By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington told reporters last week that the city has made impressive progress on removing encampments and referring their displaced residents into shelter, and that new, data-driven criteria for prioritizing encampments now prevents “the loudest voices” from dictating which encampments get removed.
Although incomplete identification data means that any numbers are likely an undercount, Washington said, “we’re happy to say that shelter referrals are up” 20 percent over last year, and shelter enrollments are also on the upswing. “I’m encouraged by the progress we’ve made over the last few years,” she said.
Harrell cited similar numbers in his State of the City speech on Tuesday, crediting a new “state-of-the-art system that informs a data driven, objective and equitable approach to resolving to resolving encampments” for the increase.
In reality, the main component of the city’s “state-of-the-art system” is a frequently updated database of encampments (which replaced an earlier spreadsheet-based system), combined with a prioritization matrix that helps inform which encampments the city removes. That matrix is essentially the same as the one Harrell’s office created back in January 2022, when he first took office.
For years, homeless service providers, advocates, and elected officials have asked the city to stop touting shelter referrals, since that number only refers to the number of people who were told that a specific bed was available, not how many actually slept in a shelter bed for even one night—much less accessed meaningful services or ended up in housing.
The deputy mayor said getting other parts of the region to allow new shelters or housing will be “a challenge. If you were them, and you saw what we were dealing with, would you want a shelter in your city?”
Enrollments—in which a person living in a swept encampment shows up at a shelter for at least one night—totaled 970, up from 746, across all encampment removals last year. While enrollments are a slightly better measure of success than referrals, staying in a shelter for a night or more—perhaps because it’s cold outside—is not a measure of success or progress toward housing.
Because the amount of available shelter space is a fraction of the thousands of people sleeping in tents, vehicles, and doorways every night, the fact that several hundred people a year are “accepting” the city’s shelter offers, and even “enrolling” in shelter, is less an impressive achievement than an indictment of the city’s perennial lack of shelter and housing. Asked about the possibility of siting more shelter and parking for people living in their vehicles, Washington said it was time for other communities besides Seattle to step up.
“I may get in trouble for this, but I think Seattle’s exasperated,” Washington said. “What happens when we go to site anything? The neighbors are like … ‘No, put it somewhere else.’ …Homelessness doesn’t just reside in Seattle, it’s a regional problem. And Seattle needs to not hold the majority of all shelters.” But, Washington added, getting other parts of the region to allow new shelters or housing will be “a challenge. If you were them, and you saw what we were dealing with, would you want a shelter in your city?”
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The Harrell administration has made a lot of adopting a “data-driven approach” to homelessness, suggesting that this distinguished them from the Durkan Administration. Last week, when I asked Washington when the city stopped using complaints as their primary basis for encampment removals, mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen jumped in and responded, “When Mayor Harrell took office”—that is, after Mayor Jenny Durkan left.
Washington, however, is a holdover from the Durkan administration, where she held several roles overseeing the city’s homelessness response including as the deputy mayor overseeing homelessness—her current role. As the head of the city’s homelessness division under Durkan, Washington vigorously defended the city’s strategy for prioritizing and removing encampments. In 2019, when the Durkan administration was forced to acknowledge they had no idea how many unsheltered people were actually ending up in housing, Washington said the exact number didn’t really matter, because “no matter how you look at it, it’s getting better.”
The city’s homelessness data still doesn’t include that information. Nor does the Harrell Administration’s “state-of-the-art” encampment dashboard appear to include most of the information a report from the City Auditor’s office said the city should provide about homelessness back in 2022, at the beginning of Harrell’s term.
That audit recommended the city create a “data dashboard” that would show whether and how the city’s encampment removal were performing based on a wide array of measures, including health and safety outcomes for people living unsheltered (like deaths from hypothermia, overdose deaths among unsheltered people, and the spread of infectious diseases) as well as other measures beyond shelter referral rates, such as outreach workers’ ability to maintain engagement with their clients after a sweep, access to mental health care and addiction treatment, and the availability of public restrooms with running water.
The city’s public-facing dashboard includes data points related to shelter referrals and public safety (such as shots fired and reported encampment fires), and a “snapshot” map, updated four times a year, showing encampments the city has removed.
During his State of the City speech, Mayor Harrell noted that “there have been bumps in the road” since the city and county created the KCRHA in 2020. “So this year, we will drive needed changes to improve oversight and accountability and foster stronger regional collaboration and solutions,” he said.
Harrell has frequently been critical of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, and recently nominated a friend and ally, Darrell Powell, as its interim CEO. (Prior to accepting the new position, Powell was the chief financial officer for several nonprofits, including the local YMCA and an agency, the Scholar Fund, at the center of a dispute with King County over alleged fiscal mismanagement.) He also asked the agency to come up with potential cuts to help the city close its $220 million budget deficit this year.
Those moves, and the increasingly high priority of the encampment-removing Unified Care Team, has led to speculation that the mayor may move to shut the agency down. During his speech on Tuesday, Harrell noted that “there have been bumps in the road” since the city and county created the KCRHA in 2020. “So this year, we will drive needed changes to improve oversight and accountability and foster stronger regional collaboration and solutions,” he said.
Last week, Washington said that the city wasn’t considering such a move, and wouldn’t unless “they fail, which we really hope they do not.” If that happens, she said, “we would have to have a discussion with all of the partners at the table and determine whether we revamp it, change it, restructure it, or completely pull out and everybody goes back to their corners.”
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