Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson said she’s “working on updating the city’s return to work policy,” which currently requires city employees to work from their mostly downtown offices at least two days a week, in order to help increase the number of people downtown during the daytime.
Nelson was speaking at the Downtown Seattle Association’s annual State of Downtown event, where she also praised her new council colleagues for requiring their staff to work in the office five days a week and for being physically present in council chambers during public meetings, which members of the previous council did not always do. (One, Teresa Mosqueda, has a young child; another, Debora Juarez, is immunocompromised.)
“We’ve come a long way since two years ago, when I talked at this event, and I said, ‘My job is to give a damn about downtown,'” Nelson said. “Well, now I’ve got company and it’s really exciting.
Nelson also said that under her leadership, the council would continue to “stop disruptive behavior” in council chambers—a reference to the council’s decision to limit public comment, shut down council chambers, arrest demonstrators, and conduct a meeting from behind locked doors last week. The demonstrators included asylum seekers and advocates who were asking the city for funding to help pay for refugees’ hotel rooms in South King County, including many who argued the city could use the $1.5 million it has set aside for a gunshot surveillance system.
When the same group of advocates marched to the King County Council earlier this week, the council (which now includes Mosqueda) gave them all two minutes to speak, listened, and found funding in the budget to help refugees stay in the hotel rooms where they’re currently living, all without kicking people out of their (much smaller) chambers or calling in the police.
During a panel discussion at the end of the event, Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison affirmed that she supports setting a limit on the number of times a person is allowed to overdose in public before they’re arrested and booked into jail. (People who overdose inside their houses are presumably exempt from this proposal). “We shouldn’t think that that’s something we should shy away from,” Davison said. “We should not be reticent to enforce our laws and to put that [provision] in there.”
Proponents have said this law would only apply after people are revived from overdoses and “refuse treatment,” but treatment is not readily available. (Davison said there should be more treatment in jail.) And there is no clinical evidence for the widespread belief that people will stop using—that is, stop being addicted—in response to a threat of punishment, nor that forced or jail-based treatment is more effective than a harm-reduction-based approach that focuses on building up the supports (like a place to live) that people need to enter recovery and stay there.
During the same panel, Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz offered his own opinion of the state of downtown. Although targeted policing in known “hot spots” for drugs and sales of stolen goods, like 12th and Jackson and Third and Pine, is “having an impact,” Diaz said, crime is still getting worse because the city doesn’t have enough police.
Specifically, Diaz contradicted Mayor Bruce Harrell’s claim, during his recent State of the City speech, that property crime is going down. Although statistics show that crime is going down, Diaz said, that’s because people “don’t call the police anymore” because they think “‘I’m not going to end up getting anything from the police department [besides] a police report.'”
Diaz offered a novel explanation for the rise of fentanyl in Seattle: The Blake decision, which overturned Washington State’s felony drug possession law. “The Blake decision really created a huge infusion of fentanyl into our community,” Diaz said.
In fact, the rise of fentanyl is a nationwide issue, not one localized to Seattle, and the King County prosecutor had not prosecuted drug users under the old law for years before the Blake decision; the state legislature has repeatedly re-criminalized simple drug possession since the decision went into effect, and recently made possession a gross misdemeanor, a law Seattle replicated in its own local law last year.
Asked about the state legislature’s decision to adopt a Republican-backed initiative that will allow police departments across the state to chase drivers on mere suspicion that they have violated a law of any kind, Diaz noted that the city’s own pursuit policy is more restrictive, allowing pursuits only when police believe there is probable cause to believe someone has committed a violent or sexual crime. But, Diaz added, the city may reconsider its policy now that the new law has passed.
“We’re actually evaluating, right now, our vehicle pursuit policy as well as our vehicle tactics policies, such as pinning vehicles,” Diaz said, “especially [given that] people are sometimes passed out because [they] are going through fentanyl overdoses [and] passing on the wheel.” At the same time, he added, “we also have mindful of, when you loosen up some of the standards, our biggest payouts for traffic deaths is because of a pursuit pursuit death, are in this area. And so we tend to be a lot more restrictive when it comes to our vehicle pursuit policy.”
Recently elected Burien City Councilmember Linda Akey was caught on tape confronting a group of unsheltered people last week outside her condo building in downtown Burien. The group, who had set up tents on the sidewalk under the building’s awning, are among dozens now sleeping on sidewalks around Burien after the council imposed a daytime encampment ban that requires people to pick up sleeping bags, tents, backpacks, and other “indicae of camping” by 6:00 every morning.
In the video, Akey can be seen telling people that they are “trespassing” and threatening to call the police on them if they don’t move their tents at least five feet away from her building and onto the public portion of the sidewalk. Every tent shown in the video appears to be well over five feet from the building.
“I have authority. I have authority. I live here and you do not belong here,” Akey says. “You’ve gotta move all the tents out of here. We will call the police,” she continues.
In an email, Akey said she was “not acting in any capacity as a government official” in the video, “but as a homeowner. I want to work toward positive solutions. I recognize I may look angry and I apologize for raising my voice.”
“Get away from here, move away from here. If you don’t want my attitude, then leave, take your tent. Residents live up here. … I live here and you do not belong here.”
“On the night in question, I approached individuals camped on the sidewalk, informing them of condo policies and city ordinances,” Akey continued. “While I empathize with their challenges, ensuring everyone’s safety is a top priority.”
In the video, as some of the people on the sidewalk begin to heckle Akey—”take your drunk ass home,’ one says—Akey continues: “I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to help you, okay? And everybody out by 6 am, okay? I want all tents gone by 6 am. If you need to start at 5am to do that, then you do that. You can laugh at me all you want, but the law says 6 am.”
At this point in the tape, a person tells Akey, who has walked behind a tent in the foreground, to “get away from my tent.” She responds, “Oh, no—get out from under where I live. … Get away from here, move away from here. If you don’t want my attitude, then leave, take your tent. Residents live up here.” The video shows Akey pointing up at her building. “I live here. I live here. All these people live here. All these residents. All these residents. All these residents. … I live here and you do not belong here.”
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Prior to the adoption of the new law, people living unsheltered in Burien were allowed to stay in public spaces other than parks.
The law says that people can’t be swept from a location unless shelter is available, but does not specify where this “available” shelter has to be. It also allows police to arrest or sweep people who can’t go into available shelter because of “voluntary” actions like active addiction and behavioral health conditions that lead to—as the law puts —”unruly” behavior.
Burien has no year-round shelters for the general population, and the council and city manager repeatedlystalled efforts to open a King County-funded tiny house village somewhere in the city before finally accepting the offer late last year.
When the city began enforcing the new “camping” ban last fall, it scattered the residents of a large encampment on Ambaum Blvd. throughout the city—including back into downtown Burien, where an encampment sweep in March of last year set off a series of events that led to the encampment ban. Akey lives less than a block from the original encampment.
In a second video, one encampment resident calls the experience of looking for housing “a loop you never escape from” while Akey repeats, “I want to get you housing, I want to get you help” and asks them what she can do (“do you mind if we get a shower?” one asks) before telling them, “This is not the place for you to live.”
Near the end of the video, a partially obscured Akey can be seen in an argument with one person, who claims she put her hands on them. “Let’s do it. Right now,” Akey says. “You want to live underneath other people? You guys don’t have to live here. You can live somewhere else. You can accept services. You can turn off the camera.”
In another video that appears to have been taken after the first, the man accompanying Akey (who appears, based on social media photos, to be her husband) tells the group, “you’ve been offered [housing] multiple times,” and claims that “there are programs for everybody.” Several encampment residents respond that this isn’t true—one calls the experience of looking for housing “a loop you never escape from”—while Akey repeats “I want to get you housing, I want to get you help” and asks them what she can do (“do you mind if we get a shower?” one says, laughing) before repeating, “This is not the place for you to live.”
In her email, Akey said her “primary concern is the well-being of all involved. I believe a multi-faceted approach involving residents, social services, and relevant authorities is crucial to address homelessness and addiction.
“One promising strategy is [criminal legal system] diversion programs, which often become more readily available when existing laws are enforced fairly and consistently,” Akey said. “By enforcing existing laws, we can ensure a safer environment for everyone in our community while also providing pathways to support and rehabilitation for those experiencing homelessness and addiction.”
The LEAD program has a contract to offer people accused of several specific misdemeanors, such as drug possession and theft, to bypass the criminal legal system and enroll in case management. The program is not designed as an off-ramp from arrest and prosecution for sleeping outdoors.
Prior to her election, Akey was a frequent public commenter at Burien City Council meetings. In September, when the council passed the encampment ban, she testified that allowing people to sleep outside is a way of “enabling” people. “I know some people reject help; however … sometimes rock bottom helps a person decide their life is unmanageable and that they need help.”
Three homeless Burien residents have sued the city of Burien over its camping ban, arguing that the law criminalizes homelessness.
1. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority will significantly alter how it conducts the interviews with unsheltered people that form the basis of the countywide “Point In Time” count, which now occurs every two years and consists of one-on-one daytime surveys at fixed locations over multiple weeks, rather than a traditional one-night count of tents, people sleeping out in the open, and vehicles used as shelter.
Although the count will still be based on respondent-driven sampling—a form of statistical sampling in which participants recruit additional respondents from their personal networks—the questions the KCRHA interviewers will ask have been transformed. Instead of open-ended questions like “What have been your experiences with the police and justice system?” and “What has it [being homeless] been like for you?,” the survey consists of basic demographic and short-form questions along the lines of the old Count Us In survey conducted by the KCRHA’s predecessor, All Home.
The interviewers—about 130 volunteers—will receive more extensive training this year than the Lived Experience Coalition members who conducted the survey last year received, KCRHA community impact officer Owen Kajfasz said last week, and their jobs will be simpler. “By removing the qualitative [open-ended interview] component from this, we remove a lot of the complexity that would require additional training” beyond the three hours volunteers received this time around, Kajfasz said.
Last year, training for the interviews was conducted in person or online by then-KCRHA CEO Marc Dones; interviewers who couldn’t make it to a training session were asked to simply review the training documents. Interview transcripts obtained by PubliCola showed that the conversations were often rambling, discursive, and (according to experts we consulted) out of step with best practices for qualitative research; for example, interviewers frequently cut people off, talked at length about themselves, offered unsolicited advice, and improperly suggested they could connect people to services.
As we reported last year, the KCRHA used 180 of these interview transcripts as the basis for its Five-Year Plan, turning answers to questions like “what things or people have been helpful to you?” into a precise, detailed budget that favored parking lots for people living in vehicles over tiny house villages, for example.
This year’s count will also include more “hubs” throughout the county than last year’s count—17 in all—which Kajfasz said should give the KCRHA a more representative sample of the region’s homeless population. Last year, the KCRHA didn’t do any surveys in Federal Way or Kent, for example, which may have exacerbated other issues with data collection in South King County, the first region where the agency did surveys and the one with the largest number of data issues.
2. During a briefing about the ongoing state legislative session by city lobbyists Monday afternoon, Council President Sara Nelson expressed support for four addiction and overdose-related bills that aren’t on the city’s official legislative agenda: House Bills 1956 and 2222, and Senate Bills 6109 and 6134.
HB 1956, sponsored by Rep. Mari Leavitt (D-28, University Place), would require the state Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) to update school drug education materials to include “information about the potential lethality and other risks associated with the use of fentanyl and other opioids.”
HB 2222, sponsored by Rep. David Hackney (D-11, Tukwila), would allow prosecutors to charge parents with endangering their children, a Class B felony, if they allow them to be “exposed to” or have “contact with” non-prescription fentanyl or other synthetic opiates, potentially removing children from their homes if a parent is struggling with addiction.
SB 6109, sponsored by Sen. Claire Wilson (D) would make it easier for the state to take children away from their parents and place them in foster care if police, medical personnel, or child welfare workers find non-prescription opiates in their home. The bill would legally place opiate use by parents on the same level as “sexual abuse, sexual exploitation, [and] a pattern of severe neglect.”
SB 6134, sponsored by Republicans Chris Gildon (R-25, Puyallup) and Lynda Wilson (R-17, Spokane), would give $7 million to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs to create “multijurisdictional drug task forces that would track overdose trends and make opiate-related policy recommendations to the state.
Three of the four bills have begun moving through the committee process (which is no guarantee they’ll go any further in the short legislative session); HB 2222 has not been scheduled for a hearing.
Mayor Bruce Harrell issued an executive order on Thursday providing direction to the Seattle Police Department as it develops policies to implement a recently passed law that makes public drug use, along with simple possession, a gross misdemeanor. The law also criminalizes simple drug possession and empowers the city attorney, Ann Davison, to prosecute drug cases. The new law does not apply to public use of alcohol or cannabis.
The order, which describes fentanyl use as a “health crisis,” says that “diversion and referral to services is the preferred response to public possession and use” in instances where police determine a drug user poses no potential harm to anyone else. But it also says that arrests may be appropriate when a drug user poses a “threat of harm to others,” then defines this potential “harm” broadly, to include any drug use that impacts “the ability of others to use shared public space.”
The drug law adopted last week defines “harm to others” in similarly expansive terms, asserting that “unchecked” drug use “in certain areas of the city” harms “businesses, transit riders, and people traveling to school, work, retail stores, or trying to enjoy the City’s parks and other public places.”
SPD is expected to issue its own guidelines to officers who will be implementing the law within the next few days.
The executive order, echoing the Harrell Administration’s earlier effort to prosecute “disorderly conduct” near transit stops on Third Ave., specifically notes that locations where drug use presents an “inherent impact on public safety and security” may include any location “in or within close proximity to a transit stop, rail station, or other transportation structure or facility.”
Harrell’s order is mostly suggestive rather than prescriptive. Officers who believe a person’s drug use inherently threatens those around them can decide, based on their training and “the totality of the circumstances,” to arrest a person or attempt to divert them to LEAD, the city’s primary diversion program. The number of arrests that officers will actually make is constrained by the booking capacity of the downtown jail, which is severely limited due to a shortage of guards.
The order also requires outreach providers that contract with the city to create a “by-name list” of every person “significantly affected by” the opioid crisis in downtown Seattle between the Denny Triangle and the stadiums south of the Chinatown/International District. (Since the new law and the rest of the executive order refers only to people using drugs in public, it’s safe to assume the list will exclude housed downtown residents who use addictive drugs indoors.)
Jamie Housen, a spokesman for the mayor’s office, said the city “is not planning to collect a list of names or individual clients, but instead to use an approach that creates a baseline estimate of those using drugs and in need of treatment and services, so that we can measure those needs, changes over time, and if progress is occurring.”
Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness, said the order released on Thursday “inappropriately uses a By-Name List,” which is supposed to be “a tool used by people who are offering focused engagement and have appropriate resources to connect people with.”
Providers that serve unsheltered people often create “by-name lists” of people living in a discrete area, such as an encampment, in order to keep track of them as part of a specific project. Recently, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority acknowledged that its own effort to create a “by-name list” of every unhoused person downtown, as part of the Partnership for Zero effort that recently folded, was unproductive, because people can and do move around.
Data on drug users from providers, including the number of drug users they’re serving downtown and the kinds of issues those individuals are facing, “will help determine how many individuals the City is trying to assist and to provide a better understanding of the underlying issues and facts addressed by this [order].” After 12 months, according to the order, the city will “conduct a follow-up assessment” and compare the two sets of data “to gauge the effectiveness of the strategies” in the order.
Council members who switched their votes on the drug law, a version of which failed back in June after Andrew Lewis decided to vote against it, said they were convinced to vote “yes,” in part, by the mayor’s promise to propose an executive order that would emphasize diversion over arrest. Before Harrell issued the order out on Thursday, Lewis said he expected that it would “provide clarification” on how the city will implement the new law. We’ve reached out to Lewis for comment on the order.
Sara Nelson, Andrew Lewis, and Lisa Herbold all supported the legislation empowering City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute drug users.
By Erica C. Barnett
On Wednesday, the Seattle City Council adopted a new law empowering City Attorney Ann Davison to prosecute people who use drugs in public, or who are caught with illegal drugs other than cannabis, on a 6-3 vote, with every council member except Teresa Mosqueda, Kshama Sawant, and Tammy Morales voting “yes.” The new law makes public drug use and simple possession gross misdemeanors for the first time in Seattle history.
An earlier version of the bill, which would have incorporated a new state drug criminalization law into the city’s municipal code, died on a 5-4 vote after Councilmember Andrew Lewis, a former city prosecutor, changed his mind in response to public testimony and Davison’s decision to unilaterally end a local therapeutic court called community court. The state law is as the “Blake fix” because it re-criminalized drug possession and public use after the state supreme court overturned an existing law that made public drug use and simple possession a felony.
The new version of the bill is significantly longer, but substantively similar, to the previous legislation. The new bill is significantly wordier, largely because it now includes more than 30 nonbinding “whereas” clauses stating the city’s intent to, among other things: Strongly recommend that police consider diversion before making arrests; avoid “repeating the mistakes of the past”; and review the impact of the legislation in the future.
The bill targets only people who use drugs in public, Councilmember Tammy Morales noted, targeting users who are poor or homeless while ignoring all the drug use that takes place behind closed doors. “If we wanted to address drug addiction, we would not be focused only on those who use it in the streets where we can see their suffering.”
It also contains new provisions saying police will, in the future, adopt policies governing when and how to divert people instead of arresting them, along with a section saying police “may” consider whether a person using drugs is harming others or just themselves when deciding whether to make an arrest.
Finally, the bill contains some reporting requirements and sets up a new committee to evaluate how the law is going in the future.
Proponents of the bill, with the exception of its original sponsor Sara Nelson, made a lot of all these nonbinding suggestions and reporting requirements. (Nelson wanted to eliminate the evaluation committee as well as a nonbinding recommendation that the police use officers who have received crisis training, who make up more than half the department, to respond to public drug use, saying both proposals infringed on the authority of Police Chief Adrian Diaz and Mayor Bruce Harrell. After other council members noted that Harrell’s office approved both provisions, a majority of the council voted down both of Nelson’s amendments.)
“This does not create new [police] authority. It seeks to limit it in a way that does not exist under state law,” one of the bill’s two sponsors, Councilmember Lisa Herbold, said. “This is a commitment to not repeat the errors of the past.”
Lewis, who co-sponsored the legislation with Herbold, said the bill was not intended to be “the magic solution that fixes the situation that we are facing,” but added that it “gives additional guidance and [a] focus on public health best practices that are alternatives to incarceration and entering the criminal legal system.”
Opponents of the bill pointed out that not only is that “guidance” nonbinding, the legislation comes with no additional funding to implement diversion or treatment; instead, Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda said, it offers a “hollow promise” of alternatives to arrest. Under the council’s regular process, the legislation would have been on the agenda for next week, coinciding with Harrell’s 2024 budget proposal, which will reveal how much, if any, funding Harrell will propose for expanding diversion programs such as LEAD, which is already oversubscribed for this year.
“So while the emphasis is on pre-arrest diversion and not arrest, we are not actually able to follow through with that without assurances that [these strategies] will be in the budget,” Mosqueda said.
Mosqueda, who chairs the council’s budget committee, also noted that Harrell’s “plan to invest $27 million toward facilities, treatments, and services to address the opioid crisis” is not actually a new $27 million investment. Instead, that number includes $7 million in unspent capital grants that will fund a new DESC overdose recovery site on Third Ave., as PubliCola exclusively reported last month, among other investments, plus an average of about $1 million a year from statewide settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors, spread over the next 18 years.
Additionally, Harrell can’t actually commit that future money (whose value will depreciate with inflation over time), because the city allocates funding annually through the budget, so the money—which does have to be spent on purposes related to drug addiction—could pay for other things in the future.
Tammy Morales’ challenger Tanya Woo held a rally outside City Hall before the vote. The legislation, she acknowledged, isn’t perfect, but at least it “does something” to address public drug use in places like 12th and Jackson, in the Chinatown/International District.Councilmember Tammy Morales—whose challenger in this year’s election, Tanya Woo, held a rally with Chinatown/International District residents outside City Hall to highlight Morales’ opposition to the bill—said the legislation was “ineffective… unnecessary, and dare I say, performative.” The bill targets only people who use drugs in public, Morales noted, targeting users who are poor or homeless while ignoring all the drug use that takes place behind closed doors.
“If we wanted to address drug addiction, we would not be focused only on those who use it in the streets where we can see their suffering. We would be standing up real alternative for everyone,” like medication-assisted treatment, counseling, social supports, residential treatment, and walk-in clinics, Morales said.
The bill mentions many of these things—identifying “treatment” as a preferred approach, for example, in ten different places—but does nothing to make it happen. Instead, it doubles down on a law enforcement-based approach to a public health crisis.
In 2022, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority did away with the longstanding, but flawed, practice of physically counting people experiencing homelessness on a single night. By replacing the physical “point in time” count with a statistical model based on Department of Commerce Data, combined with interviews with people recruited through the broad-ranging social networks that exist among unsheltered people, the KCRHA hoped to produce a more accurate picture of homelessness in King County.
The interviews, which contributed to the KCRHA’s estimate of more than 53,000 people experiencing homelessness in King County, also served a second, arguably more impactful, purpose: They formed the basis for an overarching plan that will guide the authority’s use of public dollars for the next five years. The Five-Year Plan, which includes recommendations for specific temporary housing types (and initially came with a $12 billion price tag), was based largely on 180 of these interviews, which researchers used to “identify specific temporary and permanent housing models directly from the voices of people living unsheltered, interpreted in partnership with people with lived experience,” according to the final five-year plan.
PubliCola has obtained the transcripts of more than 80 of these interviews, which took place in the early spring of 2022, through a records request. The interviews range from terse questions and answer sessions to lengthy, discursive conversations in which interviewers abandon the Q&A format to offer opinions, give advice, and tell people they can help them access services—something qualitative researchers are generally cautioned not to do. We also consulted two experts on qualitative research to learn more about how interviews like the ones KCRHA oversaw can best be used, and to learn some best practices for the kind of evaluation the KCRHA was attempting to do.
Additionally, PubliCola talked to an experienced data analyst at the KCRHA, who explained how the project worked. Initially, the interviews (which former KCRHA CEO Marc Dones called “oral histories”) were the sole focus of the research project, which the KCRHA titled “Understanding Unsheltered Homelessness.” Later on, after the Department of Housing and Urban Development rejected the KCRHA’s request to skip the point-in-time count altogether, Dones decided to “combine efforts between doing the Point in Time Count and this qualitative data collection,” Owen Kajfasz, the KCRHA’s acting chief community officer, said. “So we really merged two projects into one data collection.”
Some of the earliest interviews, which took place in South King County, didn’t include the proper consent forms or had transcripts that couldn’t be traced back to interview subjects. And overall, the interviews ended up oversampling straight white men, and undersampling women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people, forcing researchers to go back and add some incomplete interviews to the pool to correct the imbalance.
To conduct the interviews, KCRHA recruited members of the Lived Experience Coalition, a group that advocates for the inclusion of people with personal experience being homeless in policy and decision-making processes. (KCRHA staff also conducted some of the interviews.) Most interviewers received a two-part training led by Dones, who served as the “primary investigator,” or lead researcher, on the project. Those who couldn’t make the training or came on board later were instructed to read the training documents, which included a list of 31 questions, before starting work.
LEC members also held all three seats on the advisory board that oversaw the project, and later made up a majority of the team that “coded” the interviews in order to translate them into a set of recommendations for the five-year plan. As we’ve reported, the KCRHA has recently tried to distance itself from the LEC, but at the time—early 2022—the group was deeply integrated into the agency’s operations.
Although the researchers conducted more than 500 interviews, they ended up using just 180 transcripts. Some of the earliest interviews, which took place in South King County, didn’t include the proper consent forms or had transcripts that couldn’t be traced back to interview subjects. Overall, the interviews ended up oversampling straight white men, and undersampling women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people, forcing researchers to go back and add some incomplete interviews to the pool to correct the imbalance—overrepresenting marginalized groups because they are the least served by the current shelter and service system..
“This wasn’t a perfect process,” Kajfasz acknowledged. “We did have more of those [interviews] that we couldn’t use than I was anticipating.”
Once the interviews were complete, a group of LEC members and KCRHA staff, aided by technical assistance from a Washington, D.C.-based firm called the Cloudburst Group, read transcripts of the interviews and “coded” them to correspond with different shelter and housing types, using the codes “to identify specific temporary and permanent housing models directly from the voices of people living unsheltered, interpreted in partnership with people with lived experience,” according to the Five-Year Plan. Although the final plan no longer includes specific dollar figure or specific numeric recommendations (eliminating, for example, a chart that suggested building no new tiny house villages ), it still represents a proposal that would, if implemented, reverse many longstanding policies and invest heavily in new approaches, like many more permanent parking spaces for people living in RVs and cars across the city.
The interview transcripts show many interviewers engaged in patient, compassionate attempts to elicit clear responses from people who were often discursive, rambling, and hard to follow. Interviewers from the Lived Experience Coalition used their own experiences to guide conversations and make their interview subjects comfortable—a key reason for including people with lived experience in data collection.
In one such conversation, the interviewer expresses concern and empathy when the person they’re talking to describes a series of traumatic situations, while still keeping the overall conversation on track. “I’m sorry you experienced that in such a tragic way. Thank you for just being vulnerable and open and sharing that because it’ll give me a glimpse of who you are and what you’ve been through,” the interviewer says, then moves on to the next question.
Researchers who use qualitative methods say it’s important to allow the conversation to flow and to use the questions as a guide rather than reading them word by word.
“In a qualitative interview, so much depends on the amount of trust and empathy that the interviewer can show,” said New York University School of Social Work professor Dr. Deborah Padgett, an expert on qualitative research who has written several books on the subject. “If you’re there in a trusting way, and you’re there as a researcher as opposed to a case worker or outreach worker or more official person, it gives you some legitimacy.”
Dr. Tyler Kincaid, a research assistant professor at Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of New Mexico who has led qualitative research about people experiencing homelessness, said qualitative interviews can’t be scripted to the extent that an ordinary survey can. “There’s an art to making the participant comfortable enough to respond, to keep the conversation going,” Kincaid said, and going “off script” is just part of the process. “If you have, say, 10 semi-structured questions, hopefully there’s followup questions and side questions and things within those ten standard questions on a piece of paper to help to bring out more information,” Kincaid said.
But the transcripts also revealed troubling practices. In the transcripts, interviewers often cut people off, talk at length about themselves, or offer unsolicited advice. Several times, interviewers suggest they or someone else at the interview site can directly connect people with services, such as housing vouchers or a workaround for King County’s hated 211 system, or jump in with answers before the person has had time to respond.
The experts we spoke to said it’s important for researchers not to involve themselves in people’s lives or promise things they can’t deliver. Kajfasz said researchers were told that the point of the research was data collection, not problem-solving, but “folks with lived experience, when they know they have a solution for somebody, they offer it.” Some interview locations had housing navigators or other services on site, Kajfasz added.
In one transcript, an interviewer offers their opinion about the man’s substance use, saying that with drugs, “when you wake up in the morning, you hate yourself.” “I don’t ever hate myself,” the man retorts. After a tangent about the concerns police have raised about encampment fires, the second interviewer tells the man he should join the military. “You can still do it. You’re young enough. You understand?”
In many cases, interviewers suggested answers to their own questions before people had a chance to speak. In one representative transcript, an interviewer repeatedly appears to cut their subject, a Native American man, off—suggesting, for example, that the reason the man is homeless is because he “prefer[s] to be in the woods” and doesn’t “want to be acclimated in society.” Although the man says “yeah” in response to both those statements, he objects when the interviewer continues, “You don’t want an apartment.” “Well, I do eventually,” he says.
Later in the transcript, a second interviewer offers their opinion about the man’s substance use, calling it “impressive” that “it’s just Everclear now” and adding, “you’ll wean yourself off that soon enough,” prompting the man to say he isn’t so sure. With drugs, the second interviewer continues, “when you wake up in the morning, you hate yourself.” “I don’t ever hate myself,” the man retorts. After a tangent about the concerns police have raised about encampment fires, the second interviewer tells the man he should join the military. “You can still do it. You’re young enough. You understand?”
In another transcript, the interviewer suggests that their subject, a Latino man who appears to struggle with English, find work as a day laborer—a stereotypical job for Spanish-speaking immigrants. None of the interviews PubliCola reviewed were conducted in a language other than English; Kajfasz said the KCRHA offered “language services,” but that “the majority of folks, even if English was not their first language, were choosing English.”
Padgett says that while good qualitative research requires an interviewer to be patient, “take a lot of time,” and build trust and empathy, interviewers should never weigh in with their own opinions or advice. “If you’re giving opinions about what they’re saying, you’re taking up valuable space in the conversation—and they may not want that level of pity,” Padgett said. “When I’m training people, the idea is to be empathic. In the moment, you might say, ‘I’m really sorry that happened to you,’ but [you shouldn’t] go down the rabbit hole of ‘tell me more about your trauma.'”
In an interview that appeared to cross this line, an interviewer jumped in when the man he was interviewing, whose race is not identified in the transcript, said he was probably homeless because he’d been in the foster care and prison systems. “Now you know that’s not true,” the interviewer said. The conversation continued:
Interviewer: You can’t tell me that, because you’re here for a reason. You got kids. We went through the pandemic. You got sick two times, you just said. Hell to the no, ain’t nobody in their life ever in my face will ever say that. Not while I’m standing there. I’m sorry. That just hurt. That just touched me.
Subject: No, I, I—
Interviewer: Don’t ever say that shit again to me.
Subject: My apologies. I will not say that again.
Speaker 2: To anybody, because I want you to know, that’s something that’s instilled in you and that you’re going to instill every person that come through your life, especially your children. Because my kids, they already know like I’m their ride or die. They tell people, you don’t know my mama when they tell them, oh you know how your mom- No. You don’t know my mom. So, it’s a different generation. When we got to teach that generation, there is something to live for. You’re not here for nothing. You what I’m saying? I don’t know where we went off of. Let’s see. Where did you go to school?
Padgett, who looked over the interview questions before we spoke, said the questions themselves were “pretty good, but it’s qualitative, so what’s good on paper only comes out as good if the interviewer does it well so there’s a lot more onus put on the interviewer” to keep things on track. The KCRHA did not provide its training materials, but Padgett said she usually has trainees do mock interviews, then supervises them and provides feedback on their methods throughout a project so they can adjust and improve.
In addition to asking leading questions and interrupting, a number of transcripts include interviewers skipping past questions, making assumptions about people’s gender identity or sexual orientation, and speaking excessively about themselves. In one transcript, an interviewer provides a detailed roster of their own family members’ birthdays; in another, the interviewer tries to recruit the person they’re interviewing to join the Lived Experience Coalition and the KCRHA’s Vehicle Residency Policy Group.
“It’s not about the interviewer,” Padgett said. “You should think of yourself as wearing a hat that says ‘researcher’ on it, and if you take that hat off and become a comrade of lived experience, then you’re losing what qualitative [research] does best, which is having some distance but also empathy. It’s a juggling act.”
“You really don’t want to make some sort of big, generalized governmental or programmatic decisions just based off qualitative research.” —Dr. Tyler Kincaid, University of New Mexico
Once the interviews were complete, another team of researchers, which included several members of the LEC, translated them into housing types, using specific keywords and concepts that people brought up during their conversations to create a roster of shelter types that might be appropriate. People who are using drugs but want to get sober might end up in a box titled “recovery housing,” while those with medical problems might end up in another box labeled “medical respite.” Many of the 180 interviews were with people living in their vehicles or RVs, who often ended up in separate boxes for safe parking and RV safe lots.
“It wasn’t directly, ‘hey, I need medical respite,’ so these people get medical respite, or ‘hey, I need RV parking,’ so this person gets RV parking. It was looking at all of these types of challenges folks are facing,” Kajfasz said. “And for some of those, we’re having to take pieces of information across the interview.” People who were employed but couldn’t afford rent, for example, suggested a need for more housing with supported employment services, while people struggling to stay sober suggested a need for sober housing.
At a glance, some of these solutions can seem overly determinative—some people who want to quit drinking or using other drugs might do better living independently than moving into group recovery housing, for example. Others, like RV parking lots, are widely viewed as short-term solutions, not permanent homes. Although these may seem like minor issues—shouldn’t people trying to avoid drugs and alcohol jump at an opportunity for a room in sober living, even if they would prefer a private apartment?—they translate into real policy choices, and ultimately into real money.
The initial version of the Five-Year Plan called for nearly 4,000 medical respite beds ($2.7 billion over five years); 2,570 units of recovery housing ($1.8 billion); and nearly 5,000 permanent parking spots for passenger vehicles and RVs ($192 million). The specific numbers and dollar figures may have been excised from the final plan, but the mix of shelter, or “temporary housing,” types—based on an “analysis of PIT interviews and input of the Lived Experience Commission advisory group,” according to an internal memo—remains the same, so it seems important to get it right.
“You really don’t want to make some sort of big, generalized governmental or programmatic decisions just based off qualitative research,” Kincaid, from the University of New Mexico, said. For example, he said, it would “so difficult to [use] any sort of qualitative research” as the basis for investing in one type of shelter over another, unless people consistently identified a specific type of shelter they wanted.
Padgett, from NYU, said she believes strongly that “well-done, rigorous qualitative research can play a strong and scientifically valid role, but it’s all in how you handle the information so that you’re not coming to conclusions with no basis in the data.”
In a memo from September 2022, consultants from the Cloudburst Group summarized some of the lessons the LEC and KCRHA learned from the Understanding Unsheltered Homelessness project. Among their conclusions: If the KCRHA does another series of interviews in the future, researchers need to identify the intent of the project before starting interviews, and trainers should emphasize the need to ask questions consistently, “as well as allowing participants to speak and not be interrupted.”
The way the researchers recruited participants—by identifying an initial “wave” of subjects who recruited new people through their social networks—was flawed and contributed to an interview pool that was disproportionately made up of straight, white men.
Finally, the memo noted, it was hard to interpret some interviews because they included multiple people (interviewers as well as people who approached and started talking during interviews; in the future, the memo says, the protocol for interviews “should establish that these are individual interviews.”
Kajfasz said that without Dones’ “significant expertise” in the area of qualitative research, the KCRHA isn’t planning to do an interview project of similar size and scope any time in the near future. Nor will in-person interviews form the basis for the next point-in-time count, which the KCRHA must conduct next year. The KCRHA is “currently conferring with HUD about what the next PIT count” will involve, Kajfasz said, but it probably will never look like last year’s count again. “Never do I ever want to do the point-in-time count and large-scale qualitative interviewing together,” Kajfasz said.
By Erica C. Barnett
Although the count will 
