Tag: Downtown Seattle

Addiction, City Council, Drugs, housing, human services

Auditor: City Needs to Implement Smarter Strategies to Reduce Overdoses and Drug-Related Crime

By Erica C. Barnett

The City Auditor’s Office released a report on Tuesday calling for an “place-based problem-solving approach” to addressing overdoses and drug-related crime, basing its recommendations on local and national research as well as a case study focused on two blocks of Third Avenue between Blanchard and Virginia Streets, where there were 11 fatal overdoses, ten of them in or outside of the three permanent supportive housing buildings in the area.

This section of Third, according to the audit report, had the fourth-highest concentration of overdoses and “crime incidents” in the city; the top ten spots on this list are all in or around downtown, encompassing much of Third Avenue along with hot spots just outside downtown, including 12th and Jackson in the International District, around Harborview hospital on First Hill, and in the area around Pike and Broadway on Capitol Hill.

A “place-based” approach to overdoses and street crimes, according to the report, would include making the areas where drug use and illegal street vendors concentrate more appealing to people using the streets for other purposes— essentially dispersing drug activity and improving overall street safety by activating the sidewalks. For instance, the report identifies opening up sight lines in areas that are currently blocked by construction scaffolding and low-growing shrubs, opening up storefronts that are currently vacant to increase “natural guardianship,” and making other changes that are specific to conditions at specific locations, such as eliminating back-in angled parking on Blanchard Street.

City Council Public Safety Committee chair Bob Kettle put out a statement in response to the audit, saying it showed the need for “additional meaningful action that includes a coordinated effort to address permissive factors at the intersection of public safety and public health.” However, few of the recommendations explicitly involve police or a crackdown on the “permissive environment” Kettle often cites as a reason for crime. (The report does recommend that that Seattle police start investigating fatal overdoses, and says King County transit police should “increase patrol checks of bus stops and shelters” and enforce the Metro code of conduct.)

Instead, the audit points to the community-based project Rainier Beach: A Beautiful Safe Place for Youth, which used a framework developed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) to identify non-arrest interventions to address youth crime and victimization in Rainier Beach. Although the project wasn’t connected to an immediate reduction in crime, a followup report found that it “significantly improved community members’ perceptions of serious crime and the police in the short and medium term” and suggested that “even communities with entrenched crime problems can leverage this capacity to reduce crime in the longer term.”

The report also emphasized the need for “evidence-based” approaches to drug use, including medications like naltrexone and methadone that help people reduce or eliminate their opiate use, “wraparound human services,” recovery housing, and harm reduction for people who continue using drugs.

Although Councilmember Sara Nelson, in a letter responding to the audit, wrote that the rise in fatal overdoses “reveal[s] the limitations of relying on our current harm reduction approach to address a drug that is so cheap, ubiquitous, and deadly,” the report actually endorses harm reduction strategies like needle exchanges and naloxone distribution, and calls harm reduction “an essential component of overdose prevention framework.”

The report does note that housing is not a panacea for preventing overdoses, which happen indoors as well as on the street. In 2023, 279 people in subsidized, permanent supportive, or abstinence-based recovery housing died from overdoses in Seattle. “Although housing is essential for addressing homelessness, new research suggests that housing alone does not sufficiently address overdose risk,” the report notes

Nelson, a proponent of abstinence-only treatment, said this finding shows that the city should consider “modifying our current low-barrier, housing first model for city-funded affordable housing projects.”

However, the research the auditor’s report cites did not call for erecting barriers to housing or adopting a “treatment first” model that requires people to get sober before they “qualify” for housing and stay sober if they want to keep it—quite the opposite.

In fact, the author of the forthcoming study has written that existing research suggests the need for both low-barrier housing and “co-location of safe consumption sites, on-site provision of harm-reduction supplies, and expansion of peer workers” at permanent supportive housing sites. The study itself aims to confirm that it’s possible to implement “gold-standard” strategies like harm reduction in permanent supportive housing, not test whether these strategies are worth pursuing.

The study involves implementing three evidence-based strategies—overdose response, harm reduction, and support for substance use disorder treatment—in 20 existing permanent supportive housing buildings in New York.

Addiction, Drugs, homelessness, Mayor Harrell

Downtown Recovery Center Will Give Drug Users New Options After an Overdose

By Erica C. Barnett

The Downtown Emergency Service Center will open Seattle’s first post-overdose recovery center at its headquarters at the historica Morrison Hotel building in Pioneer Square next year. The Overdose Response and Care Access (ORCA) Center, part of a larger new behavioral health clinic, will be a dedicated space for drug users to stabilize, rest, and access voluntary treatment, including long-acting medication, after experiencing a nonfatal overdose.

Currently, when emergency workers revive someone experiencing an overdose in downtown Seattle, their options are basically: Transport the person to Harborview Medical Center or let them go. Those who walk away from an overdose typically seek out more drugs to counteract the effect of overdose reversal drugs like Narcan, which can send users into a state of painful, intense withdrawal.

The ORCA Center offers a third option for emergency workers to take people immediately after an overdose—”breaking the cycle of repeated overdoses” as Mayor Bruce Harrell put it Thursday, “by stopping painful withdrawal symptoms [so] people [can] find a pathway to recovery and support.” Admission to the ORCA Center will be voluntary, as going to the hospital after an overdose is today.

Thursday’s announcement took place in the second-floor area that will house the recovery center, which looks out on Third Avenue through large, semicircular windows. For decades, this floor housed a large, crowded shelter, along with day rooms and a clinic (and, at one time, an enclosed indoor smoking area). Today, the space is a hollowed-out construction zone, with two rows of metal lockers the only visual reminder of the building’s former purpose. Rooms that once held dozens of metal bunk beds are stripped to the studs, with cords hanging from the ceiling, and the floors have been stripped to their bare plywood bases.

PubliCola first reported on DESC’s plans last summer, after Harrell announced he would use $7 million in unspent federal funds to “provide care and treatment services for substance use disorders” in Seattle. DESC will receive $5.65 million of that total to help build out the new $12 million facility, which will also be funded through state and county grants and private donations. The remaining $1.35 million will go to Evergreen Treatment Services, which is building out a new campus on Airport Way.

Recent floods forced ETS to reimagine the facility, which will now include a “fire station-style” building to house its mobile units, which provide methadone treatment to hundreds of clients in downtown Seattle. ETS will also receive another $1 million from the city to add another unit to its mobile-clinic fleet, which ETS director Steve Woolworth described as another important part of the continuum of care for people with opioid use disorder.

Methadone is a highly effective treatment, but federal law requires patients to travel to a physical clinic to get doses until they “earn” take-home doses—a hurdle to recovery that’s even more daunting for people who lack a stable place to live. “Expecting folks who are living unsheltered… to come to a fixed location can’t be the only strategy we’re investing in to address community health,” Woolworth said. “And so what you’ll see from us will be a much more adaptive, flexible and mobile approach to taking medication out to where people are.”

The new recovery center won’t be a shelter, although it will have places for people to sleep. Legislation that established new licenses for 23-hour crisis clinics in 2023 stipulated that these clinics are supposed to offer “recliner chairs,” rather than beds, which is one way these clinics are distinct from hospitals or shelters. But, Malone noted, “true stability” will require places for people to live on a more permanent basis. Continue reading “Downtown Recovery Center Will Give Drug Users New Options After an Overdose” →

Density, Development, Environment, Maybe Metropolis, Transportation

It’s Time for an Urban “Discover Pass”

By Josh Feit

Urban Seattle is an offset for the rest of King County.

People who choose suburban lifestyles may frown at Seattle’s density, but their roomy yards, loping streets, and low density, which creates a disproportionate, negative impact on our region’s  infrastructure, is only possible thanks to the density they scorn. Dense neighborhoods like downtown Seattle, Capitol Hill, Chinatown, and the Fremont, Ballard, and University District cores are keeping our region sustainable.

When urban dwellers make transit-oriented, low-impact housing choices, the adjacent suburban areas such as sprawling Bellevue, isolated Bainbridge Island—and yes, Seattle neighborhoods like Laurelhurst—reap the environmental benefits. These suburbs and low-density neighborhoods would be irresponsibly unsustainable without the jumbles of urban Seattle that give our shared ecosystem a slight breather.

Apparently, our lawn-locked neighbors aren’t just passively benefitting from our green choices. They’re also dropping by a lot to take advantage of density’s perks. Judging by Seattle Department of Transportation parking data, the city’s densest neighborhoods are also the region’s most popular. Appropriately, due to this high demand, SDOT charges for parking in these neighborhoods.

Spots like Capitol Hill (where hourly parking costs $4.50 in the evenings) and the University District ($4.50 in the afternoons) are popular destinations because—thanks to the underlying zoning for mixed-use and dense housing—they have a concentration of businesses, services, restaurants, and exciting entertainment options. You can identify the same consistently popular destinations, by the way, from light rail data: Capitol Hill and the U District are among the system’s top four stations.

A better program, call it Sustainability Pricing, would remake congestion pricing by supporting affordable housing. 

Paying $4.50 an hour to park in the city hardly covers the full value suburban visitors get from visiting Seattle’s urban landscape. Just as the state puts a price on our beautiful parks with the Discover Pass (“more than just a parking pass, it’s your ticket to unlimited access to millions of state managed lands across Washington state”), Seattle should be compensated for maintaining and managing density.

To do that, Seattle could take inspiration from last month’s exciting news out of New York City, where the feds approved the nation’s first-ever congestion pricing program, allowing the city to charge drivers for entering midtown and lower Manhattan. A similar congestion pricing system has been on the books in London for two decades—fulfilling its goals  of decreasing greenhouse gases, increasing transit use, and reducing congestion. The Durkan administration briefly considered congestion pricing in Seattle, but predictably, they ended up doing nothing.

Three cheers to Manhattan for leading the way by bringing a necessary dose of environmental logic to the U.S.

Not only should Seattle follow suit by charging people to drive into our busiest neighborhoods—with exemptions for low-income drivers, including downtown service workers—we should go bolder than the Manhattan model. A better program—let’s call it Sustainability Pricing—would revamp congestion pricing in a few key ways.

First, as I just noted, Sustainability Pricing Zones would apply not just downtown, but in every dense Seattle urban hub.

Second, unlike in London and Manhattan, where the proceeds  go to transit, the money would instead fund affordable housing.

And finally: Those housing dollars should flow right back to the communities whose drivers are “bridge and tunneling” in.

Not only should the revenues go predominantly to fund  affordable housing, but they should go back to the drivers themselves in the form of subsidies for new, affordable housing in the neighborhoods where they live.

Here’s why: Many people are priced out of urban hubs. It’s the result of an intransigent resistance to zoning changes (more density) from both the suburbs and from single-family homeowners in cities themselves. Perversely, this anti-density pathology turns dense, transit-friendly zones into exclusive, expensive real estate. Sharing the density region-wide (and citywide) is a smart way to address a lot of problems caused by cordoning density into a tiny slice of Seattle, including sky-high city rents and suburban car dependency.

So, let’s send the Sustainability Pricing dollars back to the drivers themselves. Or more precisely, let’s channel the money back in the form of subsidies for new, affordable apartment buildings in their neighborhoods. In the long term, this would help create region-wide density, easing the environmental burden on today’s disproportionately dense urban hubs. If certain communities don’t want to upzone to allow multifamily housing—hello, Upper Queen Anne—the dollars could revert back to Seattle transit funding.

I realize downtown Seattle is struggling right now, and it seems counterintuitive to charge people to visit (at least by car). But an urban version of the Discover Pass isn’t only about downtown. As I’ve pointed out many times: The pandemic changed Seattle by igniting urban hubs throughout the city.  The now-popular, citywide outdoor seating program is one example of how our city is sharing urbanism. By making all our dense neighborhoods a source for supporting even more density, we will be both acknowledging that the old downtown model has changed, and that Seattle can help its neighbors do the right thing by embracing that change.

Josh@PubliCola.com

Development, Economy, Maybe Metropolis, neighborhoods

The CBGB Theory: Weirdos Not Bros Will Revive Downtown

By Josh Feit

After insisting for months that getting big employers to summon their workforces back to the office was the key to a revitalized downtown, Mayor Bruce Harrell rolled out his updated “Downtown Activation Plan” this week without mentioning that increasingly remote strategy. When Amazon announced earlier this year that, starting in May, employees must come in three days a week, the company’s own employees immediately rebelled.

Today, employees are spending about a quarter of their time working from home, according to a recent Stanford University/Census Bureau study. And just last week, noting that “offices are still at half their pre-pandemic capacity,” the New York Times ran with this enervating headline (for those holding out hope for a corporate office rebound): “Return to Office Enters the Desperation Phase.”

In Seattle, telecommuting was already rising sharply prior to COVID, tripling to more than 16,000 downtown workers between 2010 and 2019, according to Commute Seattle. And let’s be honest, a 3-days-in-2-days-out model already represents the startling acknowledgment that the future of downtowns looks different than the traditional model. More important, a mandate that grates against a major social shift hardly seems like the makings of a long-term or sustainable solution.

And so, credit where credit is due to Harrell’s office for finally chilling out on the Amazon panacea and rolling out some longstanding urbanist wish-list items, including a few legislative proposals. Erica posted an in-depth report on Wednesday, and along with Harrell’s (and soon-to-be deputy mayor Tim Burgess’) predictable, go-to policing solutions, the plan does mine some of the real Janette Sadik-Khan stuff that Seattle urbanists have been talking about for more than a decade.

The grab bag  includes supporting a broader range of building and street uses—waiving fees to bring more food trucks downtown, for example, and allowing both ground-floor housing and retail on the upper floors of buildings downtown. Likewise, it includes recommendation for a pedestrian-only pilot by prohibiting cars on Pike between 1st and 2nd—a tiny bit of car-free real estate, but I’ll take it. And Harrell’s plan even gives a nod to lidding I-5, a near-decade-old, $2.3-to-$2.5 billion planning nerd agenda item. Most prominently, there’s also legislation in the mix that supports increasing downtown housing stock through targeted up-zones on Union and Pike Streets (with incentives for affordable housing) and also code changes that help turn office space into residential space.

As a neighborhood’s stock drops, it becomes more open to free-rein experimentation, not to mention more open to a diverse economic base of commercial renters.

It’s a nice roundup of ideas, but it misses the mark by emphasizing new, downtown residential housing stock; downtown is already dense and tall. We need to get serious about putting density elsewhere in Seattle, rather focusing on downtown . The first step to reviving downtown isn’t new housing, it starts with embracing the grim commercial real estate market, where vacancies recently increased from 22 percent to 24 percent.

How does embracing vacancies help revitalize downtown? Like this: As commercial vacancies rise—new demand for Seattle office space fell 30% from January 2022 —rents drop. And as rents drop, the weirdos, rather than the big employers, move in. And by weirdos, I mean: creative-class, art-centric, small-scale retail. In short: The rebirth of downtown will be sparked not by Amazon, but by high vacancy rates, leading to low rents, leading to an influx of vibrant, small businesses, leading to new housing demand.

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Call it the CBGB theory of city planning. During the sluggish mid-to-late 1970s, New York City’s famously abandoned and spent Lower East Side neighborhood, where CBGB set up shop on Bowery, attracted waves of bohemians who turned the neighborhood into the epicenter of an urban shock wave that would change cities into magnetic destinations for brains, youth, talent, and commerce.

Making analogies to New York City—in the 1970s, for that matter!—certainly seems like a stretch for Seattle. Seattle’s hot tech economy and hot real estate market don’t conjure the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” days of NYC bankruptcy. Nor does Seattle, population 779,000, parallel the creative serendipity that flows through a city of more than 8 million people like New York. But this basic truism makes sense at any level: As a neighborhood’s stock drops, it becomes more open to free-rein experimentation (and yes, graffiti!), not to mention more open to a diverse economic base of commercial renters.

I’m going to put my hope in the new, small businesses that have recently and eagerly started popping up downtown. 

The limited data available from real estate analysts such as CoStar suggests that demand for leases on smaller spaces (0-5,000 square feet) has decreased more than 50 percent year over year—suggesting lower rents could come, drawing small businesses  downtown.

Consider the arc of this anecdotal observation about the downtown retail renters’ market from the folks at Seattle Restored, a City of Seattle program that pairs downtown landlords with small pop-up style businesses for three-to-six month rental stints, providing grants to help with rent.

A lot of property management companies began reaching back out, perhaps realizing renters weren’t willing to pay the high prices, they were now looking for smaller renters.

When I first contacted them in April for any insights about downtown’s small space retail market, they believed landlords were willing to hold out for high rental prices. They didn’t have any hard data, but said they noticed larger real estate/property management companies were rescinding  initial offers to work with the program, likely holding out hope to rent at full market value.

However, recently they noticed a change. This week they gave me an update, saying it looked more like a renters’ market these days: About a month after we first spoke, they told me, a lot of property management companies began reaching back out. Perhaps realizing commercial tenants weren’t willing to pay the high prices, they were now looking for smaller renters. The program’s success so far backs up this theory: With 30 spaces now filled, the program is well on its way to hit its goal of 45 small businesses set up by the end of the year.

With that in mind, I’m going to put my hope in the new, small businesses that have recently and eagerly started popping up in PubliCola’s neighborhood (Pioneer Square), such as The Monkey Bridge II,  OHSUN Banchan Deli & Café, and Café Lune—none of these are  a subsidized Seattle Restored business, by the way. In short, I’d rather bank on them than on Harrell’s plan for new high-rises on 3rd (conveniently ousting McDonald’s, I imagine)—or phantom Amazon employees, for that matter.

The city should focus less on policies of willful denial—landowners imagining high rents and Amazon execs mandating against reality—and focus more on attracting eager small businesses. The city can do this by passing zoning regulations that favor or even mandate smaller square footage spaces. Let the weirdos, not the bros, take the lead in reviving downtown.

Josh@Publicola.com

Drugs, Economy, homelessness, land use, Mayor Harrell

“Downtown Is You”: Harrell Unveils New Downtown Plan Against Backdrop of Anti-Sweeps Protest

Mayor Bruce Harrell speaks to a crowd of supporters and press at Westlake Park

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell gathered supporters in Westlake Plaza Wednesday morning to announce his latest downtown activation plan, officially titled “Downtown Is You.” But the press event was initially sidelined by a group of anti-sweeps protesters holding signs and chanting, “stop the sweeps” and other slogans from a few feet away. After halting his prepared remarks, Harrell hopped down from the stage and attempted to get the protesters to be quiet, but gave up and returned to the stage after several responded that they didn’t trust his offer to talk to them in a different venue.

“Westlake Center is a center for civic engagement,” he told the audience. “Unfortunately, that’s not civic engagement—that’s just yelling.”

“These [unsheltered] folks you see down here, they’re not strangers to me. I grew up on these streets,” Harrell continued. Gesturing toward the group of young activists, he added: “How dare anyone say I’m going to sweep anybody. I don’t see anyone over there I grew up with.”

Under Harrell, the city has dramatically increased the speed and frequency of encampment removals.

The seven-point downtown plan Harrell announced Wednesday does not directly address encampments. However, it does envision a downtown occupied by shoppers, sports fans, and residents of new high-rise apartment towers along a section of Third Avenue between Stewart and Union Streets, where drug users and unsheltered people frequently congregate. The proposed upzone includes the block that includes a McDonald’s and a check cashing outlet as well as the block anchored by Ross Dress for Less.

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At a press briefing on Tuesday, mayoral advisor (and soon-to-be deputy mayor) Tim Burgess said “several” developments in the area were “ready to go” once a proposed upzone goes through. The proposal would increase the maximum height for new buildings from 170 feet to 440 (460 if new developments include child care or education facilities) on about five blocks that are adjacent to a area where 450-foot-high buildings are already allowed. The city’s land use database does not include any active permits for these blocks.

On Tuesday, Burgess said the proposed rezone reflects “a recognition that we need to make some dramatic changes in order to shift what’s been several decades now of problematic street uses and disorder.”

Police almost outnumbered protesters during a demonstration at Mayor Bruce Harrell’s announcement of his downtown activation strategy.

Harrell’s plan also includes legislation to allow a broader mix of uses on the ground floor of buildings (apartments or conference spaces instead of retail, for example) and throughout buildings themselves, in the form of “vertical residential neighborhoods within buildings” that allow residents to access everything they need, from child care to retail stores to pickleball courts, inside their buildings.

The idea is a nod to the fact that—Harrell’s back-to-work order and admonishments notwithstanding—many people have continued to work at least partly from home, leaving significant vacancies in downtown office buildings. “I don’t think this is a philosophical shift away from retail” serving downtown office workers, McIntyre said Tuesday. “It’s embracing some flexibility and some new ideas and wanting to encourage a different mix on the ground floor area as the as the city continues to change.”

Another piece of legislation would make a half-block of Pike Street between First and Second Avenues pedestrian-only, connecting Pike Place Market Market to—well, one half-block of downtown directly adjacent to, but not part of, the market. (Asked whether the mayor would consider prohibiting car traffic in Pike Place Market—where pedestrians compete for space on the historic brick streets with exhaust-spewing cars—Office of Economic Development director Markham McIntyre said the city was still “talking to Pike Place Market … to figure out what what that might look like,” but had no immediate plans to get rid of cars in the Market, a change pedestrian advocates have been demanding for decades.

 

Beyond those concrete legislative proposals, the plan consists mostly of expanded pilot projects (doubling the number of businesses participating in Seattle Restored, a pop-up project that fills empty storefronts), initiatives that are already underway (reopening City Hall Park, “more murals” downtown), and ideas that are still very much in the whiteboard stages. It also incorporates many aspirational ideas that would require significant additional funding, such as completing the downtown streetcar, putting a lid over I-5, and creating a new “arts district” from South Lake Union to Pioneer Square.

Mayor Bruce Harrell speaks to a group of Stop the Sweeps protesters at Westlake Park.
Mayor Bruce Harrell briefly spoke to protesters before returning to his press event.

And, of course, it assumes a heavier police presence downtown—a mostly unspoken, but bedrock, element of the proposal. “Make Downtown Safe and Welcoming” is actually number one on the plan’s list of seven priorities, starting with arrests of people “distributing and selling illegal drugs” (and, presumably, using them—Harrell mentioned that a bill criminalizing drug possession and public use will likely pass in July). The safety plan also includes a number of initiatives to address addiction that Harrell announced in April, along with a plan to help private property owners remove graffiti—a particular burr under Harrell’s saddle.

Earlier this month, a federal judge issued an injunction barring the police from arresting people for tagging or graffiti, finding that Seattle’s broadly worded law “likely…violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments by being both vague and overbroad.” On Wednesday, I asked Harrell—who had just expounded on the difference, as he sees it, between “art” and “graffiti” (“One word: It’s unwanted”)—what he would do if the judge overturned the law.

“We have to have the ability to arrest people for unwanted graffiti, so if there’s precise language in the law that is unconstitutional, that is vague, that’s ambiguous, we have to fix it,” Harrell said. “If we lose the lawsuit, we go back to the drawing board and figure out what the deficiencies are in the law, and we fix it or remedy it.”

“This graffiti stuff just drives me nuts,” Harrell added.

Addiction, Drugs, Economy, Mayor Harrell

Harrell Proposes Investing in Evidence-Based Approaches to Addiction as Part of Downtown Revitalization Plan

 

Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Councilmember Sara Nelson

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell issued an executive order Monday expanding Health One to include a new overdose response unit aimed at getting people into treatment, directing the Seattle Police Department to “prioritize enforcing [illegal drug] sales and distribution related crimes to the fullest extent permissible,” and committing the city to “site, explore funding for, and work with the University of Washington Addictions, Drug and Alcohol Institute (UW ADAI), and County partners to establish a post overdose diversion facility where EMS can bring people after non-fatal overdoses to recover, get stabilized on medications, and access resources.”

Currently, when medics revive someone who has overdosed, the person can either agree to go to the hospital, where they’ll get information about treatment, or decline; a post-overdose facility would provide another route for people who would ordinarily decline additional care.

“What’s going to happen now is that [in addition to Fire Department medics], Health One is also going to respond” to overdoses, Seattle Fire Chief Harold Scoggins said at an event announcing the order in Pioneer Square Monday afternoon. “Health One comes with case managers and firefighters who are trained [to] talk to folks and really explain the resources that are available to them. After the fire units leave, the police units leave, Health One will still be on the scene.”

The order also endorses an evidence-based harm reduction strategy called contingency management, which involves providing incentives, such as low-dollar gift certificates, to drug or alcohol users who enroll in treatment and stay clean.

Harrell didn’t have many details about the plan to open a post-overdose response site, such as how it would be funded, who would staff it, or—importantly—why people who overdosed and refused to go to Harborview would be willing to go to a different facility. “Full disclosure: How it’s staffed, how we fund it—that’s the work we’re trying to do now, because in looking at the numbers of fatalities and overdoses, we realize that’s sort of a gap in our treatment scenario,” Harrell said.

The order also endorses an evidence-based harm reduction strategy called contingency management, which involves providing incentives, such as low-dollar gift certificates, to drug or alcohol users who enroll in treatment and stay clean. Contingency management has been especially effective at reducing stimulant use, for which—unlike opiates—there is no drug-based treatment. “We will do what makes sense to get people in treatment,” Harrell said.

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City Councilmember Sara Nelson, who is in recovery and has previously expressed opposition to harm reduction approaches like medication-assisted treatment, called  contingency management a “proven method…  that rewards people who want to stay sober, and get on the path to long term recovery, no matter what their addiction.” After the press conference, she told PubliCola the program already has a funding source: Seattle’s share of a statewide fund that resulted from a settlement in the state’s lawsuit against the three largest opiate distributors.

The executive order also commits the city to “convene a workgroup to map out the various local, county and state programs and services available to treat and respond to the opioid and synthetic drug crisis.”

“This time-limited workgroup will be tasked with identifying gaps in our current systems and making recommendations on how to better coordinate a treatment-first approach to reducing substance abuse disorders and overdose rates. The workgroup will also assess ongoing investments and programs to determine what is working well and how existing investments could be expanded to serve more people.”

As a separate part of the downtown plan, the head of the city’s Office of Economic Development, Markham McIntyre, announced that the city will reopen City Hall Park next to the downtown King County Courthouse, which has been closed and fenced off since 2021 (more “jumbo chess boards”); open up streets to pedestrians  more often for special events, including, “perhaps, on-street pickleball tournaments”; and ask the Washington Liquor and Cannabis Board for “sip and stroll” liquor permits that would allow people to walk around with drinks during events like First Thursday art walks.