By Erica C. Barnett
On this week’s edition of the Seattle Nice podcast, we discussed the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, in which the court upheld a law barring people from sleeping in public, including in their vehicles. (Officially, the ban “only” prohibited using items that provided protection from the elements or basic comfort, but in practice, a person could be ticketed, fined, and eventually jailed for actions like using a rolled-up towel as a pillow, or covering up with a blanket for warmth.)
The ruling has the effect of overturning Martin v. Boise, the landmark Ninth Circuit Case that prohibited cities from sweeping homeless people unless shelter was available. For many cities, the ruling will essentially provide carte blanche to remove people and destroy their possessions, and to do so over and over again without providing any form of shelter or assistance.
In Seattle, the situation is different: Under a set of local rules governing encampment removals adopted in 2017, the city is supposed to provide at least 72 hours’ notice and individual offers of shelter to everyone at an encampment before removing it. In practice, the city has interpreted the rules in a way that creates two categories of sweeps: Those that include 72 hours’ notice and offers of shelter, and a much larger category in which encampments are categorized as “obstructions” that can be removed immediately, with no notice, shelter offers, or even storage.
Seattle, in other words, won’t be directly impacted by the Grants Pass decision because our rules, as interpreted by the Durkan and Harrell Administrations, already allow no-notice sweeps in any circumstance where an encampment exists on public land, such as a park or plaza—that is, in almost every circumstance. When the city decides to single out an encampment for more humane treatment, by sending the Unified Care Team to familiarize themselves with encampment residents and their individual needs, it’s an exception, not the rule.
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Sandeep and I disagree about the circumstances in which cities should remove encampments, but we did agree that, as Sandeep observed, the ruling could have major implications for Seattle if (or, more likely, when) nearby cities like Burien and Everett pass or begin strictly enforcing laws that criminalize people for being homeless without providing them even nominal alternative shelter options. Already, the city of Burien considers Seattle shelters close enough to qualify as “available” shelter alternatives for people living unsheltered there; when suburbs and nearby cities no longer have to provide even a fig leaf offer of shelter before fining people caught being homeless, Seattle could become a (highly) relative refuge.
Listen to Seattle Nice below or wherever you get your podcasts.
The problem with sweeps is that the services needed by the ‘swept’ are inadequate or unavailable. According to a recent report by the King County Health Department, of people living on the streets:
(Call to Action to Support People Living in Encampments and
Address Encampment Removals in King County
June 20, 2024)
28% are adults with a serious mental illness
35% are adults with a substance use disorder
12% are survivors of domestic violence
6% are veterans
49% are chronically homeless
These are problems that require different services that need to be expanded. Being ‘swept’ should be the entry point for the people in need to get help.
But when these services are not available or adequate, rather than focusing on improving services, we focus on the sweeps!
The report by the County health department is a classic example of misdirection away from their incompetent management and delivery of services. It concludes with 7 recommendations. The first 6 address issues which are housing related, mostly outside the scope of the health department’s responsibilities for delivering services.
The last ‘recommendation’ addresses services they should provide, but takes no responsibility to actually do something.
“Enhance mental health and substance use disorder services. Mental health service capacity is growing, but additional culturally responsive, affordable, and accessible services are needed throughout King County. Comprehensive mental health services can lead to an increased number of days spent in housing, and cost reductions in inpatient/emergency and criminal legal system services. Expand on-demand treatment for substance use disorders. Capacity in this area is growing, but this growth should be accelerated. Low barrier clinics show promising rates of treatment initiation and retention and should be sited throughout King County.”
Sounds great. Who is in charge, what actions are they taking, and when’s their next status report?
“Are Sweeps the Answer?”
I’ll rephrase that as “are sweeps the solution?” Depends on the problem you are trying to solve.
Homelessness should be illegal but not in the way many people think. It should be illegal to have people who live in your city, who have it as their mailing address for employment or taxpaying purposed, made homeless. That should be a crime. But the people made homeless are not the criminals: they are the victims of crime. If they can work in a given city or have work history there, on what grounds does a city say to them, they have to leave or live on the streets of the city they were once a part of? I know this flies in the face of Seattle’s libertarian psyche (sidebar: progressive values don’t end with LGBTQ and legal weed — if your city values property rights over human rights, it’s not progressive: it’s libertarian). But the working people of Seattle built this economic powerhouse for everyone, not just the few who can afford to live in a theme park.
Maybe this was always under the surface of the Seattle I moved to almost a quarter century ago but it wasn’t the kind of thing that came up in conversation.
The cost of living here has risen with the cost to access land. Seattle is the same physical size as it was in 2000 but has 25% more people. What do you suppose that does to the cost of land? Or more to the point, to the value of land? There are unimproved parcels of land in downtown Seattle — parking lots — even now, several years into a “homelessness emergency” and a housing affordability crisis. An emergency that lasts multiple years is not an emergency: it’s the status quo. Likewise a crisis. So we have acres of land held by speculators, disused buildings (Seattle Fire Dept can probably give you a list), all held out of productive use by speculators.
If you ever read “Atlas Shrugged” as many impressionable high schooler did, you may remember the capitalists all holing up in Galt’s Gulch. In other words, they removed their “productive value” from the market. If working people do that, it’s called a strike and widely deplored by capitalists.
So we have speculators, many of them out of state or out of the USA, holding onto land (it only costs 1% of the assessed value to hold…look up any address in the King County property tax database to see for yourself). until it reaches a high enough price. See image below if I can’t insert an image in text.
When Seattle’s punditocracy realizes this is not a progressive city (maybe it was once?) but a propertarian one, things might change. But you can count on the establishment paper, now in its third generation of ownership, to ignore this. Until that happens, we will hear the same voices admiring a problem they have no way to solve. No one wants to be homeless or unhoused or otherwise at the mercy of the elements, to say nothing of law enforcement or vigilantes (like we saw out in Lake City, where locals attacked an RV encampment). So let’s stop making them the criminals and point to the bootlickers in city hall (who should really learn something from the huge hole in the ground across the street, the old SPD HQ site) who have tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https://bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/487a8880-a089-4935-bfc4-04af5286e560_1863x1268.png
Whoever you are….well said.