By Erica C. Barnett

When he ran for mayor in 2021, Bruce Harrell vowed to implement key elements of the Compassion Seattle ballot measure, an initiative that would have required the city to create  a total of 2,000 new “units (in addition to those already funded) of emergency or permanent housing with services.” If the measure had passed, Harrell, who supported it, would have been responsible for making the 2,000 new units happen.

After a state appeals court took Compassion Seattle off the table, candidate Harrell wasted no time in urging the city council to adopt key elements of the measure, saying that “the amendment-specified 2000 units of housing is critical to set in motion now.” He also rolled out a “homelessness action plan” that incorporated the 2,000-unit promise, and added that, if elected, he would “identify and begin the process of moving people into 1,000 units of housing within the first 6 months of taking office, and securing an additional 1,000 units by the end of year one.” 

Media outlets reported widely on this bold campaign promise, and the Seattle Times mentioned it as one of their reasons for endorsing Harrell. He even hired Compassion Seattle’s chief architect, former city council member Tim Burgess, as a top policy advisor.

So in his first year as mayor, did Harrell deliver? In a word, no. In a few words, not even close.

In 2022, Harrell did not deliver 2,000 new units of housing, even using the most generous interpretation of that campaign promise.  A detailed look at the 31 developments the administration says it “identified” this year shows that the vast majority were planned and funded before Harrell even took office, including many that former mayor Jenny Durkan hyped with media events and press announcements during her term. 

In fact, Durkan took credit for many of the exact same units the Harrell administration is counting toward their total. In 2021, for example, Durkan announced funding for 840 new housing units, primarily from the city’s 2016 housing levy; those units included LIHI’s Good Shepherd House, which Harrell’s dashboard counts among 1,912 units “identified” between January and September of last year, when the dashboard was last updated.) The following year, PubliCola was on hand when Durkan announced federal funding for several other LIHI projects on the list. 

But let’s say that Harrell, who likes sports metaphors, was just nudging the goalposts a bit—understandable, especially for such an ambitious promise in such a lousy budget year. (I even wrote a column calling Compassion Seattle an “unfunded mandate” that would either fail entirely or “succeed” by funding low-cost shelters instead of real solutions like permanent housing.) And indeed, over the last year, the mayor has suggested that he merely promised to identify 2,000 housing and shelter units, not create 2,000 new ones. As the dashboard puts it: “We have identified 1,912 total units of shelter so far, with only 88 units left to reach our goal of 2,000 units of shelter and housing identified by end of 2022.”

Even by this measure, however, the Harrell Administration can’t claim success.

PubliCola has documented, to the best of our ability, the year or date on which each housing or shelter development on the city’s list was announced. 

A review of these 1,912 units and shelter beds shows that fewer than 300 were newly planned or funded by the city in 2022. What’s more, around 100 shelter beds included on the list have been canceled, including 68 that were supposed to open as part of the abandoned SoDo shelter expansion. The city’s tally, which has not been updated since September, includes 40 high-acuity shelter beds and 28 tiny house-style Pallet shelters toward the total. Neither project is happening.

The mayor and city council actually cut funding for one of the programs on the list last year. JustCare, the Public Defender Association’s pandemic-era hotel shelter program, would have to shrink from 84 beds to 50 if the PDA hadn’t secured one-time federal funding to make up for the city’s cuts.

Overall, of the 1,912 housing units and shelter beds on the city’s website, PubliCola could only identify 288 that were announced in 2022, after Harrell took office. Most of those—163—are existing apartment buildings that were purchased using emergency federal “rapid acquisition” funds, which allow housing agencies to quickly repurpose market-rate apartments for affordable housing. For example, the Low-Income Housing Institute recently purchased the Dockside Apartments on Greenlake Way North; the property served as a backdrop when Harrell announced the dashboard back in June.

The rest of the “identified” units are traditional permanent supportive housing, emergency shelter, such as tiny houses, and a 35-space RV safe lot. The city has tried and failed repeatedly to open similar parking lots for RV residents in the past; the most recent attempt was at the SoDo shelter site, and King County took it off the table under neighborhood pressure long before deciding to abandon the shelter expansion altogether.

Candidates often make unrealistic promises to get elected; Compassion Seattle was, according to all the polls at the time, extremely popular, so it made sense for Harrell to incorporate it into his campaign. What’s harder to understand is why more of Harrell’s supporters—who professed to support housing, not just sweeping, people living in parks and city rights-of-way—aren’t asking why he failed to deliver.

Harrell’s office did not immediately respond to questions sent early Tuesday afternoon; we’ll update this post if we hear back.