SEATTLE — Seattle removed thousands of tents in 2023 in accordance with Mayor Bruce Harrell’s campaign promise to keep parks, sidewalks and public spaces “open and clear of encampments.”
Now, a new City Council with more moderate and business-friendly members could continue the drumbeat, as many residents become increasingly upset about open-air drug use and other visible signs of homelessness.
According to city data, about 16% of people living in encampments that the city removed last year entered a shelter immediately after, meaning the vast majority of people were likely shuffled to another location outdoors. Meanwhile, encampment removals and cleanups cost the city about $38 million last year.
For decades, advocates have protested the city’s encampment removals, often holding signs that say, “Stop the sweeps.” The same message dominates the public comments section of many King County Regional Homelessness Authority board meetings.
While many advocates agree that taking down tents and dispersing people is not an effective way to end homelessness, divisions have started to appear.
Real Change founder Tim Harris left the homeless advocacy organization and street newspaper he led for nearly three decades partly because of his stance that clearings still have a place in Seattle, which conflicted with other staff.
Real Change was one of several groups that sued the city of Seattle in 2017, claiming its encampment removals violated people’s rights.
Tiffani McCoy was the advocacy director at Real Change under Harris and disagreed with him. She’s now working with a nonprofit organization called House Our Neighbors that will look at ways to fund Seattle’s new social housing initiative that passed in 2023.
Interviews with Harris and McCoy, edited for clarity and length, show how some of Seattle’s progressive leaders are thinking about the issue.
Tiffani, can you lay out what the demand to “Stop the sweeps” means?
McCoy: What I mean by sweeps is the forcible removal of individuals with very little or no notice and the discarding of most of their possessions of value and then having nowhere to go. While some people are offered places to go again, there are not enough places in the city for everyone to go.
If we had enough shelters, if we had enough housing that’s actually affordable to individuals, the idea of sweeps wouldn’t even exist.
Tim, you have a different position that encampment removals should happen. Why is that?
Harris: I think one legitimate basis for sweeps is that it is a fact that businesses are negatively impacted, communities are negatively impacted. Allowing tent encampments on an ongoing basis is just bad for the community. And when we deny those impacts on the community, advocates look like we’re naive. And that drives people to the other side.
It is profoundly self-defeating to deny the impact that homeless encampments have on the community or to say that those communities should just absorb those impacts because homeless people have it worse.
Tiffani, what do you think about the idea that calling for the end of encampment removals ignores the needs of housed residents and businesses and only alienates them?
McCoy: I have a problem with this idea that if we just say that sometimes sweeps are good and OK and people need to be moved for X, Y and Z, then we’re going to have this magical space where we’re now going to get along and be able to solve these crises.
I still say at the end of the day, if our focus is on whether or not it’s OK to sweep people sometimes or not, whilst not having a plan to actually make it so that, that is not a necessity, what are we doing?
Tim, less than 20% of people in an encampment removal go to shelter so presumably the majority of people are just moving somewhere else outside. So, what’s the basis for that?
Harris: I agree. I think it’s futile.
But if I am a small business, and I’ve got an encampment on my doorstep, and people aren’t coming into my business because they want to avoid it, I am perfectly happy to see that encampment move four blocks away. It’s not a solution, but it is relief for those who are immediately impacted, and that’s meaningful.
Are you saying there’s an argument to have an encampment move four blocks away because it at least shares the burden of homeless encampments around the city? It’s not always on one business’s doorstep all the time?
Harris: Yeah, functionally, that’s exactly what it does. I think as a community, we need to ask, “Can we live with that equation?” If you’ve got a futile solution that is sharing the burden, it kind of works, but if that futile solution is actively doing harm to vulnerable people, that’s a problem. I think that’s where that has to be balanced and mitigated.
Tiffani, what do you think about the idea that encampment removals at least share the burden?
McCoy: I just find the premise is quite faulty, that this individual that doesn’t have a place to go is a burden as if they’re like a sack that should just be moved on to the next person. It’s dehumanizing. And it feeds into this idea that it is that individual’s problem, it is not the system’s problem.
If this is the best we can do, that we can relieve the burden from someone for, like, a month and that’s the whole focus and we call it a good day, then we’re failing. Because then in a couple of months, there’s going to be another tent or RV that pops up there.
Tim, do you think there are other reasons to remove encampments even if the majority of people stay outside?
Harris: Healthy encampments often turn into unhealthy encampments. In a healthy encampment, there are people who are visiting to support. Often there is some sort of natural leadership, you know, some kind of street mom or street dad who’s kind of keeping things glued together, watching out for people.
The longer an encampment sits, one thing that happens is the dealers find it. Once the dealers find an encampment, it’s downhill from there because the drug trade completely infiltrates it. With size and identification by dealers, the inevitable path is that it’s going to get druggier and more dysfunctional and that usually means a lot more internal strife.
Tiffani, what do you think about the idea that encampment removals serve the function of breaking up dangerous activity that can concentrate if encampments are left alone for a long time?
McCoy: There are thousands of people outside, not every single encampment area turns into that. And also, if it does turn into that, that is a deep failure on the city and all levels of government.
These things are happening because we are leaving folks outside to live in a vacuum. And yes, those things happen. So why do we keep just forgetting this, pretending this isn’t happening, just sweeping people, instead of actually investing deeply in the things that we need so that this isn’t even a reality anymore?
What is the harm you’ve seen done to people who are displaced from encampments?
Harris: When people are continually swept, what happens is they start looking for more creative out-of-the-way places to be less visible. And that often means going deeper into green belts, going into neighborhoods and areas where they’re off the beaten path. And the practical impacts of that is that it makes it way harder for anybody to be in relationship with them and be consistent about offering support. It is driving people into deeper isolation and seclusion.
And in the age of fentanyl, what is going to happen as a result of that is more people are going to die of overdoses.
McCoy: I’ve seen people lose their last possessions and lose their will to go on. They’ve contracted UTIs from waiting out in their tents because they’re afraid of being swept. The more they’re swept, the more they’re displaced, the more the lack of trust is built between them and outside agencies trying to work with them to get them inside
Any last words on encampment removals?
Harris: There are ways that you can approach the sweeps that just simply do less damage, like creating places where people can store things, being more careful not to throw away people’s survival gear. Seeing that there are options for sanitation, figuring out some way so that if somebody doesn’t accept their offer into shelter, that you’re not just going to lose track of this person as they go deeper and deeper into it, which is what’s happening. Police shouldn’t be involved.
McCoy: Stop putting this teeny Band-Aid on this gaping wound. I want to focus on the root causes because I don’t even want to have to be having conversations on whether we should be allowing criminal elements in encampments, like of course not, but what we’re doing is not going to make that not happen in the future.
Like Greg Colburn said in his book, homelessness is a housing crisis. It’s a deeply economic issue. And until we have enough housing stock to where folks are not becoming evicted easily because of medical bills, or student loans, or a loss of job, or wages, wage reduction, this pipeline in homelessness is going to continue.
