By Erica C. Barnett
On the campaign trail and in his slickly produced Seattle Channel budget video, Mayor Bruce Harrell has been touting a new statistic: “Most of the most of the people that are homeless in Seattle did not become unhoused in Seattle,” he said at a recent debate. He’s made a similar claim at other campaign forums and events.
“About 70% of people experiencing homelessness on Seattle streets became homeless outside of our city, and even with Seattle providing over six providing over 60% of the region’s shelter beds and 85% of the region’s tiny homes, we cannot do this alone,” Harrell claimed in his budget video, adding that it’s time for the rest of the region to step up and take care of their homeless residents. He also called on the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to identify land in areas with “fewer land constraints than we have here” where new shelters could open away from the city.
Leaving aside the fact that unhoused people congregate in cities, rather than far-flung suburbs, for obvious reasons—not only are there services here, there’s also community, opportunity, and access to transit—Harrell’s “they’re not from here” stat is extremely misleading, because it’s based entirely on responses to about 240 surveys with people who showed up at KCRHA’s survey tents over several days in January and February 2024.
A bit of background: Since 2022, the KCRHA has based its Point In Time Count of the region’s homeless population not on a physical count (which generally results in undercounting) but surveys with people who travel to fixed sites to provide demographic data and answer questions. This technique, known as respondent-driven sampling, was used to extrapolate some of the data in the full 2024 report, including an estimate (16,868) of the total number of sheltered and unsheltered homeless people across the county.
However, Harrell’s “about 70 percent” number (actually 69 percent) isn’t based on that sampling method; it’s based on raw data that represents less than a third of about 800 surveys across all parts of King County. In Seattle, the KCRHA interviewed around 240 people.
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This is important, because statistics based on small, self-selected samples of people aren’t generally considered reliable guides to demographic and population-level trends; that’s why KCRHA used statistical sampling for all its top-level data, rather than just extrapolating directly from a few hundred surveys.
It’s also to important to know that Harrell’s new talking point completely ignores the 43 percent of people who said they were last stably housed outside King County, which is one reason the “last housed in Seattle” and “last housed in King County” sample sizes are so small. If the city and county based their “fair share” of homelessness spending on where people were housed most recently, it would make sense for both Seattle and King County to refuse to fund services for nearly half their homeless residents, a heartless policy neither would be likely to adopt.
During a “deep dive” on the PIT numbers on Friday, KCRHA data staffers confirmed that researchers intended for the raw survey information to be taken “at face value,” not used to “make any further inferences” about the homeless population as a whole. The staffers also noted that KCRHA didn’t ask how long it had been since people had stable housing; given that the number of chronically homeless people increased in the 2024 count, people could have been talking about housing they had years in the past, which makes the question of which city or region they “belong” to murkier.
Like previous point-in-time surveys, the 2024 PIT count suggests not just that people are mobile—relocating around the region for various reasons, including local laws designed to keep them moving—but that “last stably housed” statistics aren’t a a good way of deciding whether people are worth spending local dollars on—even ignoring the obvious anti-humanitarian implications of making policy this way.
The biggest problem I can see, as someone who’s been homeless here a couple times, is the way Seattle’s shady about how they classify the low income housing they build vs. who is on the streets. Check it out.
So a lot of the low income housing here is classified as what’s called 30-70%. That means people are able to pay 30-70% of their income towards rent. The rest is usually covered by programs. But, the majority of people on the streets will only qualify for housing that’s classified for 0-30% income. In other words, housing for people who can’t pay ANY money towards rent. Or up to only 30% of their income. So the amount of people on the streets grows, and Seattle congratulates itself for getting people housing.
One other thing. I filed a FOIA request a few years ago. I wanted to see what the results were when the shelters were inspected. But it turns out that this city doesn’t ever inspect shelters. So the places here are just able to self report about how they’re doing and still get city funding. I was wondering about how places like Bread of Life can have bedbugs and still get away with charging $5/night for people to stay there. There are other problems at shelters like broken windows, leaks, and mold. And they have the nerve to be upset that homeless people don’t want to stay there. But these shelters are never inspected by the city. That is a problem that needs to be fixed
During your interviews did you ask how many homeless acctually get disability SSI payments ? Even the younger ones ,if you did you would be surprised how many do ,instead of using for a cheap apt etc they spend on booze ,ciggys ,drugs
It’s their money…Try minding your own spending habits instead of generalizing people you know nothing about…
so because of a few irresponsible people, we deserve nothing? The millions deserve nothing?
What’s your point?
Bus them back to California where many of them came from. I hear their governor is going to build housing on land he’s somehow someway buying from their owners in the Palisades where million dollar homes used to reside.
If you’re asking me, yes. Of 48 people who answered about Social Security, 3 were receiving SSI, 4 were on SSDI, 1 was getting both.
Portraying Bruce Harrell as less than progressive or less than liberal is misinformation. Half of Seattle’s workers are employed by Microsoft, Boeing or Amazon–these (and other) globalist capitalist international corporations run the State of WA not the “Mayor”. Watch The Wizard of Oz again and look at the Munckin local gov.leaders–that’s the Mayors office. The homeless come to Seattle because Republican rural areas won’t allow their presence in any significant numbers. Seattle is more than “Cap Hill” and it’s phony “progressivism”.
The buck stops with the mayor! Bruce’s effort to shift blame to other Seattle area cities is NOT working. And, yes, Bruce and Sara have spent the last 4 years telling us they are Trump-lite “centrists”, not progressive. The problem with that is most ‘voters’ in Seattle are progressive, and despise anything that sounds or looks like Trump. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it IS a duck. Bruce and Sara’s police buildup favored by Trump is a case in point. All the data tells us that more police on the street is NOT what reduces crime. It just leads to more police abuse of power, as the tendency is to to try to justify your increased police presence on the street with arrest quotas in which you end up bothering and harassing people who are not harming anyone. You reduce crime with smart social services that get at the root causes of crime (mental illness, substance abuse, lack of job skills, etc.). Like most Trump boosters, Bruce has adopted the perspective of wealthy people who don’t want to see visible poverty on the streets. He does not have the perspective of ordinary people living in Seattle who may be only a couple of paychecks away from being homeless themselves.
And of course, the lack of reasonably priced housing, among the causes of homelessness and crime.
Housing not handcuffs , isn’t working.
Drug addicts camping roaming Seattle is contributing to crime and mayhem.
Arrest those taking drugs on public city streets. Maditory inpatient drug treatment needed before free housing should happen. Those who refuse outreach or care team offers of any type of help or shelter, need to leave Wa state . Or get a job , picking up litter , removal of graffiti, planting trees, in Seattle or the forest where fires have destroyed the wooded areas . Picking fruit , or crops . Or forest rangers .
Work at recycling plants . Cooking at the mission or elsewhere. Washing donated items for salvation army . Packing food for meals on wheels. Volunteers at the hospitals .
If the homeless can get any type of job to contribute to their own support for , apts , shelters , HUD housing, this would give some meaning to their lives. They can become contributors to the society in general.
But, rewarding homeless drug addicts, without an assigned job or mandatory treatment, just leaves them to drain all the funding for ” all the homeless people, who just need a hand up , to help themselves out of a rut .
Provide jobs …… provide mandatory treatment….. Or leave Seattle or wa state
you employ them then. Stop tell others to employ them.
You make them contribute if they are such valuable employees?
Seattle Mayoral candidate debates; Democracy in action. See and hear the candidates yourself and avoid bias reporting from media
You can register to attend in person at the website below
What do people want from the next leader of Seattle? Affordable housing, public safety, addressing the homelessness crisis and supporting the business community will be among the major issues on the plate of Seattle’s mayor and the primary topics of conversation when incumbent Bruce Harrell and challenger Katie Wilson meet for a debate at Seattle University.
The event, part of Seattle University’s ongoing Conversations series, is 7–8 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 8, in Pigott Auditorium. It is being presented in cooperation with KOMO TV and The Seattle Channel.
The debate will be co-moderated by Seattle University Professional-in-Residence Joni Balter and KOMO TV senior reporter and lead political journalist Chris Daniels. SU undergraduate student Diego Borromeo, an international studies and public affairs major, will also help guide the conversation.
https://www.seattleu.edu/newsroom/2025/seattle-university-hosting-mayoral-debate.php
Tell me, do you have any plans for homeless people who aren’t drug addicts? I used to be one, so this kind of matters to me.
Oh, and I did work for pay several of the years I spent on Seattle’s streets.
There are more poor people in cities than elsewhere, just as there are more rich people, as Henry George alluded in 1879. Seattle is 84 sq miles today, just as it was in 2000, but the population has increased from 600,000 to 750,000…that can only put a strain on the housing market. Add to that the big salaries offered to today’s tech workers and the gap widens.
If Harrell had a shred of imagination he would do something with the vacant/disused land to get it into development. The hole in the ground across City Hall — maybe someone could point it out to him? — is 20 years old and if it had been developed soon after becoming available, it would probably be under renovation by this point. More jobs, more housing, more retail in the mossbacks’ beloved downtown, but they actually live in the suburbs, I mean neighborhoods, that aren’t downtown so they really don’t care.
Seattle is not a progressive city, though many progressive people live in it…it’s a libertarian city that elevates property rights — design review that holds up development NIMBYs don’t like, tree canopy advocates who think the trees on their property are old growth from the pre-settlement era — over human rights. It’s more a collection of car-connected suburbs than a city with a definable core. Harrell doesn’t have the leadership skills or awareness to define a new vision for what could be a great city.
Mayor’s coming perilously close to “the illegal homeless are destroying Seattle culture, it’s purity and must be walled out. These species are other.
We already have our Savage.
MAGA Madam Flowers Savage.
This points to a fundamental problem of homelessness and homeless services. It’s so easy for police in Edmonds, Tacoma, Bothel, Everett, Kirkland or Lynnwood to tell a camper, “you can’t be homeless here, you have to go to Seattle.” I did a detailed survey of 50 homeless folks camping at Bitter Lake and Woodland Park in 2021, and I found people who had their last stable housing in all of those towns. 18% were from Seattle itself, and 47% more from western Washington. So, it’s disingenuous for Harrell to imply that Seattle has no responsibility for homeless folks here, but he’s absolutely right that all these towns up and down I-5 need to contribute to the solution, and not just push people over the city line.
On the other hand, the mayor’s practice of “removing” homeless camps and pushing folks down the street makes the problem much less visible, but it doesn’t solve anything. We have 5000 shelter beds, and they are always almost all filled. We have 16,000 homeless people in King County, and that will surely increase with the federal cutbacks and the lack of new low-income housing. Trying to hide this problem is not going to work much longer. The next mayor needs to face reality.
Don’t count on said ‘facing reality’ if Harrell is reelected. Along with that, expect “going big on AI,” so whether you get your service or not might be up to some “hallucination” (I know, I know, we’re not supposed to worry about whether it works or not because “this is literally the future”); and also another another $150 million poured into the black hole of mass surveillance, cop gear, and prepaying salaries of non-existence police officers (and that will be only the first year).
It’s a very dangerous time. Bruce pledged to “Work with Trump wherever we can”. And he has made several STRONG statements and executive orders saying Trump will not have access to mass surveillances and data!
I feel so much safer when ignorance is in charge.
Get those folks a job . Or give those folks a job . Anything to help contribute to their own support means . Free handouts are just encouraging more of the same activities.
you keep saying that. Are they employable? YOU EMPLOY THEM!
Just like tRUMP, if Harrell is talking, he’s lying!