In some ways, the report to Congress last week that homelessness is surging wasn’t news in Seattle or the state.
People living under bridges has long been part of the fabric here. Plus the local count showing the largest number of homeless people ever in King County was already released here last May.
But the federal report, the 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment, was shocking to the senses anyway. At least it ought to have been. It allowed a comparison of how Seattle and Washington state are doing on homelessness relative to more than 400 other cities, counties, and states.
The picture was brutal. It ought to chasten or even embarrass local leaders. If not that, it should at least prompt some course corrections.
The report shows Seattle and the broader state of Washington as leaders in failure. Not just at solving homelessness long term, which is a tough ask. But at providing even the minimum aid for getting folks up and out of the gutter.
The headline is that Washington has the third-largest homeless population in the nation, after California and New York. A closer look at the data though shows it’s much worse than that.
Washington has higher rates of unsheltered homelessness than most other states, except California. These are people living out in the elements, in greenbelts, in doorways and by the sides of roads — what the British call “rough sleepers.” These are the worst places to be.
Compare here with New York, a state with nearly 2 ½ times more people. Washington had 16,222 rough sleepers on a given night in 2024. While the entire state of New York had just 5,638. For the hardest, chronic cases — people who have disabilities such as mental illness or substance abuse, and are homeless for long periods — Washington had 9,185 unsheltered compared with New York’s 1,337.
These huge disparities are largely because New York has so much more emergency shelter than Washington does — by design.
It’s the same dire picture if you compare Seattle-King County to New York City — which researchers at the Brookings Institution did last year.
“Seattle is the stark outlier in the sample: Over 57% of its homeless population is living without shelter,” the researchers found. This compares with just 3% in New York City.
Last week’s report to Congress is a giant red flag for Washington state. After years of supposedly urgent attention to the issue, Washington statewide had 4,000 more souls living outside in wintertime than much larger, and warmer, Texas.
Since 2015, when leaders in Seattle and King County declared a homelessness emergency, the rate of unsheltered homelessness has soared.
The numbers are jarring. Seattle-King County has twice as many people unsheltered as New York City, the report shows. Six times as many as Chicago. Ten times as many as Philadelphia (we have 9,810 unsheltered people, Philly has just 976). All these cities stood up more emergency shelter than we did — and it at least got roofs over people’s heads.
“In New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, we found trends of unsheltered homelessness had not ballooned during the pandemic … but rather remained steady for the past decade,” the Brookings researchers found. “Seattle, again, was a stark outlier — seeing an 88% jump in unsheltered homelessness since 2015.”
The term “stark outlier” is used for Seattle four times in that study.
What happened?
It’s complicated, as everything with homelessness is. Fentanyl had a lot to do with it, but they have fentanyl in these other cities, too. The bottom line comes down to one word: shelter.
In a policy switch, Seattle-King County stopped adding much emergency shelter back in 2015. The plan was to instead focus on building permanent housing in what they argued was a more compassionate, deeper response.
Shelter is seen as helping people get off the streets in the moment, but not so much for stabilizing people long-term. “Shelter alone can’t solve homelessness,” was the phrase often used. The drawback to permanent housing though is that it takes years and tons of money to build. Regardless, a decision was made to effectively leave folks outside, potentially for years, while apartments got built.
They didn’t put it that way, of course. But that was the result. The federal report shows that since 2015, Seattle and King County have increased shelter capacity by just 8%, even as the number of homeless people jumped 67%.
I’ve been yelling at the top of my pixels for years that this policy, well-meaning as it was, is dooming us to mass levels of people living in squalor outside for the immediate future. For humanitarian aid purposes alone, we simply needed more emergency shelter — tiny homes, FEMA tents, conventional shelters, even managed tent cities. While we worked on putting up permanent housing for the long run.
The data in last week’s federal report is nearly a year old, so maybe some progress has been made since. We’ll see when new counts come out in the spring.
I was heartened to see that the blundering, elephantine Regional Homelessness Authority has tightened up its focus. Its mission is no longer “reducing homelessness,” it’s “reducing unsheltered homelessness.” As Seattle Times reporter Greg Kim noted: “In other words, the top priority of the homeless response system went from getting people housed to getting people in shelters.”
Good! It’s an urgent crisis after all — more than 750 homeless people died in King County in just the past two years.
This stuff is hard, but surely it would have been possible to better balance shelter and housing work all along — as other cities apparently did.
“If you focus on immediate problems, you can end up spending a lot of money not solving homelessness,” the Brookings study concluded. “However, it’s equally true that building housing can’t happen overnight, and leaving people with no safe place to sleep outside is extremely bad for both them and society.”
What is it about our nature in this state that led us to follow this course for so long — to leave people in dire conditions, supposedly in the name of doing better by them? Was it idealism? Utopian society dreaming?
I’m no psychologist. But I think we need one, to peer into the region’s civic soul. So we don’t walk so readily into disastrous liberal blind spots like this again.