The Case of the Missing Housing Report
The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce partnered with a firm to study the homelessness crisis. They didn’t like the findings. What did they do next?
Last fall, The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce partnered with a consulting firm called McKinsey & Company to determine the best course of actions to address Seattle’s homelessness crisis.
McKinsey & Company came back with a realistic look at the resources Seattle needs to house the homeless and keep rent-insecure families from landing on the street in the first place. The short report of McKinsey & Company’s findings found that…
…In King County, we estimate it would cost between $360 million and $410 million a year to tackle current levels of homelessness — that’s twice today’s spending. Action would be needed on three fronts: preventing more people from becoming homeless in the first place, assisting the homeless to find accommodation, and most important, providing more affordable housing. Investments in affordable housing account for about 85 percent of the extra funding required. Housing subsidies — payable to landlords to make unaffordable accommodation affordable — may be the most effective investment, as they quickly boost the supply of cheap housing.
Some corporations keen to alleviate homelessness in their local communities already fund emergency shelters. These are crucial. But they are not a long-term solution. Affordable housing is. Partnerships with local governments to support more of it could therefore be one of the best ways for companies to do more.
So naturally, when presented with these findings—findings that they requested, remember—the Chamber of Commerce immediately shared the McKinsey report with the public, urging fast action to house the unhoused and to increase revenue to deal with a problem that has grown much more severe after a decade of outsized prosperity in Seattle. Because as we all know, the Chamber of Commerce is only interested in helping their fellow neighbors and being good citizens.
Nah, I’m just messing with you. That’s not what happened at all.
The Chamber didn’t release the McKinsey report. They kept it quiet until Vianna Davila at the Seattle Times published the findings earlier this week. Davila says the report found that Seattle needs “up to 14,000 units to address the crisis as it is.”
The report also says Seattle has greatly improved efficiencies in the existing homeless crisis-response system, and it found, according to Davila, a staggering “96 percent statistical correlation between the region’s rent increases and the increase in homelessness.”
These findings refute two frequent claims of conservative groups. Critics argue that Seattle’s homelessness response system is leaking money like a sieve and that our homeless population is made up mostly of people from out of town who supposedly come to Seattle to cash in on all the “perks” we supposedly supply to unhoused individuals.
In fact, the Chamber publicly continued to promote the argument that Seattle simply wasn’t properly managing funds allocated to homelessness long after they had compelling evidence to the contrary in their possession.
Councilmember Lorena González called out the Chamber in a very good piece by David Kroman of Crosscut:
That [the Chamber] has not yet gone public with the report frustrates her. “What I think is disingenuous is for esteemed members of our business community to say that $63 million is enough when they know through their own analysis and report that $400 million is the right number,” she said, referring to the amount the city currently budgets for homelessness.
“Disingenuous” is a word that gets thrown around a lot in politics. Everyone loves to accuse their opponents of bad-faith statements. But in this case, I’d argue that Councilmember González is using exactly the right word. The Chamber had information in its possession that indicated the high price tag of Seattle’s housing crisis, and yet the Chamber continued to publicly argue that the city had enough money to deal with the problem. I don’t know what else to call that—seems pretty disingenuous to me.
This story is important for two reasons. First, it highlights one of Seattle’s biggest problems: our inability to recognize the size and scope of our housing problem. Even when we have access to all the available evidence, we find ways to ignore or even refute the truth that’s right in front of us.
Second, I hope that Seattle remembers this story the next time the Chamber comes out against a wage raise or a worker protection or a regulation that will make the city safer. With their decision to sit on this study, the Chamber has proven that they are not good neighbors. The only interests they’re looking after are their own.
