Harrell Promised 2,000 Units of Housing or Shelter by the End of His First Year. He Didn’t Deliver.

Mayor Bruce Harrell speaks at the opening of LIHI’s Dockside Apartments earlier this year, when he also unveiled his homelessness dashboard.

By Erica C. Barnett

When he ran for mayor in 2021, Bruce Harrell vowed to implement key elements of the Compassion Seattle ballot measure, an initiative that would have required the city to create  a total of 2,000 new “units (in addition to those already funded) of emergency or permanent housing with services.” If the measure had passed, Harrell, who supported it, would have been responsible for making the 2,000 new units happen.

After a state appeals court took Compassion Seattle off the table, candidate Harrell wasted no time in urging the city council to adopt key elements of the measure, saying that “the amendment-specified 2000 units of housing is critical to set in motion now.” He also rolled out a “homelessness action plan” that incorporated the 2,000-unit promise, and added that, if elected, he would “identify and begin the process of moving people into 1,000 units of housing within the first 6 months of taking office, and securing an additional 1,000 units by the end of year one.” 

Media outlets reported widely on this bold campaign promise, and the Seattle Times mentioned it as one of their reasons for endorsing Harrell. He even hired Compassion Seattle’s chief architect, former city council member Tim Burgess, as a top policy advisor.

So in his first year as mayor, did Harrell deliver? In a word, no. In a few words, not even close.

In 2022, Harrell did not deliver 2,000 new units of housing, even using the most generous interpretation of that campaign promise.  A detailed look at the 31 developments the administration says it “identified” this year shows that the vast majority were planned and funded before Harrell even took office, including many that former mayor Jenny Durkan hyped with media events and press announcements during her term. 

In fact, Durkan took credit for many of the exact same units the Harrell administration is counting toward their total. In 2021, for example, Durkan announced funding for 840 new housing units, primarily from the city’s 2016 housing levy; those units included LIHI’s Good Shepherd House, which Harrell’s dashboard counts among 1,912 units “identified” between January and September of last year, when the dashboard was last updated.) The following year, PubliCola was on hand when Durkan announced federal funding for several other LIHI projects on the list. 

But let’s say that Harrell, who likes sports metaphors, was just nudging the goalposts a bit—understandable, especially for such an ambitious promise in such a lousy budget year. (I even wrote a column calling Compassion Seattle an “unfunded mandate” that would either fail entirely or “succeed” by funding low-cost shelters instead of real solutions like permanent housing.) And indeed, over the last year, the mayor has suggested that he merely promised to identify 2,000 housing and shelter units, not create 2,000 new ones. As the dashboard puts it: “We have identified 1,912 total units of shelter so far, with only 88 units left to reach our goal of 2,000 units of shelter and housing identified by end of 2022.”

Even by this measure, however, the Harrell Administration can’t claim success.

PubliCola has documented, to the best of our ability, the year or date on which each housing or shelter development on the city’s list was announced. 

A review of these 1,912 units and shelter beds shows that fewer than 300 were newly planned or funded by the city in 2022. What’s more, around 100 shelter beds included on the list have been canceled, including 68 that were supposed to open as part of the abandoned SoDo shelter expansion. The city’s tally, which has not been updated since September, includes 40 high-acuity shelter beds and 28 tiny house-style Pallet shelters toward the total. Neither project is happening.

Candidates often make unrealistic promises to get elected; Compassion Seattle was, according to all the polls at the time, extremely popular, so it made sense for Harrell to incorporate it into his campaign. What’s harder to understand is why more of Harrell’s supporters—who professed to support housing, not just sweeping, people living in parks and city rights-of-way—aren’t asking why he failed to deliver.

The mayor and city council actually cut funding for one of the programs on the list last year. JustCare, the Public Defender Association’s pandemic-era hotel shelter program, would have to shrink from 84 beds to 50 if the PDA hadn’t secured one-time federal funding to make up for the city’s cuts.

Overall, of the 1,912 housing units and shelter beds on the city’s website, PubliCola could only identify 288 that were announced in 2022, after Harrell took office. Most of those—163—are existing apartment buildings that were purchased using emergency federal “rapid acquisition” funds, which allow housing agencies to quickly repurpose market-rate apartments for affordable housing. For example, the Low-Income Housing Institute recently purchased the Dockside Apartments on Greenlake Way North; the property served as a backdrop when Harrell announced the dashboard back in June.

The rest of the “identified” units are traditional permanent supportive housing, emergency shelter, such as tiny houses, and a 35-space RV safe lot. The city has tried and failed repeatedly to open similar parking lots for RV residents in the past; the most recent attempt was at the SoDo shelter site, and King County took it off the table under neighborhood pressure long before deciding to abandon the shelter expansion altogether.

Candidates often make unrealistic promises to get elected; Compassion Seattle was, according to all the polls at the time, extremely popular, so it made sense for Harrell to incorporate it into his campaign. What’s harder to understand is why more of Harrell’s supporters—who professed to support housing, not just sweeping, people living in parks and city rights-of-way—aren’t asking why he failed to deliver.

Harrell’s office did not immediately respond to questions sent early Tuesday afternoon; we’ll update this post if we hear back.

7 thoughts on “Harrell Promised 2,000 Units of Housing or Shelter by the End of His First Year. He Didn’t Deliver.”

  1. Mayor Harrell and Mayor Durkan before him have provided the majority of the funding for the King County Regional Homeless Authority which provides housing and outreach in all of king county. Seattle was the only contributor initially but now finally other cities are contributing. It’s due to the work of committee members including Harrell. And it takes time to build housing and get employees hired to provide homeless services so I think Harrell should get credit for any homeless who are housed. We should make encampments illegal within ten mile radius of a homeless housing bldg or shelter because tents spring up near these. The tents are used to commit crimes that can victimize the homeless.

    1. Tents are homes. The fact that homes of every sort are sometimes used to commit crimes does not make them criminal. And Harrell refused to raise progressive revenue, cease dumping more wasteful money into SPD including ghost cops, or make the neighborhood upzones we need in order to create enough housing

    2. What non-anecdotal evidence do you have that encampment tents are used to commit crimes?

  2. Let’s start by admitting Mayor Harrell isn’t any different than any other mayor in the last 40 years. So he fudged the numbers on low income housing? So did the last mayor…. and one before that… and so on and so on. Low income housing has never been a priority for Seattle. The mess we’re in took decades to make…. and Harrell always knew this plan and his “dashboard” were total crap. So did most of the people who voted for him. The idea that Harrell voters would hold him accountable for homelessness isn’t realistic. The left never holds Councilperson Sawant accountable for all the crazy shit she’s done over the years and the right isn’t about to hold Harrell’s feet to the fire over the bullshit homeless numbers.

    As far as Seattle’s longer term plans for the homeless, I think we’ll know more after the next two elections… the special election on Feb. 14th (I-135) and the regular one on Nov. 14th (city council).

    Politically, Seattle tends towards the conservative–liberal two step. City voters take a liberal step forward one election… and take the conservative step back the next election, after figuring out the cost of the liberal policies they supported. Will Seattle go liberal or conservative in 2023? We’ll know a whole lot more on February 14th.

    1. What exactly is the “crazy shit” you think we on the left have not held Sawant accountable for? None of the things the recall was supposedly about were wrong or regrettable.

  3. Thank you for this investigative reporting. This is why I support Publicola. In addition, You’ll find that the same “affordable units” claimed as created by MHA fees, “leveraged 3:1 with other funds” are also counted as created by the Seattle Housing Levy, “leveraged 3:1 with other funds.” including the State Housing Trust Fund and federal tax credits. Rob Johnson once stated from the podium that MHA was contributing $83,000 toward each new affordable unit. LIHI gives the pre-Covid cost at $350,000 for each unit of permanent supportive housing. Most of the “leveraged” funds are tax funds. On top of that, previous mayors counted MFTE units, even though they convent to market-rate after 12 years.

  4. Honestly I am surprised the number is above zero. Durkan was incredibly anti-homeless, and Harrell is even worse. That the number didn’t dip into the negative digits is frankly shocking.

    Not that he will ever be held accountable for this lie.

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