Seattle Homelessness is a Complex Problem: Here’s how to Solve It

We previously pinpointed the cause of the homelessness crisis in King County. The county added more than 700,000 residents over the past 30 years but woefully failed to keep pace by expanding housing supply. Research clearly shows that local jurisdictions with a massive shortfall in housing end up with large-scale homelessness.

But we haven’t yet proposed solutions. Does the fact that King County has a large, long-term housing shortfall mean we can solve homelessness in King County merely by building more housing? No. The problem is now far too complicated. We aim here to explain why, and to offer a starting point for solutions to a complex problem. More than anything else, we need political leadership that can devise a coherent plan and carry it out.

A lasting solution will, of course, include new housing. Lots of it, especially the affordable kind. But housing alone won’t be sufficient. Why? The short answer is that the chronically homeless, defined as those who have been unhoused for a year or more, usually need more than just four walls and a door that locks. These individuals (about 6,400 in King County, or about one-third of the homeless population here, according to the latest headcount often suffer from trauma, mental illness and/or substance abuse. Sleeping outside for a prolonged period, which is extraordinarily stressful, can exacerbate such vulnerabilities. In many cases, it can even create them.

Our community needs to do more to keep housing-insecure members from becoming homeless in the first place by expanding the housing supply and providing rent assistance to those facing eviction for non-payment, and then help the unhoused get into housing before they experience even greater trauma. Finally, we must identify all of the region’s chronically homeless individuals by name, document their different vulnerabilities, and provide them with both shelter and appropriate services. To solve this crisis, we must be intentional and we must be deliberate.

A well-coordinated “housing first” system can succeed. Unlike several other local jurisdictions across America that have experienced remarkable success, Seattle/King County has never followed such an approach. One could call ours a chaotic and redundant “nonprofits first” program in which more than 150 non-governmental organizations scramble for government contracts without a coherent plan of action or any serious results-focused system of accountability. The current approach is expensive and ineffective. It is not working.

We know this because, despite the significant amount of tax dollars spent, the homeless population here keeps growing. Worse, the number of rough sleepers, or unsheltered homeless people, is growing even faster – by 21% over the past two years. Many of these folks are chronically homeless, which means their needs are dire and becoming more serious over time.

A working system would recognize the diversity of the region’s homeless population and treat individuals differently to refer them appropriately. For example, sober campers (and there are many such out there) should never be pushed into low-barrier shelters, where they will be tempted by drug users. They need housing, and perhaps friends or peer counselors. A sense of community. Drug addicts should be placed in shelters with caseworkers trained in rehab. But they too need community. The mentally ill should go to shelters with access to professionals who can prescribe medicine, therapy, and (yes) community. Predators, on the other hand, should go to jail.

Through our volunteer work (Walter with the Ballard Community Task Force on Homelessness and Hunger; Mark with Anything Helps), we have met and helped hundreds of rough sleepers who fall into these different categories. Let us introduce you to a few.

Mike, a mechanic from California who doesn’t use drugs –- except the prescription kind to deal with high blood pressure and a bad heart. He was sleeping on a bench on the Magnolia side of the Ballard locks when we met him; he had no interest in moving into a shelter with folks he calls “trouble.” A member of the Ballard task force was able to get Mike into permanent housing with very low rent. He is happier now than he has been in years but still worries (for good reason) about his heart.

Then there’s Stuart. He is a proud, African-American man with bipolar disorder. Sometimes he is the sweetest, maybe even the smartest guy in the room; other times, he is impossibly angry. He belongs in a shelter with caseworkers who can refer him to Sound Health to treat his condition. 

And there’s DJ, a young, white addict. He had been a construction worker in rural Pierce County, but suffered chronic muscle pain and struggled to pay medical bills. He eventually lost his rental housing, became homeless and turned to fentanyl and meth. He belongs in rehab, and then in a shelter that can help him stay on track.

Finally, there’s the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Fred Meyer.” He has lived, off and on, in a camp behind the Ballard store. He is a dealer who sends scrawny young men off to construction sites and elsewhere to steal copper wire for drug cash, and who trades fentanyl and meth for sex with women. He belongs in jail.

If it weren’t for the region’s shortage of transitional and permanent housing, these individuals might never have become homeless. They probably would have lived in the low-rent apartment buildings, flophouses, SRO hotels, trailer parks of the past. But those are mostly gone as the region has become more affluent and less tolerant of slum-like conditions. We will never fix the crisis here until we replenish our housing stock by upzoning, relaxing restrictions on new construction, and increasing subsidies for those who supply low-income units. We also must maintain the affordable units that already exist. But all this work could take decades.

In the meantime, we have to provide targeted services to the chronically homeless. The longer they sleep outside, the more they will become unstable, sick, profoundly vulnerable and (for taxpayers) expensive to help.

Mayor Katie Wilson’s shelter expansion program, designed to add 1,000 additional beds each year of her term, will certainly help move chronically homeless folks off the street. It will, at least for a while, provide greater stability, an opportunity for many to think about the future rather than just daily survival. But as one unhoused resident of Ballard recently wrote, it won’t fix Seattle’s problem. The mayor’s program “should be the beginning, not the plan itself,” argues Jeremy Wolff, who sleeps in his vehicle. “Build the beds, please. But build the system too: shared intake, live availability, by-name coordination, placement by fit and public accountability for whether people stay housed. Effort matters most when everyone is pointed at the same goal: ending homelessness.”

Unlike Seattle/King County, where we seem to be heading backwards, several other jurisdictions are moving forward.

• In Milwaukee, a well-coordinated “housing first” plan reduced homelessness there by 42% in the decade from 2015 to 2025. There was an even bigger drop (92%) in the unsheltered homeless population. City and county officials have added shelter beds and permanent housing, but also a variety of treatment programs targeted at substance abusers and those with mental illness. Most importantly, they have designed a working plan that all parties, public and private, must follow.
  
• Denver, too, has shown the way. Since 2023, when Mayor Mike Johnston declared a homelessness emergency, he has used a “housing first” plan to reduce overall homelessness by 12% and unsheltered homelessness by 64%. He has expanded housing options, reducing restrictions on new construction, converting empty hotels into shelters and (for a while) even created sanctioned encampments. Drug addicts and mentally ill campers are steered into appropriate programs. Denver is hoping to sustain its progress by offering rent-assistance to residents at risk of becoming homeless, and by providing temporary subsidies for the newly homeless.
  
  The city’s Department of Housing Stability (HOST) carefully oversees its “All In Mile High” program to reduce homelessness. Denver providers who are accountable to the city meet twice a month as the Homeless Leadership Council. “We are aiming for synergy,” said Jessica Ehinger, CEO of the Colorado Village Collaborative, a major provider.
  
• Although it has regressed a bit in the past year or so, Houston has blazed a similar trail, reducing homelessness by 60% in the past 15 years by pursuing a well-coordinated “housing first” plan. It established a centralized system, called “The Way Home,” under which all providers and service organizations had to operate. They relied on shared data to move people from the streets, to shelters, to permanent housing.

The common denominator in all three successful jurisdictions is political will expressed through committed leadership. “Beyond the Bridge,” an eye-opening documentary, shows how “housing first” can and does work. It highlights local jurisdictions that have devised workable plans that not only fill the housing gap but target appropriate services to disparate groups in the diverse homeless community. It shows how these jurisdictions have required providers to follow clear guidelines or lose contracts.

Then consider Seattle/King County, the home of what we call a “nonprofits first” approach. Over the past six years, local politicians have entrusted its “system” to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, even as many of them (including the Seattle Mayor and King County Executive) served passively on its governing board. When KCRHA spun its wheels early on, local pols began to use it as a political punching bag to avoid responsibility for their own leadership failures. No one has really been in charge.

In the lurch, dozens of nonprofits compete for government contracts. Some like Plymouth Housing and the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) have become giant operations that pay their leaders far more than the City of Seattle pays its mayor and more than King County pays its executive. Earlier this year, an audit of KCRHA found that it could not account for perhaps $13 million in public funds. As a result, the city and county will stop funding the authority in January.  

It’s a chaotic jungle out there

For example, there is no central clearinghouse for information on the region’s thousands of homeless individuals and their distinctive problems and needs. Part of this is due to privacy concerns. But another part is due to the deep fragmentation sewn into our “nonprofits first” approach. For example, LIHI uses the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) to keep track of its clients. But it acknowledged to us that it doesn’t share any client-specific data with other non-profit providers or with local government, including KCRHA. In other words, the “network” isn’t networked.

So this area’s homeless individuals are mostly on their own, wandering from caseworker to caseworker, from one provider to the next, re-explaining their conditions, hoping to get ID, medicine, counseling, drug treatment, food stamps, disability benefits, or whatever they might need (especially housing). Repeating themselves. Getting frustrated. Mostly giving up.

Even in our (ill-named) “Coordinated Entry Program,” the local form of a national program that is designed to help cities and counties move homeless individuals and families on the list into available housing, providers often don’t “buy in” to the program due to distrust. So there is little or no coordination. A KCRHA staffer expressed this frustration in an evaluation: “It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy, where if folks don’t believe in the system, they don’t participate in the system, they start putting their time and energy elsewhere, and therefore they undermine the system to where it’s less likely to be something that they support.”

More than a decade after the Seattle mayor and the King County executive declared a homelessness crisis, the Puget Sound region –- unlike Milwaukee, Denver and Houston –- still doesn’t have a coherent plan to respond. More concretely, Mayor Wilson only very recently (eight months after taking office) named a permanent director of Seattle’s Office of Housing, and she still hasn’t replaced her chief policy strategist on homelessness. (Mark Ellerbrook, deputy director of city operations, is now supposed to “manage” this portfolio. But he is laser focused on the city’s effort to reclaim homelessness service contracts from KCRHA. In other words, he is managing our chaotic “nonprofits first” approach.) 

We conferred with Jon Grant before he was pushed out of his role as the mayor’s “homelessness czar,” presumably because he ruffled too many feathers on the City Council. And we asked: When will the mayor develop a coherent governing plan for solving Seattle’s most vexing problem? “We expect to look at that sometime next year,” he told us. “Right now, we’re just focusing on expanding shelter.”

Tick tick tick.