From Alycia Ramirez and Shaun Scott’s “Better Washington” Campaign for the 43rd LD / Opinion

In 2024, over 200,000 Washington Renters were behind on rent, while homelessness also increased 9% in the same year. Despite the growing number of residents in need and a severe lack of affordable housing options, municipalities across the state, from Burien to Spokane, have responded by banning camping.

This criminalization of homelessness is, in part, due to a right-wing propaganda campaign that has blamed progressives for the homelessness crisis and falsely branded policies like Housing First a “leftist failure.” This narrative conveniently denies the significant roles that racial and socioeconomic disparities, as well as the lack of affordable housing, have in homelessness.  Figures like Tucker Carlson perpetuate these falsehoods on a national level, while local entities such as the Discovery Institute (a right-wing think tank originally working to teach creationism in our schools) and We Heart Seattle, a conservative-leaning non-profit, reinforce these harmful narratives on the local level.

Who is We Heart Seattle?
Founded in 2020 by Andrea Suarez, We Heart Seattle (WHS, initially named I Heart Downtown Seattle) is a nonprofit that engages in privately funded encampment “cleanups.” Throughout its four-year run, this group and its founder have had a long history of conflict within the Seattle Mutual Aid and homelessness services community.

In the first interactions, and as mutual aid volunteers offered food to unsheltered campers at Miller Park, Suarez compared unhoused individuals to dogs, stating “we train dogs, we parent toddlers, and there is no reason we cannot expect the homeless, addicted, or mentally ill, to be challenged more to contribute something” mutual aid.

This notion that homelessness can be fixed by shaming or dehumanizing the people experiencing it is not only cruel but ineffective. Yet, this cruelty has repeated itself throughout WHS’s existence.

We Heart Seattle’s History of Cruelty and Deception
Since its early days, WHS has often hyper-focused on the “squalor” or “filth” of encampments, insisting that giving campers “self-sustainability” and “responsibility” will somehow lift them out of homelessness.  Instead of advocating for regular garbage pickup at encampments and the installation of hand-washing stations, which would help increase hygiene in these places, WHS has advocated for the restriction of both.

Equating encampments with “garbage” and not recognizing other’s autonomy has led to multiple unhoused residents reporting that their belongings, or those of someone they know, were thrown out or destroyed by WHS: Sam Lange’s belongings, including photos of deceased relatives and tent, were thrown away by WHS volunteers and William Hughes watched Andrea tear down a neighbor’s tent that she had deemed “trash”.

WHS’s deceptive behavior goes beyond lying about not throwing out the belongings of unsheltered individuals. Their founder has falsely pretended to be a homeless youth’s caseworker to get access to their information and was denied access to the Homeless Management Information System (a client database that most providers use that contains private medical information) by King County Regional Homeless Authority because she had accessed the database then shared private medical info of an unsheltered man to multiple people, via email.  WHS has also lied to the community about explicitly not allowing sex offenders to volunteer, putting both the volunteer and others in a potentially risky situation.

We Heart Seattle’s connection to the far right
WHS’s embrace of right-wing talking points and junk science around homelessness has made them a darling of local conservative media, especially The Discovery Institute, a Christian pseudoscience think tank that has branched into the issue of homelessness through their “Fix Homelessness” initiative. The Discovery Institute believes that poverty can be fixed by simply “pulling up one’s bootstraps” and that homelessness is solely a drug and mental health issue, not a socioeconomic or affordable housing scarcity issue.  They also sat on the advisory board of Project 2025, a template for dismantling the federal government and replacing it with a Christian nationalist state, should Trump win a second term in the White House.

Despite these associations with Trumpism and Christian Nationalism, Andrea has publicly declared that she is “ideologically aligned” with the Discovery Institute. For her 43rd LD state representative campaign, her proposals to “defund” Housing First Policies in federal organizations like HUD echo similar Republican demands in Project 2025.

WHS is also unwilling or unable to recognize the clear and long-established evidence that harm-reduction slows overdose rates and saves lives. WHS’s narrow,  preachy approach to addiction treatment rigidly rejects anything other than “recovery first”, ignoring both the complicated nature of addiction and the consequences of ineffective approaches. The coalition that WHS started in 2023, North America Recovers, advocates for a treatment-first model called The Alberta Model. in Canada, Alberta Providence saw a 17% increase in overdose deaths in 2023 after adopting their recovery-first approach (“The Alberta Model”).

WHS’s North America Recovers coalition also has multiple ties to the U.S. and Canadian far-right. The coalition has included the Last Door Addiction Treatment Center, which has deep ties to Conservative Canadian political actors; a handful of libertarian and right-leaning think tanks such as the Texas Public Policy Institute; local anti-homeless group Safe Seattle; the Discovery Institute; and also the Cicero Institute, one of the most influential libertarian think tanks in the country, that has been instrumental in creating legislation that has led to camping bans around the U.S.

We Heart Seattle’s Embrace of Stigmatizing and Harmful Policies
The camping bans that have been spreading like wildfire across the country are ineffective but make life harder for the unsheltered. In Missouri, thousands of unsheltered residents have nowhere to go, especially at night, while in Austin, Texas, police have issued over 900 citations since 2021 for breaking their no-camping laws. Most advocates and providers vehemently oppose blanket camping bans because they inflict further trauma on those experiencing homelessness, and breaking the bans can lead to arrest, criminal penalties, and a criminal record, which can seriously impede their journey to becoming housed. Still, WHS has openly supported such bans.

Where do we go from here?
Even though regressive policies like camping bans and “recovery first” are increasing, it’s still possible to embrace solutions that have long been known to be effective. State and City elected officials can support expanding our affordable housing supply, adopt housing-first policies, pass renter protections, and support harm-reduction measures (such as needle exchanges and safe consumption sites). Rather than passing camping bans or no-sit, no-lie ordinances, municipalities can increase services and shelter space for residents experiencing homelessness.

Finally, voters in the 43rd legislative district can reject the stigmatizing and backward policies Andrea Suarez embraces and vote for Shaun Scott on November 5th.

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