-And I can’t work right now
because I don’t have a place to live.
-This is the hardest fight I’ve ever did in my life.
-Homelessness --
the battle has cost Seattle taxpayers
over $1 billion in the last decade,
with no comprehensive solution in sight.
-It’s just endless lawlessness,
and nobody is held accountable for their actions.
-Business owners and residents are frustrated
about encampments moving from one neighborhood to another,
and a promising regional effort has faltered.
-We need to see stronger outcomes.
-Will new leadership and tough demands
for accountability be enough?
-We have to ask ourselves what value the RHA is adding.
-Our panel weighs in.
-The problem keeps outpacing the solution.
-Harm reduction is about keeping people alive
to live another day.
-Finding answers to some burning questions
about solving regional homelessness --
next on "City Inside/Out."
♪♪
-Welcome to this edition of "City Inside/Out."
I’m your host, Brian Callanan.
In King County, there’s new pressure building
over the age-old challenge of homelessness.
Seattle is pulling back some funding
from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority,
and small businesses are pressing for answers
from a new slate of city council members.
People living on the street and service providers
are looking for answers, too, in the midst of a crisis
where at least 53,000 people countywide don’t have a home.
Russell Meyer, owner of Ben’s Cleaners
in SoDo, feels surrounded
by what he calls endless lawlessness.
-Human feces and human waste
and drug paraphernalia and weapons.
It’s a third-world country back here at times,
it looks like.
-He’s photographed a persistent issue
of homeless encampments
behind his family’s 75-year-old business on Fourth Avenue South.
-I can attest to some customer loss,
just revenue loss, just due to people
not wanting to have to come and deal with this.
-And even after a mid-February sweep,
Meyer says the tents,
RVs, and bullet holes will soon return.
-It’s cleaned, and nothing else is done.
There’s nothing to prevent it from happening again.
-I saw blight.
-New Seattle City Council member Rob Saka,
whose district includes SoDo, visited Ben’s Cleaners recently
and saw what he described as plenty of room for improvement,
especially from a city
that spends about $165 million per year on homelessness.
-The city needs to see more bang for its buck,
more return on investment.
-Seattle is cutting 10% of its funding
to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority,
as leaders like Saka call
for a new governance structure for the RHA
and more accountability.
-I’m going to insist on
we make sure we bake better performance metrics
into our contracts with our various service providers.
-It’s a changing approach to a problem compounded
by an equally persistent opioid crisis.
This man, who goes by "Tarantula,"
explains these entwined struggles in Lake City.
-A lot of us are here because we are on some drug
of one sort or another, or multiple drugs,
whatever that... It’s just not easy to give up.
-But others, like Kandy in Northgate,
who says she’s not a drug user, are simply frustrated
by a lack of affordable housing and social workers.
-They come, and they leave, or they never, ever show up.
I mean, it’s empty promises left and right out here.
-The city of Seattle is trying to back up its promises
with what it calls its largest investment ever
in affordable housing.
-Simply put, more housing, more quickly.
-But how quickly remains the question,
says Blue, a homeless vet on First Avenue.
-The difference between us and the people over here
that's got a home is two paychecks away.
-And to talk a little bit further about this topic,
we have with us an auspicious panel, including Karen Lee,
executive director of Plymouth Housing,
a local nonprofit housing provider
with 19 buildings in our region. Karen, good to have you here.
-Nice to be here. Thank you.
-We also have with us Claudia Balducci,
the King County Council member,
represents District 6 on the Eastside,
also chair of the county’s Affordable Housing Committee.
Council member Balducci, good to see you, too.
-Thank you so much.
-And joining us once again, Jon Scholes,
president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association.
Thanks for being here, Jon. -Good to be here, Brian.
-All right. Let’s get going here.
And, Karen, I’ll start with you.
For people who might not be familiar with Plymouth Housing,
talk about the work you do, the Housing First approach
you take to homelessness. What is that?
Who are you helping? What does that look like?
-Certainly. So housing is a complex problem.
And so, it takes a lot of providers
working with government
and other partners to come together
to help alleviate the burden that we’re facing.
So, what Plymouth does is it provides services
to single adults that have at least one disability
and have been chronically homeless
for at least a year. -Okay, so, very specific focus.
-A very specific population.
And then we have partners
that might serve women, families.
-Okay. -There’s youth.
So, we all sort of try to specialize
within a particular area.
And then Plymouth also operates permanent supportive housing.
-Right.
-Which means the housing is permanent.
You have a lease. All of our tenants,
they have all of the rights that come with a full lease.
So, it’s different from emergency housing or shelter.
-Okay. Okay.
-So, those are all the spectrum that we try to --
-And I will dive into a few of those different pieces.
But thank you for breaking those down.
Council member Balducci,
I wanted to talk about this with you
because the most recent state analysis
says we have at least 53,000 homeless people
in King County here. You’ve seen the numbers.
You’ve served on the county council since 2015,
which, by the way, is when the county and city
declared a state of emergency on homelessness, as you know.
What’s your assessment of where our region is right now
when it comes to dealing with our homelessness crisis?
-Yeah, it’s been quite a journey, actually.
I want to say I started at the city of Bellevue,
and when I started there,
we always would get small numbers of people
who were living outside,
and we had zero response, zero infrastructure.
And so the mayors -- at the time I was the mayor of Bellevue --
of Bellevue, Kirkland and Redmond,
we all shook hands and said we need to build basic shelter.
And we did over time.
But the problem keeps outpacing the solutions.
And you see that here in Seattle.
You see that throughout King County.
The number you quoted is a really large
and daunting number.
But I do think we know what to do.
We have a lot of the answers.
We know that we need a spectrum of response,
from intervening with people in crisis
to dealing with people with mental health
and providing treatment for them,
and for people with behavioral health or addiction issues.
And we need lots more housing of all kinds,
from emergency shelter
all the way up through market-rate housing.
And we’re doing things all along that spectrum,
and we’ll probably talk about some of those things.
But what we need to do is do it at scale.
If we really want to bring those numbers down,
we need a scale, which means we’re going to need help
from all levels of government and a lot of private partners.
-Thank you for that.
Jon, I want to go to you and get a current snapshot,
maybe if I could, of what the DSA
is seeing with homelessness right now.
Your Community Safety and Hospitality team,
funded by the Metropolitan Improvement District,
monitors the amount of tents it’s seeing
on the streets of downtown Seattle, among other things.
That number is way down
from where it was during the pandemic.
In the first quarter of this year,
it appears there were an average of about 22 tents per month.
And I know this is only one measure
of what people are seeing downtown
and what you’re seeing downtown.
But what does that statistic tell you
about where we are on homelessness?
-We’ve made some progress.
Three years ago, we had 140-plus tents within the downtown core,
in parks and plazas, other public spaces.
We don’t see those encampments today.
We still see a lot of people in need,
a lot of folks living unsheltered,
and a lot of folks dealing with substance-use disorders.
So, we’ve made some progress, certainly.
I think credit to the mayor and the unified care team
and our team, as well,
working to bring people out of tents,
out of encampments in downtown,
but still plenty of people in need
that aren’t getting the services and housing they need.
And we’ve seen this collision now of the unsheltered crisis
with the fentanyl crisis in our community.
-And I’m going to try. to unpack that in a little bit.
But thank you for bringing that up.
Council member Balducci, I’ll go back to you.
I wanted to get more specific about the King County Regional
Homelessness Authority.
The agency has had a lot of challenges,
as we all know, since its inception here.
CEO Marc Dones stepped down rather abruptly
in May of last year. There have been problems
with paying contractors, other issues, too.
And recently the city of Seattle,
which is the RHA’s largest funder,
said it would reduce the amount of money
it’s paying into the authority by about 10%.
Are you confident the RHA is functioning properly, first off,
and it can withstand this budget cut from the city of Seattle?
-So, I want to say first that the theory behind
the RHA is an absolutely true and correct theory.
Homelessness is a regional problem.
It requires a regional solution.
That is 100% a true thing.
People don’t obey boundaries.
They move around all over the place.
And this problem belongs to all of us.
The organization itself has indeed
had its bumps as it was stood up.
I will say with regard to some basic things,
like finances and paying the bills,
we have made tremendous progress.
In the last year. Our interim CEO, Helen Howell,
made it her mission to get the bills paid.
And the last report I had,
we were very close to having all of them paid,
and I believe by now they probably all are.
And that’s something -- that’s like minimum, right?
You have to do that. -Right.
-What our goal is now, and I say "our" because I’m
on the board of directors along with Mayor Harrell,
is to make sure that we’re doing what we can,
making the best use of the resources that we do have.
And so, the big push this year will be to figure out
how do they say rebid the contracts.
And that scares everybody when we say "rebid" the contract.
But the idea is figure out
what we want to achieve, with the resources
we have, what we can achieve,
what services need to be provided to meet that,
and then make sure the contracts do those things
and focus on those things.
And right now, we have a series of contracts that have grown up
over a long period of time that do a lot of things.
So, that’s the focus now.
I am aware of Seattle’s interest in pulling back money
that has gone mainly for things like outreach
and their interest in having the KCRHA focus on shelter.
I mean, that could be made to work. It’s early days.
This announcement is pretty new.
But it could be made to work if we figure out
how to collectively provide
the services that are needed to get the outcome,
which is fewer people in doorways and under tents
and more people in shelter beds that are appropriate for them.
-Okay. Thank you for that.
And I wanted to make sure I talked to Jon about this
because a few months ago the RHA announced
it was ending this pilot project, Partnership for Zero,
which had a goal to house every unsheltered person
from West Denny Way down to Edgar Martinez Drive South.
And the DSA was part of this.
Millions of dollars from philanthropy went into this,
along with millions of tax dollars,
but it didn’t go as planned.
At the time, the DSA said this was the right approach
executed in all the wrong ways.
I wanted to ask the question now,
does the DSA still have faith
in the Regional Homelessness Authority?
-I think it remains to be seen.
I think we have to ask ourselves what value the HRA is adding.
I think we’ve created a lot of complexity.
I don’t know if it’s made things simpler.
And I think if we can’t answer
that question of what’s different,
what’s better, what additional value is being added
by the end of this year, or maybe sooner,
then I think we do have to revisit this approach
because the crisis is worsening
and the intersection now of a very, very lethal drug
in fentanyl with the unsheltered crisis,
I think, is creating a whole new level of urgency,
or at least should, in our ability and desire
to get people off the streets.
-And I promise I will get to that drug issue in a bit.
But was there something you wanted to add?
-Yeah, I’ve been saying something very similar
From the suburban-city standpoint.
There’s been the question, like, Seattle is the biggest funder.
King County is the second-biggest funder.
You’ve got a small contribution
from a few smaller cities to the north.
Where are the rest of the cities?
And I’ve been saying this from the beginning.
You have to show the value. You have to show those cities
how joining and contributing to KCRHA
will make their situation better for them
to want to move in. -Thank you.
And I’m going to dive into that issue, too, in just a second.
But I do want to make sure I heard from Karen on this.
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell,
several city council members are calling
for more accountability within the RHA.
I know the DSA is asking this, too --
better return on investment, if you will.
Plymouth Housing works with the RHA
and the coordinated-entry system there to help
find housing referrals to people with Plymouth,
sometimes other providers. Has that system been working?
Is there something that needs to change
with the structure of RHA? What do you think?
-So, I would say there’s two parts to that question.
As far as an individual who is unhoused,
it’s much easier to interact with all of the providers
because we have a KCRHA.
So, an individual that is looking for shelter,
they have one system to go to rather
than having to try individually all these different providers.
So, the idea of having a regional homelessness authority
is the right one.
When it comes to providers like Plymouth,
we want to see quick turns. When we have a vacant room,
we want to have an appropriate placement
that is qualified to come have a home with us.
And sometimes that process cannot be efficient.
Or it can take longer than we would like.
And then the end result is people
that want to be housed aren’t housed.
So, all those complications and technicalities
of who should reside where, that can really be improved upon
because our interest is housing stability.
And when we receive a tenant,
we may have that tenant for the rest of their lives.
So, it needs to be the right tenant at the right time.
-I see. I wanted to follow up on this point
that Council member Balducci brought up.
And, Karen, maybe I can start with you,
because I think one of the biggest challenges
I’ve seen with the KCRHA
is this idea of getting buy-in from cities outside of Seattle.
I know it’s been a challenge for Plymouth, too, in some cases.
You had this project all set to go
in Kenmore a couple years ago.
A lot of community pushback,
council there killed the project,
and it was fully funded at the time,
which was kind of the big eye-popper on this one.
Now the project has been adopted by the city of Redmond.
I just wanted to ask about this bigger issue of,
I guess, what does this say about
how the whole concept of helping people
has somehow become politicized?
And I just wanted to get your take on that.
-Well, we think it’s unfortunate
when helping people does become politicized.
And I think all of us that are in this space realize
that we need to do a lot more to educate individuals
on what affordable housing is
and what permanent supportive housing is.
And I think that downtown Seattle suffers from that same,
I guess, pall. And so suburban folks,
they just ascribe a lot of negativity
to downtown Seattle.
And then that impacts all providers as we’re trying to,
you know, deliver a regional solution to our problem.
And I think that, you know, as a society,
we’re all to blame. If you live in the suburbs,
and then every article you see in The Seattle Times
is a murder or a death or something else, right?
-They cover other stuff, too, but I hear what you’re saying.
No, I hear what you’re saying about that pall.
Council member Balducci,
I can go down a little bit this path a little further with you.
I just think about some of the challenges
in creating the Eastgate Housing Campus there in Bellevue there.
I know you championed this.
Plymouth opened it last year along I-90 there.
I guess I wanted to go further on this path of your message
to cities on the Eastside
and maybe some of the other cities outside of Seattle
who’ve been so wary of having some of these buildings
that have permanent supportive housing in them.
What do you want to say to them? -Yeah.
This is a big question.
And so Karen was describing a large part of my life.
Siting is always challenging. Siting anything is challenging.
siting a light-rail station is challenging.
And so Siting housing, shelter, permanent supportive housing,
there are inevitably neighborhood concerns,
neighbor concerns, community concerns, business concerns.
But you can work through them.
It can be done. It has been done.
It shouldn’t have taken ten years from the day, you know,
I shook hands with the other mayors and said,
"Let’s build a men’s permanent shelter in Bellevue"
to the date we opened the door. -Mm-hmm.
-But we learned some things along the way
that will make it easier in the future.
For example, if you invite the neighborhood in
to the process early, if you create a regular space
for people to come together, not just a public hearing,
but we used a committee and "good neighbor" committee
they called it, and hired somebody from the community
and paid them to be our liaison.
So, created trust and transparency
and a place for information to flow
so that fears and, you know, the occasional
nutso-next-door message you could debunk, right?
Like "I heard that they’re going to bring in rapists."
-Okay, okay. -And so and I will also say
that attitude that goes both ways between the suburbs
and Seattle is very fascinating.
I hear because I represent parts of the Eastside,
we are importing problems from Seattle.
In reality,
we have such a concentration of social services in Seattle
that we actually export problems to Seattle.
And so, that is the discussion we need to be having about
how the region solves the region’s problems.
-Yeah. -These are all our people.
These are all our people. These are our neighbors.
And there are a lot of them that need help.
And it’s incumbent on us to do it.
I do think if we listen, if we stay open,
if we hear people’s -- if we hear through the concern
and the fear and the sometimes the anger
that you hear and hear the real interest,
there are real interests that we can really address.
-Thank you. Jon, I wanted to jump back
on this whole siting issue with you.
Do you envision more empty office buildings downtown,
converted to affordable housing or permanent supportive housing?
I just wanted to try to figure out how
downtown Seattle might be changing in response
to this continued response to homelessness.
-Well, over the last 40 years,
we’ve converted a lot of buildings
in downtown to affordable housing.
Plymouth operates a number of those today --
the Downtown Emergency Service Center, Compass, others.
So, there’s pretty significant concentration
relative to the total amount of affordable housing
in the city that’s located in downtown.
And potentially office-to- residential conversion
will open up more of those opportunities in downtown
and in other neighborhoods.
But we clearly need more housing in Seattle,
whether it’s brand-new or converted.
And we need more housing throughout our region.
-Yeah. And let me stick with you, Jon,
because I did want to get back to this issue about drugs
and the opioid crisis that we’re going through,
which is in tandem with this homelessness crisis.
I don’t want to conflate these two
because it’s important not to do that,
but I know there are some points of intersection.
Maybe, Jon,
you can tell us about how these two crises are connected here,
maybe how measures like Seattle’s new
public drug-use law could have an impact on this
and what we’re seeing on the streets.
Talk about this, please.
-Well, in King County last year,
we saw a record number of people die from drug overdoses.
It’s now the leading cause of death of folks
that are living unsheltered in our community.
That wasn’t the case two years ago.
So, more than 300 people died outside
that were living unsheltered from drug overdoses
in King County.
And this crisis is really centered in Seattle.
Nearly 60% of all the drug-overdose deaths
within the county occurred within the city of Seattle.
So, this is a moral crisis,
a health crisis, and economic crisis.
It’s expensive, what we’re doing now
in tying up our EMS system
and people responding with Narcan
in the trips to Harborview.
And it’s really fully now converged
with the unsheltered crisis on our streets.
This is an incredibly lethal drug,
much more lethal than other drugs
we’ve seen in our community.
-A lot cheaper, too. -A lot cheaper,
easily distributed, and costing a lot of lives
of the most vulnerable in our community.
-Some thoughts about that?
I mentioned that new public-drug-use law.
Any ways to try to attack the problem? What do you think?
-We have to intervene as a community.
We have to intervene with public drug use,
with sale, with distribution.
There has to be a response from the community.
So, I think the law is one way in which we can intervene
to connect people to services, to treatment, to housing,
and for those that are out harming and hurting others
and selling and pushing this poison,
there should be some accountability there, as well.
-Great. Council member Balducci,
I’m broadening this out a little bit.
The state has a public-drug-use law, too.
Does that have an effect, or will it have an effect
getting people off the streets?
I just wanted to ask about your thoughts,
this connection between the opioid crisis
and our homelessness crisis.
-I’m going to go back to the spectrum of response.
We need to intervene with people and help them to "a," survive,
and "b" to change their behavior
because what we’re seeing is self-harm
and harming the community at large.
There’s a number of things that we’re looking at
at King County, including the Crisis Care Center levy,
which passed in 2024.
The first, actually, Crisis Care Center
will open later this year in north and east King County.
It’s a partnership between the cities from Shoreline
over to Kirkland. -Mm-hmm.
-But the idea is the same --
mobile crisis response for people who are having,
you know, behavioral-health crises,
which can include drug overdoses and drug addiction,
people to respond, a place to take them,
and then a way to deal with connecting them
to what they need in order to,
you know, sort of get out of the cycle.
-Yeah.
-I should probably confess at this point
that I’m a former director of the King County jail system.
That was one of my jobs.
And I do believe that jails have a purpose.
We have them for a reason.
There are people who need to be separated from the rest of us
for a while for safety reasons. -Mm-hmm.
-We need to use that resource for what it’s intended,
which is people who are a risk to themselves and others.
And we have to make sure that we can fill the vacancies
and some of the resource challenges at the jails,
or else we’re not going to have enough capacity
for the people that do need to be in jail.
So, it does all kind of merge together.
-Okay. Thank you for connecting all those dots there.
And, Karen, I know there’s a very controversial issue
you deal with all the time. Housing First means clients
can continue to use drugs in some cases.
And many critics I know have raised issues with that.
Talk about Housing First and permanent supportive housing.
How do you ensure your clients' safety,
the safety of your staff, the surrounding community
when we talk about this?
-So, harm reduction is about keeping people alive
to live another day.
And we believe in that. And it's proven.
The last ten presidential administrations
have supported the harm-reduction approach.
Not to say that other approaches don’t work,
but it is by far the most effective approach.
And I think it can be judgmental
when we look at someone who has an illness.
Addiction is an illness. -Substance-use disorder, sure.
Okay. -Yeah.
-Sorry. Substance-use disorder. I should know that.
And so, if you look at it as an illness,
I think that you can have some empathy
for the people that are suffering.
You know, their lives are controlled
by the substance that they use.
And what we are here to do in the harm-reduction business
is to make sure that they are using safely
and then to help them meet their goals,
and hopefully that’s to diminish their use over time.
-Is there -- when I hear about Council member Balducci
talking about jails as a possibility
to help out some people,
when I hear about public-drug use laws
as a way to try to intervene
and push people back in a direction they need to go,
how do you respond to that?
-Well, we think that every system,
every public-safety system should be working effectively
and in the best way possible for us
to come together.
At the end of the day,
if you don’t have enough places for people to live,
then the jails aren’t as effective as they should be.
Our E.R. rooms and hospitals are backed up.
If we don’t have a stabilization to send someone to,
then our residents, potential residents,
when they are really ready and they say,
"Okay, I am ready for treatment today,"
we have to have a place to send a resident to
right at that time, and we don’t have that.
And then we’re short. And so, all of a sudden,
the services that we are delivering,
we’re getting people that need higher levels of care
or different types of care.
And then what we see from the public
is frustration with the providers
when the providers are really working outside
of what they should be doing.
-I see. Thank you for this.
And we need to start wrapping up here,
but I really appreciate the discussion.
Maybe, Jon, I can go to you first
for some final thoughts here, maybe some brighter news
you can share about the homelessness crisis,
something you’re looking forward to,
maybe some advice for Darrell Powell,
the new interim leader of the RHA?
-Well, we haven’t talked about the power of employment,
I think, in helping people off the streets.
And over the last three months or so, our organization
has hired 40 additional downtown ambassadors,
folks coming out of tents and living on the sidewalks.
And we’ve connected them with first-last-month deposit
to get them stabilized
and with wages and healthcare and other benefits.
-Karen’s clapping over here. Okay.
-So, the power of employment.
Not everybody coming off the streets can work again.
And many of them will have physical limitations,
and they’ll need a place at one of Karen’s facilities.
But there’s a lot of folks that can,
and we and other organizations in the community
are really leaning into the power of work
to help people off the streets,
in addition to the importance of housing.
-Thank you for that.
If you could keep it to about 40 seconds or so,
Karen, I wanted to think about some last thoughts here,
maybe some advice for the RHA, wherever you want to take it.
-Well, I would say that a takeaway I like to always leave
with viewers is that permanent supportive housing is effective.
The crucible metric that we have is housing stability.
At Plymouth, we're at 96%,
and we know that once people are housed,
they’re not using on the street.
Why would they? They have a place to live.
And that the individuals that we serve are people,
and they have stories, and they have relatives
that live right here in Seattle
and right here in King County. -Okay.
Thank you very much for that. Council member Balducci,
I’ll let you wrap up about where we go from here, please.
-Yeah, I'd say it’s really exciting
that from the government perspective,
almost everybody seems to get it.
And we’ve got all hands on the oars,
and we’re all pulling.
Sound Transit.
who you don’t think of as a housing provider,
has got 2,500 units in the pipeline
or coming out right near transit,
where we want people to be to be able to get to opportunity.
Cities are embracing permanent supportive housing.
We have one in Bellevue now.
We have one coming out in Redmond.
We have a new project now planned in Redmond.
I visited the Chief Seattle Club, which did
a health-through-housing partnership
for their members with King County.
And every jurisdiction in King County
is currently planning for very large numbers of affordability
in their comprehensive plans this year,
which they have never done before.
We’ve always planned for housing and jobs
but not for how the cost of the housing
relates to the pay of the jobs. So, there’s a lot of effort,
a lot of seeds being planted now.
I think they will bloom very beautifully in years to come.
-All right. Thank you, all of you, for this.
And we will be right back.
What are people saying online
about the homelessness crisis facing our region?
One person says...
Another person writes...
We’d like to know what you think.
Send us an e-mail at Contact@seattlechannel.org
or find us on social media.
Thank you for that input.
Thank you for the input of the wonderful panel here, as well.
And we will see you next time on "City Inside/Out."
♪♪