01:57 PM PST on Thursday, March 23, 2006

BY PAUL CHAMBERS / KING 5 News

SEATTLE – An apartment building at 1811 Eastlake Avenue in Seattle provides a safe haven for chronic street alcoholics.

The building is not a rehabilitation center for its residents, who are not forced to quit drinking..

Local leaders believe this new approach will save taxpayer money by reducing the number of homeless alcoholics being treated for emergency response calls.

The $11.2 million housing project has 75 units. How well is this program working?

Bill Hobson, the executive director of Downtown Emergency Service Center, which owns and operates the building, says if it wasn't for this place residents would continue to drain taxpayers’ pockets because they would need somewhere to go.

“They would be in jail or locked up or dead, because street life out there, people don’t play out there,” Hobson said. “We move into 1811, the most expensive consumers of emergency department services, jail services sobering and detox services.”

KING

The building is at 1811 Eastlake Avenue, on the edge of downtown Seattle.

“I would probably be crashed out in some alley underneath a bridge, in the bushes,” said one resident.

Since opening its doors three months ago, the number of emergency aid calls have not declined. Seattle fire reports they have responded to 39 aid calls.

The health needs of the residents are little bit more acute than we had anticipated them being.

“If a person is presenting with medical issues that the onsite nurse don't have the resources to resolve, then we are being cautious and send them to Harborview Medical Center,” Hobbs said.

Hobson says the aid calls would have happened no matter where the person ended up. He believes it is unfair to judge the center only three months in.

In fact, Hobson says it will take two years before they know if the center will work...

Before residents lived at the center, Hobson said the city's most recent studies show it cost the taxpayers $100,000 per person per year to take care of the most chronic street alcoholics.

But now it cost a fraction of that, at $12,000 per person per year to live at 1811.