By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced a new approach to unsheltered homelessness this week that builds on previous successful “encampment resolution” efforts that brought hundreds of unsheltered people into shelter that met their needs instead of simply sweeping them from place to place.

The new approach, announced at Community Solutions’ Built for Zero conference on Tuesday (and at a press conference at City Hall the following day) will change how the city does outreach to encampments and connects people to shelter. It depends—as Wilson emphasized several times during a press conference at City Hall on Wednesday—on the council fully funding her two-year, $37 million shelter plan, which would add around 960 new shelter beds, including a new, 90-unit RV “safe lot” where people living in RVs can park as they move into shelter and, eventually, housing.

Instead of brief outreach followed by sweeps, the city’s new approach is supposed to include targeted, neighborhood-based outreach that goes on for weeks, not days, and includes genuine connections to appropriate shelter and services, rather than a “referral” to whatever shelter happens to be available at the time of a sweep. Outreach workers will be assigned to specific neighborhoods (rather than council districts, which is how the current system works) and will work to create a “by-name list” of everyone in an area, getting to know people and their needs individually and working with them during and after they go to shelter and, ideally, from there into housing (more on that in a moment).

The shelter part is critical, proponents say, because outreach without shelter just moves people from place to place, traumatizing them repeatedly and angering housed residents who feel the city isn’t addressing visible homelessness.

“We’ve seen that neighborhood leaders, ambassadors, and outreach teams are great at identifying and case conferencing individuals who had high neighborhood impact, but we rarely, if ever, have access to the kind of shelter and services that we need to resolve their concerns out in the community,” REACH program Chloe Gale said Wednesday. “So we’re pleased that this will change through this plan.”

The city and state have used (or given lip service to using) a similar approach before, both during the pandemic and afterward, but the most successful recent effort came during last summer’s World Cup games, when Purpose Dignity Action, along with the Downtown Seattle Alliance and other groups, spent weeks doing outreach to a group of unsheltered people living in Pioneer Square and moved most of them into a newly opened high-acuity shelter in Interbay run by the nonprofit Everyone Deserves Housing. Of the group, 47 percent had been homeless for more than three years, and 77 percent had addiction or mental illness.

Speaking at the Built for Zero conference on Wednesday, Wilson said, “My predecessor’s administration moved extraordinary numbers of people from place to place, largely without meaningful offers of shelter or services. Those poor outcomes fostered cynicism, and I believe that we had to do better. And that’s why, when I stepped into the mayor’s office, my first priority was to build a lot more shelter fast, and not just any shelter, but shelter that can accommodate people who need intense support to get back from their feet.”

The citywide effort has support from the Downtown Seattle Association—a business group whose leader, Jon Scholes, also praised Wilson’s budget when she announced it in September. Echoing something homeless advocates have been saying in response to conservative complaints about homeless people for many yesrs, Scholes said Wednesday, “This idea that we have a lot of service resistant people in our city, I just think. is a myth, and it’s not a thing,” Scholes said. “ If f we offer the right service, if we understand who’s out there, if we don’t offer a one-size-fits-all, we can bring people inside instead of chasing them around the corner, down the block, or to the next park.” (As I was heading to the elevators, I passed by a bank of TV reporters shouting questions at Scholes, including one who asked whether would like to disavow that statement).

Wilson said she hoped the new approach would reduce the need for encampment sweeps, which she has continued to carry out at a similar or slightly higher rate than her predecessor Bruce Harrell. The vast majority of encampment removals are “obstruction” removals that require no prior notice or offers of shelter; if an encampment qualifies for outreach, the Unified Care Team, which conducts sweeps, will give 72 hours’ notice and offer whatever shelter beds are available to the people they’re displacing. This approach has not been generally successful at connecting people to shelter, services, or housing.

The biggest challenge facing of Wilson’s plan is the fact that permanent supportive housing development has fallen off a cliff and will likely lose federal funding beginning next year. Last month, a federal judge ruled that the US Department of Housing and Urban Development can move forward with a 2026 Notice of Funding Opportunity that prioritizes projects that require residents to get and stay sober, look for work, and move quickly to “self-sufficiency.” Permanent supportive housing is for people who can’t meet those requirements, including chronically homeless people with severe disabilities related to behavioral health conditions—exactly the group Wilson’s new shelter initiative is supposed to help.

Although Wilson said yesterday that the housing part of her plan will rely entirely on using “existing resources” more “efficiently,” the city does not have enough of this expensive, service-rich housing type to serve everyone who needs it. The bottleneck is there; if Wilson’s new plan gets people into shelter, the equally challenging stretch goal will be making sure they don’t just languish there.