Westneat: Homelessness catastrophe

The headline is that Washington has the third-largest homeless population in the nation, after California and New York. A closer look at the data though shows it’s much worse than that.

Washington has higher rates of unsheltered homelessness than most other states, except California. These are people living out in the elements, in greenbelts, in doorways and by the sides of roads — what the British call “rough sleepers.” These are the worst places to be.

Compare here with New York, a state with nearly 2½ times more people. Washington had 16,222 rough sleepers on a given night in 2024. The entire state of New York had just 5,638. For the hardest, chronic cases — people who have disabilities such as mental illness or substance abuse, and are homeless for long periods — Washington had 9,185 unsheltered, compared with New York’s 1,337.

These huge disparities are largely because New York has so much more emergency shelter than Washington does — by design.

Last week’s report to Congress is a giant red flag for Washington. After years of supposedly urgent attention to the issue, Washington statewide had 4,000 more souls living outside in wintertime than much larger, and warmer, Texas.

What happened?

It’s complicated, as everything with homelessness is. Fentanyl had a lot to do with it, but they have fentanyl in these other cities, too. The bottom line comes down to shelter.

In a policy switch, Seattle-King County stopped adding much emergency shelter back in 2015. The plan was to instead focus on building permanent housing in what they argued was a more compassionate, deeper response.

Shelter is seen as helping people get off the streets in the moment, but not so much for stabilizing people long-term. “Shelter alone can’t solve homelessness,” was the phrase often used. The drawback to permanent housing though is that it takes years and tons of money to build. Regardless, a decision was made to effectively leave folks outside, potentially for years, while apartments got built.

They didn’t put it that way, of course. But that was the result. The federal report shows that since 2015, Seattle and King County have increased shelter capacity by 8 percent, even as the number of homeless people jumped 67 percent.

I’ve been yelling at the top of my pixels for years that this policy, well-meaning as it was, is dooming us to mass levels of people living in squalor outside for the immediate future. For humanitarian aid purposes alone, we simply needed more emergency shelter — tiny homes, FEMA tents, conventional shelters, even managed tent cities — while we worked on putting up permanent housing.

The data in last week’s federal report is nearly a year old, so maybe some progress has been made since. We’ll see when new counts come out in spring.

This stuff is hard, but surely it would have been possible to better balance shelter and housing work all along — as other cities apparently did.

What is it about our nature in this state that led us to follow this course for so long — to leave people in dire conditions, supposedly in the name of doing better by them? Was it idealism?

I’m no psychologist. But I think we need one, to peer into the region’s civic soul. So we don’t walk so readily into disastrous liberal blind spots like this again.