Seattle Archdiocese

St. Therese parishioner Joe Martin has been serving the needy of downtown Seattle since the 1970s. The Low Income Housing Institute’s 41-unit “Martin Court” in Seattle’s Georgetown district was named in his honor. Photo: Rev. Rick Reynolds

Though honored recently with its “Hero of the Homeless” award by the Seattle street ministry Operation Nightwatch, Joe Martin of St. Therese Parish in Seattle can remember the days when such an award wasn’t needed.

“When I started working down here homelessness was a relatively new phenomenon in terms of numbers,” said Martin, a social worker since 1978 at the Pike Market Medical Clinic, which he helped found. Today, a third of the clinic’s 3,600 patients are homeless, and others are on the brink of being displaced as affordable housing downtown gets erased by new development.

Still, after more than three decades, Martin continues to be a “tireless advocate for the poor, infirm, the marginalized, seniors, and homeless people,” said Rev. Rick Reynolds, Operation Nightwatch’s executive director and an ordained chaplain with the Free Methodist Church.

“Every day needy people line up to talk to Joe at his office,” Rev. Reynolds said recently at the awards program. “Then he gets to work. Lining up shelter, helping find housing, leaning on a landlord for a little time, aiding someone (with) the paperwork to apply for Social Security, Medicaid, replacement ID, insurance, food assistance.

A life of services
“If you have never been on the other end of a phone call from Joe Martin, you may never know how tenacious and convicting he can be.”

Martin has the distinctive honor of having a building named after him while still living: The Low Income Housing Institute’s “Martin Court” in Seattle’s Georgetown district provides 41 units of transitional housing for individuals and families.

In addition to the Pike Market Medical Clinic, Martin was among the founders of the Downtown Emergency Service Center in Seattle and works closely with the two roving “Tent City” encampments for homeless people sponsored by the Seattle Housing and Resource Effort (SHARE) and the Women’s Housing Equality and Enhancement League (WHEEL).

“My parish, St. Therese, was the first Catholic parish to host tent city, back in 2001,” Martin notes with pride. He also is active with the Seattle Displacement Coalition.

Of Irish ancestry (he sings with the Irish music group, “Claypipe”), Martin was born in Boston, Mass. – the “capital of Ireland” as he calls it – and came to Seattle in 1975 after serving in Ogden, Utah as a Vista Volunteer. He transferred here with Vista and worked in emergency services for the Seattle Mental Health Institute. He later worked in Seattle’s Skid Road community through the First Avenue Service Center before co-founding the Pike Market Medical Clinic, which provides medical care and mental health and drug and alcohol counseling to low-income patients and seniors.

Money and ‘muscle’ needed
Reflecting on the people he serves, Martin said it’s a “horrible thing” to be hungry, to be mentally or physically ill, to be without health care coverage or a job. But “whatever your problems are – they get worse if you’re homeless.”

He said gentrification, drugs and the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people have all contributed to the homelessness problem America faces today.

And it won’t be addressed until our nation’s leaders “dispense with our addiction to militarism” and focus instead on domestic ills, he said. “The war (in Iraq) is costing us billions of dollars a week. Those are dollars that don’t go into housing…health care…education…job creation…”

Martin is glad to see King County and other communities around the country designing 10-year plans to end homelessness because it brings legitimacy to the issue and keeps it in the public eye. “But we need to make sure it doesn’t become one more nice idea that is nothing more than a passing notion,” he said. “We have to put the money and the political and legal muscle behind it.”

As for being selected the 2006 recipient of the “Hero of the Homeless” award, Martin said there are plenty of other deserving candidates but he’s honored to have it. The award consists of a red cape. “It’s a Superman cape,” he notes. “I tried it out. It’s fun to fly in and out.”

Joe Martin and the Irish music group “Claypipe” will perform in Seattle on Saturday, Jan. 27 around 9 p.m. at Finn McCools Irish Pub & Restaurant, 4217 University Way N.E. Proceeds over $300 will go to the Tent City encampments for the homeless.