In August, Mayor Bruce Harrell bragged that his #OneSeattle Homelessness Action Plan managed to decrease homelessness encampments by 61 percent over the last two years. At the same time, the 2024 Point-in-Time Count tallied more than 16,000 people experiencing homelessness in King County, the largest number ever reported in the survey and a 23 percent increase over the last two years.
The ideology that fed those disparate results lies bare in Harrell’s 2025-2026 budget proposal, wherein he defunds stuff that houses people in order to fund stuff that temporarily pushes homeless people around town, allowing homelessness to fester out of sight. Essentially, Harrell is giving the city council a choice as they rework his budget in the coming weeks—treat homelessness as an aesthetic issue, or treat it as a humanitarian crisis.
BTW We Are in Crisis
In case you’ve missed it: Seattle, along with most of the United States, is in a housing crisis. To dig the city out of the crisis, we need 112,000 new homes by 2044, according to a recent report from the Seattle Office of Housing (OH). That total includes more than 41,000 private market units for those making between 80 and 120 percent of the area median income (AMI), more than 42,000 subsidized units for people making between 0 and 80 percent AMI, and then about another 28,000 units of permanent supportive housing for those with high-acuity needs.
All that means Seattle needs to fund at least 2,100 units of affordable housing every year for the next 20 years. Harrell’s budget doesn’t do that, not even when combined with the couple hundred units the Housing Levy will pay for every year.
Instead, in his 2025-2026 budget proposal, the mayor defunds affordable housing by raiding $330 million from the JumpStart Payroll Expense tax, a tax on the city’s largest businesses that must reserve 62 percent of its revenue to affordable housing. Harrell's proposal does pump up affordable housing investments to a historic $342.2 million in 2025, representing a 2.5 percent increase from 2024. But, had he honored the legally mandated JumpStart spending plan, he would have allocated an additional $204 million to affordable housing.
Doing a little back-of-napkin math here, let’s assume a unit of affordable housing costs about $320,000, as estimated in the Housing Levy. In that case, Harrell’s "historic" budget funds about 1,068 units a year. If he hadn’t raided JumpStart, then he would have $526.2 million from all streams to fund about 1,706 affordable units in 2025. To fund the 2,100 units we need to do our part this year, he would need to allocate about $630 million total to affordable housing. If he really believed we were in a housing crisis, then he could reach that total by combining the money he budgets for housing this year, plus the affordable housing funds he stole from the JumpStart tax, plus the $100 million for new programming that he added this year to “activate” spaces and install CCTV cameras, mainly to show off to World Cup tourists in 2025. But he didn't.
Staying Housed
Aside from short-changing affordable housing construction funding, Harrell’s budget proposal also pokes holes in our social safety net, weakening the City’s ability to protect workers from their bosses and renters from their landlords.
Helping tenants stay in their homes, whether by protecting their wages so they can afford rent or by evening the playing field when it comes to evictions, can help prevent homelessness. On that former score, Harrell’s budget proposal cut more than $600,000 from the Office of Labor Standards (OLS), the City’s only mechanism to enforce its 19 unique labor laws, including the minimum wage ordinance, the wage theft ordinance, the Fair Chance Employment ordinance, four laws specifically protecting hotel workers, and three laws protecting gig delivery drivers.
The cuts include three full-time positions; $216,000 from general operating expenses, $100,000 from outreach to marginalized small business owners, and in 2026 Harrell plans to cut one-third of the funding dedicated to helping spread awareness of workers’ rights in partnership with community-based organizations. All of this limits the agency’s ability to enforce labor standards. According to the budget document, the mayor’s proposal “maintains core services” of OLS at a “reduced scale” in order to preserve “critical City services” in the face of the $250 million shortfall in 2025.
But labor leaders argue that OLS does provide “critical City services.”
MLK Labor Executive Secretary-Treasurer Katie Garrow said the nation recognizes Seattle as a vanguard for workers’ rights given its early adoption of the $15 minimum wage and its protections of gig delivery drivers. But none of those rights matter if the City does not enforce them, she says.
Garrow noted that every year employers steal a stunning $15 billion from workers in the United States. According to the Economic Opportunity Institute, the total value of property stolen through robberies, burglaries, and carjackings adds up to less than 4 percent of what bosses steal from their workers each year. Without enforcement from OLS, the City would allow companies to “continue this crime with impunity because a minimum wage worker does not have the money or time to litigate a claim against a multi-billion dollar corporation,” Garrow said.
And it's not like trimming a little fat from the already slim department will fill Harrell’s hole. In 2023, the City spent $8.4 million in total on the entire department, accounting for just 0.14 percent of the City’s operating budget. That year alone, OLS recouped more than $4.4 million in wages for workers who were wronged by their bosses. When the City gave the agency more money in 2022, about $12.1 million, it raked in even more for workers–about $7.7 million. In total, since its inception in 2014, OLS has recouped more than $42 million for workers.
So maybe labor law enforcement is not a “critical” service in Harrell’s eyes, but for the more than 94,000 workers with more money in their pockets thanks to the OLS, enforcement could mean the difference between making your rent on time and getting evicted, which often leads to homelessness.
The mayor’s budget also limits the City’s ability to protect renters, leaving them all the more vulnerable to eviction and homelessness. In his proposal, Harrell cut tenant services funding from $2.6 million in 2024 to just $1.8 million. And instead of renewing additional one-time funding of about $1 million for rental assistance, he only designated about $527,000 of the $1.8 million to pay rent for struggling tenants. That leaves tenant services at a measly $1.2 million.
Kate Rubin, the co-executive director of tenant advocacy group Be:Seattle, said $1.2 million is “nowhere near enough to support tenant education, organizing, counseling, and legal services,” all of which fall under the umbrella of “tenant services.”
The City contracts with organizations such as Be:Seattle to provide tenant services. Be:Seattle, with just two paid staff members, serves about 785 renters per year, according to Rubin.
“Renters typically come to us frustrated by unresolved issues,” Rubin said in an email to Council Member Tammy Morales’s staff. “We equip them with knowledge of their rights, guide them in navigating landlord-tenant relationships, and teach strategic organizing skills. This knowledge spreads through their communities, often reaching those who might not otherwise have access.”
Without funding this work, Rubin said “disputes would escalate, landlords would exploit renters unchecked, and more people would be at risk of displacement and homelessness.”
The mayor’s proposal also cuts $50,000 promised in a previous budget to establish a work group to help create an Office of Rental Housing Standards. That office would help author new renter protections and enforce existing ones. As Garrow said of labor standards, laws protecting renters mean little when they’re not strongly enforced.
Stop the Sweeps
As he blamed the budget deficit for every cut to programs that benefit working people, Harrell found ways to increase spending for sweeps, seemingly his homelessness solution of choice.
His budget bolsters sweeps by adding $880,000 to the Unified Care Team (UCT), a cross-department team that conducts encampment removals. The new funds will pay for 11 new full-time positions and enable the UCT to conduct sweeps seven days a week rather than just five.
And boy does the UCT already make use of those five days. According to Real Change, the City of Seattle conducted a record-breaking 2,827 sweeps in 2023, an increase of 207 percent from the 922 conducted in 2022. That means the City conducted about 11.3 sweeps per day, excluding weekends and the 12 recognized City holidays. If the UCT kept that pace on their new seven-day schedule, then the City could theoretically conduct 4,000 sweeps a year.
But more sweeps does not mean less homelessness. At most, 11 percent of the City’s shelter referrals actually lead to people taking the offer, according to a report analyzing the UCT’s performance between July and September of 2023. Publicola reported that people often rejected the shelter referrals because the UCT offered them a stay at an overnight, congregate shelter rather than at a spot in a tiny shelter village, or, most desirably, in actual housing.
And that’s when the UCT makes the offer at all. According to Real Change, more than 99 percent of all sweeps conducted by the UCT in 2023 were considered “obstruction” sweeps, which means the City does not have to give three days notice or offer shelter upon removal.
Alison Eisinger, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness (Seattle/King County), tells The Stranger that investing in the sweeps team amounts to the “least effective and most cynical response to homelessness in our community.”
“Most people understand there is no magic wand,” says Eisinger. “It takes real and sustained work to help people get the housing, shelter, health care, and other supports they need.”
Eisinger says the City would see better results if Harrell or the council took the funding from sweeps and put it toward regional approaches that have more success.
For example, the state’s slower, more methodical Encampment Resolution Program has closed 47 encampments while bringing 70 percent of their residents–or about 1,200 people–inside. The model works particularly well in King County, which managed to close 18 encampments and bring 90 percent of the people inside. According to the Seattle Times, the Encampment Resolution Program found more success because it offered better, more permanent shelter options.
While the Mayor did not renew $2 million in one-time funding from 2023 to 2024 to CoLEAD, the group that conducts the slower, more effective sweeps, CoLEAD Director Lisa Daugaard said the State pays for the removals, and so the future of the program depends on who wins the gubernatorial race and who makes up the State Legislature.
From the Mayor
The Mayor’s office disagrees with the framing that his budget perpetuates homelessness, and it argues that to say so is to neglect “the nuance of the homelessness crisis, the $250 million general fund deficit, and the full breadth of the mayor's work across all of these issues,” mayoral spokesperson Jamie Housen said in an email to The Stranger.
Housen noted that Harrell delivered historic investments to affordable housing in the face of the deficit and saved 300 existing shelter beds whose funding would have otherwise lapsed. Of course, the budget deficit excuse sort of falls flat when you consider he also added $100 million in new spending throughout the budget.
Housen also said Harrell attempted to increase housing supply outside of the budget. He streamlined the design review process, made it easier to build ADUs, supported a new redevelopment plan for affordable housing at Fort Lawton, and updated the City’s maritime and industrial lands policy to create more opportunities to build housing, he said. Those policies add capacity, but they do not fund housing. The Fort Lawton plan will allow for as many as 500 units. The maritime and industrial land update will allow for about 3,000 units over 20 years, according to the mayor’s press release.
He also mentioned Harrell’s One Seattle Comprehensive Plan, but that plan did not exactly impress anyone, as it only plans for about half the housing we need.
As for the UCT, Housen said the team receives a “fraction” of what the City invests into homelessness services, shelter, and permanent housing. Still, he said UCT’s approach is “making a difference.” Seattleites see fewer tent and RV encampments, less gun violence and fires related to homelessness, and more shelter referrals, he said.
Housen also casted doubt on the Point-In-Time survey, which found an increase in homelessness under Harrell’s watch. He claimed the count “lacks consistency” in its method, which “creates difficulties in comparing year-over-year data.”
He did not address the cuts to renter services and labor law enforcement or how they could threaten housing stability for working people.
“The mayor believes that it is inhumane for people to live outside, and our budget reflects an investment strategy to continue making progress bringing people indoors with the services to recover, using the resources we have available,” says Housen. “Ultimately, a significant budget deficit requires difficult decisions, and this proposal is now in the hands of the city council to review the budget, propose modifications, and complete the process.”
You can tell the city council how you feel about the budget at public comment Wednesday at 5 pm. Sign up opens an hour before the meeting.