By Erica C. Barnett
Seattle Nice welcomed another (!) special guest this week, bringing housing activist, writer, and occasional PubliCola contributor Katie Wilson on the podcast to talk about an article she wrote for the Stranger, “Where the Left Went Wrong on Homelessness.”
The premise of Wilson’s piece is that while left-leaning homeless advocates in Seattle are generally correct about the root causes and effective solutions to the homelessness crisis (cause: Lack of housing; solution: More housing), they often fail to acknowledge the impact people living on the streets can have on other people just trying to live and work in the city.
“Drugs? Housed people use them too. Anyway, it’s common for people to get addicted after they become homeless. Trash? Actually, a lot of it is opportunistically dumped from passing cars. Bodily excretions? We need public restrooms. Shoplifting and crime? The claims are overblown. Anyway, homeless people are more often the victims of crime than the perpetrators. Feel unsafe? It’s all in your head, really you just don’t want to look at poverty.”
As I told Katie, I’ve definitely made most of those arguments—mostly because I personally find them compelling, not because I think someone who wants to arrest people for public urination actually believes homeless people don’t need to pee. Nonetheless, I’m intrigued by the idea that there might be a way for the left to reframe our arguments in a way that captures the hearts and minds of people who actually do want solutions (not just sweeps) but feel frustrated by the city’s lack of visible progress.
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Wilson believes that the left needs to be advocating for something, rather than just against policies that haven’t fixed the problem. (“Stop the Sweeps,” for example, doesn’t answer the question: And then what?) As an example, she said we ought to be “aggressively pushing for” the expansion of programs like JustCare, which resolves encampments by working with people over a period of weeks to identify shelter, services and housing appropriate for each individual.
Wilson also told us she wonders now if defeating Compassion Seattle—a Tim Burgess-backed ballot measure that would have directed the city to use existing funds to pay for 2,000 new shelter beds—was the victory it appeared to be. After all, the defeat of that proposal was followed immediately by the election of a slate of centrist-to-conservative local politicians like Sara Nelson, Bruce Harrell, and Ann Davison (an literal Republican). Even if the 2021 backlash election was inevitable, Wilson says, a legally binding shelter mandate could have forced the city to build a lot of shelter, fast, reducing pressure from the “Seattle Is Dying” crowd to take more drastic actions.
While I can definitely see the benefit of investment in shelter, I countered that there are many people living in and around Seattle who will never accept any solution that involves spending taxpayer money on the long, difficult work of helping people recover from addictions, find stable housing, and gain financial stability without resorting to survival crimes. Those people aren’t part of “the left,” broadly defined, but they play an outsize role in our public policy, especially now.
Listen to the discussion, which also features Sandeep arguing for more involuntary commitments and David wondering how much the media are to blame for promoting simplistic narratives about homelessness, below or wherever you get your podcasts.
What’s with this site. I wrote a long comment, and it said “not verified”, and discarded my text …
Katie Wilson raises an essential point: the left often focuses on opposing bad policy (like sweeps) without presenting politically viable alternatives. But we need to go further—offering not just better solutions but ones that align with the incentives policymakers actually respond to.
Right now, Washington State has the highest rate of chronic homelessness in the country, following a staggering 56% increase between 2023 and 2024. We keep cycling between quick fixes—sweeps, criminalization, shelters—without addressing the root causes. This pattern, what systems thinkers call “shifting the burden,” ensures that each temporary fix only exacerbates the problem in the long run.
Yes, we need housing. But in the absence of sufficient permanent housing, we also need immediate solutions that don’t rely on displacing people or forcing them into shelters they won’t accept. That’s why models like Supportive Outreach work: they offer the optics of action without the harm of punitive measures, while also addressing the core issues.
Bring Shelter to the Streets: Instead of forcing people into shelters they don’t trust, bring services and basic sheltering options directly to encampments. This ensures people get immediate support without losing their community or autonomy.
Turn Adversaries into Advocates: Public frustration with visible homelessness is real. Instead of dismissing it, we should redirect it—turning anger away from unhoused individuals and toward the systemic failures that keep them there.
Make Ends Meet: Traditional outreach models are appointment-based, off-site, and inaccessible to people in crisis. On-site services, transportation, and daily engagement increase service utilization and stability by over 200%.
The reality is, politicians won’t abandon sweeps just because we tell them they’re bad policy. We need to offer them an alternative that achieves their goals—reducing visible homelessness—while also aligning with best practices. Anything Helps’ Supportive Outreach model does exactly that.
Right on samm! (Here here)
Spot on.
I am cognizant that “(cause: Lack of housing; solution: More housing)” is an over-simplification but it’s also almost all we hear about it. Yes, more housing is the solution to the housing crisis like food is the answer when you’re hungry. But the housing debate continues to miss the point that without access to land, there is no way to build housing.
There is land in Seattle to build on, lots of it. Some of it is in the form of “covered land plays” — those storage warehouses that create 2-3 jobs and take up acres of land or surface parking lots that occupy land during peaks but are empty most of the time. Some of is covered by disused or abandoned buildings — come out the Lake City from 105th to 130th and you won’t go 5 blocks without seeing a boarded up store (Starbuck and Bartells both gave up on it) or empty lot, fenced off. All of that could be developed, as could the old SPD site across from City Hall.
Until this city takes a more robust approach to land value, either taxing the value of land it owns rather than selling it or reclaiming disused land/property as the public safety dangers/eyesores they are, nothing will change. We’ll be talking about this in the same way for another 25 years and still be using the word “crisis” for something we have long since normalized.
Well the city was literally given 3.8 acres of land right next to the Mount Baker light rail station on which to develop affordable housing, but the old UW laundry facility just sits there and rots, as it has for the last five years since the city acquired it. So develop unused land? I think that’s one of those dirty solutions by those awful progressives who are the cause of all of Seattle’s problems, as I’ve been told in much of the media over the last decade, and is therefore “unworkable,” in the language of the current city council. Besides, they are too busy sinking a hundred million into all things about cops, nutty security boondoggles like ShotSpotter, all-seeing surveillance cameras, and just about every other way they can think of so that wealthy recluses “feel” safe while driving their Teslas from their fancy northend communities to their jobs downtown.
Also, Tim Burgess’s ballot measure? If he wasn’t so busy on the forefront of driving wedges in the community over who should and definitely should not be on the city council then just maybe people would’ve voted for his measure, instead of perceiving him as the politically posturing case of syphilis he presented himself as.