Seattle’s Homeless Challenge

https://www.city-journal.org/seattles-homeless-challenge

by DoreenMichele • 8 years ago

28 74 8 years ago

danjayh• 8 years ago

I wonder if the explosion in homelessness is in any way related to the importation of voters from San Francisco & related areas. Similar policies, similar problems?

longerthoughts10• 8 years ago

That's interesting and fits with SF -> Portland migration as well, but were policy preferences in Seattle all that different from SF before the last few years?

burlesona• 8 years ago

That seems a common refrain as if San Francisco invented homelessness and now exports it to the world. But seriously, what percentage of voters in Seattle are actually from SF? Secondly, why do you suppose that the people who strongly support San Francisco policies are the ones who are leaving San Francisco?

vkou2• 8 years ago

No.

I think it's in some way related to the explosion in cost of living, importation of tech workers getting paid ludicrous amounts of money, and, despite record-setting construction rates, inability to match housing supply with demand.

Also, consider that the housing climate in Seattle is highly different from SF. There is no proposition 9. There is no rent control. There is no 'lovely California weather attracting rough sleepers' and no mythical 'bus-fulls of homeless people being shipped in from other states.' And, yet, homelessness is skyrocketing.

Maybe rent control and prop 9 aren't solely to blame for out-of-control homelessness? Maybe people like me are the problem?

taobility• 8 years ago

I would say the legalization of marijuana

the_cat_kittles• 8 years ago

rents, regional policies, and not enough mental health and addiction services are the main reasons i think. we need to spend about 250 million more annually to properly address it. vienna is an example of a city that has succeeded. one problem is that without an income tax, most taxes are regressive. so our best bet is an increase in propert taxes.

troydavis2• 8 years ago

The $1 billion/year number cited by this ex-candidate has been so widely and so completely discredited that anyone using it has an agenda. Here’s a short summary of one massive flaw:

https://old.reddit.com/r/SeattleWA/comments/7dijkx/homelessn...

Yes, it actually counted the assessed value of land and buildings as a per-year operational expense, as if the land was re-purchased, and the buildings re-erected, every year.

The real number is somewhere between it and $90 million (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/seattle-h...), depending heavily on how one amortizes capital assets (land, buildings) and allocates shared services. It’s nowhere near $1 billion/year though.

UPDATE: To learn more about homelessness in Seattle, here's some starting points:

1. McKinsey's "The Economics of Homelessness in Seattle and King County": https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-cities/... ("In total, we estimate a budget of $360 million to $410 million would be needed. This is about twice what the system invests today.")

2. Barbara Poppe's 2016 recommendations (https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/pathwayshome/B...) and 2018 Q&A (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/qa-two-ye...).

3. Survey of 1,056 homeless people: http://allhomekc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/FINALDRAFT-C.... Skip to page 23. I think pages 28, 30-31, 33-34, 43, 45, and 66 have the most information for the least time.

4. Seattle Times homelessness coverage (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/), which has an RSS feed (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/feed/).

hn_throwaway_54• 8 years ago

ex-candidate

Oh, so it's just sour grapes after he lost an election. I guess we can skip over this due to his agenda.

But wait...

[...] I put my hat in the ring early and I got tremendous support from across the city, from a lot of people in neighborhoods who are fed up with some of the policy of failures that they're seeing every day. But I got a very quick education in how activists pressure groups work. And in a very short time period as my campaign was gaining some momentum, I started getting barraged by harassment, by threats.
One individual from an activist group had posted hundreds of messages, threatening messages over the period of a few weeks. They had gone after my wife attempting to get her fired from her employer. She works at Microsoft. They had been posting white supremacists content to my family. And I'm a biracial family, interracial marriage. And [we] have mixed race kids. And then the final straw is they actually went after my kids, they started posting hateful messages to my eight year old son school, facebook page. And not only that, they let people know that they knew where I lived, and really just kind of engaged in a reign of terror. And I very regretfully withdrew from the race because it was a decision that I had to make for the best interest of my family.
And I felt conflicted because I deeply want policy change. But the political environment, as you've seen with in Seattle, as you've seen with Andy knows, reporting for city journal down in Portland, is saturated with the threat of violence.

Yikes.

Now I'm not sure. Should we discount the side that quotes a bad number from the media, having missed the Reddit post disproving it? Or should we discount the side that harasses and threatens a candidate, his wife and his children until he retires from an election?

Maybe they cancel out. Anyway, I'd suggest reading the whole transcript after all, $1 billion or not. There's some interesting stuff in there.

troydavis2• 8 years ago

I guess we can skip over this due to his agenda.

No, you should skip over this because the number is obviously factually flawed. I can't link to the Puget Sound Business Journal infographic it's from because PSBJ uses a paywall. Regarding "having missed the Reddit post disproving it," as I wrote, it was widely discredited (including in Reddit comments). It's unlikely that anyone following the issue as closely as a city council candidate would have "missed" that.

I'm all for learning more about the problem. However, all 4 sources that I linked to are closer to primary sources for the information they provide, and 3 or 4 of the 4 are less biased.

cwkoss9• 8 years ago

Make a brutalist prison-like structure downtown where:

- Anyone can get a free bed/meal

- Anyone can get illegal drugs provided to them by a nurse for free. Nurse may give 5 min sobriety pep talk before administering.

- You have to piss clean before you can leave.

Seems like for $80k/person a year, we could clean up the streets, make the addicts much happier and safer, and perhaps even have some money left over. I'm sure it'd take a huge load off emergency services too - removing the economic needs of satisfying addiction seems like it could drastically reduce crime, why steal for a fix if you can get it for free?

natalyarostova• 8 years ago

I'm a huge fan of these types of ideas.

While I like this one specifically, and think it has promise, what we really need to do is try 20 different ideas. Each should be a small randomized trial, with pre-registered outcome metrics.

Get all the conservatives, liberals, progressives, socialists in a room. Get them to agree on optimal outcomes (I actually don't think this is insane, as we often want the same thing). Then run a series of experiments, where each partisan leaning can propose an experiment.

Obviously, in real life with actual humans, this would never work. But I can dream...

onlyrealcuzzo2• 8 years ago

While I agree with you totally about the experiments -- am I the only person that thinks it's crazy that we're going to give $80K a year to the most useless people in our society when the median household income is like 33% less than that!?

It'd be great to, you know, not have the homeless problem. But when it's going to cost substantially more per person than the average person earns in a year, that just doesn't seem fair...

cco2• 8 years ago

I'm not being glib but I think agreeing on outcomes is a much harder issue than you think that it might be. In my experience in this space, disagreement on desired outcomes is the root of political problems around drug addiction, mental health, and homelessness.

I would hazard a guess that you support harm reduction strategies, those policies do not garner widespread support amongst the voting public. Further, even when it is, it is very easy for opponents to say, "Why are we giving drug addicts this money when school teachers haven't had a raise in five years and can't afford to live here?"

T4NG2• 8 years ago

why would an addict want to better themselves in this situation?

cwkoss9• 8 years ago

Why do humans have motivations?

flukus• 8 years ago

Because most addicts want to better themselves and once basic needs are met they have the ability too.

The only change I'd make to this is to let addicts out, and not completely disconnect them from society.

projectramo• 8 years ago

Is the idea that people with psychological disorders and under/unemployment should also have to develop an addiction to drugs?

cwkoss9• 8 years ago

A segment of the homeless population is excluded from housing services because they are not willing to give up their addictions. If they use drugs, they are kicked back onto the street.

I by no means think this should be the only homeless solution, but for the subset of the homeless unwilling to stop using drugs, our currently policies literally leave them out in the cold.

freyir2• 8 years ago

make the addicts much happier and safer

This is the current trend in many progressive cities, and so far it's a massive failure. Perhaps it's not surprising that when you work to make addicts happier, you attract more addicts. You also wind up with an entire industry that spends hundreds of millions of tax dollars catering to the addicts, and which perversely needs addicts to remain addicted in order for the industry to survive. The situation only gets worse.

These policies put the addict's needs above those of the non-addicts, since most non-addicts do not want a neighborhood filled with junkies who moved in to get free services, free needles, and legal injection sites.

Common knowledge used to be that an addict needs to hit "rock bottom" before they will turn their life around. If this is true, by making addicts happier and more comfortable, you're not helping anybody.

cwkoss9• 8 years ago

This has not been attempted anywhere. What are you referring to?

who typically do not want their neighborhood filled with addicts who have moved in to get free services, free needles, and safe spaces.

The lack of a policy for dealing with homeless addicts is a effectively just a policy of keeping them in the poorest neighborhoods. Ignoring them doesn't make them go away, we can do better.

zozbot123• 8 years ago

Common knowledge used to be that an addict needs to hit "rock bottom" before they will turn their life around.

There are some newer treatments of drug addiction (e.g. wrt. opioids) that seem to hit a useful middle ground. They do more than simply letting the addict hit "rock bottom", e.g. they do mitigate the effects of physical dependence and withdrawal - but they seemingly do not replicate the "rewarding" and "addictive" effects of the drug. They're still rather controversial, precisely because nobody wants to inadvertently "enable" an opioid junkie in their destructive habit, but their use may be worthwhile here.

fzeroracer6• 8 years ago

This is the current trend in many progressive cities, and so far it's a massive failure
Perhaps it's not surprising that when you work to make addicts happier, you attract more addicts.
Common knowledge used to be that an addict needs to hit "rock bottom" before they will turn their life around.

Please cite your claims.

pkamb• 8 years ago

Stop brutalizing brutalism.

alexbecker• 8 years ago

You have to piss clean before you can leave.

This is clearly unconstitutional, unless you have to be tried and convicted of a crime in order to enter, which I suspect would make it less attractive. Not to mention I think your view of what homeless people want/need is, uh, not exactly informed by a lot of experience in the streets.

omegaworks• 8 years ago

He discounts immediately the obvious solution for the problem houseless people face: providing them homes.

At $80,000 a year, it's absurd that we are unable to use that money to actually finance housing.

What he says about it:

about 80 percent of people who are on the streets, uh, struggle with lifetime drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness

Is a total non-sequitur. People that struggle with lifetime addiction and mental illness have those problems exacerbated by not having housing. Providing stable housing is the first step toward coping with that illness.

They're doing it in Canada, and the results validate this policy:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/world/canada/homeless-can...

the cost of housing the homeless was far less than the cost of the emergency services needed by the homeless while they were living on the street.
“The reduction in days in jail alone pays for the program,” said Jaime Rogers, a Medicine Hat housing official. She cited studies that said the average homeless person costs taxpayers 120,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $91,600, in services, while it costs just 18,000 Canadian dollars a year, or $13,740, to house someone and provide the necessary retention support.

longerthoughts10• 8 years ago

He discounts immediately the obvious solution for the problem houseless people face: providing them homes.

Keep reading. He leads by highlighting flaws of the commonly proposed strategies for addressing homelessness but later goes back and proposes a solution tying several things together, including providing housing.

He essentially says 1) build housing, 2) enforce laws against low-level offenses associated with homelessness (e.g. littering, vandalism), 3) provide services for addiction and mental illness, 4) create a jobs program.

TaylorAlexander2• 8 years ago

I really dislike it when people downvote perfectly valid political opinions they disagree with and don’t even bother to respond to you. I agree with you that building homes for the homeless is a fantastically effective way to deal with homelessness. I’m sorry you’re not getting the respect you deserve. You’ve got my upvote.

longerthoughts10• 8 years ago

I suspect some of the downvotes are coming not from disagreement, but because the first line of the parent's comment misstates the interviewee's conclusions about providing housing. I share your view that downvotes should be reserved for comments that don't encourage productive discussion and comments should be used to disagree, and misstating conclusions from an article is not productive.

sebringj• 8 years ago

I completely missed the boat on that one with home prices. I guess that's why it's a tough issue. It's not something you can just answer without knowing a ton of variables which maybe is a task for AI. My bad. I really liked this video -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6h7fL22WCE regarding a man who tried to help (in LA) by making tiny homes.

mrep2• 8 years ago

House/rent prices have gone way up.

No they haven't recently from sources I have seen. Housing prices are falling [0] (admittedly might be due to rising interest rates) and rents fell earlier this year [1].

[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...

UnpossibleJim• 8 years ago

That's relatively new. Housing prices over the last decade have gone way up.

Pfhreak• 8 years ago

Have gone up is not mutually exclusive with falling house prices. It can be true that they've gone way up, but are currently falling.

I bought a house in 2014, and it's definitely way up, despite a fall in the past couple months.

TomMckenny• 8 years ago

A Month or even a year's price decline is insignificant. Housing prices have outpaced inflation and far outpaced wage gains nation wide for decades.[0]

As is true of every asset class relative to the value of labor[1]

Indeed, barring extreme systemic changes, there are a couple of things that we can be absolutely certain of nation wide in 10 years: housing will be less affordable and there will be more homeless.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/23/how-much-housing-prices-have...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...

opportune• 8 years ago

Another challenge is that most direct funding (aside from Medicaid) comes from municipalities rather than the state or the federal government. So other areas are incentivized to ship their homeless to Seattle or at the very least consider it not their problem to begin with.

With state and federal funding you could enact a program where the addicted people living on the streets rather than in shelters (who are the homeless people who cause most of the problems) are committed to involuntary sobriety programs, and then on completion provided with private housing (not a shelter, some 1bed public housing) and, as the article mentions, some low-skill job like picking up trash on the condition that they remain clean (kind of like a halfway house). You could also long term house the severely mentally ill who cannot live on their own in psychiatric facilities. That would cost a lot of money up front but could actually solve the problem long term.

Also note that even in Seattle over 2/3 of homeless people live in cars or shelters. Most homeless people aren’t the crazy people on the corner harassing you for drug money and camping in public parks, even though those are the most visible

dan_quixote• 8 years ago

Keep in mind that about half of our country's political leadership see the strain on major cities as a win-win-win: They don't have to allocate funds to properly deal with the problem and the urban liberals and lower class are subsequently punished. The solution is rather clear when viewed from the federal level, but the motivation is low.

subzidion2• 8 years ago

It was recently announced that King County and the City of Seattle want to consolidate their homeless response into a single agency.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/durkan-and-constan...

Hopefully this can be a good step forward in the right direction. As mentioned by other comments, there are much better resources for learning about homelessness in Seattle than an interview with a dropout Seattle City Council candidate who has a pretty clear political agenda.

longerthoughts10• 8 years ago

there are much better resources for learning about homelessness in Seattle than an interview with a dropout Seattle City Council candidate who has a pretty clear political agenda

Agreed that there are better ways to get informed but it's a politician's job to have a clear political agenda. Forgive me if I'm detecting the wrong tone but I'm becoming accustomed to hearing people say "political agenda" with the implication of some sinister plot.

subzidion2• 8 years ago

Sorry if that was the implication. I just wanted to make it clear that Rufo is not just a film maker, but also someone with political aspirations.

fzeroracer6• 8 years ago

Keep in mind that Chris Rufo is known to call all of his opponents ideologues, has ties to to the Claremont Institute (known for dabbling a bit in white nationalism), frequently complained about his opponents 'virtue signalling' and talks about 'break[ing] up the homeless industrial complex'

He tends to be biased more towards criminalizing homelessness and institutionalizing them. I also noticed in this podcast he makes claims that are simply not backed up by evidence, specifically when he's talking about Canada and the safe injection sites.

This isn't to say that homelessness isn't a problem in Seattle, because it is. We're seeing similar issues happen to San Francisco as in Seattle due to rising rent and poor healthcare opportunities and there's unfortunately no easy solution.

haberman• 8 years ago

has ties to to the Claremont Institute (known for dabbling a bit in white nationalism)

It's gotten to the point that I don't trust these vague-links-to-white-nationalism accusations at all. They so rarely have any substance to them that they make me more suspicious of the person accusing than the person being accused.

drak0n1c4• 8 years ago

Ad hominem isn't a good look, nor an effective argument when it comes to policy. Too often I see dismissals based on indirect associations with the Koch brothers or unsubstantiated allegations of white nationalism. I don't see how ad hominem by progressives is any better than someone dismissing research data because of "links" to think tanks funded by George Soros, etc.

fzeroracer6• 8 years ago

I think that says a lot more about you than anything else, considering we've seen a large surge in white nationalist activity over the past year. We should be very concerned, especially when they're becoming violent and lashing out at people like the Proud Boys.

rukittenme• 8 years ago

Can you expand on the white nationalism support of the Claremont Institute and the connection of Chris Rufo to it?

fzeroracer6• 8 years ago

Not only did their previous president (until 2017) have ties to Steve Bannon (which should be throwing alarms right away) [1], he was a former Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute [2] which still had some recent issues due to members openly supporting white nationalism [3].

[1] http://thefederalist.com/2017/03/10/will-steve-bannon-help-b...

[2] https://www.claremont.org/page/fellowships/lincoln-fellowshi...

[3] https://www.politico.com/story/2018/08/23/trump-think-tank-r...

DoreenMichele• 8 years ago

I submitted it. I didn't expect it to hit the front page.

A few stats on Seattle homelessness:

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/seattle-sta...

A few stats on California homelessness:

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-...

"Homes for the homeless" is always a bad idea. For one thing, it de facto helps entrench the problem, if only due to The Shirky Principle. For another, it fosters "creative" solutions that amount to designing something that would only appeal to you if you were currently sleeping in a dumpster.

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-shirky-...

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/05/homes-for-h...

I've done a lot of research over the years. I would like to see market rate housing solutions for people, not "homes for the homeless." I don't think we solve this by trying to "help the homeless" per se. That's just survival mode, basically. I think we solve it in part by adding more missing middle housing and replacing the million SROs that have been torn down in recent decades, plus creating a single payer medical system. The ACA was the only politically viable solution. It isn't actually a good solution. I don't have citations at my fingertips, but I've seen research linking housing instability and excessive medical bills.

Housing is typically the single biggest expense in a household budget. Transportation is typically the second biggest. Medical expenses in the US are a shockingly high percentage of GDP, on the order of a fifth of our economy.

Supplying walkable urban housing at the right price point and proper universal medical coverage wouldn't solve homelessness, but would make a big difference in the issue.

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-clear-c...

https://streetlifesolutions.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-missing...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

So, as nutshell as possible, those are some of my thoughts on the problem space as someone who both had a class on Homelessness and Public Policy and spent several years homeless and got myself back into housing without going through some program. I continue to blog about it in some fashion or other, continue to communicate with currently homeless individuals and try to supply useful information to try to make some small difference.

jakelarkin• 8 years ago

from my observation, the primary drivers are

1) the heroin/fentanyl epidemic

2) political choices or fiscal constraints as local spending on public healthcare/shelters/mental-wards/criminal-justice has not kept up with spiraling costs increases and population growth

3) the minimum rents in coastal cities exceeding the max SSID benefit ( ~$750/month) in the early 2010s

The sub causes of (3) are myriad but include; a decade of easy credit inflating property values, revival of American cities, local zoning/permitting strangling construction, and I guess the economic success of West coast technology companies (although this tax base keeps the government sector afloat particularly in California, so think the progressives protest a bit too much)

The east coast does not have as many problems with (2) because there is an effective "right to shelter" with subfreezing winter temps. Having enough shelter capacity helps prevent the short-term homeless from becoming "chronically homeless".

vkou2• 8 years ago

local zoning/permitting strangling construction

Looking at the Seattle skyline from my apartment, it's construction cranes as far as the eye can see.

A lot of construction is happening. It's not enough, though, because there's an absolute torrent of people into the area.

8bitsrule• 8 years ago

Here's the 'challenge': Seattle spends $$tens of millions each year on treating the symptoms.

Mostly policing, sheltering and moving tent-emcampments around. Wasted money.

The cause (exacerbated by huge price increases) is home-less-ness. The cure is homes. Apart from showcase projects, no progress. Buy the property, build small homes, move people in.

So why doesn't it happen? Follow the money.

cwkoss9• 8 years ago

In the words of Steve Balmer:

Developers Developers Developers Developers

Seattle’s Homeless Challenge

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