Westneat: Who owns homeless crisis?

What the city council candidate, a man named John Procter, said next is what really drew my attention.

“I don’t know where these people come from,” he speculated about the tent encampments. “I think a lot of these people come from Seattle … they come here for the free stuff.”

I’m bringing this to attention for two reasons. One is that it’s not just Seattle that’s struggling with a rise in street homelessness. It’s important that Seattleites know this — the crisis we’re experiencing here is at a terrible scale, but it isn’t unique. It isn’t confined even to the big urban centers.

The other is this notion that Port Angeles’ homeless population came from Seattle. The rap on Seattle for decades is that we’re “Freeattle,” luring in the poor and the transients from around the West. Now we’re supposedly exporting them, too?

“It’s a consistent storyline about the homeless — that they’re always from somewhere else,” says Lacey Fry of Port Angeles, who organizes the town’s annual count of people living on the streets.

For a debate about homelessness in Seattle, and one of the first questions submitted by a Seattle resident was this: “Folks come from out of town and pitch their tents, because other cities don’t allow them to do so. Why are we not asking for proof of residency in our state or city before providing housing for all?”

So we think they’re coming from over there. And over there they think they’re coming from here.

In Port Angeles, Fry said this year volunteers counted 231 people who were homeless in and around Port Angeles during a couple nights in January. That includes a record 148 living “unsheltered,” meaning in tents or doorways or cars, rather than in an official shelter.

Social workers asked them where they had been living when they became homeless. Two answered “Seattle,” one “Bremerton.” The rest, Frey says, said they were “from Sequim or Quilcene or Port Angeles or Neah Bay or other towns around here.”

The last time King County asked the same question, in 2019, 84 percent said they had been living in the county at the time they became homeless.

Now, I’ve interviewed folks holed up under bridges in downtown Seattle who said they moved here for the legal weed, or because we have a rep for letting people camp wherever they want. It definitely happens. None of this is to say that communities like ours shouldn’t have basic standards about unauthorized encampments — about trash or any of the other issues that arise with street homelessness.

It is to say, though, that one reason we struggle so much to deal with this civic emergency is the “stranger” phenomenon. It’s understandable in one sense — you see someone living in inhuman conditions, and the instinct is to conclude that they’re foreign to you and me. They’re not of this place. They’re from Othertown.

In Port Angeles, that’s Seattle. I don’t know what Port Angeles is going to do. They could probably just run the couple hundred homeless out of town if they wanted to — which is basically what that one city council candidate was advocating.

Seattle is considering a charter amendment, Measure 29, that seeks to stand up 2,000 units of shelter while aiming to keep public spaces free of encampments.

I don’t know if this charter amendment is the right answer. But I do think it’s crucial that Seattle, and places like Port Angeles, own the problem. The tragedy, the blame, and hopefully the solutions, all live here. Not off in Othertown.