Category: homelessness

Addiction, Elections, homelessness, King County

UPDATED: Initiative Would Criminalize Sleeping Outdoors in King County
From the website of the King County Quality of Life Coalition

By Erica C. Barnett

Editor’s note: This post has been updated with comments from initiative backer Saul Spady and reposted.

Saul Spady—Dick’s Burgers scion, anti-tax election activist (twice over), and KIRO radio fill-in host—has filed an initiative that would criminalize “unauthorized camping and storage of personal property” in unincorporated King County. The proposal, which Spady has dubbed “the Compassionate Public Safety Act,” would make sleeping outdoors or “storing” property in public a misdemeanor; similar to the total sleeping ban in Burien, the initiative would give police power to arrest people who fall asleep in public.

The ballot language, approved by the King County Prosecutor’s Office, says the measure “would not be enforced when overnight shelter is unavailable,” then lists exceptions to that rule that would allow police to make arrests if they determine the person sleeping “poses a substantial danger to any person, an immediate threat and/or risk of harm to public health or safety, or a disruption to vital government services.”

“I think camping bans are part of promoting better policy, which is a commitment to saying, in our community, we would much rather you go to shelter or rehab or housing,” Spady told PubliCola on Wednesday. “This is supposed to put the fire underneath [elected officials] to open those shelter beds and partner with [groups like] LEAD or The More We Love or Mary’s Place to create a more direct solution.”

The carveouts in the proposed ballot measure are similar to the exemptions included in Seattle’s official policy on encampments, which guarantees unsheltered people 72 hours’ notice before a sweep unless they or their belongings constitute an “immediate hazard or obstruction.”

For years, the city has interpreted that exemption very broadly to allow sweeps of tents in public spaces, including parks, sidewalks, and planting strips—basically, anywhere housed people might complain about the presence of homeless people.

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In a press release announcing the initiative and the creation of a new group called the Quality of Life Coalition earlier this month, initiative supporter and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic said, “As an avowed independent and music fan, I know the world is coming to Seattle looking for the soul of our music scene and quite often they find graffiti, addiction and in-action [sic]. … [This is the first step toward making King County safe, livable, and worthy of our incredible cultural legacy I’m proud to be a part of.”

The Quality of Life Coalition also plans to propose an initiative that would force anyone who “commits three crimes linked to addiction, such as OD’ing, theft, or public drug use” (note: overdosing is not a crime) into mandatory six-month rehab, and one that would impose mandatory five-year jail sentences for any drug dealer who “is not an addict.”

Although Spady said service providers have told him there are more than enough available shelter beds for everyone experiencing homelessness in unincorporated King County, he added that the coalition’s long-term plans include “adding 2,500 short-term beds across the region.”

Spady acknowledged that it’s hard to discern which people selling drugs are addicts, versus “somebody who’s sober doing something that kills people,” but noted that a mandatory five-year minimum sentence for dealing drugs is less than the 10-year minimum proposed by the Trump administration.

Asked about the probably astronomical cost of funding mandatory long-term residential treatment for every person who overdoses or commits addiction-related misdemeanors three time, Spady argued that addiction, crime, and the cost to send firefighters to reverse overdoses create “costs to society that are spiraling. If you want the [reason] why I’m doing this, my fear is that Seattle is a lot closer to Detroit in the 80s and 90s than we think, and our  magic economic spaceship that never runs out of money could break.”

The ideas Spady is proposing—three-strikes laws for overdoses, punishing public drug use through what amounts to involuntary commitment—may seem out of step with King County values. But they aren’t much different from the policy City Attorney Ann Davison endorsed toward drug users last year, saying that anyone who overdoses three times should be arrested and thrown in jail.

Spady’s group is collecting signatures now. They’ll need around 6,800 valid signatures to get the measure on a future ballot.

Addiction, Elections, homelessness

Initiative Would Criminalize Sleeping Outdoors in King County
From the website of the King County Quality of Life Coalition

By Erica C. Barnett

Saul Spady—Dick’s Burgers scion, anti-tax election activist (twice over), and KIRO radio fill-in host—has filed an initiative that would criminalize “unauthorized camping and storage of personal property” in unincorporated King County. The proposal, which Spady has dubbed “the Compassionate Public Safety Act,” would make sleeping outdoors or “storing” property in public a misdemeanor; modeled after a similar total sleeping ban in Burien, the initiative would give police power to arrest people who fall asleep in public.

The ballot language, approved by the King County Prosecutor’s Office, says the measure “would not be enforced when overnight shelter is unavailable,” then lists exceptions to that rule that would allow police to make arrests if they determine the person sleeping “poses a substantial danger to any person, an immediate threat and/or risk of harm to public health or safety, or a disruption to vital government services.”

These carveouts are similar to the exemptions included in Seattle’s official policy on encampments, which guarantees unsheltered people 72 hours’ notice before a sweep unless they or their belongings constitute an “immediate hazard or obstruction.” For years, the city has interpreted that exemption very broadly to allow sweeps of tents in public spaces, including parks, sidewalks, and planting strips—basically, anywhere housed people might complain about the presence of homeless people.

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Spady did not respond to a request for an interview. In a press release announcing the initiative and the creation of a new group called the Quality of Life Coalition earlier this month, initiative supporter and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic said, “As an avowed independent and music fan, I know the world is coming to Seattle looking for the soul of our music scene and quite often they find graffiti, addiction and in-action [sic]. … [This is the first step toward making King County safe, livable, and worthy of our incredible cultural legacy I’m proud to be a part of.”

The Quality of Life Coalition also plans to propose an initiative that would force anyone who “commits three crimes linked to addiction, such as OD’ing, theft, or public drug use” (note: overdosing is not a crime) into mandatory six-month rehab, and one that would impose mandatory five-year jail sentences for any drug dealer who “is not an addict.”

Sounds nuts to you, maybe, even logistically impossible—how are dealers supposed to prove they’re addicted, exactly, and how would King County jails handle the influx of low-level dealers who’d get swept up in such a law? But it’s not much different from the policy City Attorney Ann Davison endorsed toward drug users last year, saying that anyone who overdoses three times should be arrested and thrown in jail. Spady’s group is collecting signatures now.

Addiction, homelessness, podcasts, Trump

Seattle Nice: Is Trump’s Executive Order the End of Housing First?

By Erica C. Barnett

Freaked out about the Trump Administration’s latest executive order, which calls for “ending crime and disorder on America’s streets” by ending Housing First, arresting people with addiction and mental illness, and punishing people for sleeping outside?

Our guest on Seattle Nice this week, Lisa Daugaard, says people should read past the scary headlines and the tough-guy hyperbole of Trump’s press release and look at what the executive order actually does. Daugaard, the co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action (formerly the Public Defender Association), is a longtime proponent of housing first—the theory that stable housing is a prerequisite for long-lasting recovery. After reading the order, she told us she believes it was written by people who knew what they were doing.

For one thing, the order doesn’t explicitly call for defunding anything, except (entirely theoretical—that is, nonexistent) federally funded programs whose purpose is “only [to] facilitate illegal drug use and its attendant harm.” Although the order does call for more civil commitment, it doesn’t change the law in places like Washington State, which already has laws allowing involuntary commitment in some circumstances. In some circumstances, Daugaard said, the order holds out the possibility of more funding for evidence-based programs.

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“They’re certainly trying to accomplish some turning of the ship, and I think in most respects … this is not terribly problematic, if maybe not problematic at all, and maybe holds out the prospect of increased resources in areas where we really need those,” Daugaard said. “So I think in general, people are responding to the politics and not to the language of the actual order, and that that’s understandable, but maybe not wise.”

I pushed back a bit on Daugaard’s apparent optimism—which, to be clear, does not apply to the entire Trump Administration and its policy apparatus—noting that even if smart people who care about health and human services wrote it with the intention of making it as harmless as possible, the Trump Administration is unpredictable and has a history of not following the law. Sandeep added that right-wing activists are already portraying the order as a devastating loss for “the homelessness industrial complex.”

Daugaard said left-leaning activists and leaders shouldn’t take the bait. “We need to define ourselves as largely aligned with the values that this order enunciates and lower the temperature by saying that’s the [what the order calls for is] the work we want to do,” she said. “We don’t want to leave people camping in public. We don’t want to foster lifelong drug use with a low ceiling on people’s recovery capacity. And we need additional resources to make that a reality.”

City Council, Drugs, Elections, homelessness

John Wilson Drops Out of Race He was On Track to Lose, We Heart Seattle Lashes Out Against Harm Reduction

1. King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson, who was arrested last week outside his former partner Lee Keller’s home for allegedly stalking and harassing her, ended his campaign for King County Executive yesterday, announcing the decision on Facebook.

Every single member of the King County Council, including the two frontrunners in the county executive race, Girmay Zahilay and Claudia Balducci, has called on Wilson to not just drop out of the race but to step down from his current elected position, which he will hold until next year unless there’s a successful recall campaign.

In his Facebook post, Wilson said he was dropping out because “personal matters have drawn attention away from critical issues” in the campaign. “I’m grateful for the support I’ve received and look forward to continuing to serve the residents of King County in my role as Assessor.”

Wilson, who was running as a law-and-order candidate, wasn’t likely to beat either of his better-known and better-funded opponents in the primary, so dropping out of the race with just a few weeks left was a largely symbolic act.

Wilson has been prolific on Facebook both before and after his arrest, posting subtle digs at Keller and writing darkly about enemies who are purportedly trying to take him down. In June, Wilson posted a photo he took with Keller during a brief reconciliation in May. “Shown recently to a member of the news media, the reporter said Ms. Keller looked happy and not at all afraid” in the photo, Wilson wrote. “As you can see from the photograph, Ms. Keller took the picture at 3:15 PM that afternoon.”

Keller has a protection order against Wilson barring him from contacting or coming within 1,000 feet of her. Earlier this week, the Snohomish County Prosecutor declined to immediately file criminal charges against him; a civil case, in which Wilson is seeking the termination of Keller’s protection order, is still moving forward.

2. During a council committee meeting to discuss a proposal from Council President Sara Nelson that would dedicate up to 25 percent of a forthcoming public safety sales tax to addiction treatment, We Heart Seattle founder Andrea Suarez showed up for public comment armed with what she described as “methamphetamine pipes and foil that are handed out” to drug users in Belltown, along with a rubber strip she described as a tourniquet for drug injection. “We have to stop handing out tourniquets and pipes and foil and cookers,” Suarez said.

Handing out safer smoking supplies is a form of harm reduction for drug users, who might otherwise use pipes contaminated with infectious fluids or unknown drugs or sustain burns from thin grocery store aluminum foil, among other risks. Opponents of these measures, like Suarez, say they enable people to keep using drugs.

Suarez, who stood behind Nelson at the press launch for her proposal last week, lashed out at two of the organizations that were about to discuss their work and take questions from the committee. We Heart Seattle is an anti-harm reduction advocacy group that “cleans up” occupied homeless encampments and directs people to abstinence-based treatment programs, including a high-barrier program in Oregon that kicks people out if they relapse.

Zeroing in on Purpose Dignity Action (co-directed by Lisa Daugaard) and the Downtown Emergency Service Center (headed up by Daniel Malone), Suarez said, “I ask my colleagues to stop [distributing smoking supplies] within your low-barrier housing. It’s not working, and I don’t hate the player. I hate the game. I hate that you have a fentanyl smoking shack in the back of your hotel, Lisa.” (The PDA has what amounts to a safe smoking site outside one of its residential buildings). “I respect you, the person, the colleague, but I can’t get behind that.”

“I toured the Canady House at DESC—the carpets are pitch black, rats, rodents, bugs,” Suarez claimed. The Canady House is a 15-year-old permanent supportive housing building that has been the target of regular outrage from right-wing personalities and activist groups like the Discovery Institute.

Daugaard won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2019 for creating the successful LEAD diversion program, which has been replicated all over the US. DESC provides housing, shelter, and health care to homeless Seattle residents with complex physical and behavioral health care needs that make them effectively ineligible for other types of housing; they’ve won numerous national awards over their many years in Seattle, including several for their low-barrier “wet” housing on Eastlake.

During the presentation, Daugaard brought up the fact that the legislation says “up to” 25 percent of the proposed 0.1-cent sales tax increase could go to treatment. If the legislation was tweaked to say “at least,” Daugaard said, that would set a floor, rather than a ceiling. Nelson later said she heard a similar idea on a recent episode Seattle Nice, where both Sandeep and I agreed that it would be great to see 100 percent of the public safety sales tax go to behavioral health care.

City Council, homelessness, Women

The More We Love Launches Six-Month “High Accountability” Out-of-Town Shelter for Commercially Exploited Women
The More We Love founder Kristine Moreland at a panel hosted by former city councilmember Cathy Moore’s committee last month.

By Erica C. Barnett

The More We Love, a group that began as a private homeless encampment sweep contractor, just finalized its contract with the city to provide 10 shelter beds for the rest of the year, at a cost of around $600,000, to women seeking to leave the sex trade on Aurora Ave. N. The organization already operates a 20-bed shelter for sexually exploited women and their children in Renton, and plans to add 10 new “non-congregate” shelter spots, which appear to consist of rooms at a hotel that also serves the general public.

During a Seattle City council meeting last month, the group’s founder, Kristine Moreland, brought several of her clients to provide sometimes graphic testimony about their experiences as victims of commercial sexual exploitation. Stories like theirs appear to have swayed former (as of today) city councilmember Cathy Moore to direct up to $1 million in city funding to the group earlier this year, forestalling a competitive bidding process that was already underway.

The contract contains a number of provisions and deliverables that are unusual for a city human services contract.

For example, it says The More We Love’s program is “intentionally low barrier to enter and has high accountability to stay.” What this means, according to the contract, is that women with substance use disorders “are asked to commit to a pathway towards recovery to stay in the shelter unit” after what the contract calls a 72-hour “recharge” phase. The maximum stay is 30 days.

“TMWL’s pathway to recovery is connecting the survivor to the appropriate detox/treatment facility, supporting them in the programming that will best fit their needs, and supporting with after care such as TMWL’s recovery housing units,” the contract says. “If survivors are not able to commit to the program, TMWL will work with them to find next steps after exiting the emergency shelter.”

 

Requiring commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) survivors to commit to sobriety as a condition of shelter for themselves and their children is not considered a best practice by experts on gender-based violence. “This approach has already been asked and answered as not effective to the realities of substance use and healing from long term trauma,” Amarinthia Torres, the co-director of the Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence, said.

The city’s contract with the only other organization it funds to provide shelter beds to women leaving sex work, Real Escape from the Sex Trade, describes REST’s program as low-barrier and does not include any “accountability” requirements for participants.

Peter Anderson, The More We Love’s chief operating officer, told PubliCola the term “high accountability” means that “we walk alongside women to support their goals, address behaviors that jeopardize their safety or the safety of others, and create environments conducive to recovery and transformation. No woman is ever ‘kicked out’ for relapse. We meet each individual where they are, while ensuring that program safety standards are upheld for all participants.”

The contract goals include 180 referrals to The More We Love’s shelter and 105 successful enrollments over six months, which works out to 30 referrals and 17 placements in The More We Love’s 10 new beds every month—a swift turnover rate, even with the 30-day maximum stay.

A third and final goal is for all 105 of those women to “report increased safety, agency, dignity, belonging.” It’s unclear whether or how the city plans to verify that The More We Love has achieved this vague program goal.

In the contract, The More We Love says the group’s “ability to merge the public and private sectors to meet the full scope of need makes its program unique. TMWL works closely with the Seattle Police Department (SPD) and regional service partners, like Organization for Prostitution Survivors (OPS), to receive referrals to the emergency shelter, while leveraging a strong network of community volunteers and faith-based supporters to provide relational care beyond what most programs can offer.”

A representative from OPS said that contrary to what the contract implies, the group has no formal partnership with The More We Love, although they have occasionally referred women to their shelter on a one-off, strictly “informal” basis.

It’s unclear how The More We Love recruits its “community volunteers and faith-based supporters” or how these individuals are trained to provide “relational care.” The city requires all volunteers for contractors that work with CSE survivors to complete 20 hours of training prior to volunteering.

The six-month contract includes $23,000 in “automotive” expenses, on top of $5,782 for “client transportation.” Asked if The More We Love is using the $23,000 to buy a car, Anderson said, “The automotive budget line covers transportation-related expenses, which may include maintenance, mileage reimbursements, other transportation arrangements, or the acquisition of an additional program vehicle to safely transport women and their children to critical appointments and services.”

In comparison, REST’s contract for 2025 includes transportation costs of $786.

The More We Love’s six-month contract also includes $272,000 for salaries and benefits, along with $10,000 for “consultant services.” Client assistance—flexible funds that can be used to help women and their children with expenses, including rent assistance, clothing, job training, child care, and anything else that helps promote self-determination—amounts to $20,000 over the life of the contract. “24/7 onsite security” will cost another $34,000.

City Council, Elections, homelessness, King County, Mayor Harrell, Taxes

This Week on PubliCola: July 5, 2025

King County assessor jailed, new public safety sales tax could pay for treatment, and a longtime youth homelessness provider is in tumult.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, June 30

Head of Downtown Business Group Lobbied for Digital Kiosk Company; Education Levy Will Help Backfill City’s Budget Deficit

Sung Yang, the board president for the Downtown Seattle Association, is also a registered lobbyist for IKE Smart City, the company that just brokered a deal to install digital ad kiosks that will benefit the DSA financially throughout downtown Seattle. And: The city’s families and education levy is supposed to fund preschool and other additive education improvements, but this year’s will also fund programs previously paid for out of the city’s general fund.

Seattle Nice: What’s Behind the Proposed New Business Tax?

On this week’s podcast, Sandeep and I discuss the proposed ballot measure to increase business and occupation taxes for the highest-grossing businesses—why it’s happening, why it’s happening now, and what it could mean for this year’s elections.

Tuesday, July 1

Local Public Safety Sales Tax Increase Could Include Some Treatment Funding (In Addition to Cops)

City Council President Sara Nelson, anticipating Mayor Bruce Harrell’s introduction of a 0.1-cent sales tax increase for public safety, is proposing that up to 25 percent of the new tax go to addiction treatment; precisely what kind of treatment the tax would fund remains up in the air.

Thursday, July 3

County Assessor Wilson Jailed on Allegations of Stalking, Violating Protection Order

After PubliCola broke the news that county assessor and King County executive candidate John Arthur Wilson had been jailed for stalking his ex-partner, Lee Keller, at her home, we updated this post to include details from Wilson’s bail hearing at the downtown jail, at which Keller spoke about her fear that Wilson would continue to violate her no-contact order against him.

Campaign Fizz: Mallahan Says He Voted GOP in Hopes of Hurting Trump, Sawant Proposes “Battering Ram” Free Health Care Initiative

Accused of voting Republican by the Harrell campaign, mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan first said the accusation was false, then recalled that, actually, he did vote for Tulsi Gabbard in the 2024 primary. And former councilmember (and current Congressional candidate) Kshama Sawant registered a campaign for a local health care initiative her political party has described as a “battering ram” to push nationwide universal Medicaid.

Amid a Long-Brewing Financial Crisis, Homeless Service Provider YouthCare Shuts Down Services, Fires Executive Director

YouthCare, the 50-year-old nonprofit dedicated to ending youth homelessness, has taken drastic actions in recent months to address a financial crisis—laying off a quarter of its staff and closing or consolidating standalone shelter and housing programs. Former staff critical of the agency worry that Youthcare is focusing too much on a future workforce-training hub, the Constellation Center, and not enough on its core mission.