by Josh Feit
More Sweeps ≠ Less Homelessness
During last week’s city council budget hearings, Ballard council member Dan Strauss channelled a business owner in his district to give a speech criticizing Mayor Wilson. There’s an encampment in front of the business, Strauss said, leading to this dais grandstand: “We have seen in this last year, since last October, a complete change in the city and how effectively the city is addressing homelessness.”
He continued: “I have a business in downtown Ballard that had an encampment in front of their business last October and .. it wasn’t moved until, I believe, March. And that person reported to me that they have had an encampment on one of the four blocks around their business—and it’s a small block—270 days out of the last 365 days.” This demonstrated, Strauss said, that “just the ability to interact with and work with people has changed from a three-week cycle to a three-plus-month cycle”.
What Strauss’ (and his constituent’s) sidewalk tent example actually shows is not that we need more sweeps, but the opposite: Sweeps don’t work. They simply push homeless people around the city. Logically enough, in the context of an ongoing, active sweeps campaign, an encampment has now landed on this particular doorstep. Sweeping the people living in that encampment to another part of Ballard just means that a different business will eventually end up in Strauss’ ear.
Consider: Wilson is actually doing more sweeps than her tough-love predecessor, Bruce Harrell. According to the UCT’s own records, they’ve done more than 150 full encampment removals this year, compared to 112 by this point in Harrell’s term. According to the UCT’s “site journals,” the team rarely connects encampment residents to shelter.
Complaining about a homeless encampment in front of a business as an argument for more sweeps—when the people at that encampment were likely swept there in the first place—reminds me of the illogical days when neighbors argued against upzones on the grounds that they would make housing more expensive even as housing prices were skyrocketing under the strict Seattle zoning that prevented building more housing.
Seattle Home Listings Increase > Home Listings Increase in All Other Metro Areas
This brings me to the post-single-family-zoning-only Seattle housing market. According to Zillow data for September 2026, Seattle has the biggest percentage increase in home listings for US metro areas. Seattle’s current 14,877 listing represented a 20.3% increase from September 2025.
With housing prices dropping 1.1% month over month and 2.2% year over year, Seattle is a buyer’s market right now.
Rents, by the way, dropped .2% in September and ticked up only minimally, and far below inflation, at 1.8% year over year with typical rent at $2,250.
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Cutting $950,000 is Not a Good Look
As I’ve noted before in this column, I’m frustrated with Mayor Wilson’s approach to reviving Seattle’s business climate. Following the recommendations of a report her Office of Economic Development commissioned, the mayor seems focused on prompting more tech-adjacent startups as opposed to girding existing small businesses. The thinking goes that tech businesses have a disproportionately positive impact on jobs and the local economy. But my thinking is that indie businesses, just like childcare and affordable housing, are prerequisites for economic growth. Indie small businesses, for example, bring the crowds and lines that make cities vibrant. Lines around the block at clubs are a public policy win for a city.
I’ve been asking managers at bars and shops lately what the city could do for them right now. One thing I’m consistently hearing has to do with the costs of repairs and infrastructure upgrades—how those costs, often related to city inspections, can be debilitating. One manager, who recently oversaw the closure of a longtime North Seattle business (and still manages a couple more across the city), gave a specific example about graffiti, reporting that the cost of repeatedly cleaning up the graffiti —as the city requires—became onerous for the neighborhood bar that closed.
I’m not convinced graffiti cleanup could sink a healthy business, nor do I think the city’s fixation on graffiti —particularly under Mayor Harrell, who actually funded anti-graffiti education for kids—is discerning policy. But I took this bar manager’s request for city support in earnest—and, lo and behold, it turns out Wilson’s budget cuts $950,000 for a program that helps private business owners clean up graffiti on their buildings.
As a council Central Staff memo put it, “The proposed budget would not continue funding for these services and [Seattle Parks & Recreation’s] ability to offer private property owners graffiti abatement services would be significantly impacted.”
I tend to filter the business-lens on local politics with skepticism, but as a Wilson fan I must say, when the bad-mood example from a bar manager tracks so succinctly with Wilson’s new budget, the mayor’s got a problem. I’m not saying reinstating a graffiti cleanup contract is the answer. I’m saying Wilson’s angle on what’s ailing Seattle’s economy has the wrong emphasis.
Josh@PubliCola.com
If you view a city like Seattle as a labor market, it has failed at the first job of one: housing the people who work in it. “We wanted workers…we got people instead,” as we are often reminded. No one seems to learn from the repeated reminders.
Wages here are among the highest in the country. Yet the 2026 King County count found 11,829 people living unsheltered, up 4,771 in two years, while the sheltered count fell by 3,274 as beds disappeared (KCRHA). The 2024 survey found about 60% of respondents were last stably housed in King County, so most of this is us, not an invasion. There is no Great Migration of unhoused people trekking to “Freeattle” for a welcome bag of weed or whatever right wing radio is claiming this week. And 45% cited job loss as the cause. You don’t have to look hard to find first hand accounts of how people in RVs or tents would live to get out if they could.
Buildable land is available. Look at the two most valuable sites in the middle of the labor market:
Every one of these parcel numbers is in the county’s public records. Both sit next to the offices, transit and jobs that justify those wages, and both stay empty because waiting is cheaper than building.
We don’t have a worker shortage or a land shortage. We have a land-holding/speculation problem, and a tax and contract system that rewards patience. But go ahead and punch down at your neighbors who lost their job or their apartment. It’s easier than trying understand how they ended up where they are.
I’m getting sick and tired of the term “vulnerable” that is thrown around so freely, always describing the individuals who have chosen to live in tents rather than anyone else.
How about the aforementioned business and home owners who are “vulnerable” if they don’t have expensive contract security, or a fucking Fort Knox-quality security system installed? Because that’s exactly the case with the petty crime, break-ins, alley prowling, package theft, exposure to drug dealing and trafficking, etc. that perpetually trickles down from the encampments the mayor is failing to address.
And as per usual, sweeps is the red herring that is mentioned over and over and over. No one gives a shit about sweeps, other than the Homeless, Inc. city contractors that are kept employed actually doing the sweeps. They’ll be happy sweeping around from now until 2060 if the city (you and I) keeps paying them to do it. What citizens and neighbors want is LONG TERM SOLUTIONS, and that’s where Wilson is failing miserably.
Yeah, who cares, right? “Vulnerable,” ugh! All weakness should be crushed, right Bill??? /sarc
Josh,
You’re the first reporter to have the courage to take on this issue of the futility of sweeps. My organization Ballard Community Taskforce on Homelessness and Hunger has collected years of data that sweeps, while destroying the lives of our most vulnerable neighbors, do nothing to get get homeless people off the streets and onto a pathway towards housing, indeed these disruptive activities do the opposite.
“Destroying the lives” is a little excessive wouldn’t you say?
But if you want to use that term, it is the residents and business owners who’s lives are being “destroyed” by these permanent (until swept) encampments.
Keep on sweeping is what I say. Some of them will leave town eventually.
The city’s own data show that Mayor Wilson is offering shelter only 7% of the time she sweeps a camp. In other words, she is failing to offer an alternative 93% of the time she sweeps. This is beyond disappointing.
5
Here’s the thing about sweeps: The shelters report their bed-occupancy, and it’s always around 95%. The shelters are fully filled all the time. What a surprise. What they should report is the number of people who moved out of the shelters (6271 beds in the county) and into permanent housing, each month. If that number is very low, then the number of new homeless people getting into shelter will be the same, and the number of beds they have to offer during sweeps, each month, will be the same. It’s a pipeline. The sweeps almost always move zero people into shelter. Maybe sometimes they have 2-3 beds to offer, and then they sweep out 20 or 30 people. In Ballard, at least, they just move down the street in front of BevMo, and 4 weeks later, they move up a few blocks to that funky corner at Leary and 48th and 17th. Back and forth, the same people, the same locations, for several years now. How is that helping anyone? Let’s start being honest about what we’re doing (looking at you, Dan Strauss).
Maybe we should not call moving homeless people out of an area a “sweep” and just call it a “community cleanup” instead? It’s a chance to pick up all the dangerous and disgusting trash that builds up around any camp. Of course the great unwashed will just wander off to a new location and start a new camp/toxic waste dump and the cycle goes on all over again. I’m not sure what people think the City’s response should be? Let the garbage pile up 6 feet deep?
I’m not a hater, but people who are so out of their minds they’d live in a tent next to a pile of trash are not a very easy group to help. Then there’s the problem of money. Seattle is short on cash for a lot of things.
I think Mayor Katie is nice person and *might* even want to really help the homeless, but she has zero resources to do so. She’s no different than all the other mayors since Mayor Tim Rice. All of them made a whole lot of promises about homelessness and none of them had the resources to deliver.
I’d like to interject the words of commenter Quintet from the interview from October 21:
PubliCola Questions: District 5 City Council Candidate Nilu Jenks
“I want politicians who will deal with symptoms and leave root causes to some pie-in-the-sky dream.”
What you suggest simply moves the homeless from one place to another. “Community cleanup” for one set of neighbors, and community trashing for another. Maybe you see this as a solution, maybe not. Maybe you aren’t up to date with the cutting edge thinking on this issue (like Quintet, dealing with symptoms should be prioritized and root causes ignored), or maybe you agree with it.
The fact is, whether you believe abject poverty and even homelessness is a personal choice, or simply don’t care and just want the homeless to be removed from your personal line of sight, the problem doesn’t change, and (here’s the catch for said solipsists) the homeless might land right back on your front door.
So you can shout, “there’s no money,” when of course there is when it comes to paying salaries of non-existent police officers, removing privacy rights by funding mass surveillance, and repeatedly trying to toss money at clear boondoggles such as ShotSpotter. It’s obvious there’s as much money for sweeps (or, sweeping homelessness under the rug) as you want, but none to fix the root problems.
In other words, I find your excuses for only wanting to deal with symptoms underwhelming. I don’t see why anyone who only wants to deal with solutions should be taken seriously. Are actual solutions really that threatening?
I’m puzzled by your phrase “indie businesses, just like childcare and affordable housing…”. What businesses are capable of building affordable housing? Affordable housing is inherently impossible to be built because of a host of factors. Sure they might have the technical capability, but the economics are impossible. What are you referring to?
Nevertheless, I agree with you that the Mayor is on the wrong track to be focusing on supporting tech startups… The best way for this City to support economic growth is to do a good job of the nuts and bolts of government such of public safety and transportation, parks and libraries etc etc.
Do less but better.
He’s saying that indie businesses are a form of social fabric or infrastructure that a healthy city has, like adequate childcare and affordable are necessary infrastructure.
Sorry. Thanks, I just didn’t understand the syntax.
But now the phrase is even worse ….as if “indies” are an actual real function like childcare and housing.
Oh well, we’ll have a right-wing authoritarian state due to the naïve progressive left refusal to deal with reality… perfect example is “indies” being a real social function.
“Oh well, we’ll have a right-wing authoritarian state due to the naïve progressive left refusal to deal with reality”
Ha! Here is you on today’s thread:
“I want politicians who will deal with symptoms and leave root causes to some pie-in-the-sky dream.”
Ha! No matter your vomiting of irrational drivel. The reason we have right-wing authoritarians is because of “moderates” who prefer them. You can blame your choices on others, but you have already displayed how contradictory and irrational you are.
It’s just too funny. What a chump you are! You want a police state now, police state forever, and it’s somebody else’s fault!