Elections, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Greater Seattle: Wilson’s Sweeps and Nelson’s Disappearing $30,000

By Josh Feit

108 < 112 < 151

In her press conference last Wednesday, Mayor Wilson debuted a new homelessness approach that focuses on identifying homeless people by name and then prioritizes getting them into shelter and formulating individualized plans. Prompted by successful examples, like a joint Downtown Seattle Association/Purpose Dignity Action encampment resolution in Pioneer Square during the World Cup this summer, social service workers will hit the streets neighborhood by neighborhood and connect people to services and shelter that work for them. Erica has a full report.

In addition to this empathetic effort, Wilson also went on record at a press briefing last week to say the city has not—counter to Councilmember Dan Strauss’ claims—backed off on sweeps, telling two different reporters that she has no plans to change the city’s encampment removal policy. “Our Unified Care Tam has continued doing encampment removals at basically the same rate that they were doing removals before I entered office,” Wilson said. 

Wilson’s buy-in on sweeps was not news to us!

The subject of sweeps and how they beget more sweeps was actually the very first item in last Monday’s installment of this column, which also noted that lefty mayor Wilson had done more sweeps in her first year so far than her predecessor, Mayor Harrell had done by the same point in his first year.  Wilson’s 151 > Harrell’s 112. This, despite Harrell’s tough-love, football-coach reputation that endeared him to the pro-sweeps establishment.

It turns out Wilson’s 151 sweeps tally so far also bests Harrell’s tally for the same period (January through September) throughout his entire term, including in 2025, when the number of sweeps under Harrell was 108. In 2024, there were 112 sweeps under Harrell during the same period. In 2023, there were 95. And as I noted, during his first year in 2022, there were 112 sweeps.

These persistent numbers reiterate the main point I was making all along: Sweeps obviously aren’t a solution to homelessness.

Good on Mayor Wilson for at least adding a proven, humanist policy to the otherwise vicious circular logic of sweeps.

$30,000 > $15,000

We could soon find out who contributed to SeaFor, the shadowy entity former Seattle city council president Sara Nelson set up to raise money for local candidates while concealing donor’s names in order to “protect the privacy of businesses and individuals” (as its own website boasted.) That’s the possible silver lining, anyway, after the lefty Progressive People Power PAC  filed two complaints about a $30,000 donation Nelson’s fund made to a local PAC, North Seattle Neighbors. NSN is supporting the establishment-backed choice in this fall’s council race, Julie Kang, against progressive favorite Nilu Jenks.  The complaints convinced NSN to return the mystery money, which accounted for about two-thirds of the money NSN had raised to date.

How would returning the check reveal whose money SeaFor collected and passed through to NSN? Well, NSN effectively already spent the $30,000 by sending out an initial round of anti-Jenks mailers. As a result, in order to pay off the debt they incurred on those mailers, which they originally planned to cover in part with Seafor’s check, they’ll now have to go out and raise more money themselves. And it’s likely NSN will simply turn to the same conservative donor base that Nelson did. The public should keep an eye on NSN’s upcoming disclosure reports to see who their donors are in the next few weeks. NSN has until election day to cover the mailers; they’ve only reported $15,000 raised to date beyond the elusive $30,000.

I say “silver lining,” because on balance, this is an ethically-challenged turn of events for Seattle. Nelson got exactly what she wanted without having to spend any of her PAC’s money. Sure, NSN was going to buy the mailers before they had the money in hand, as political campaigns often do, operating on the assumption that they’d be able to raise the money in time to pay the eventual bill. But the bad actor in all of this, Nelson, hasn’t faced any consequences for her cynical chicanery. Her group’s ephemeral check, which as of last week accounted for two-thirds of NSN’s money “raised” to date, was on NSN’s books—and now it’s not.

By Monday, NSN had reported raising another $15,000 or so from individual donors, including former deputy mayor Tim Burgess, Vulcan chief real estate officer Ada Healey, Fremont industrial landowner Suzie Burke, and real estate investor Judith Runstad. By that time, though, NSN had already sent out another mailer accusing Jenks of being “clueless” on crime.

And as we were going to press, Jenks’ campaign announced they’d filed a complaint with the state Public Disclosure Commission and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission calling on NSN to halt any more mailings until the names of their donors are released. They note in their complaint that the NSN’s mailers themselves list Nelson’s group as their top donor.

Josh@PubliCola.com

City Council, Elections, homelessness

This Week on PubliCola: Council Approves Phased-In RV Ban, Council Candidates Describe Their Plans for D5, Dark Money Returned to Sender, and More
Behold the Photoshop skills on display in the latest cut-and-paste scare tactic mailer

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, October 19

Greater Seattle: We’re Number 1 (in Home Listings Jump); Small Biz is in a Bad Mood; and Sweeps are Not a Solution

As council members continue to speculate that Mayor Katie Wilson is sweeping fewer encampments (a bad thing, in their view), Josh argues in his column that the ongoing presence of encampments shows that sweeps don’t work. Also this week: Storefront businesses say they want more from the city, and Seattle is now a buyer’s market (though you still have to be rich to buy a house).

Tuesday, October 20

PubliCola Questions: Seattle City Council District 5 Candidate Julie Kang

I sat down with Julie Kang, one of the two city council candidates in North Seattle’s District 5, to discuss her plans for the district if she’s elected. Kang supports surveillance cameras, more police, and the use of SOAP orders to keep men caught paying for sex off Aurora; she also wants to slow down housing growth and require more “accountability” for spending on human services.

Wednesday, October 21

PubliCola Questions: District 5 City Council Candidate Nilu Jenks

The second candidate in the D5 race, Nilu Jenks, says she’d take a different approach than her opponent on almost every issue. She opposes surveillance on Aurora, says the city should invest in violence interruptors in North Seattle, wants to invest in streetscape improvements to make Aurora safer, and would consider a tax on AI tokens to fund small business improvements in neighborhoods like Lake City.

Council Supermajority Passes New Licensing Law That Will Gradually Ban RVs in Seattle

The Seattle City Council approved a package of legislation sponsored by Dan Strauss that, among other changes, broadens the definition of “junk vehicle” and creates a new licensing scheme designed to prohibit people living in RVs from parking overnight in Seattle over time. RV owners who get the new licenses will have to follow all laws, participate in mandatory services, and agree to eventually leave their RVs for a shelter bed.

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Thursday, October 22

Mayor’s Homelessness Proposal Would Bring Hundreds Out of Tents and Into Shelter That Works for Them

Mayor Wilson announced a new approach to homelessness designed to move people out of tents and into dedicated, service-rich shelter over time, replacing haphazard and inconsistent shelter offers with individualized connections. This approach has worked locally when appropriate shelter has been available, so a key component of the plan is Wilson’s push to fund 960 new shelter beds.

Friday, October 23

Pro-Julie Kang PAC Returns Dark Money Contribution from Ex-Councilmember Nelson’s Pass-Through Group

If you were at our live recording of Seattle Nice on Wednesday, you got this news a little earlier than other PubliCola readers: North Seattle Neighbors, a business-backed group supporting Kang, returned a $30,000 contribution from Seafor, a group created by former city councilmember Sara Nelson that attempted to fund the pro-Kang campaign while disguising who its donors were.

Although Seafor appeared to acknowledge its contribution was illegal, it remains to be seen whether and how they intend to fund pro-business candidates next year, when seven councilmembers will be on the ballot.

Campaign Fizz: The More We Love Promotes Anti-Tax Initiative

The More We Love, a group that runs a controversial (and trans-exclusionary) women’s shelter out of a motel in Renton, filmed ads for the campaign against the state income tax on people who earn more than a million dollars a year. The two videos argue that the group is losing donations because of the tax—a dubious claim, since the tax has not gone into effect.

Former Candidate Spams Voters With Text Promos for “Lefty Cheat Sheet”

Ron Davis, who challenged 46th District state Rep. Gerry Pollet and got knocked out in the primary, hasn’t stopped blaming the Stranger for his loss. He has raised tens of thousands of dollars for a new PAC that has been bombarding voters with texts criticizing the Stranger and promoting the Lefty Cheat Sheet—an anonymously created alternative to the Stranger’s “cheat sheet” that aggregates selected endorsements that are supposedly more “lefty” than the Stranger and the existing Progressive Voters’ Guide.

Also this week: Although our planned live District 5 candidate debate had to be canceled at the last minute because of COVID, the show went on at the National Nordic Museum in Ballard. Our live show included a discussion of the D5 race, Strauss’ RV legislation, and Wilson’s new encampment plan—and we answered live audience questions!

 

Elections, legislature, Media, Uncategorized

Campaign Fizz: The More We Love Promotes Anti-Tax Initiative, Former Candidate Spams Voters With Text Promos for “Lefty Cheat Sheet”

1. Kristine Moreland, whose group The More We Love received city funding last year to run shelter in Renton for women leaving the sex trade, stars in ads supporting an initiative from MAGA multimillionaire Brian Heywood that would overturn the state’s “millionaire’s tax,” a marginal tax on annual income above $1 million. So does at least one woman who says she was helped by Moore’s nonprofit, The More We Love—a controversial group that received around $600,000 from the city of Seattle last year.

In the videos for the Yes on I-645 campaign (top five donors: A venture capital fund, a retired tech executive, two trucking company executives, and Bellevue megadeveloper Kemper Freeman), Moreland, “fewer families in need are being helped today because of Olympia’s income tax. Fewer kids are being rescued from fentanyl exposure. Fewer battered women have a safe place to go.” 

In the second video, set against the same generic kitchen background, a woman named Marisa says she became addicted after a car crash and ended up a victim of sex trafficking. “A local charity”—The More We Love—”got me back on my feet. … Now, the same program is losing funding because Olympia’s income tax is pushing away the people who donate to places like this.” 

No one has been impacted by the tax on income above $1 million because no one has paid the tax yet.

Many of The More We Love’s former shelter clients spoke to PubliCola earlier this year. They said they felt abandoned once they moved into the Renton motel where the group ran its shelter for women trying to leave the sex trade, describing unlivable conditions and scarce help obtaining counseling, addiction treatment, transportation to appointments, and assistance with housing and jobs. Women also said the shelter staff pressured them to participate in religious ceremonies, including an exorcism.

The More We Love also refuses to serve trans women, according to a report on the contract produced by the Seattle Human Services Department—a position that puts them right in line with another Heywood initiative—I-638, which would exclude trans girls from playing sports and require some girls, including those who don’t have personal pediatricians, to submit to invasive genital exams.

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2. Voters for Honest Endorsements, a PAC created by former 46th District state house candidate Ron Davis after the Stranger didn’t endorse him, sent a second round of texts to voters in the 43rd and 46th Districts last week, lambasting the Stranger and promoting a site called the Lefty Cheat Sheet as the true progressive alternative to the Stranger’s endorsement “cheat sheet

“By now you’ve heard the Stranger was bought by investors in 2024, including by Amazon’s top Lobbyist, and they have started endorsing more corporate-friendly candidates in many races,” both texts begin. “Fortunately, the Lefty Cheat Sheet has stepped in to fill the gap.”

Davis, safe to say, is a little obsessed with the Stranger, which endorsed his fellow challenger, Will Dreher, in the race against 46th District incumbent Gerry Pollet. The paper also endorsed longtime 43rd District incumbent Jamie Pedersen over his challenger, Hannah Sabio-Howell. (Also: Militant socialist Kshama Sawant).

Davis’ preoccupation with the Stranger’s Dreher endorsement came through, inadvertently, in his text supporting Sabio-Howell, which includes a paragraph complaining that Dreher (running in a different district) is “personal friends” with Stranger CEO Brady Walkinshaw. The Stranger’s entire unionized editorial staff put out a statement earlier this year saying management had no say in their endorsement decisions.

The claim that the Stranger is owned in part by “Amazon’s top Lobbyist” appears to stem from the fact that one of the board members for the company that owns the Stranger, Lynn Hubbard, is the wife of Amazon’s general counsel.

The Lefty Cheat Sheet, which describes itself as “a quick guide on how to vote lefty” in Seattle, is a website that makes voting recommendations based on an aggregation of selected endorsements. Generally, the “cheat sheet” excludes groups that endorsed Dreher or Pedersen.

It’s unclear who is behind the site or what criteria they used to choose and exclude endorsements from the “lefty” list; when we asked these questions, the group did not respond. On Bluesky, an account representing the site called our questions offensive and said disclosing who was making the recommendations would put people in danger and could harm people’s future political careers.”

Whatever the criteria, no reproductive rights, gun control, climate change, or civil liberties groups made the “lefty” list, and the urbanist groups that made the cut are the ones whose picks align with the Lefty Cheat Sheet’s. Fuse Washington’s Progressive Voters’ Guide, which is excluded, comes in for some pretty harsh, and inaccurate, criticism, while.unions are listed but excluded by default as too “risk-averse.”

Davis did not respond to our questions o n Friday. Voters for Honest Endorsements has reported raising nearly $20,000, most of it from programmers and software engineers; former city councilmember Mike O’Brien contributed $2,000 to the effort.

The Stranger endorsed Dreher and Pedersen in the primary, which led Davis and many of his supporters to conclude that their new-ish owner, former state legislator and Grist CEO Brady Walkinshaw, had tipped the scales.

 

City Council, Elections

Pro-Julie Kang PAC Returns Dark Money Contribution from Ex-Councilmember Nelson’s Pass-Through Group

But it looks like the money’s already been spent.

By Erica C. Barnett

Seafor, the political group created by former Seattle City Council member Sara Nelson to funnel anonymous contributions to groups supporting “pragmatic” centrist candidates, has taken back the $30,000 it contributed to North Seattle Neighbors, a local PAC supporting District 5 City Council candidate Julie Kang.

Contacted on Wednesday, North Seattle Neighbors leader Jordan Royer said the PAC returned the contribution after learning about two complaints by the Progressive People Power (P3) PAC alleging that the anonymous contributions violated state and local election laws (the local complaint, to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, also alleges that Seafor failed to register as a grassroots lobbying group.)

“North Seattle Neighbors recently became aware of complaints filed against Seafor, alleging that Seafor had made a non-compliant donation to North Seattle Neighbors,” Royer said. “In light of those reports, North Seattle Neighbors over the weekend refunded Seafor’s contribution.”

As PubliCola reported last week, Seafor’s pitch to donors is that they can support candidates for office without disclosing who they are. Structuring the group as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, the website claims, “protects the privacy of businesses and individuals historically punished for backing fiscally responsible causes. Many of our supporters operate businesses, sit on boards, or hold positions where political activity isn’t tenable.”

Put another way, if you don’t want anyone to know you’re supporting a political candidate or trying to tip the scales on an initiative campaign, you can give to Seafor, which will clean your money and funnel it to the campaign without your name attached.

Under state election law, you can’t set up a pass-through to avoid disclosing political donors.

On its own website, Seafor more or less explicitly acknowledges they broke the law. “SeaFor’s donation to North Seattle Neighbors for the 2026 election was rescinded to comply with all applicable laws and statutes.”

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Nelson did not respond to questions sent late Friday morning, including a question about whether the group will make similar, anonymous campaign contributions in the future. Seafor called the Julie Kang race a “test run” for the seven council races that will be on the ballot next year (whoever wins in D5 will have to run for a full four-year term). But if their model depends on using anonymous donations to fund independent expenditure campaigns, it may be cut off at the knees long before then. The two complaints are still pending at the state Public Disclosure Commission and the Seattle elections commission, which is more likely than the PDC to take up P3’s case.

North Seattle Neighbors already spent more money than they have without Seafor’s contribution, so they’ll have to raise enough by Election Day, November 3, to make up the difference. Under state election law, no individual or group can give more than $7,500 to a candidate or committee like (North Seattle Neighbors) in the three weeks before election day. As of Friday, the pro-Kang campaign had reported just over $15,000 in contributions from non-Seafor sources, including private equity director Collin Hathaway, developer Martin Smith, and philanthropist Michele Rosen, whose husband Stan Rosen is a real-estate developer. Royer said Friday he anticipates the group will make up the remaining debt with new donations.

Separately, the campaign for Nilu Jenks—Kang’s progressive opponent, who won 54 percent in the primary—filed a complaint against North Seattle Neighbors. In addition to complaints related to Seafor’s contribution, the campaign alleges that a mailer that went out on October 19 inaccurately reported the top five donors. Of the five, one—hotel owner Craig Schafer—isn’t listed as a contributor in North Seattle Neighbors’ campaign filings. Another, Martin Smith, didn’t donate until after the mailer went out, which Jenks’ complaint calls an “impossible timeline.”

A representative from North Seattle Neighbors said, ‘“Smith and Schafer’s contributions were disclosed on the mailer because they were pledges received on October 13. They said Smith’s contribution hit their bank on the 20th, after the mailers were printed and heading out. Smith’s donation, which they received on the 14th, will be in their next filing on the 27th, they said.

So you may be wondering what North Seattle Neighbors is doing with its contributions. So far, they’ve sent out the mailer in the image at the top of this post, insinuating darkly that she supports doing nothing on gun violence “open-air” drug sales, and human trafficking. Here’s the flip side, which claims that a vote fro Jenks is a vote for cutting the police budget—which, reality check, progressive mayor Katie Wilson’s budget increases by more than $68 million next year.

Tents across from bungalows, wild claims about gun violence, and misleading claims about the enforcement of local laws? Sounds very 2019, 2021, 2023, and 2025. Although the graffiti-covered surveillance camera, apparently yanked from its perch by hooligans, is new.

homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Mayor’s Homelessness Proposal Would Bring Hundreds Out of Tents and Into Shelter That Works for Them

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced a new approach to unsheltered homelessness this week that builds on previous successful “encampment resolution” efforts that brought hundreds of unsheltered people into shelter that met their needs instead of simply sweeping them from place to place.

The new approach, announced at Community Solutions’ Built for Zero conference on Tuesday (and at a press conference at City Hall the following day) will change how the city does outreach to encampments and connects people to shelter. It depends—as Wilson emphasized several times during a press conference at City Hall on Wednesday—on the council fully funding her two-year, $37 million shelter plan, which would add around 960 new shelter beds, including a new, 90-unit RV “safe lot” where people living in RVs can park as they move into shelter and, eventually, housing.

Instead of brief outreach followed by sweeps, the city’s new approach is supposed to include targeted, neighborhood-based outreach that goes on for weeks, not days, and includes genuine connections to appropriate shelter and services, rather than a “referral” to whatever shelter happens to be available at the time of a sweep. Outreach workers will be assigned to specific neighborhoods (rather than council districts, which is how the current system works) and will work to create a “by-name list” of everyone in an area, getting to know people and their needs individually and working with them during and after they go to shelter and, ideally, from there into housing (more on that in a moment).

The shelter part is critical, proponents say, because outreach without shelter just moves people from place to place, traumatizing them repeatedly and angering housed residents who feel the city isn’t addressing visible homelessness.

“We’ve seen that neighborhood leaders, ambassadors, and outreach teams are great at identifying and case conferencing individuals who had high neighborhood impact, but we rarely, if ever, have access to the kind of shelter and services that we need to resolve their concerns out in the community,” REACH program Chloe Gale said Wednesday. “So we’re pleased that this will change through this plan.”

The city and state have used (or given lip service to using) a similar approach before, both during the pandemic and afterward, but the most successful recent effort came during last summer’s World Cup games, when Purpose Dignity Action, along with the Downtown Seattle Alliance and other groups, spent weeks doing outreach to a group of unsheltered people living in Pioneer Square and moved most of them into a newly opened high-acuity shelter in Interbay run by the nonprofit Everyone Deserves Housing. Of the group, 47 percent had been homeless for more than three years, and 77 percent had addiction or mental illness.

Speaking at the Built for Zero conference on Wednesday, Wilson said, “My predecessor’s administration moved extraordinary numbers of people from place to place, largely without meaningful offers of shelter or services. Those poor outcomes fostered cynicism, and I believe that we had to do better. And that’s why, when I stepped into the mayor’s office, my first priority was to build a lot more shelter fast, and not just any shelter, but shelter that can accommodate people who need intense support to get back from their feet.”

The citywide effort has support from the Downtown Seattle Association—a business group whose leader, Jon Scholes, also praised Wilson’s budget when she announced it in September. Echoing something homeless advocates have been saying in response to conservative complaints about homeless people for many yesrs, Scholes said Wednesday, “This idea that we have a lot of service resistant people in our city, I just think. is a myth, and it’s not a thing,” Scholes said. “ If f we offer the right service, if we understand who’s out there, if we don’t offer a one-size-fits-all, we can bring people inside instead of chasing them around the corner, down the block, or to the next park.” (As I was heading to the elevators, I passed by a bank of TV reporters shouting questions at Scholes, including one who asked whether would like to disavow that statement).

Wilson said she hoped the new approach would reduce the need for encampment sweeps, which she has continued to carry out at a similar or slightly higher rate than her predecessor Bruce Harrell. The vast majority of encampment removals are “obstruction” removals that require no prior notice or offers of shelter; if an encampment qualifies for outreach, the Unified Care Team, which conducts sweeps, will give 72 hours’ notice and offer whatever shelter beds are available to the people they’re displacing. This approach has not been generally successful at connecting people to shelter, services, or housing.

The biggest challenge facing of Wilson’s plan is the fact that permanent supportive housing development has fallen off a cliff and will likely lose federal funding beginning next year. Last month, a federal judge ruled that the US Department of Housing and Urban Development can move forward with a 2026 Notice of Funding Opportunity that prioritizes projects that require residents to get and stay sober, look for work, and move quickly to “self-sufficiency.” Permanent supportive housing is for people who can’t meet those requirements, including chronically homeless people with severe disabilities related to behavioral health conditions—exactly the group Wilson’s new shelter initiative is supposed to help.

Although Wilson said yesterday that the housing part of her plan will rely entirely on using “existing resources” more “efficiently,” the city does not have enough of this expensive, service-rich housing type to serve everyone who needs it. The bottleneck is there; if Wilson’s new plan gets people into shelter, the equally challenging stretch goal will be making sure they don’t just languish there.

City Council, homelessness

Council Supermajority Passes New Licensing Law That Will Gradually Ban RVs in Seattle

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council approved a new permitting scheme designed to gradually prohibit RVs from parking for more than two hours inside city limits on a supermajority 6-3 vote yesterday. (Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Dionne Foster, and Eddie Lin—who voted in favor of the legislation in committee—voted no.) The program, sponsor Dan Strauss said, is designed to “center humans,” end the “inappropriate use of public space,” and provide “pathways to housing for people in need.

Under Strauss’ permitting proposal , the city will conduct a one-time count of people currently living in RVs in Seattle and provide temporary “licenses” to eligible RV residents. These licenses will allow RV owners to park in Seattle as long as they obey “all laws,” to participate in services, and eventually accept shelter and leave their RVs behind. Anyone who “turns down” six offers of “appropriate shelter”—an undefined term—will lose their permit, and their right to park in the city.

Separate legislation in Strauss’ five-bill package will allow the city to stand up short-term storage for unoccupied RVs; expand the city’s Unified Care Team to add eight more city outreach workers focused on RVs; and broaden the definition of “junk vehicle” to make it easier for the city to designate a vehicle as “junk” and tow it away.

Under the new permitting system, no one who moves into an RV or arrives in Seattle in an RV after the one-time “census” will be eligible for a license, and if they park in Seattle for more than two hours, their vehicles can be ticketed and towed.

The council approved the most substantive piece of the legislation—the RV permitting program— after hours of public testimony, much of it from RV residents and advocates for homeless people who called the proposal ill-conceived and inhumane.

Dee Powers, a former RV resident who became homeless in 2015, said it took seven years to find a shelter that would allow her to stay with her partner and pets. “I personally know how badly the proposed ban will be for people living in their vehicles,” Powers said. “I would not survive in a tent. I would not survive in a passenger vehicle. A friend of mine ended up amputating a foot because he was living in a smaller car with no room to lay down. It’s inhumane to force people to live in even more substandard conditions for the sake of the city’s curb appeal.”

On Tuesday, the ACLU of Washington and Columbia Legal Services sent letters to the council opposing Strauss’ proposal. In the ACLU letter, the group’s Smart Justice Policy Program Director Jazmyn Clark said the plan relies on “punitive enforcement and impoundment practices that raise constitutional and civil liberties concerns and risk further destabilizing people living in vehicles.” Specifically, the civil-rights group wrote, enforcing the two-hour parking rule could subject people living in their RVs to “the loss of their home, shelter, possessions, and often their primary source of stability,” in possible violation of their constitutional protection against unlawful search and seizure.

Strauss characterized the package of legislation as the first real effort in many years to help people living in RVs get into safe, stable housing. “This legislation is about ensuring people who live in their vehicles are not forgotten, but that they are cared for, and that they have a clear road to a more stable life that we can provide them,  so that they can come inside into housing or shter keep higher to engage in housing or shelter that is appropriate for them, that meets their needs,” Strauss said. 

Councilmember Dionne Foster said the one-time nature of the “census” was a key reason for her vote against the permitting bill. Foster proposed an amendment at a committee meeting in September that would have made it possible to hold another count of RV residents in the future, but it failed.

“With that door not available, unfortunately, I just have too many concerns around people who may become homeless in the future and could be left out of this permanent program,” Foster said. “Homelessness, I know and I think many of us know this isn’t a static experience. We have success in getting people housed every year …  But we struggle to actually meet our goals on solving homelessness, because we also have more neighbors who become homeless every year for a myriad of reasons. All of those folks who become homeless will not end up living in their vehicles, but some of them may, and some of them may need access to different supports.”

The council declined to pass an amendment from Maritza Rivera, which she called a “line in the sand,” that would have excluded people convicted of promoting loitering for purposes of prostitution (a misdemeanor), sex trafficking, or selling any amount of drugs from the registration program. City-funded diversion plans, like Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, target people engaged in survival crimes, including those sell drugs to support their own addictions, for diversion rather than criminal prosecution, so excluding anyone who sells drugs from homeless services would have been a departure from the city’s current approach.

Originally, Strauss proposed using $3.5 million that Mayor Katie Wilson had earmarked for a new RV safe lot and shelter to pay for his RV licensing plan, which will include the new city outreach workers and additional police and parking enforcement hours to enforce the new law. Last week, Strauss accused Wilson of being “uncomfortable” addressing homelessness because she proposed a budget that conflicted with his own RV proposal. This week, however, he changed his tune, saying he would identify $5 million in the budget to pay for a new RV safe lot as well as his own RV permitting proposal.

It’s unclear where Strauss plans to find the money. Shortly after this post went to press, Strauss got back to me to say he is “not taking the shelter money,” which totals $37 million over two years, to fund his plan.

At a press conference where WIlson announced a new citywide, neighborhood-based outreach strategy for resolving homeless encampments, I asked her about Strauss’ RV proposal. “We do have a lot of RVs around our city, and there are some real challenges associated with noise, with garbage, with, in some cases, criminal activity happening in and around those vehicles, and so this is a real problem.” But, she added, “I do have some very serious concerns about a number of aspects of the legislation, from the legal risk to the challenges of implementing this very complicated permit program, the cost of implementing it … about the challenges of actually doing this in practice. And I also have concerns about the human impacts.”

The ACLU and Columbia Legal Services also objected to the expansion of the definition of junk vehicles, which requires a vehicle to meet at least three criteria on a list. That list currently includes having a value of less than $500, being on a public street for more than 24 hours, having a broken window, and failing to have an up-to-date registration. Strauss’ junk vehicle legislation expands that list to make it easier for the city to declare a vehicle “junk”; now, if someone’s license or registration is missing or not fully visible, that will count toward the three criteria that the city can use to justify taking it. The new list also now includes vehicles that need repairs to “side or back windows, wheels, tires, lights, body panels, or seats”—items that can be expensive to repair.

“For people with limited financial resources, these conditions may reflect an inability to afford registration, repairs, or other costs, not abandonment of a vehicle,” the ACLU’s Clark wrote. “When that vehicle is also someone’s home, the consequences of an expanded definition are particularly severe.”

The legislation gives the city until July 2027 to come up a plan to implement the legislation, which could include changes to the underlying program—although the 6-3 supermajority that supported the proposal as written suggests there won’t be the kind of fundamental changes opponents have asked for, like allowing amnesty for unregistered RV residents to participate in the program after the one-time cutoff in the legislation.