By Erica C. Barnett
On Friday, several private and nonprofit affordable housing developers joined Mayor Bruce Harrell to criticize his challenger Katie Wilson’s proposal to move unsheltered people into vacant units in “workforce” housing developments, saying it would be a “disaster” to try to mix chronically homeless people in with the general population in these buildings.
“Our experiences and independent data have shown that people struggling on the street with behavioral health challenges cannot just be placed in an apartment and succeed,” Harrell said.
“According to the 2024 Point in Time Count, most people living unsheltered in King County have a physical, cognitive or general disability, a third of those surveyed said they live with severe mental illness, and nearly half said they struggle with substance abuse. … Scattering people in buildings across the city where the services to address addiction and mental health health issues do not exist, will be a disaster.”
Currently, thousands of units funded with city dollars, many of them small studios with rents comparable to what’s available in the private market, are sitting vacant. Some developers have argued that these will fill up as construction slows and rents for market-rate studio apartments increase.
Karen Lee, the CEO of Plymouth Housing, described the intensive services provided in Plymouth’s buildings, which are designed to serve chronically homeless people who, by definition, have disabling mental or physical conditions. “For them to rejoin society, it takes care, it takes compassion, it takes knowledge, and it is doable. But [living] in an apartment building for working-class folks that is staffed with a building manager and some cleanliness staff—that is not the environment” for success, Lee said.
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Wilson, contacted this afternoon, said she never proposed putting people who need permanent supportive housing in empty apartments at buildings that lack supportive services—an approach that helped doom the “Partnership for Zero” program to swiftly end visible homelessness downtown, which Harrell supported, last year.
Instead, Wilson said, she wants to create subsidies for “low-acuity” people who don’t require intense, round-the-clock care, freeing up shelter beds by helping people who’ve been stuck in shelter for long periods move on to housing. “Obviously, we need to pay close attention to who we’re placing where, and we don’t want to replicate the kind of problems that have ben happening recently with putting high-acuity homeless folks in buildings that aren’t equipped to handle them and without the supportive services that they need on site,” Wilson said.
“If you look across our shelter system, there are a lot of low-acuity homeless folks who are kind of stuck in the system because we don’t have throughput to affordable units for them. … The success of this plan is going to rely on appropriately placing people” in housing that fits their needs, Wilson continued.
Harrell has repeatedly said that recently homeless people do not belong in the same living environment as the “teachers and baristas” for whom workforce housing is designed. Wilson’s strategy, he said, “will actually create more vacancies as these buildings experience the well-known issues” seen in permanent supportive housing, such as fights, overdoses, and frequent 911 calls. “[It] will be a disaster.”
Wilson disagreed that formerly homeless people can’t thrive in regular affordable housing. “If you have someone who is coming out of homelessness, who doesn’t have serious behavioral health problems, who maybe has a disability, they’ll be a fine neighbor,” Wilson said. “Obviously we need to assess people, but the idea that, categorically, these are different kinds of people [is wrong]. There are teachers and barista who are homeless.”
They need to screen these people really well. I live in an affordable building and have had two people on my floor have mental health breakdowns where they completely destroyed their apartments and had infestations of insects, rotting stinking garbage, and one was breaking his windows out onto the sidewalk below. It took months to get there guys help and out of the building. Meanwhile I had to deal with hundreds of flies in the hallway and getting into my apartment and 911 calls when one of the tenants started screaming in the hallway at 2 am. The apartments they left were a disaster and required extensive repairs costing the non profit that runs the building thousands. We do not need more of that.
It’s just a failure of logic for Bruce Harrell to say half the homeless folks have a disability and nearly half are using drugs, and a third have severe mental illness, and THEREFORE there is nothing we can do for any of them. Those three groups have a huge overlap. So maybe 30% of the homeless have none of those problems. Maybe half of those using drugs would respond well to a simple drug-rehab program and a secure place to sleep. We don’t know because we don’t have effective and coordinated outreach. We have no idea how many of the 16,000 homeless folks in King County are in the HMIS database that is supposed to keep track of them all. The mayor uses city resources to aggressively sweep homeless folks out of sight. The city is not doing an effective job, and the visible unhoused population is going to increase dramatically as winter sets in and federal dollars dry up. My (pretty educated) 2c.
P.S. Katie Wilson is right …
Politically exploiting a form of “soft” bigotry.
“Oh no, you misunderstand!” escape hatch.