
Seattle’s Homeless Challenge - DoreenMichele
https://www.city-journal.org/seattles-homeless-challenge
======
subzidion
It was recently announced that King County and the City of Seattle want to
consolidate their homeless response into a single agency.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/durkan-and-
constan...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/durkan-and-constantine-
endorse-recommendations-to-consolidate-fragmented-homelessness-system/)

Hopefully this can be a good step forward in the right direction. As mentioned
by other comments, there are much better resources for learning about
homelessness in Seattle than an interview with a dropout Seattle City Council
candidate who has a pretty clear political agenda.

~~~
longerthoughts
>there are much better resources for learning about homelessness in Seattle
than an interview with a dropout Seattle City Council candidate who has a
pretty clear political agenda

Agreed that there are better ways to get informed but it's a politician's job
to have a clear political agenda. Forgive me if I'm detecting the wrong tone
but I'm becoming accustomed to hearing people say "political agenda" with the
implication of some sinister plot.

~~~
subzidion
Sorry if that was the implication. I just wanted to make it clear that Rufo is
not _just_ a film maker, but also someone with political aspirations.

------
opportune
Another challenge is that most direct funding (aside from Medicaid) comes from
municipalities rather than the state or the federal government. So other areas
are incentivized to ship their homeless to Seattle or at the very least
consider it not their problem to begin with.

With state and federal funding you could enact a program where the addicted
people living on the streets rather than in shelters (who are the homeless
people who cause most of the problems) are committed to involuntary sobriety
programs, and then on completion provided with private housing (not a shelter,
some 1bed public housing) and, as the article mentions, some low-skill job
like picking up trash on the condition that they remain clean (kind of like a
halfway house). You could also long term house the severely mentally ill who
cannot live on their own in psychiatric facilities. That would cost a lot of
money up front but could actually solve the problem long term.

Also note that even in Seattle over 2/3 of homeless people live in cars or
shelters. Most homeless people aren’t the crazy people on the corner harassing
you for drug money and camping in public parks, even though those are the most
visible

~~~
dan_quixote
Keep in mind that about half of our country's political leadership see the
strain on major cities as a win-win-win: They don't have to allocate funds to
properly deal with the problem and the urban liberals and lower class are
subsequently punished. The solution is rather clear when viewed from the
federal level, but the motivation is low.

------
troydavis
The $1 billion/year number cited by this ex-candidate has been so widely and
so completely discredited that anyone using it has an agenda. Here’s a short
summary of one massive flaw:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/7dijkx/homelessn...](https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/7dijkx/homelessness_the_seattle_area_spends_more_than_1/dpypw87/)

Yes, it actually counted the assessed value of land and buildings as a per-
year operational expense, as if the land was re-purchased, and the buildings
re-erected, every year.

The real number is somewhere between it and $90 million
([https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-
news/homeless/seattle-h...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-
news/homeless/seattle-homelessness-spending-tops-90-million/)), depending
heavily on how one amortizes capital assets (land, buildings) and allocates
shared services. It’s nowhere near $1 billion/year though.

UPDATE: To learn more about homelessness in Seattle, here's some starting
points:

1\. McKinsey's "The Economics of Homelessness in Seattle and King County":
[https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-
cities/...](https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-cities/the-
economics-of-homelessness-in-seattle-and-king-county) ("In total, we estimate
a budget of $360 million to $410 million would be needed. This is about twice
what the system invests today.")

2\. Barbara Poppe's 2016 recommendations
([https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/pathwayshome/B...](https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/pathwayshome/BPA.pdf))
and 2018 Q&A ([https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/qa-two-
ye...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/qa-two-years-after-
her-report-on-seattles-homelessness-how-does-barbara-poppe-grade-the-city/)).

3\. Survey of 1,056 homeless people: [http://allhomekc.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/05/FINALDRAFT-C...](http://allhomekc.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/05/FINALDRAFT-COUNTUSIN2018REPORT-5.25.18.pdf). Skip to
page 23. I think pages 28, 30-31, 33-34, 43, 45, and 66 have the most
information for the least time.

4\. Seattle Times homelessness coverage
([https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-
news/homeless/](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/)), which
has an RSS feed ([https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-
news/homeless/feed/](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-
news/homeless/feed/)).

~~~
hn_throwaway_54
> ex-candidate

Oh, so it's just sour grapes after he lost an election. I guess we can skip
over this due to his agenda.

But wait...

> [...] I put my hat in the ring early and I got tremendous support from
> across the city, from a lot of people in neighborhoods who are fed up with
> some of the policy of failures that they're seeing every day. But I got a
> very quick education in how activists pressure groups work. And in a very
> short time period as my campaign was gaining some momentum, I started
> getting barraged by harassment, by threats.

> One individual from an activist group had posted hundreds of messages,
> threatening messages over the period of a few weeks. They had gone after my
> wife attempting to get her fired from her employer. She works at Microsoft.
> They had been posting white supremacists content to my family. And I'm a
> biracial family, interracial marriage. And [we] have mixed race kids. And
> then the final straw is they actually went after my kids, they started
> posting hateful messages to my eight year old son school, facebook page. And
> not only that, they let people know that they knew where I lived, and really
> just kind of engaged in a reign of terror. And I very regretfully withdrew
> from the race because it was a decision that I had to make for the best
> interest of my family.

> And I felt conflicted because I deeply want policy change. But the political
> environment, as you've seen with in Seattle, as you've seen with Andy knows,
> reporting for city journal down in Portland, is saturated with the threat of
> violence.

Yikes.

Now I'm not sure. Should we discount the side that quotes a bad number from
the media, having missed the Reddit post disproving it? Or should we discount
the side that harasses and threatens a candidate, his wife and his children
until he retires from an election?

Maybe they cancel out. Anyway, I'd suggest reading the whole transcript after
all, $1 billion or not. There's some interesting stuff in there.

~~~
troydavis
> I guess we can skip over this due to his agenda.

No, you should skip over this because the number is obviously factually
flawed. I can't link to the Puget Sound Business Journal infographic it's from
because PSBJ uses a paywall. Regarding "having missed the Reddit post
disproving it," as I wrote, it was widely discredited (including in Reddit
comments). It's unlikely that anyone following the issue as closely as a city
council candidate would have "missed" that.

I'm all for learning more about the problem. However, all 4 sources that I
linked to are closer to primary sources for the information they provide, and
3 or 4 of the 4 are less biased.

------
jakelarkin
from my observation, the primary drivers are

1) the heroin/fentanyl epidemic

2) political choices or fiscal constraints as local spending on public
healthcare/shelters/mental-wards/criminal-justice has not kept up with
spiraling costs increases and population growth

3) the minimum rents in coastal cities exceeding the max SSID benefit (
~$750/month) in the early 2010s

The sub causes of (3) are myriad but include; a decade of easy credit
inflating property values, revival of American cities, local zoning/permitting
strangling construction, and I guess the economic success of West coast
technology companies (although this tax base keeps the government sector
afloat particularly in California, so think the progressives protest a bit too
much)

The east coast does not have as many problems with (2) because there is an
effective "right to shelter" with subfreezing winter temps. Having enough
shelter capacity helps prevent the short-term homeless from becoming
"chronically homeless".

~~~
vkou
> local zoning/permitting strangling construction

Looking at the Seattle skyline from my apartment, it's construction cranes as
far as the eye can see.

A lot of construction is happening. It's not enough, though, because there's
an absolute torrent of people into the area.

------
8bitsrule
Here's the 'challenge': Seattle spends $$tens of millions each year on
treating the symptoms.

Mostly policing, sheltering and moving tent-emcampments around. Wasted money.

The cause (exacerbated by huge price increases) is home-less-ness. The cure is
_homes_. Apart from showcase projects, no progress. Buy the property, build
small homes, move people in.

So why doesn't it happen? Follow the money.

~~~
cwkoss
In the words of Steve Balmer:

Developers Developers Developers Developers

------
fzeroracer
Keep in mind that Chris Rufo is known to call all of his opponents ideologues,
has ties to to the Claremont Institute (known for dabbling a bit in white
nationalism), frequently complained about his opponents 'virtue signalling'
and talks about 'break[ing] up the homeless industrial complex'

He tends to be biased more towards criminalizing homelessness and
institutionalizing them. I also noticed in this podcast he makes claims that
are simply not backed up by evidence, specifically when he's talking about
Canada and the safe injection sites.

This isn't to say that homelessness isn't a problem in Seattle, because it is.
We're seeing similar issues happen to San Francisco as in Seattle due to
rising rent and poor healthcare opportunities and there's unfortunately no
easy solution.

~~~
haberman
> has ties to to the Claremont Institute (known for dabbling a bit in white
> nationalism)

It's gotten to the point that I don't trust these vague-links-to-white-
nationalism accusations at all. They so rarely have any substance to them that
they make me more suspicious of the person accusing than the person being
accused.

~~~
drak0n1c
Ad hominem isn't a good look, nor an effective argument when it comes to
policy. Too often I see dismissals based on indirect associations with the
Koch brothers or unsubstantiated allegations of white nationalism. I don't see
how ad hominem by progressives is any better than someone dismissing research
data because of "links" to think tanks funded by George Soros, etc.

~~~
longerthoughts
>I don't see how ad hominem by progressives is any better than someone
dismissing research data because of "links" to think tanks funded by George
Soros, etc.

Are you saying association with a partisan think tank is equally as damning as
association with white nationalism?

It's an issue of morality. Being morally bankrupt should probably challenge
somebody's credibility more than having stances on policy that some don't
agree with.

~~~
drak0n1c
Please read my comment closely. I said neither are "damning", because ad
hominem shouldn't be considered a reason to "damn" ideas in an unrelated
policy debate. Especially unsubstantiated allegations about a second or third
degree connection.

~~~
longerthoughts
I agree that ad hominem attacks are overwhelmingly used to evade the
responsibility of substantive debate. The problem is that policy debates are
not purely objective and in reality people weigh presented perspectives and
evidence according to the perceived credibility of a given source. As a
result, information that speaks to the soundness of a person's judgement has a
place in policy debate as a means of drawing conclusions in the absence of
indisputable facts.

We're all placing faith in something that determines what we call truth and
what we call lies or ignorance.

------
the_cat_kittles
rents, regional policies, and not enough mental health and addiction services
are the main reasons i think. we need to spend about 250 million more annually
to properly address it. vienna is an example of a city that has succeeded. one
problem is that without an income tax, most taxes are regressive. so our best
bet is an increase in propert taxes.

------
cwkoss
Make a brutalist prison-like structure downtown where:

\- Anyone can get a free bed/meal

\- Anyone can get illegal drugs provided to them by a nurse for free. Nurse
may give 5 min sobriety pep talk before administering.

\- You have to piss clean before you can leave.

Seems like for $80k/person a year, we could clean up the streets, make the
addicts much happier and safer, and perhaps even have some money left over.
I'm sure it'd take a huge load off emergency services too - removing the
economic needs of satisfying addiction seems like it could drastically reduce
crime, why steal for a fix if you can get it for free?

~~~
freyir
> _make the addicts much happier and safer_

This is the current trend in many progressive cities, and so far it's a
massive failure. Perhaps it's not surprising that when you work to make
addicts happier, you attract more addicts. You also wind up with an entire
industry that spends hundreds of millions of tax dollars catering to the
addicts, and which perversely needs addicts to remain addicted in order for
the industry to survive. The situation only gets worse.

These policies put the addict's needs above those of the non-addicts, since
most non-addicts do not want a neighborhood filled with junkies who moved in
to get free services, free needles, and legal injection sites.

Common knowledge used to be that an addict needs to hit "rock bottom" before
they will turn their life around. If this is true, by making addicts happier
and more comfortable, you're not helping anybody.

~~~
cwkoss
This has not been attempted anywhere. What are you referring to?

>who typically do not want their neighborhood filled with addicts who have
moved in to get free services, free needles, and safe spaces.

The lack of a policy for dealing with homeless addicts is a effectively just a
policy of keeping them in the poorest neighborhoods. Ignoring them doesn't
make them go away, we can do better.

~~~
drak0n1c
Seattle does not enforce laws against public drug use and recently vacated all
gross misdemeanor charges, citing the "case load". This just incentivizes bad
behavior and further increases the case load. Every time I take my weekly walk
I find 2-5 of those "free" used syringes with uncapped needles on sidewalks.
While some decriminalization is good, if it is accompanied by indulging
people's addictions and lackadaisical enforcement of littering, loitering, and
harassment laws it only makes the problem worse.

~~~
cwkoss
By making the decriminalization location-based, it would concentrate the
problem and make providing services to those individuals much cheaper because
of economies of scale.

I'd imagine if there was free heroin and needles inside, not many people would
continue buying H and discarding syringes on the street.

~~~
drak0n1c
Hopefully these facilities can consistently confront disagreeable and
potentially unstable users and ensure they are discarding all needles that
were used before leaving. Seattle's track record of enforcement in other areas
makes me pessimistic, unfortunately.

One idea I've heard of is requiring more needles to be handed in before fresh
needles are handed out as a means of incentivizing neighborhood cleanup.

------
DoreenMichele
I submitted it. I didn't expect it to hit the front page.

A few stats on Seattle homelessness:

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle-
sta...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle-statistics-
on-homelessness-and.html)

A few stats on California homelessness:

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-
statistics-on-homelessness.html)

"Homes for the homeless" is always a bad idea. For one thing, it de facto
helps entrench the problem, if only due to The Shirky Principle. For another,
it fosters "creative" solutions that amount to designing something that would
only appeal to you if you were currently sleeping in a dumpster.

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-
shirky-...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky-
principle-and-homelessness.html)

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/homes-
for-h...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/homes-for-homeless-
is-always-bad-idea.html)

I've done a lot of research over the years. I would like to see market rate
housing solutions for _people_ , not "homes for the homeless." I don't think
we solve this by trying to "help the homeless" per se. That's just survival
mode, basically. I think we solve it in part by adding more missing middle
housing and replacing the million SROs that have been torn down in recent
decades, plus creating a single payer medical system. The ACA was the only
politically viable solution. It isn't actually a good solution. I don't have
citations at my fingertips, but I've seen research linking housing instability
and excessive medical bills.

Housing is typically the single biggest expense in a household budget.
Transportation is typically the second biggest. Medical expenses in the US are
a shockingly high percentage of GDP, on the order of a fifth of our economy.

Supplying walkable urban housing at the right price point and proper universal
medical coverage wouldn't solve homelessness, but would make a big difference
in the issue.

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-
clear-c...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-
connection-between-housing.html)

[https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-
missing...](https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing-
middle.html)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy)

So, as nutshell as possible, those are some of my thoughts on the problem
space as someone who both had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy and
spent several years homeless and got myself back into housing without going
through some program. I continue to blog about it in some fashion or other,
continue to communicate with currently homeless individuals and try to supply
useful information to try to make some small difference.

------
danjayh
I wonder if the explosion in homelessness is in any way related to the
importation of voters from San Francisco & related areas. Similar policies,
similar problems?

~~~
vkou
No.

I think it's in some way related to the explosion in cost of living,
importation of tech workers getting paid ludicrous amounts of money, and,
despite record-setting construction rates, inability to match housing supply
with demand.

Also, consider that the housing climate in Seattle is highly different from
SF. There is no proposition 9. There is no rent control. There is no 'lovely
California weather attracting rough sleepers' and no mythical 'bus-fulls of
homeless people being shipped in from other states.' And, yet, homelessness is
skyrocketing.

Maybe rent control and prop 9 aren't solely to blame for out-of-control
homelessness? Maybe people like me are the problem?

~~~
taobility
I would say the legalization of marijuana

~~~
longerthoughts
No. Homelessness exploded in San Francisco before legalization in California.

------
sebringj
I completely missed the boat on that one with home prices. I guess that's why
it's a tough issue. It's not something you can just answer without knowing a
ton of variables which maybe is a task for AI. My bad. I really liked this
video ->
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6h7fL22WCE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6h7fL22WCE)
regarding a man who tried to help (in LA) by making tiny homes.

~~~
mrep
> House/rent prices have gone way up.

No they haven't recently from sources I have seen. Housing prices are falling
[0] (admittedly might be due to rising interest rates) and rents fell earlier
this year [1].

[0]: [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-
ar...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-area-home-
prices-drop-again-with-6-month-decline-among-largest-ever/)

[1]: [https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-
ar...](https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-area-rents-
drop-significantly-for-first-time-this-decade-as-new-apartments-sit-empty/)

~~~
TomMckenny
A Month or even a year's price decline is insignificant. Housing prices have
outpaced inflation and far outpaced wage gains nation wide for decades.[0]

As is true of every asset class relative to the value of labor[1]

Indeed, barring extreme systemic changes, there are a couple of things that we
can be absolutely certain of nation wide in 10 years: housing will be less
affordable and there will be more homeless.

[0] [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/23/how-much-housing-prices-
have...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/23/how-much-housing-prices-have-risen-
since-1940.html)

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-
First_Ce...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-
First_Century)

------
omegaworks
He discounts _immediately_ the obvious solution for the problem houseless
people face: providing them homes.

At $80,000 a year, it's absurd that we are unable to use that money to
actually finance housing.

What he says about it:

>about 80 percent of people who are on the streets, uh, struggle with lifetime
drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness

Is a total non-sequitur. People that struggle with lifetime addiction and
mental illness have those problems exacerbated by not having housing.
Providing stable housing is _the first step_ toward coping with that illness.

They're doing it in Canada, and the results validate this policy:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/world/canada/homeless-
can...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/world/canada/homeless-canada-
medicine-hat-housing-first.html)

>the cost of housing the homeless was far less than the cost of the emergency
services needed by the homeless while they were living on the street.

>“The reduction in days in jail alone pays for the program,” said Jaime
Rogers, a Medicine Hat housing official. She cited studies that said the
average homeless person costs taxpayers 120,000 Canadian dollars a year, or
$91,600, in services, while it costs just 18,000 Canadian dollars a year, or
$13,740, to house someone and provide the necessary retention support.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
I really dislike it when people downvote perfectly valid political opinions
they disagree with and don’t even bother to respond to you. I agree with you
that building homes for the homeless is a fantastically effective way to deal
with homelessness. I’m sorry you’re not getting the respect you deserve.
You’ve got my upvote.

~~~
longerthoughts
I suspect some of the downvotes are coming not from disagreement, but because
the first line of the parent's comment misstates the interviewee's conclusions
about providing housing. I share your view that downvotes should be reserved
for comments that don't encourage productive discussion and comments should be
used to disagree, and misstating conclusions from an article is not
productive.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
Agreed. Thanks for the clear reply. :)

