, rejection, betrayal, injustice, the feeling of guilt and shame, where you hate yourself, where you feel unworthy, fearful, or inadequate in a world driven by status,” said Wankelman.
Wankelman was often bullied in school due to his lack of confidence and shy, nervous nature. So, in 2000 he joined the U.S. Military believing it would give him strength. However, this decision, he would later find out, would only exacerbate his issues through combat-related PTSD.
Wankelman was medically discharged from the military given his mental health struggles. In the years that followed he continued to struggle with anger, alcoholism, and severe depression.
These struggles led him to Patrick Crosby, Snohomish County PUD Commissioner Julieta Altamirano-Crosby’s husband, who co-chairs Randy Couture’s Xtreme Couture G.I. Foundation which assists U.S. veterans with various struggles including financial burdens, civilian transition, and mental health issues related to service.
Crosby’s support is where Wankelman’s mental health journey began, eventually leading him to study Data Analytics and Policy at John Hopkins University – a program that swings a magnifying glass over important political issues and attempts to generate data-driven solutions.
While working towards his master’s degree at John Hopkins, Wankelman approached Snohomish County Councilman Nate Nehring to ask if he could do a study on the county road systems. Nehring, while appreciative of his interest, asked Wankelman if he could look into the homeless crises instead noting the county is driven by their annual Point In Time (PIT) data but could use more in-depth, grassroots, analyses.
“We must be open-minded to new ideas for how we service our most vulnerable neighbors. There is room to build stronger accountability, transparency, and compassion into how we deliver services to those who need help,” Snohomish County Councilman Nate Nehring told the Lynnwood Times.
Wankelman began his work by visiting homeless encampments throughout King and Snohomish counties, county-operated hotels designated to tackling the drug epidemic and interviewing the individuals living in these communities to figure out how their subconscious impacts decision-making, an approach inspired by his experience in marketing.
His approach to initiating these interviews was similar to his own introspective journey; trying to help individuals pin at what age they recall their first traumatic memory taking place in an effort to “reverse engineer [his] brain.”
“I entered this project knowing that data points would give me a portion of the answer but people, the words they use, who they are, is really where this story is,” said Wankelman. “Then it was learning how to match their words, and stories, to match statistical analysis.”
Wankelman began to see a stark reflection of himself, and his own life, in the homeless individuals he would meet. He began to see a pattern, noting that individuals who grew up in households encumbered by violence had earlier memories of trauma, where those who had stable households tended to recall their first traumatic memories taking place in their teens.
“I really started to see the similarities in my own story in all the people I’ve talked to who were struggling with the housing crises, drugs, and temper; because those are just maladaptive mechanisms to survive the process going through hard times,” said Wankelman.
What Wankelman realized is that the housing crises, and closely linked substance abuse crises, are often being treated similar to many clinical issues the country is facing; in that that treatment tends to focus on the symptoms, not the root cause that fuels them.
“You can treat a symptom but if you don’t take care of the problem then it comes back in a different way,” said Wankelman. “Sobriety is the hardest battle you’ll have to go through, because it’s giving up a bad habit, a maladaptive mechanism you have used to protect yourself, or disassociate or attach, to alleviate the suffering of something, for years, sometimes decades. It’s deciding there’s a better way and letting that go.”
His solution: Hope – the only thing that can overcome fear and anxiety, according to Wankelman.
Recovery begins with a safety environment where you can build trust, Wankelman said. Trust, he continued, is important to build before stages of vulnerability where true change happens.
Another issue Wankelman found is how the region has historically “treated” the homelessness and drug abuse problem, emphasizing “optics” over actual change. For example, in compiling the PIT data (which, again, is the universally accepted report the county uses as a baseline for all homelessness-related decision-making) he found the data did not properly reflect a vast majority of homeless individuals who chose to opt out of participating in the study.
“The PIT count is highly inaccurate. They had to spend $40 million to manipulate the numbers just so it looked somewhat accurate. This is what messed up my statistical analysis while I was at John Hopkins. It’s so inaccurate that I can’t even do any statistical analysis,” said Wankleman. “I interviewed 40 people in Lynnwood, for example, but according to the provisions I was given I could only include two of them.”
At a recent Chemical Dependency and Mental Health Board meeting Wankelman sat in the stands while the board reviewed their evaluations. They reported connecting 7,000 individuals to local services but when Wankelman asked how many of those 7,000 were unique examples the number fell to 400.
The PIT data is also skewed, according to Wankelman, because, in his experience, most individuals suffering from homelessness and drug addiction have a distrust of governments and choose not to participate in their surveys and analytics.
“There’s a frustration and distrust within the homeless community of having their story be used for someone else’s profit,” said Wankelman. “Many of them don’t want to be recorded. Most of them just want jobs yet jobs are so hard to get.”
According to a government report released September 3, there are currently more people in the United States who are unemployed than there are available jobs, the first time since 2021.
Wankelman himself, after obtaining his master’s degree in statistical analysis, struggled to find a job after graduate school. “Imagine how hard it is for someone living on the streets,” he added.
County, state, and federal funds, Wankelman also found, were primarily used to upkeep the facades of buildings but not necessarily the inside rooms where individuals were living – the conditions of which, Wankelman said, are “truly horrifying.”
In one case, an individual living in a county-operated hotel poured cement down the vents. Instead of fixing the issue he was moved to a new room. In that new room, he tore up the walls. He was moved to a new room without the problem being addressed.
“The system is so siloed due to the competition of money. This is a huge issue because you have a service center saying they need their optics to appear superior to all other resources because we’re in a competitive environment, but the reality is it’s just another piece of the pie,” said Wankelman. “They need to appear that they have the most successful program so that they can receive more money to have the staffing necessary and pay a living wage.”
Another solution of Wankelman is to have service centers house several individuals per room because, when an individual in recovery is alone, they lack the pivotal peer support and accountability from their peers.
Word of Wankelman’s work quickly spread throughout Snohomish County, through former Lynnwood City Councilwoman Shannon Sessions (with Support 7), through Mike Kersey and Christina Anderson with Courage to Change (where he set up his “base camp”), and Hope N Wellness.
Now, his work is being recognized throughout the county as a baseline for change.
Author: Kienan Briscoe
