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Earlier this week, during the fourth “State of Homelessness” forum, we heard some real frustration expressed by John Kelly, the senior vice president for Global Affairs at Starbucks, who has offered to bring Seattle government officials to meet with business leaders to agree on solutions.

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“This is a county problem,” he said. “And in a county that is among the wealthiest, most passionate, most progressive in the world, we’re ashamed and we’re shocked. And the problem, unfortunately, has not gotten much better. Last year, we, along with many other businesses, rallied to try and build more shelter space. We find it completely impossible to fathom that in King County a child has to wait for more than 150, 160, 170 days not for housing, but for shelter.

“Think about that.”

So what have the city and county been doing?

“One thing that’s important for the community to know; last year … we housed over 15,000 people in this community. The point in time count last year was just over 10,000. The important thing to note there is the huge inflow of homelessness.”

That’s Adrienne Quinn, director of King County Health & Human Services, during the forum hosted by the Downtown Seattle Association, Seattle Metro Chamber, Visit Seattle, and Alliance for Pioneer Square. As she points out, the flood of people entering homelessness is overwhelming.

One of the big developments over the past year was the opening of the Navigation Center — a barrier-free housing model that crucially allows pets, partners, and possessions and doesn’t have a curfew or checkout time in the morning.

So how’s that going? from The Seattle Times — editor of their new Project Homeless series — posed the question to , the director of Seattle’s Human Services Department. Martin pointed out that of the 105 people who came through the Navigation Center since it opened in July, two were housed and nearly half left without saying where they were going.

“What are we buying if we’re getting two people housed out of 105 coming through?” he asked.

“So, I would say first it’s a very different model. Part of what we’re doing is learning,” Lester responded. “That’s not to be glib, but we often don’t really exist in an environment where we learn and can make mistakes and can sort of course correct.”

Barb Poppe, Seattle’s homelessness consultant, defended the model, having toured it earlier in the week.

“It only opened in July,” she said. “So they’ve served a hundred people since July. As I walked around … you could see the level of stress was far less for those people who were inside that facility than the individuals I met on your streets. And so that stress reduction is incredibly important and knowing the things they value the most with them.”

But, of course, the real problem is housing, housing, housing.

“There are 20 or 30 people who are at the Navigation Center today that if you offered keys to an apartment they would move in tomorrow.”

Janet Pope from the notes that even people with clean records and jobs who are experiencing homelessness aren’t able to find a place to stay.

“We could have the most perfect, ideal client who does every single thing their case manager asks them to do, and there’s still nowhere for them to go.”

And the idea that we can “build our way out of the problem鈥� isn’t necessarily going to work either.

Barb Poppe says when a neighborhood is upzoned, down come the older buildings with affordable units, and in their place, we get new top-market apartments and condos. New construction also targets the upper-middle to high-end of the housing market.

“If you build it they’re still not going to be able to afford it without the rent subsidy. So you really have to preserve, provide the flexible rent subsidies, and to build. And to keep the cost down on the build you have to reduce the cost of the building … and this is when the regulation pieces come in.”

Janet Pope is one of the few developers who build housing specifically for people experiencing homelessness. She shared this mind-boggling dollar figure on what it costs to actually build new units.

“So, as a housing developer, it’s about $350,000 per unit of housing. So there is no way the public funders can give a handful of housing developers that actually do this work the funds to do building, after building, after building.”

Based on the numbers provided during the forum, it would cost an estimated $5.25 billion to house all the homeless people in the area. No matter how much spare land the city gives up — building our way out with a public housing model simply isn’t going to happen.

How about rent subsidies? Let’s just say, on average, each of those 15,000 people need a $1,000 subsidy every month, or $180 million a year.

In the meantime what we have is a city being primarily in charge of funding shelters while the county covers most of the mental health and chemical dependency services. A group called All Home is in charge of coordination, but has no influence in the budget process.

“You put all that money in and it’s $195 million a year in operating costs for the homeless response system. Do we have the right governance model?” Martin asked.

It’s a question that has yet to be answered.