Homelessness in Seattle is getting worse. Let’s deal with it.
Seattle has more construction cranes in our skyline than any other American city — a potent symbol of the continued growth and success we enjoy here in King County. But look down from the cranes for a moment and you’ll see another metric by which we should also measure our home: the reality that people face on our streets. This is not a reality unique to King County — metro areas around the country are struggling to house increasing populations of homeless people — but the numbers here are particularly troubling.
Like most cities today, the greater Seattle region suffers from a homelessness epidemic. Anyone can see that there are more people living under our bridges and highways than ever before. The numbers bear these observations out: at the end of May, King County released numbers from the most recent point-in-time count, which is the best metric we have to track changes in the city’s homeless population. Experts from All Home King County found 11,643 people living without traditional housing — a number higher than the entire population of Woodinville, as Crosscut’s David Kroman points out.
Only those with their heads in the sand could argue against the need for an ambitious solution. In the absence of immediate bold action, this situation will go from bad to worse. Homelessness does not stem from a single cause, and the many factors driving homelessness will not go away or improve on their own. Housing costs are going up, not down. The opioid epidemic isn’t getting better, but worse. The challenges of poverty and health care costs facing so many Americans are not going to disappear over the next four years, but instead will worsen.
King County’s homelessness boom has escalated alongside tremendous economic and population growth — particularly over the last four years. A big part of the problem is a lack of affordable rental opportunities as new renters with more resources drive rents up and vacancy rates down. A 2015 study found that for every hundred dollars average rent costs go up, homelessness increases by 15 percent.
Recent analysis from Zillow’s team of economists determines that the bottom third of all rents are growing at an alarming rate. Average rents in the lowest tier of multifamily units have climbed by more than 50 percent in less than six years — from $817 per month in November of 2010 to $1263 per month in June of 2016. In fact, over that six-year window, rent increases for the lower tier have slightly outpaced the increase of rents in the higher tier, by about a half a percent.
Those who have argued that the market will magically provide a housing solution for our county’s lowest wage-earners are wrong; there’s no relief in sight. The result has been a proliferation of tents in places you never saw them before, with the unsheltered population growing by more than 20 percent in 2016 over the year before.
And our community has been hit hard by the opioid epidemic. The final report from King County’s Heroin and Opiate Addiction Task Force determined that “the number of people who entered the publicly funded treatment system for heroin use disorders annually in King County” doubled from 2010 to 2014, from 1,436 people to 2,886. Other opioid treatment programs have likewise seen a doubling in admissions over the same timeframe, with over 150 people on a waitlist for a King County methadone-dispensation program. Drug overdoses are now the single largest cause of death in America’s homeless population.
There’s a broader issue, too: many in the homeless population are our society’s most vulnerable people, and they will never be able to fend for themselves in this marketplace. They have (often multiple) disabilities and low, fixed incomes. By defunding housing and social service programs over the course of decades, federal officials have reduced much of our homeless care to emergency services. In a mid-March interview, nationally recognized homelessness expert Barbara Poppe said that Washington state has “one of the worst mental health systems in the nation.”
In the end, when we rely on our emergency rooms and police departments to address the needs of people experiencing homelessness, we still pay the bill — a much higher bill, by the way — and this inadequate solution traps people in a negative feedback loop ensuring their continued homelessness, rather than ennobling them with the opportunity to leave it and more fully participate in the life of the community.
President Trump’s policies will accelerate the problem. According to CBO estimates, a staggering 23 million Americans will lose health care coverage under Trump’s new plan, which will leave Washington state scrambling to provide funding for 600,000 state residents currently on Medicaid. And if the president’s proposed 2018 budget is passed, Seattle will lose significant federal assistance for housing and human services.
Trump would slash Housing and Urban Development funds by six billion dollars next year. Over the past decade, more than a quarter of a million Washington families have purchased homes through the assistance of HUD programs. King County’s 2017–2018 housing budget is built around some $50 million in federal funds. Whether these cuts materialize exactly as promised or not, it’s obvious that the federal safety net will fray further under Trump’s leadership.
It’s clear that if we do nothing, things will only get worse. That’s why my team at Civic Ventures and I are working with the County on two pieces: 1) to make sure the services and outreach approach we need to address the homelessness crisis are included in this year’s Veterans and Human Services Levy Renewal and 2) to introduce a package before the County Council next year that focuses on the housing options and capital pieces of the solution.
Barbara Poppe’s report to the city last year noted our success when we focus on housing people rather than providing temporary shelter, and she recommended steering our entire system to this orientation. Poppe’s assessment is correct: the scope of the problem, and local housing costs, have dramatically increased since the data period covered by the reports.
The Veterans and Human Services Levy renewal is laser-targeted to improve the lives of those most at need — the elderly, those suffering from domestic abuse, those who served our country in the armed forces. In January of this year, veterans organizations estimated that King County’s homeless population contained some 2,102 veterans, with an average of 66 veterans added to the population every month. That’s an astounding figure, and it means that by the end of this year, King County could see nearly 800 veterans living on the streets for the first time.
For no more than twelve cents per thousand dollars of assessed real estate value, funds raised by the levy will immediately be put to work. In an effort to address the outsized need for immediate housing relief, fifty percent of the proceeds in the first year will go toward creating housing stability for veterans and their families.
Other aspects of the levy will address the systemic issues that push people out into the street and prevent them from acquiring housing in the first place. Past levies have created over 2,000 units of affordable housing, with 850 veterans successfully housed in 2015 alone. Programs funded by the levy have successfully delivered nearly 4,000 previously incarcerated or high-risk homeless veterans into housing or health care. The County has provided services improving parenting skills, legal assessments, psychological evaluation, and PTSD counseling. This work must continue and expand.
The levy will also support King County’s ongoing outreach programs which combat the opioid epidemic. Programs including the sobering patrol, which connects individuals and providers, will see an immediate benefit from the levy. These services will complement the multipronged opioid strategies approved by the Mental Illness and Drug Dependency tax, which the county council approved late last year.
The present situation has created unlikely alliances, bringing together street-level service providers and tech millionaires in pursuit of solutions. We’re proud of this levy and believe it will move King County to a stronger, more inclusive, more compassionate future. We hope the County Council will agree that the increases in the Veterans and Human Services Renewal Levy are critical.
This is not some rote ratification of a tried-and-true policy. The new Veterans and Human Services levy provides a frontloading of funds to support housing and navigation teams to connect vulnerable populations with mental health and substance abuse treatments, to get people off the streets as soon as possible, at a crucial moment in their lives. This is a plan that builds on the successes of the past and addresses some of the most up-do-date thinking in the policy sphere.
We live in complicated times. The federal government is abdicating many of its most important responsibilities, and it must be tempting for those in charge of decisions on a county level to follow the president’s lead, to say that this is not our problem. But while the president and the Republicans in Congress don’t have to live on a day-to-day basis with the decisions that they make, the Council’s decisions affect the world on our doorstep.
King County is at a crossroads. We must make a choice. Rents will continue to rise, and people will continue to lose their homes. We can decide to leave people to survive on the streets. We can choose to step over them in our doorways. We can ignore the needs of people who are lost in the throes of mental illness and addiction. Or we can vote to offer them a way off the streets and a way out of homelessness. We can choose to ignore the problem at our future’s peril, or we can invest in solutions now.
We can decide to be a responsible society — one which intelligently addresses its systemic failures — or we can decide to close our eyes tight and hope that the issues will disappear. But unlike our leaders in the other Washington, we know that real solutions demand real work on our part. Government should never give up. Government should become smarter and more efficient, and most importantly, government should vow to never leave anyone behind. I firmly believe that this levy does exactly that.
Here in King County, we understand a society that excludes anyone is a weak society. By working together, working smarter, and working with empathy, we can build the King County that everyone deserves.
