A sweep earlier in 2022 at Seven Hills Park
Harrell’s new dashboard maps “Verified Tent and RV Encampments”
With reporting by Elizabeth Turnbull
Mayor Bruce Harrell has released his plan for taking action on Seattle’s ongoing homelessness crisis with a strategy that includes a funding focus on the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, reducing encampments and offering better alternatives to people living outdoors, affordable housing, and a new data-driven approach including a new “Transparency Dashboard” to track City Hall’s progress.
At a press briefing on Tuesday, Harrell touted the new approach and $118 million in planned funding of the new regional homelessness authority — enough to power about 70% of the region-wide effort’s budget. Harrell said the new approach and the new dashboard is a step forward and will be used responsibly.
“We’re not afraid to look at the data, that does not mean we are criminalizing poverty,” Harrell said. “This does not mean we’re not compassionate, or empathetic. It means that we’re opening up the data for everyone to see. So you can see what I see.”
Harrell has painted himself as a data-centric mayor since taking office and the city’s latest dashboard — a consolidation of six existing databases — provides certain points of data surrounding the nuanced face of homelessness in the city.
The new data offers some specific categories on the ongoing crisis and the tool currently breaks down homelessness in the city into data points such as racial demographic, camp locations, and available housing units. Many of the data points are well known. According to the dashboard, over 40,000 people in the county experience homelessness and Black and Native people are disproportionately impacted. In addition, the dashboard detailed a current and partial count of 763 tents and 225 RVs — as of May — in addition to encampment locations.
“Driven by data, the One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan identifies priorities and actions to make progress on the City‘s objectives to get people indoors, create places for people to live, and develop innovative and regional solutions to ensure sustainable progress,” the administration said in its press release on the new plan.
One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan Key Priorities
- Driving a regional approach by providing $118 million to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) this year, representing approximately 70% of their total budget, as they develop, communicate, and execute a regional strategy to end homelessness in Seattle.
- Surveying, inspecting, and verifying encampment sites and providing a publicly accessible map of encampment concentration by neighborhood citywide.
- Providing outreach to help move people indoors, and tracking offers of shelter by displaying a transparent count over time.
- Keeping public spaces open and accessible, using objective criteria to determine which encampments to address, and restoring sites after encampments are closed.
- Identifying 2000 units of shelter and permanent housing by year’s end; 1300 units have been identified so far this year.
- Building more affordable housing faster by setting a one-year deadline for approval of all permits related to affordable housing projects to increase housing production.
- Forming a Housing Sub-Cabinet to share data, coordinate actions, and reduce barriers to swift construction of all types of housing.
- Diversifying public safety responses to help connect those in crisis to needed resources and better address health emergencies, fires, and other public safety issues arising disproportionately at and around encampments.
- Creating new ways for Seattle businesses, organizations, philanthropies, and communities to help address this crisis, including development of public-private-philanthropic partnerships, funding efforts, and volunteer opportunities.
Tuesday, Harrell also announced the city intends to identify 2,000 units of affordable housing by the end of the year. So far, Harrell said they have already identified around 1,300 expected to open this year.
Thus far, the dashboard shows 241 units of new housing and shelter units are in preconstruction, 540 are in construction and 533 are available. While documenting the housing units may have been part of Harrells initiative, most of the actual planning and funding for these units occurred before he became mayor.
At Tuesday’s press conference, Harrell also announced the city awarded $18.9 million to the Low Income Housing Institute for the purpose of acquiring and opening the Dockside Apartments in Green Lake, as affordable housing—opening this summer.
The building is intended to provide new permanent housing for 70 people experiencing homelessness, as well as 22 homes for individuals earning up to 50% of the Area Median Income
As part of Harrell’s plan, the city will spend the majority of its homelessness budget on funding roughly 70% of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s total budget—amounting to roughly $118 million dollars. The new authority includes services such as rapid rehousing, transitional housing services, and other services associated with housing.
Harrell also said Tuesday the city will do more to help speed up construction of new apartments with a commitment to getting housing project permits approved within 12 months of submission.
The administration’s housing efforts have the support of state Rep. Nicole Macri (D-43). “There are no shortcuts to addressing homelessness in Seattle and across our region.” Macri said, adding she looks forward to “continuing a close partnership with Mayor Harrell and other regional leaders to ensure neighbors who are living homeless quickly receive the assistance they need to gain safety and stability, and to ensure all our communities can thrive.”
To date, the most visible impact on the homelessness crisis by the Harrell administration has been the escalation of faster, more targeted encampment sweeps. In April, workers cleared out Capitol Hill’s Thomas Street Mini Park of a single camper.
Across the city and on Capitol Hill, community “mutual aid” efforts have also grown to try to help people living underhoused or on the streets. Harrell’s plan, instead, champions philanthropy and charitable giving from the region’s wealthiest residents and companies to help with the ongoing crisis. Early this year, the Partnership for Zero launched to coordinate some $10 million in funding from “major businesses and philanthropies in King County that have formed the We Are In homelessness charity effort led by the Ballmer Group to power “peer navigators, flexible funding, a command center and data” in an effort to to “dramatically reduce unsheltered homelessness in downtown Seattle.”
The Harrell administration sweep efforts are featured in the new plan and included in the datasets — “Bringing People Indoors” by addressing “Unsheltered Homelessness” and efforts to “Keep Public Spaces Open and Accessible.”
“It is inhumane for us to turn a blind eye to people who are forced to live in parks and on sidewalks,” the plan reads. “These areas are often unsanitary and unsafe for living. Mayor Harrell believes we cannot accept this as the status quo. We have allocated significant resources to conducting outreach to people experiencing homelessness, improving the quality of services, and coordinating efforts to better track shelter capacity and ensure beds do not go unfilled.”
The new plan on homelessness comes amid increased concerns about street disorder and violent crime that the Harrell administration has addressed through an embrace of hot spot policing focused on some of the city’s most challenged areas. The crises often overlap. SPD continues to investigate the murders of two young, gay, homeless men on the streets of Capitol Hill earlier this year.
You can view the plan and the dashboard on the One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan site.
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love too call the cops for people existing
Should the overall key metrics be how many open housing/shelter units are available that meet peoples needs vs the number of people homeless? For section 2 shouldn’t the key metric be the % of people who are offered meaningful housing not just the number of people?
Yes and He’s decided to take credit for programs that existed as tho this is progress.
Re: Dockside. Maybe I missed something but I see no kitchen/food prep area in their graphics. There’s a communal laundry room plus washer/dryers in each apt but, food? How practical is that for low income?
It sounds like we’re just going to hand Mark Dones and the KCRHA more money to burn. I wish these dashboards included KCRHA’s overhead costs and administrator salaries.
And all of the nonprofits receiving funding under the guise of combating homelessness from the city and the KCHRA should provide the same. I suspect we’d quickly find out which are truly doing good work and which are grifters floating on a sea of promises.
The near term focus should be on opening congregate shelters and clearing all encampments as soon as they appear without the hand-wringing.
The city verified 1000 homeless households (tents and RVs) in Seattle and is recommending to spend $118 Million Dollars for a new government department that will productively resolve 70% of this issue (functional, humane shelter for all)? $118,000 per homeless household does not seem reasonably efficient. Does this include all other public dollars currently being spent on this issue? Probably not. Bottomless pit.
Do you have an alternative in mind?
Bus tickets back home?
I think that Mayor Harrell is doing a great job addressing the homeless issue, with fresh ideas and initiatives. He is obviously committed to clearing out long-standing encampments, but at the same time he is emphasizing outreach and offers of better housing, including an impressive number of new units becoming available. If homeless people refuse offers of help, then that’s their (unfortunate) choice.
According to today’s ST article, it looks like the SPD focus on sweeps is possible thanks to cutting ALL investigations into adult sexual assault cases.
Great priorities Harrell, moving unhoused people from park to park is way more important than finding actual violent criminals! Who cares about (mostly) women’s safety, we have graffiti to remove!
Are the detectives that investigate sexual assault cases the same cops that accompany the sweeps?
Hopefully. There are a lot of sex offenders living in the encampments.
the key metric should be 0 people in tents in public spaces.
All the rest will resolve itself.
Seattle needs to snap out of the mindset that it is our responsibility to build an apartment for every drug addict pushed into the city from other jurisdictions. There is no amount of money that can dig us out of a hole filling with water. Enforcing a no camping policy and directing all campers to congregate shelters would go a long way toward stemming the inflow of lost souls to Seattle. It is also important to acknowledge that a portion of the homeless population is unhousable in their current state of drug and mental health crisis and need to be institutionalized for their safety and everyone else’s. This is not a housing crisis.
Bingo!
Indeed.
I understand the sentiment you’re expressing, and there’s a strong element political activism in Seattle’s diverse array of actors that’s frankly counterproductive. But homelessness is not primarily the result of the itinerant homeless flocking to cities with expansive social services, it’s the result of steadily increasing housing costs, in real terms and as a percentage of median salaries.
In the past, even people with serious on-going substance abuse problems and severe psychiatric illness have been able to maintain independent households and engage in modest productive employment. The US has had periods in which homelessness was quite uncommon, e.g., during the early 60s, a NYC homeless survey of the city was unable to find a single person sleeping rough in central park.
IMO, Seattle’s over-all approach is the correct one: increase housing supply to make housing units more affordable, build special purpose housing for those on the extreme end of being able to care for themselves, provide support for transitioning people into housing. All the while trying to mittigate the effects substance abuse and psychiatric illness. But even though Seattle does a better job then NYC and California cities with respect to stimulating housing, it’s not been enough to stop housing costs for continuing to increase, let alone actually reduce them, therefore costs for sheltering homeless are extremely high, and run the risk of reducing the supply of market rate housing, especially on the low end, compounding the cost burden to those not receiving subsidized housing and pushing the vulnerable into homelessness. All the other benefits of the supportive services Seattle provides are marginal if there’s no housing available into which to put the homeless.
A worker in Seattle’s biggest growth industry perhaps? Lol
This framing has been the only narrative for 15 years. I used to believe it, but reality has set it. This is a DRUG crisis
This is appealing but incorrect and NYC’s experience proves it.
NYC has far fewer unsheltered than Seattle, despite (much) lower incomes (median and 20th percentile) and higher costs of housing. During the Bloomberg administration unsheltered homelessness dropped to near zero and it was extremely rare to see psychotic people and meth addicts on the streets and subways. DeBlasio (and the state legislature) changed a variety of policies around enforcement, and redirected a ton of money for mental illness upstream, which has resulted in the situation there deteriorating dramatically in just a few years. However they have had and continue to have an extreme homeless crisis among families, which is driven primarily by the cost of housing relative to incomes, as well as the fact that the shelter system works as a defacto front door to public housing units.
All things considered, I’d rather have their situation than ours. Which we could totally choose to do.
Austin is another good example. They got rid of enforcement. Tents popped up everywhere. Started enforcing the law again and they went away. I don’t think the dynamics of where people go are particularly well understood. Do they move to LA? Do they get clean? Do they move to Mexico? Hide better? Draw fewer people in and therefore shrink organically? Probably a little bit of each, but it’s very clear no one is being helped by letting encampments grow.
I’m not really disagreeing with you. If housing costs are allow to continually climb, then the only parameters you can change are those that affect how you treat the homeless that exist (both in your states and nationally).
Insisting that people not sleep rough in the city, but instead use government sponsored shelters (and obey the rules of those shelters) is a defensible position. And my point that even people with sever psychiatric and substance abuse problems are still able to behave in a way that’s consistent with minimum expectations about public behavior still stands.
But we should remember that the cost of housing is the root of the problem, not the myriad of other social ills which have always been with us. And on that score Seattle does do a better job then NYC or California, but not enough better to actually drive down homelessness.
So tired of hearing “this is not a housing crisis.” The HELL it isn’t! Otherwise, obviously, there’d be enough cheap housing for everyone, regardless of their mental health or drug habits. You know, like there used to be in this city. There was a time not so long ago when virtually everyone in the country at least had a shabby SRO room, including, yes, alcoholics and drug addicts. But those places just don’t exist anymore, as we tore them all down for condos and $3,000 per month rentals. The direct result is what you see around you now. House the homeless first, then the pathologies that result from homelessness will dissipate to a manageable level.
Housing First as applied in Seattle and West Coast cities has been a disaster. It is time for a new approach that balances maintaining existing affordable housing, building housing, building drug treatment facilities, building mental health treatment facilities, opening more congregate shelters and maintaining a functioning public realm (no camping anywhere, no open drug use, law enforcement, legal consequences for repeat criminal conduct). This is a national and state level crisis that cannot be solved in Seattle alone. Our current approach attracts and concentrates those experiencing drug and mental health issues here. Our city is sinking under the weight of this burden. We cannot nor should we try to give every drug addict that shows up at our doorstep a free apartment with no rules. It is not even close to sustainable.
Who said anything about “free,” “apartment” or “no rules”? I’m just talking about making sure every person, couple or family at least has a private room (or a LIHI-type tiny house, which some people seem to prefer) that they can afford to pay for out of whatever income stream they may happen to have. In one of the wealthiest states per-capita in the wealthiest country on earth, I don’t think this is exactly a utopian fantasy. It’s the very minimum we should be doing, here and all over the country. The fact that the federal government and many states and localities don’t even make a serious effort to expand affordable housing does not entitle those entities that do to stop trying. And generally speaking, I don’t think it should matter very much where someone came here from, or how long they’ve been in the area. (We’re supposedly all U.S. Americans, right?) Solve the housing shortage, and I guarantee that the side effects everyone’s upset about will resolve themselves for the most part — and to the extent they don’t, there’ll be plenty of system capacity for more stringent therapeutic and/or disciplinary measures in appropriate cases. It’s not rocket science.
It is not rocket science to see that this is gaslighting and does not reflect the reality of the drug addiction crisis in Seattle and the city’s failed response to it.
It’s not rocket science to foresee your simplistic “solution” to the very complex problem of people living outside and in parks can’t just be solved with housing. And to “guarantee that the side effects everyone is upset about will resolve themselves for the most part” is BS. Please, id like your contact info for when it doesn’t just magically “resolve itself” I can give you a call…
We have both a housing crisis AND a drug/addiction/mental health crisis. It’s not either/or.