Ask a Seattleite what they think about homelessness, let them talk for a minute, and—especially if they’re a Very Political Person—you can make a good guess as to where they stand on the city’s political spectrum.
In the decade since city and county leaders declared homelessness a civil emergency, attitudes have crystallized into camps with distinctive ways of talking about the crisis, who’s to blame, and what to do about it. Unfortunately for the left, our story isn’t working.
The short version goes something like this: The root cause of homelessness is a severe shortage of affordable housing, the result of neoliberal underinvestment in subsidized housing and a long history of exclusionary zoning, intensified by Seattle’s tech boom. The solution is to fund housing, shelter, and services at scale; sweeping people from one place to another is cruel and useless.
There’s a lot of truth in that little paragraph, but it has failed to hold the allegiance of the average Seattle voter. This should matter to us, for the sake of the nearly 10,000 people living outside in King County and the many thousands more sleeping in shelters or unstably housed; we need political power to enact policies that work. But the left should care for another reason, too. Over the past decade, homelessness has become a true wedge issue in Seattle politics. The failure of our approach to this crisis has helped to elect leaders who are now busy undermining other, undeniably popular progressive-left priorities, from workers’ rights to multimodal transportation to taxing the rich. Reclaiming this issue could mean reclaiming power for the progressive left.
How We Lost
I watched this narrative ship run aground, and not as a mere witness. Some seven years ago, I was pushing the left’s story on homelessness as part of a coalition supporting the “head tax,” a modest business tax that would have expanded affordable housing, shelter, and homeless services. Big business teamed up with NIMBY types to kill the tax, and in so doing they told a very different story: Where we saw insufficient resources, they denounced a do-nothing city council squandering taxpayers’ money while tents, needles, and crime proliferated in the parks and on the streets. With an energetic assist from The Seattle Times opinion section, their version prevailed, and the council repealed the tax barely a month after unanimously passing it into law. It was a disorienting experience, to say the least.
The following year, big business tried hard to make Seattle’s elections all about homelessness. Unhappily for them, they overreached. Big-dollar campaign spending, culminating in a splashy million from Amazon, introduced a new theme: Did voters want a city council bought and paid for by our corporate overlords? The answer was no. Soon after, the most progressive council in living memory passed a far larger tax on big business – the JumpStart Seattle payroll expense tax—in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, committing the bulk of the long-term spending to affordable housing.
Alas, the drama didn’t end there. The corporate brain trust licked its wounds and regrouped around a new strategy. In 2021, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce announced that it would no longer endorse or spend on candidates. Instead, it would focus on issues. First up? Homelessness. That year businesses spent big on a ballot initiative called Compassion Seattle.
While Compassion Seattle promised to force the city to get serious about its major crisis, the left saw a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Language that sounded great to most voters (compassion! housing and services! tent-free parks!) threatened to enshrine sweeps in the city’s charter, some feared. Others smelled a ruse to polarize that year’s elections, forcing candidates to take sides on the measure and casting progressive contenders in a bad light. The initiative was struck down in court before it reached the ballot, but it still reverberated in the elections, and the left lost the races for mayor and city attorney, along with one of two citywide council seats.
Two years later, with homelessness still on voters’ minds, big business and its centrist allies finally got their council supermajority. Our councilmembers now wonder why we let people reject offers of shelter, and why we fund outreach to unsheltered homeless people at all; their signature legislative achievement thus far is banning people accused of certain drug or prostitution related crimes from large swaths of the city. And JumpStart? They revoked the commitment to a long-term spending plan centered on housing. Boy, did we lose.
What can we learn from this saga? It’s tempting to argue that it doesn’t matter what the left said or tried to do about homelessness. There are so many reasons why visible homelessness surged during the pandemic; even if local elected leaders did everything right, they would be vulnerable to blame. Anyway, in 2021 and 2023 policing was the higher profile issue. And all issues aside, a “kick the bastards out” vibe was almost inevitable as voters strove to move on from a traumatic few years. The powerful opponents of Seattle’s progressive council had no shortage of fodder; a backlash was overdetermined.
All this may be true. Nevertheless, I’ve come to believe that there are some serious defects in the left’s approach to the homelessness crisis. Even if smarter choices may not have prevented our recent losses, they could help us to hold power the next time around — and to actually make progress on this thorniest of social problems.
What We’re Wrong About
The central weakness of the left narrative on homelessness is a habit of deflection that makes it sound, at best, as though we are in denial about the grim reality on the streets; at worst, like we embrace it. Drugs? Housed people use them too. Anyway, it’s common for people to get addicted after they become homeless. Trash? Actually, a lot of it is opportunistically dumped from passing cars. Bodily excretions? We need public restrooms. Shoplifting and crime? The claims are overblown. Anyway, homeless people are more often the victims of crime than the perpetrators. Feel unsafe? It’s all in your head, really you just don’t want to look at poverty.
It’s not that there’s no truth to these rejoinders. But they amount to trivializing what anyone who spends some time walking around Seattle’s streets can plainly observe: People with acute mental illness whose behavior is disturbed and occasionally aggressive. People using drugs, often incapacitated or passed out on the ground. People in dire need of medical care, suffering and in some cases slowly dying in public. And trash, and excrement, and broken windows.
I think it’s possible to acknowledge these realities without sensationalizing them á la “Seattle is Dying,” and without demonizing or dehumanizing the people who are suffering through them. When we don’t, or when we do so using only the most euphemistic and sanitized language, we leave a void that’s too easily filled by right-wing narratives and false solutions. These gain traction because at least they’re pointing to what people see and proclaiming it unacceptable.
It’s true that homelessness is a housing problem, and in a high-cost region like King County a missed paycheck or a doctor’s bill can be enough to tip someone over the edge. But it’s also true that drug addiction and mental illness often precipitate the loss of housing, and that once someone falls into that vortex, on an individual level, housing alone may not be enough to pull them out. Most of us on the left do recognize this, but we tend to downplay it and ignore some of its implications.
When, for example, it’s said that homeless people reject offers of shelter, the common left reply (beyond pointing out that shelters are consistently full) is a litany of the most reasonable of reasons: many shelters don’t accommodate couples or pets; there’s nowhere to store belongings; you have to arrive late and leave early. All true, and many people would gladly move into shelter or housing without these limitations; that’s why tiny houses are popular. But it’s also true that some people’s reasons are more complicated and less sure to elicit sympathy. They may fear going through withdrawal and not want to disrupt the strategies they’ve developed for obtaining and using drugs. They may have paranoid delusions that lead them to avoid shelters, or disruptive behaviors that get them kicked out.
Even if such cases are rarer than the ones we deflect to, the people for whom drugs or mental illness are significant factors in staying outside tend to be more visible and more likely to break laws and behave in ways that make other people uncomfortable or afraid. When we’re squeamish about admitting this and have little to say about what to do about it, we open the door for punitive policies and narratives that blame homeless people, portraying them as loafers who are coddled by handouts and don’t want to follow rules.
I’m not suggesting that the left relax our insistence that affordable housing at scale is needed to solve the homelessness crisis. But we also need to talk more about mental illness and drug addiction, and show ourselves to be the adults in the room when it comes to solutions. Too often our attitude is one of bland assent that we do need more voluntary mental health and addiction treatment services, coupled with support for “harm reduction” strategies like safe consumption sites. Unfortunately, this comes across as an unserious plan that will only amplify the chaos.
How We Can Win
So what do we do? If the left wants to win, we need to preach beyond the choir. Where better to find the average Seattle voter than in the comment section? “Left Leaning Patriot,” who wrote this response to a New York Times article on homelessness, actually hails from Mercer Island, but I think represents well the kind of person whose support we can’t afford to lose:
“Homelessness is a very nuanced and multi-layered problem and clearly there is no one-size fits all solution. I want to be compassionate, but it is fatiguing. It makes me sad to see the homeless camped out on city streets and parks. It also angers me to see the homeless leaving piles of garbage and feces on those same streets and parks. I don’t like fearing for my safety walking the streets at night after going to a restaurant or worrying if my car will be broken into or vandalized. I know many people are in their dire situation due to a bad situation or simply bad luck. At the same time, I know there are people who don’t want “help” and choose to be on the streets, many often victimizing others in the same situation by selling drugs, trafficking sex, etc. Billions being spent with very limited results. Our society is broken. I don’t have the answer, but something needs to be done…”
Bingo. If this person lived in West Seattle, they might have voted for Lisa Herbold in 2019, then Rob Saka in 2023. Queen Anne? Andrew Lewis, then Bob Kettle. Leschi? Maybe even Kshama Sawant, then Joy Hollingsworth. You get the drift. We had their vote, then we lost it. How can we win it back?
First, it’s not enough to say “stop the sweeps.” We need to offer a positive and realistic plan for how the people living in tents in the park near Left Leaning Patriot’s house are going to become stably sheltered or housed, freeing that space for its intended uses. This could be something similar to the JustCARE program that PDA, REACH, ACRS and Chief Seattle Club pioneered briefly during the pandemic, which succeeded in moving chronically homeless people with complex challenges into low-barrier housing through intensive and individualized outreach. (This approach has continued in the state-level Encampment Resolution Program, whose future funding is uncertain.) It’s fine if this takes longer than a sweep, even much longer. But it can’t be put off to some indefinite utopian future.
Second, we must be clear, in our words and in the solutions we call for, about the degree of ongoing support that some people need. Even when treatment is available for someone in crisis, too often they’re ejected a week or two later with no meaningful follow-up. It’s easy to do some hand-waving about “housing first,” which in principle is absolutely correct. But it’s become clear that most permanent supportive housing, in its current form, isn’t set up for the people with the most severe challenges. And the fentanyl crisis has made everything exponentially worse. People need a way to use drugs safely when they lapse without finding themselves homeless again. Others need attention and intervention before behavior related to mental illness gets them evicted. Even if someone has goals for recovery or stability, a plan, motivation to pursue it, and people supporting them, it’s a rocky road. It’s easy to hate on homeowners and business owners who fear that shelter or supportive housing will bring drugs and disorder to their neighborhood. But if there’s not sufficient staffing and skilled support for residents who need it, their concerns aren’t entirely unfounded.
Finally, we need to recognize that for a very small percentage of people, even this isn’t enough. They need longer term psychiatric care in an institutional setting; for a few, involuntary commitment may be the only way to bring them off the streets. There are also a very small number whose behaviors are too dangerous for a communal living situation. This needn’t be prominent in our narrative, by any means, but we do need to be able to acknowledge it: both because it’s true and because denying it undermines our credibility when we say, also truly, that what the vast majority of homeless people need is simply an affordable home.
Obviously, a local government like Seattle’s can’t do all of these things alone. It will require resources from the federal and state levels and coordination between many currently disjointed systems and organizations. But we on the left need to be able to tell this story, or one like it that actually responds to people’s perceptions of the homelessness crisis as they walk around our city streets. And when we next have political influence, we need to lend our support to building whatever parts of this infrastructure we can, to demonstrate its effectiveness even if at a small scale.
In the meantime, we must make sure that those now in power don’t get a pass for their failures to meaningfully address the homelessness crisis. Back in 2021, I argued against Compassion Seattle and, through my work in the Transit Riders Union, played a role in booting it off the ballot; now I wonder if that was a mistake. Had it passed, which it surely would have, people might be asking more questions about the 2,000 new units of “emergency or permanent housing with services including access to behavioral health services and necessary staffing to serve people with the highest barriers” that the city was supposed to create within a year of its adoption, and which now-Mayor Harrell retained as a campaign promise. And the initiative’s language on encampment removals, while vague, arguably would have given unsheltered homeless people more protection from arbitrary dislocation than they currently have. As it is, it’s too easy for our mayor and council to pass the buck and blame the dysfunctional King County Regional Homelessness Authority for the lack of progress.
What’s Radical on Homelessness?
I can already hear one likely reaction from my fellow leftists: “Katie, you’re just telling us to move to the right on homelessness! You’re becoming a cranky centrist in your middle age.” But I don’t think that’s true.
If the root of homelessness is commodified housing, then crisis-level mental illness and drug use can be seen, likewise, as creatures of 21st century capitalism. Psychosis and addiction both feed on the alienation, isolation, and sense of meaninglessness that have followed the creeping marketization of every facet of social life. Poverty worsens both. And while the bad old days of long-stay psychiatric hospitals may be harder to romanticise than other parts of the 20th century welfare state, their dismantling, the deinstitutionalization of their patients, and the failure to replace them with the promised community-based care are all part of the same story of neoliberal defunding and privatization.
Many leftists deeply distrust the institutions — governments, housing and service providers — that are supposedly trying to fix these crises, often with good reason. But there’s simply no way forward that bypasses the state and the nonprofit sector; “mutual aid,” or grassroots service provision, is great but it’s a tiny band-aid. As leftists we should see these institutions, not as enemies, but as vessels that can contain the interests of the ruling classes, or the radical and humanistic ambitions of our movements — usually, complex admixtures of both. They are a terrain of struggle, and its our job to build them up as tools fitted to our task.
Leftists are rightly motivated by a desire to uphold homeless people’s humanity, dignity, and agency. But this turns into a strange kind of libertarianism when we fail to acknowledge how mental illness and drug use can impair people’s ability to make good decisions for themselves and can lead people to act in ways that harm themselves and others. We need to find an approach that grapples with this reality, while also upholding people’s humanity, dignity and agency. By telling the real story of what’s needed, and the resources it will take to do it right, we can expose the hollowness of right-wing narratives that pretend some “tough love” is all that’s needed to bring “service-resistant” people inside, and shove them through what Daniel Malone of DESC has memorably called a “magical treatment carwash” that people emerge from cured and into gainful employment.
The left response to all this must ultimately be rooted in creating social conditions — of material abundance, of meaningful work and relationships, of community — under which no one is homeless and far fewer people become mentally ill or addicted to drugs. But we also need better answers for the here and now, both for the sake of the people who are currently suffering on the streets, and so we can gain and retain power long enough to make progress toward more lasting change.
The left needs to tailor arguments to persuade a NY Times commenter from Mercer Island, and a hypothetical critical mass of the public said commenter represents? This can’t be serious.
I miss when The Stranger was all kinky sex and show listings.
While I may not agree with every particular of the authors analysis or her recommendations, I strongly support her public reflection and willingness to publicly ask the hard question – “What did I do wrong?”
This is difficult and necessary, regardless of the issue.
“So what do we do? If the left wants to win, we need to preach beyond the choir.”
Hannah (Krieg)…read those 2 sentences. Then read them again.
and again.
and again.
and again.
Oh, dear.
@1 is the perfect example of why progressives will never get it. They just think they are better than everyone else.
@6 if someone argued policy messaging should cater to thirteen12 from SLOG I’d mock them too. The concept is patiently absurd.
@7, and yet here you are every day on these threads, doing your best effort as the right-wing influencer you are to spread your message of contempt and toxicity–and all with an extraordinary level of message discipline. Why is that?
“Leftists are rightly motivated by a desire to uphold homeless people’s humanity, dignity, and agency”
Weird, most of the Leftists I read on TS seem to be mostly motivated by a desire to dunk on centrists and neoliberals.
If you feed the birds, you get more birds. In Bellevue, they don’t feed the birds. The birds fly somewhere else.
“The left response to all this must ultimately
be rooted in creating social conditions —
of material abundance, of meaningful
work and relationships, of community —
under which no one is homeless and
far fewer people become mentally
ill or addicted to drugs.”
yeah but when up against
a bought-n-Paid for far
right movement intent
on profiteering off our
Every Human require-
ment, we’re not likely
to see a whole Lotta
care & concern for
our fellow man or
woman etc et al
I guess I’m currently just feeling
a shade pessimistic about our
odds for Any kinda Societal
benefits coming out of el-
trumpfster’s upcoming
maladministration
Cum horrorShit-
show of a fiasco
@2,
That was not ever the case and you’re either terribly misinformed or lying if you suggest otherwise.
My god, are the writers for The Stranger paid by the word?
Brevity takes skill.
The author nailed it.
When are they coming up for vote? I’ll vote them into power in a heartbeat.
I used to be a liberal Democrat, but the far left pushed me to the center. The left’s problem is chasing it’s tail into oblivion, you can’t really solve problems running around in circles. Homelessness should have been front and center a decade ago, but now the mess is so bad a tourniquet won’t help. Seattle’s far left likes to look the other way of reality. We got to this place on your watch.
@7 it’s ‘patently’
as in textbookly so
and thnx! for Staying
On our Toxic Message
cum utter Contempt for
the absurdity of the ‘right’
wing and its
psycophants
the talking points’ll
be issued at the same
time tomorrow as for the
14th of every other month except for
leap year of course which is 2.7 weeks later
c u @
the Cooler!
@15
‘Seattle’s far left
likes to look the
other way of reality.
We got to this place on your watch.’
Home-
lessness’s
Nationwide
so yeah it’s Gotta
be Seattle Progressives’ fault.
“the
far left
pushed me
to the center.”
the Center was
pulled so Far to the
right it’s no Wonder the
Left looks so terrifying! what
if I came up behind you & SHOUTED:
BERNIE FUCKING SANDERS!
would you consider
that a terrorist
act?
This is a good companion piece to Danny Westneat’s recent article in the ST – https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/the-new-report-on-homelessness-shows-a-catastrophe-for-wa/
Katie, Great piece. I became concerned when you mentioned “moving chronically homeless people with complex challenges into low-barrier housing,” and so I was heartened when you immediately then explained the challenges of a “housing first” approach. A year and a half ago, I got a “housing first” neighbor in the apartment next to me in the low-income building where I live. He was evicted within four months, but not before causing physical, mental, and emotional harm to me and others on our floor, to say nothing of the damage he did to the apartment he was in, or of the expenses that resulted from multiple visits from caseworkers, the mental health crisis response team, and police. In the end, the experience served only to hurt a bunch of apartment dwellers– folks who well understand and are sympathetic to the issues around being homeless– and surely put the guy back on the street, only now with (more?) multiple frightening incident reports in his file, and (another?) eviction to his name.
“Nevertheless, I’ve come to believe that there are some serious defects in the left’s approach to the homelessness crisis.”
There’s nothing scarier than a savvy progressive. I was hoping the progressive strategy would be to keep doing stupid things, like accusing single-family houses of being racist, or replacing police officers with unarmed mobile hug squads. Katie Wilson’s reality-based strategy might actually win votes for progressives, the horror! 😆
Long term inpatient civil involuntary commitment, by the thousands, to offset the problem created by late stage capitalism and human nature, is an expensive defacto dumping ground for the mentally ill and criminally insane.
There aren’t enough working specialists in the entire nation to staff one city facility.
What was the solution presented in the Mad Max films? Because it doesn’t work. Neither does the solution in a Clockwork Orange.
@8: You complain about right-wing influencers, but you’re obviously fine with left-wing influencers. Why is that?
@19 the key to Housing First is the “first.” Housing Only is obviously doomed to fail, but unfortunately due to the dramatic shortage of behavioral health treatment infrastructure in this area that’s too often what happens in reality. And people like you (and, as you noted, your ex-neighbor) are the ones who suffer. The only way out of this mess is massive investment in housing AND behavioral health.
The progressive failures here hurt the city very very badly. Now that we’re midway through recovering I am worried people will forget the past, or new transplants won’t know about it.
I respect what the author of this article is saying, but the nastiness and condescension and lying that I had to endure from progressives between 2015-2021 in discourse about this issue — just sheer smug confidence in their righteousness while they drove the city into the ground — has left me with the belief that they are just really bad people, by and large, and I have no interest in working with them again even if they did agree with me.
Furthermore, I do not want to see them get close to power ever again. The last time they had power, they tried to push the envelope by promoting the candidacy of Nicole Thomas-Kennedy. No. I’m never going to let this city get to that place again.
@23 — yeah
but whattabout
second Yachts and
fifth Mansions & series
of Trophy Wives & Living
like fucking Pharaohs? if a
Few can do so, isn’t it Better?
they’ve rigged it so
it all goes to the Top
and let the bottom 90%
fend/fight/fuckright off for Themselves
it’s only Sustainable
for as long as we
Allow it to
be.
Drugs? Housed people use them too. Anyway, it’s common for people to get addicted after they become homeless. Trash? Actually, a lot of it is opportunistically dumped from passing cars. Bodily excretions? We need public restrooms. Shoplifting and crime? The claims are overblown. Anyway, homeless people are more often the victims of crime than the perpetrators. Feel unsafe? It’s all in your head, really you just don’t want to look at poverty.
This section has a notable lack of sources in an article that desperately attempts to source its claims.
Also a lesson learned from Kamala’s loss this fall – telling people that their experiences aren’t actually that big of a deal is a certain way to lose support. I’ve had dozens of negative encounters with homeless people ranging from unpleasant to dangerous – I stopped reading after the last sentence of this paragraph after the author suggested it must all be in my head.
@26: Ha ha ha, the paragraph you stopped reading in disgust was the author’s attempt to agree with you. It was a list of stupid things progressive say that she wishes they wouldn’t say! 🤣
@20
“I was hoping the progressive strategy would be to keep doing stupid things, like accusing single-family houses of being racist, or replacing police officers with unarmed mobile hug squads”
They’ve always got that in their back pockets if things don’t go their way.
“If the root of homelessness is commodified housing, then crisis-level mental illness and drug use can be seen, likewise, as creatures of 21st century capitalism.”
Ok, well, “commodified housing” has housed almost every Seattle resident for the entire history of the city, so that’s not it. Dark Age Europe produced violent crazy people at a rate unseen since, so capitalism had nothing to do with that, either. Any article on addiction which doesn’t mention Substance Use Disorder needs to get modern. So, the entire premise of this paragraph (and article, really) are wrong. The Stranger continues to insist homeless policy should be based in anti-capitalist belief, not reality.
@24: As the subhead reveals, this reformist impulse results from a craving for power, not out of any sincere desire to make amends for previous failures, or even to help the homeless: “Reclaiming This Issue Could Mean Reclaiming Power for the Progressive Left”
@2, That day is returning. The Stranger loses money on its “news” narrative payroll.
17, maybe pull your head out of your hole and read the mess that is this slog to understand you are the problem. Always blaming someone else, perhaps that’s why we are stuck with Trump.
There are two things missing from this article:
From people working with homeless, their unanimous take is that the most important intervention is to catch people within the first two days of their homelessness. That’s the most impactful for their lives, and the most cost effective. The talk about “need for low-cost-housing” is true but it’s a distant future, not the impact that’s urgently needed.
Parks and playgrounds are there to help families. When homeless take over a park and kids no longer play there, the well-off kids just get driven by their parents to a more welcoming playground; when the streets feel unsafe then well-off kids just get driven by their parents to Bellevue or a mall. It’s the poor but homed people who suffer. Sweeps are an equity issue. They bring equity to the poor people.
I don’t see how anyone could write a piece like this without addressing the recent HUD 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report to Congress. It concludes our regional response to homelessness has led to worse outcomes for the unhoused than in any other place in the country.
We had the highest rate of chronic patterns of homelessness in the country in 2024, and the largest numeric increase in the number of individuals who experienced chronic patterns of homelessness.
Other states, including more populated states, have had success in reducing chronic homelessness and the percentage of homeless who are unsheltered.
As a result, this isn’t a question of “where the Left went wrong.” It’s a question of where Washington’s elected leaders, particularly those within Snohomish and King County, went wrong.
Excellent article. Thank you for clarifying what has been in my thoughts for the past few months. I do think, however, that the key to managing the homeless crises, there is no solving for it, is to segment the homeless population and prioritize those that are most amenable to a housing solution. This means that people who through economic circumstance are in danger of becoming homeless, should be the first ones to be helped to ensure that they can retain their current housing. They should be separated from people who have alcohol, drug addictions or who have other mental issues.
This may sound harsh but people who have addictions should be forced to attend addiction counselling while being housed in an institutional setting. Providing them with independent housing would be futile. Discipline and coercion are the best ways to kick addiction. The army is really good at this in molding minds and bodies to achieve goals and I would use methods similar to what the army use to force these people to kick their addictions if they want to access tax-payer funded services such as housing. Helping people with mental issues is even more complex and I don’t have an answer to this but that does not mean that we cannot take action on the other two groups. It’s never an all or nothing solution.
While good, this misses the big classic deadlock of Seattle politics. Where do we build. The easiest and most viable route is on the transit corridors and in the city center. Already has transit access, viable sewers and utilities, etc… But almost instantly the usual suspects start screaming “equity” and shut that route down.
Meanwhile, no one pushed for anything in the areas the actual rich live in. Perfect example. The Stranger’s favorite hard-on, “Ron Davis, Urbanist Dad” was doing the ever tiresome “you gotta love it!!!” commentary on upzoning and construction north of University Village in the area up to 55th west of 40th. But what was obviously missing from the maps and excitement? Anything south of UVill across Sandpoint Way. Funny dat, no? What could possibly be south and east of Sandpoint Way over there, immediately next to the upzone and behind existing commercial strips on SW?
Oh right, some of the wealthiest areas of NE Seattle. They’re just as near UVill, immediately off a larger arterial than any of the streets in the upzone, and have transit runs. So where’s the upzone? Where’s the Urbanist Dad or the Stranger? See the first sentence of this paragraph.
So not only are the boring normies given all the BS pointed out in this article, but the Seattle left targets them and only them for all negative impact of their alleged “solutions”. Then they wonder why their polities are rejected.
I really appreciate this analysis, it is honest, thoughtful and courageous. The one suggestion I would add, based on my experience in our neighborhood, is that we need police to catch and jail vandals and thieves. Right now, they are “low-level” crimes not even worthy of investigation. My guess is, this behavior is driven by drugs and mental illness, which deserve compassion, but at the same time, after repeated car break-ins and thefts, I am tired of it all, and so are our other neighbors. When they are caught, they are given fines they don’t pay and court dates they don’t bother to show up for, with no consequences. Can we have both compassion and consequences?
As someone who spent years working with people who are homeless and mentally ill, I agree with almost all of this. The part I disagree with is what seems to be a limited view of housing. What my experience working in Seattle and Atlanta showed me and what the data shows is that causes homelessness is primarily lack of housing at all levels and all types and what is needed in Seattle is housing of all types: supportive for those with mental illness and other problems, subsidized housing, social housing, and market rate housing. Your left orientation may not want to hear this but in current US system the only way to build enough housing is primarily by the private market. We need to provide as much money as possible for housing that needs to be paid for with public funds but the amount of housing that will be built that way is far short of the need. Only by clearing away obstacles to building enough market rate housing such as zoning (see the current Comp Plan debate) can enough housing be built to lower the price of housing so people don’t fall into homelessness in the first place. Hard to believe in Seattle, I know, but that is case in much of the rest of the country and the rest of the world. Keep enlarging your perspective Katie but enlarge it just a little more.
@31– “Always blaming someone else,
perhaps that’s why we are stuck with Trump.”
Bingo. sorta.
kristo@17:
quoting @15:
‘Seattle’s far left
likes to look the
other way of reality.
We got to this place on your watch.’
so it’s always someone elses’ fault?
Home-
lessness’s
Nationwide
so yeah it’s Gotta
be Seattle Progressives’ fault.
my head up my ass it may be
but at least I can mostly
still fucking Read.
@29 & @Wormtongue:
‘Ok, well, “commodified housing” has housed
almost every Seattle resident for the
entire history of the city,
so that’s not it.’
by-oh-so Conveniently omitting
short-term rentals and private equity
et al purchasing vast swaths of our Housing
you make quick,
short work of
our Reality.
my
oh my how
Totally unsurprising.
It’s good to read some soul-searching on this issue. It would have to come from the “left” as the “right” is consumed by their victimhood, celebrates their ignorance, and is unwilling to take any sort of personal responsibility or offer any sort of solution.
And it’s particularly good to see nuance on the “Housing First” bumper sticker/meme. It should be evaluation first, then appropriate housing.
I was a little dishteartened to read the usual criticisms of the “stay out” areas, for I think that anyone who looked at the the situation rationally would have to admit that what was going on in those areas was untenable. True, it just moved the problems to other parts of town, but in the absence of any real solution it’s a viable option.
I, too, don’t know what the solution is. The “conservatives” would probably tell you that the homeless need Jesus, but that’s just them either feathering their nests (if they’re clergy) or just being cheap. Blaming everything on “tech jobs” is ultimately self-defeating in a town where probably 70% of the jobs are tech, tech-related, or tech-dependent. That makes the messenger come across as a dreary moral scold.
We live in a country where healthcare is a commodity, and every facet of society is centered around making the obscenely rich feel comfortable and don’t have to pay their fair share of taxes. That’s not likely to change soon. In fact, it will probably get worse in the short term. We live in a city that makes nice noises about “affordability” but is actively condoizing the single-family zoned neighborhoods. Putting six houses with no parking on a lot that previously had one house and selling each unit for $650k is not affordable.
I fear that we are going to become a city with a lot of very affluent people, and a handful of desperately poor people, who the affluent will regard as their pet charity, with everyone else coming in from the far suburbs.
My sister in law works for one of the homeless housing providers. At the end of the year her boss called her into her office and handed her a bonus check for $7000 which is on top of the $80,000 a year she makes. It was because our tax dollars had to be spent or they went back to who’s in charge. Don’t ever let anyone in government say there isn’t waste.
Probably the best piece on this subject The Stranger ever produced. Very well done.
I’m guessing it’s not very popular with some of The Stranger’s other writers.
@39: Well, no, it’s just an actual fact that at any moment in Seattle’s history, almost all residents were housed, and almost all of the housed had obtained their housing from the private sector. Public housing, social housing, and charitable housing all have their places, and we should subsidize and encourage each one, but the simple fact is the private sector provides most of the housing. It’s one remedy for homelessness, not a cause.
The author seems to have taken several steps towards grasping what everyone outside the Progressive Left echo chambers (btw, has everybody got their Bluesky™ account set up yet?) understood years ago: the habit of couching unpopular and/or half-baked ideas in PhD-level obscurantist euphemisms doesn’t work. (For instance “neoliberal underinvestment in subsidized housing” — is there a simpler, more direct way to express this?) People have caught on to the game that when Progressives would rather gloss over a difficult topic, their words get longer and harder to understand.
On the plus side, any approach that shows even modest gains has a chance of gaining public support. The problem is so bad that even making it slightly-less-terrible could be presented as proof of concept. Show voters something that works and don’t insult their intelligence, explain how to do it at scale, and watch them flock to your agenda.
As much as I appreciate the author’s nuanced approach to what has been obvious (for years) to most Seattllites about the failings of the far left, I do wish they had spoken more directly to the issue of personal responsibility. The far left has an allergy to acknowledging that personal responsibility and accountability even exist for homeless people. Unfortunately for them that warped perspective will continue to be an impediment to any political traction even in what is arguably our country’s most liberal city and state.
“The problem
is so bad that even
making it slightly-less-terrible
could be presented as proof of concept.”
–@Tragedy of the Commons
how do you sell it
without auctioning it off
so many sticky fingers in the pie
other than that
Brilliant.
@41: But $87,000 in salary and bonuses is peanuts in Seattle. That’s like a one-bedroom apartment, no kids kind of lifestyle, not something anyone could reasonably call middle class. At $87,000 a year, your sister in law’s salary doesn’t strike me as “government waste,” it strikes me as a working-class, first-job-out-of-school kind of salary. Depending on her qualifications, she is likely underpaid at that salary.
What’s not discussed in Katie’s column nor among the commenters here is managing the demand for any type of affordable housing if there are no qualifiers put on it. There are a great many people who live outside the city limits in surrounding communities who would jump at the chance to live in the city and have taxpayers fund a portion of their rent. That can’t happen. You can not build enough affordable housing to meet that demand. Any type of subsidized housing at its core should be temporary and should also be provided only if someone meets some qualifications (e.g. they have already lived in the area for a year, they have a life changing event such as loss of job, illness or other unpreventable financial tragedy) and need help to get back on their feet again. If you are working a barista job and think you are owed a one bedroom unit that the rest of us should partly fund you need to get a roommate or a different job. Leftists seemingly think we just need to “tax the wealthy” to subsidize things for everyone else and in real life it just doesn’t work that way. There will never be enough money or resources (like land) to fulfill that pipe dream.
Bravo, Thumpus dear! And let me quietly murmur to Our Dear Subship182 that “Housing Providers” are generally not government employees. And it is beyond credulous that either government agency or charity would provide a bonus.
Perhaps Subship182 should either distance themself from their highly theoretical Sister-In-Law, or perhaps enroll in a community college class on critical thinking.
@40 I know you think I’m an idiot high school student, but this is actually one of the best comments I’ve seen on this site. You hit the nail on the head as far as the factors making a solution to this problem all but impossible. My one point of disagreement is that I think Seattle unfortunately already is the type of city you fear it becoming, and that’s what we’re seeing reflected in the streets.