What NYC Must Learn From Seattle’s Homeless Struggle

Seattle is under siege. Over the past five years, the Emerald City has seen an explosion of homelessness, crime and addiction. In its 2017 point-in-time count of the homeless, Washington state’s King County social-services agency All Home found 11,643 people sleeping in tents, cars and emergency shelters. Property crime has risen to a rate 2¹/₂ times higher than Los Angeles’ and four times higher than New York City’s. Cleanup crews pick up tens of thousands of dirty needles from city streets and parks every year.

At the same time, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Seattle metro area spends more than $1 billion fighting homelessness every year. That’s nearly $100,000 for every homeless man, woman and child in King County, yet the crisis seems only to have deepened, with more addiction, more crime, and more tent encampments in residential neighborhoods. By any measure, the city’s efforts are not working.

Over the past year, I’ve spent time at City Council meetings, political rallies, homeless encampments and rehabilitation facilities, trying to understand how the government can spend so much money with so little effect.

While most of the debate has focused on tactical policy questions — build more shelters? open supervised injection sites? — the real battle isn’t being waged in the tents, under the bridges or in the corridors of City Hall, but in the realm of ideas, where, for now, four ideological power centers frame Seattle’s homelessness debate. I’ll identify them as the socialists, the compassion brigades, the homeless-industrial complex and the addiction evangelists.

Together, they have dominated the local policy discussion, diverted hundreds of millions of dollars toward favored projects, and converted many well-intentioned voters to the politics of unlimited compassion. If we want to break through the failed status quo on homelessness in places like Seattle, we must first map the ideological battlefield, identify the flaws in our current policies and rethink our assumptions.

Seattle has long been known as one of America’s most liberal locales, but in recent years, the city has marched even further left as socialists, once relegated to the margins, have declared war on the Democratic establishment. Socialist Alternative City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant claims that the city’s homelessness crisis is the inevitable result of the Amazon boom, greedy landlords and rapidly increasing rents.

The capitalists of Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft and Boeing, in her Marxian optic, generate enormous wealth for themselves, drive up housing prices, and push the working class toward poverty and despair — and, too often, onto the streets.

On the surface, this argument has its own internal logic. Advocates point to Zillow and McKinsey studies that show a high correlation between rent hikes and homelessness in Seattle, for example. But correlation is not causation, and the survey data paint a remarkably different picture.

According to King County’s point-in-time study, only 6 percent of homeless people surveyed cited “could not afford rent increase” as the precipitating cause of their situation, pointing instead to a wide range of other problems — domestic violence, incarceration, mental illness, family conflict, medical conditions, breakups, eviction, addiction and job loss — as bigger factors.

Further, while the Zillow study did find a correlation between rising rents and homelessness in four major markets — Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, DC — it also found that homelessness decreased despite rising rents in Houston, Tampa, Chicago, Phoenix, St. Louis, San Diego, Portland, Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta, Charlotte and Riverside, Calif. Rent increases are a real burden for the working poor, but the evidence suggests that higher rents alone don’t push people onto the streets.

Even in a pricey city like Seattle, most working- and middle-class residents respond to economic incentives in logical ways: relocating to less expensive neighborhoods, downsizing to smaller apartments, taking in roommates, moving in with family or leaving the city altogether. King County is home to more than 1 million residents earning below the median income, and 99 percent of them manage to find a place to live and pay the rent on time. The aggregate-level analyses from Zillow and McKinsey don’t take into account the vast number of options available even to the poorest families; for the socialists, “the rent is too damn high” explains everything.

What the socialists won’t, or can’t, see is that their agenda cannot solve the homelessness crisis. Even if the Sawant-championed “head tax” on big employers had stayed in force — it was repealed in June — the city would have built, at most, only 187 subsidized housing units per year, which means that it would take at least 60 years to provide housing for all those currently homeless.

The compassion brigades are the moral crusaders of homelessness policy. Their Seattle political champion is City Councilman Mike O’Brien, a former chief financial officer for the corporate law firm Stokes Lawrence, who made his name in Seattle politics fighting to ban Yellow Pages deliveries and build a bike lane through a working shipyard in the city’s Ballard neighborhood.

In recent years, O’Brien has become a leader in the campaign to legalize homelessness throughout the city. He has proposed ordinances to legalize street camping on 167 miles of public sidewalks, permit RV camping on city streets, and prevent the city’s homeless-outreach Navigation Teams (made up of cops and other workers) from cleaning up tent cities.

O’Brien and his supporters have constructed an elaborate political vocabulary about the homeless, elevating three key myths to the status of conventional wisdom. The first is that many of the homeless are holding down jobs but can’t get ahead. “I’ve got thousands of homeless people that actually are working and just can’t afford housing,” O’Brien told The Denver Post last year.

But according to King County’s own survey data, only 7.5 percent of the homeless report working full-time, despite record-low unemployment, record job growth and Seattle’s record-high $15 minimum wage. The reality, obvious to anyone who spends any time in tent cities or emergency shelters, is that 80 percent of the homeless suffer from drug and alcohol addiction and 30 percent suffer from serious mental illness, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

The second key myth is that the homeless are “our neighbors,” native to Seattle. Progressive publications like The Stranger insist that “most people experiencing homelessness in Seattle were already here when they became homeless.” This assertion, too, clashes with empirical evidence. More than half of Seattle’s homeless come from outside the city limits, according to the city’s own data. Even this number might be vastly inflated, as the survey asks only “where respondents were living at the time they most recently became homeless” — so, for example, a person could move to Seattle, check into a motel for a week, and then start living on the streets and be considered “from Seattle.”

More rigorous academic studies in San Francisco and Vancouver suggest that 40 percent to 50 percent of the homeless moved to those cities for their permissive culture and generous services. There’s no reason to believe that Seattle is different on this score.

The third myth: O’Brien and his allies argue that the street homeless want help but that there aren’t enough services. Once again, county data contradict their claims: 63 percent of the street homeless refuse shelter when offered it by the city’s Navigation Teams, claiming that “there are too many rules” (39.5 percent) or that “they are too crowded” (32.6 percent).

The recent story about a woman’s “tent mansion” near the city’s Space Needle vividly illustrated how a contingent among the homeless chooses to live in the streets.

“We don’t want to change our lifestyle to fit their requirements,” the woman told newscasters for a CBS Seattle report, explaining how she and her boyfriend moved from West Virginia to Seattle for the “liberal vibe,” repeatedly refusing shelter. “We intend to stay here. This is the solution to the homeless problem. We want autonomy, right here.”

The city’s compassion campaign has devolved into permissiveness, enablement, crime and disorder. Public complaints about homeless encampments from the first three months of this year are an array of horrors: theft, drugs, fighting, rape, murder, explosions, prostitution, assaults, needles and feces. Yet prosecutors have dropped thousands of misdemeanor cases, and police officers are directed not to arrest people for “homelessness-related” offenses, including theft, destruction of property, and drug crimes.

As Scott Lindsay, Seattle’s former top crime adviser, reported to former Mayor Ed Murray: “The increase in street disorder is largely a function of the fact that heroin, crack and meth possession has been largely legalized in the city over the past several years. The unintended consequence of that social-policy effort has been to make Seattle a much more attractive place to buy and sell hard-core drugs.”

What I call the addiction evangelists make up the final cohort of the city’s homelessness power center. They don’t want society simply to accept their choices; they want society to pay for them.

They promote harm reduction, including the opening of safe-injection sites for drug users — something that New York City is looking to introduce. Whatever help they might offer addicts, public-consumption sites do tremendous damage to businesses, residents and cities at large. It also attracts more homeless to a city.

In Seattle, the influx has already begun. According to survey data, approximately 9.5 percent of the city’s homeless say that they came “for legal marijuana,” 15.4 percent came “to access homeless services,” and 15.7 percent were “traveling or visiting” the region and decided that it was a good place to set up camp. As the city builds out its addiction infrastructure and focuses social services in the downtown core, the problem will intensify. Even King County’s former homelessness czar admits that the city’s policies have a “magnet effect.”

The United States generally remains in denial about the reality of homelessness. While ideologues denounce various villains who “cause” homelessness — capitalists, landlords, racists, computer programmers — the reality is that homelessness is a product of disaffiliation.

For the past 70 years, sociologists, political scientists and theologians have documented the slow atomization of society. As family and community bonds weaken, our most vulnerable citizens fall victim to the addiction, mental illness, isolation, poverty and despair that almost always precipitate the final slide into homelessness. The best way to prevent homelessness isn’t to build new apartment complexes or pass new tax levies but to rebuild the family, community, and social bonds that once held communities together.

In the near term, cities must shift toward a stance of realism, which means acknowledging that compassion without limit is a road to disaster. Homelessness should be seen not as a problem to be solved but one to be contained. Cities must stop ceding their parks, schools and sidewalks to homeless encampments. And Seattle, in particular, must stop spending nearly $1 billion a year to “solve homelessness” without clear accountability and visible results.

In San Diego, for instance, city officials and the private sector worked together to build three barracks-style shelters that house nearly 1,000 people for only $4.5 million. They’ve moved 700 individuals off the streets and into the emergency shelter, allowing the police and city crews to remove and clean up illegal encampments.

In Houston, local leaders have reduced homelessness by 60 percent through a combination of providing services and enforcing a zero-tolerance policy for street camping, panhandling, trespassing and property crimes. There’s nothing compassionate about letting addicts, the mentally ill and the poor die in the streets. The first order of business must be to clean up public spaces, move people into shelters and maintain public order.

Ultimately, the success or failure of local government is a back-to-basics proposition: Are the streets clean? Are the neighborhoods safe? Are people able to live, work and raise their families in a flourishing environment? We have the resources to contain the homelessness crisis, in Seattle and elsewhere. The question is whether political leaders will have the courage to act.

Christopher F. Rufo is executive director for the Documentary Foundation and a research fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Wealth & Poverty. He has directed three documentaries for PBS, and his next film, “America Lost,” tells the story of life in three of America’s forgotten cities. This essay is adapted from City Journal.

This piece originally appeared in New York Post