Reclaiming this issue could mean reclaiming power for the progressive left. by Katie Wilson Ask a Seattleite what they think about homelessness, let them talk for a minute, and—especially if they’re a Very Political Person—you can make a good guess as to where they stand on the city’s political spectrum. In the decade since city and county leaders declared homelessness a civil emergency, attitudes have crystallized into camps with distinctive ways of talking about the crisis, who’s to blame, and what to do about it. Unfortunately for the left, our story isn’t working. The short version goes something like this: The root cause of homelessness is a severe shortage of affordable housing, the result of neoliberal underinvestment in subsidized housing and a long history of exclusionary zoning, intensified by Seattle’s tech boom. The solution is to fund housing, shelter, and services at scale; sweeping people from one place to another is cruel and useless. There’s a lot of truth in that little paragraph, but it has failed to hold the allegiance of the average Seattle voter. This should matter to us, for the sake of the nearly 10,000 people living outside in King County and the many thousands more sleeping in shelters or unstably housed; we need political power to enact policies that work. But the left should care for another reason, too. Over the past decade, homelessness has become a true wedge issue in Seattle politics. The failure of our approach to this crisis has helped to elect leaders who are now busy undermining other, undeniably popular progressive-left priorities, from workers’ rights to multimodal transportation to taxing the rich. Reclaiming this issue could mean reclaiming power for the progressive left. How We Lost I watched this narrative ship run aground, and not as a mere witness. Some seven years ago, I was pushing the left’s story on homelessness as part of a coalition supporting the “head tax,” a modest business tax that would have expanded affordable housing, shelter, and homeless services. Big business teamed up with NIMBY types to kill the tax, and in so doing they told a very different story: Where we saw insufficient resources, they denounced a do-nothing city council squandering taxpayers’ money while tents, needles, and crime proliferated in the parks and on the streets. With an energetic assist from The Seattle Times opinion section, their version prevailed, and the council repealed the tax barely a month after unanimously passing it into law. It was a disorienting experience, to say the least. The following year, big business tried hard to make Seattle’s elections all about homelessness. Unhappily for them, they overreached. Big-dollar campaign spending, culminating in a splashy million from Amazon, introduced a new theme: Did voters want a city council bought and paid for by our corporate overlords? The answer was no. Soon after, the most progressive council in living memory passed a far larger tax on big business – the JumpStart Seattle payroll expense tax—in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, committing the bulk of the long-term spending to affordable housing. Alas, the drama didn’t end there. The corporate brain trust licked its wounds and regrouped around a new strategy. In 2021, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce announced that it would no longer endorse or spend on candidates. Instead, it would focus on issues. First up? Homelessness. That year businesses spent big on a ballot initiative called Compassion Seattle. While Compassion Seattle promised to force the city to get serious about its major crisis, the left saw a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Language that sounded great to most voters (compassion! housing and services! tent-free parks!) threatened to enshrine sweeps in the city’s charter, some feared. Others smelled a ruse to polarize that year’s elections, forcing candidates to take sides on the measure and casting progressive contenders in a bad light. The initiative was struck down in court before it reached the ballot, but it still reverberated in the elections, and the left lost the races for mayor and city attorney, along with one of two citywide council seats. Two years later, with homelessness still on voters’ minds, big business and its centrist allies finally got their council supermajority. Our councilmembers now wonder why we let people reject offers of shelter, and why we fund outreach to unsheltered homeless people at all; their signature legislative achievement thus far is banning people accused of certain drug or prostitution related crimes from large swaths of the city. And JumpStart? They revoked the commitment to a long-term spending plan centered on housing. Boy, did we lose. What can we learn from this saga? It’s tempting to argue that it doesn’t matter what the left said or tried to do about homelessness. There are so many reasons why visible homelessness surged during the pandemic; even if local elected leaders did everything right, they would be vulnerable to blame. Anyway, in 2021 and 2023 policing was the higher profile issue. And all issues aside, a “kick the bastards out” vibe was almost inevitable as voters strove to move on from a traumatic few years. The powerful opponents of Seattle’s progressive council had no shortage of fodder; a backlash was overdetermined. All this may be true. Nevertheless, I’ve come to believe that there are some serious defects in the left’s approach to the homelessness crisis. Even if smarter choices may not have prevented our recent losses, they could help us to hold power the next time around — and to actually make progress on this thorniest of social problems. What We’re Wrong About The central weakness of the left narrative on homelessness is a habit of deflection that makes it sound, at best, as though we are in denial about the grim reality on the streets; at worst, like we embrace it. Drugs? Housed people use them too. Anyway, it’s common for people to get addicted after they become homeless. Trash? Actually, a lot of it is opportunistically dumped from passing cars. Bodily excretions? We need public restrooms. Shoplifting and crime? The claims are overblown. Anyway, homeless people are more often the victims of crime than the perpetrators. Feel unsafe? It’s all in your head, really you just don’t want to look at poverty. It’s not that there’s no truth to these rejoinders. But they amount to trivializing what anyone who spends some time walking around Seattle’s streets can plainly observe: People with acute mental illness whose behavior is disturbed and occasionally aggressive. People using drugs, often incapacitated or passed out on the ground. People in dire need of medical care, suffering and in some cases slowly dying in public. And trash, and excrement, and broken windows. I think it’s possible to acknowledge these realities without sensationalizing them á la “Seattle is Dying,” and without demonizing or dehumanizing the people who are suffering through them. When we don’t, or when we do so using only the most euphemistic and sanitized language, we leave a void that’s too easily filled by right-wing narratives and false solutions. These gain traction because at least they’re pointing to what people see and proclaiming it unacceptable. It’s true that homelessness is a housing problem, and in a high-cost region like King County a missed paycheck or a doctor’s bill can be enough to tip someone over the edge. But it’s also true that drug addiction and mental illness often precipitate the loss of housing, and that once someone falls into that vortex, on an individual level, housing alone may not be enough to pull them out. Most of us on the left do recognize this, but we tend to downplay it and ignore some of its implications. When, for example, it’s said that homeless people reject offers of shelter, the common left reply (beyond pointing out that shelters are consistently full) is a litany of the most reasonable of reasons: many shelters don’t accommodate couples or pets; there’s nowhere to store belongings; you have to arrive late and leave early. All true, and many people would gladly move into shelter or housing without these limitations; that’s why tiny houses are popular. But it’s also true that some people’s reasons are more complicated and less sure to elicit sympathy. They may fear going through withdrawal and not want to disrupt the strategies they’ve developed for obtaining and using drugs. They may have paranoid delusions that lead them to avoid shelters, or disruptive behaviors that get them kicked out. Even if such cases are rarer than the ones we deflect to, the people for whom drugs or mental illness are significant factors in staying outside tend to be more visible and more likely to break laws and behave in ways that make other people uncomfortable or afraid. When we’re squeamish about admitting this and have little to say about what to do about it, we open the door for punitive policies and narratives that blame homeless people, portraying them as loafers who are coddled by handouts and don’t want to follow rules. I’m not suggesting that the left relax our insistence that affordable housing at scale is needed to solve the homelessness crisis. Too often our attitude is one of bland assent that we do need more voluntary mental health and addiction treatment services, coupled with support for “harm reduction” strategies like safe consumption sites. Unfortunately, this comes across as an unserious plan that will only amplify the chaos. We also need to talk more about mental illness and drug addiction, and show ourselves to be the adults in the room when it comes to solutions. How We Can Win So what do we do? If the left wants to win, we need to preach beyond the choir. Where better to find the average Seattle voter than in the comment section? “Left Leaning Patriot,” who wrote this response to a New York Times article on homelessness, actually hails from Mercer Island, but I think represents well the kind of person whose support we can’t afford to lose: “Homelessness is a very nuanced and multi-layered problem and clearly there is no one-size fits all solution. I want to be compassionate, but it is fatiguing. It makes me sad to see the homeless camped out on city streets and parks. It also angers me to see the homeless leaving piles of garbage and feces on those same streets and parks. I don’t like fearing for my safety walking the streets at night after going to a restaurant or worrying if my car will be broken into or vandalized. I know many people are in their dire situation due to a bad situation or simply bad luck. At the same time, I know there are people who don’t want “help” and choose to be on the streets, many often victimizing others in the same situation by selling drugs, trafficking sex, etc. Billions being spent with very limited results. Our society is broken. I don’t have the answer, but something needs to be done…” Bingo. If this person lived in West Seattle, they might have voted for Lisa Herbold in 2019, then Rob Saka in 2023. Queen Anne? Andrew Lewis, then Bob Kettle. Leschi? Maybe even Kshama Sawant, then Joy Hollingsworth. You get the drift. We had their vote, then we lost it. How can we win it back?   First, it’s not enough to say “stop the sweeps.” We need to offer a positive and realistic plan for how the people living in tents in the park near Left Leaning Patriot’s house are going to become stably sheltered or housed, freeing that space for its intended uses. This could be something similar to the JustCARE program that PDA, REACH, ACRS and Chief Seattle Club pioneered briefly during the pandemic, which succeeded in moving chronically homeless people with complex challenges into low-barrier housing through intensive and individualized outreach. (This approach has continued in the state-level Encampment Resolution Program, whose future funding is uncertain.) It’s fine if this takes longer than a sweep, even much longer. But it can’t be put off to some indefinite utopian future.   Second, we must be clear, in our words and in the solutions we call for, about the degree of ongoing support that some people need. Even when treatment is available for someone in crisis, too often they’re ejected a week or two later with no meaningful follow-up. It’s easy to do some hand-waving about “housing first,” which in principle is absolutely correct. But it’s become clear that most permanent supportive housing, in its current form, isn’t set up for the people with the most severe challenges. And the fentanyl crisis has made everything exponentially worse. People need a way to use drugs safely when they lapse without finding themselves homeless again. Others need attention and intervention before behavior related to mental illness gets them evicted. Even if someone has goals for recovery or stability, a plan, motivation to pursue it, and people supporting them, it’s a rocky road. It’s easy to hate on homeowners and business owners who fear that shelter or supportive housing will bring drugs and disorder to their neighborhood. But if there’s not sufficient staffing and skilled support for residents who need it, their concerns aren’t entirely unfounded.   Finally, we need to recognize that for a very small percentage of people, even this isn’t enough. They need longer term psychiatric care in an institutional setting; for a few, involuntary commitment may be the only way to bring them off the streets. There are also a very small  number whose behaviors are too dangerous for a communal living situation. This needn’t be prominent in our narrative, by any means, but we do need to be able to acknowledge it: both because it’s true and because denying it undermines our credibility when we say, also truly, that what the vast majority of homeless people need is simply an affordable home.   Obviously, a local government like Seattle’s can’t do all of these things alone. It will require resources from the federal and state levels and coordination between many currently disjointed systems and organizations. But we on the left need to be able to tell this story, or one like it that actually responds to people’s perceptions of the homelessness crisis as they walk around our city streets. And when we next have political influence, we need to lend our support to building whatever parts of this infrastructure we can, to demonstrate its effectiveness even if at a small scale.   In the meantime, we must make sure that those now in power don’t get a pass for their failures to meaningfully address the homelessness crisis. Back in 2021, I argued against Compassion Seattle and, through my work in the Transit Riders Union, played a role in booting it off the ballot; now I wonder if that was a mistake. Had it passed, which it surely would have, people might be asking more questions about the 2,000 new units of “emergency or permanent housing with services including access to behavioral health services and necessary staffing to serve people with the highest barriers” that the city was supposed to create within a year of its adoption, and which now-Mayor Harrell retained as a campaign promise. And the initiative’s language on encampment removals, while vague, arguably would have given unsheltered homeless people more protection from arbitrary dislocation than they currently have. As it is, it’s too easy for our mayor and council to pass the buck and blame the dysfunctional King County Regional Homelessness Authority for the lack of progress.   What’s Radical on Homelessness?   I can already hear one likely reaction from my fellow leftists: “Katie, you’re just telling us to move to the right on homelessness! You’re becoming a cranky centrist in your middle age.” But I don’t think that’s true.   If the root of homelessness is commodified housing, then crisis-level mental illness and drug use can be seen, likewise, as creatures of 21st century capitalism. Psychosis and addiction both feed on the alienation, isolation, and sense of meaninglessness that have followed the creeping marketization of every facet of social life. Poverty worsens both. And while the bad old days of long-stay psychiatric hospitals may be harder to romanticise than other parts of the 20th century welfare state, their dismantling, the deinstitutionalization of their patients, and the failure to replace them with the promised community-based care are all part of the same story of neoliberal defunding and privatization.   Many leftists deeply distrust the institutions — governments, housing and service providers — that are supposedly trying to fix these crises, often with good reason. But there’s simply no way forward that bypasses the state and the nonprofit sector; “mutual aid,” or grassroots service provision, is great but it’s a tiny band-aid. As leftists we should see these institutions, not as enemies, but as vessels that can contain the interests of the ruling classes, or the radical and humanistic ambitions of our movements — usually, complex admixtures of both. They are a terrain of struggle, and its our job to build them up as tools fitted to our task.   Leftists are rightly motivated by a desire to uphold homeless people’s humanity, dignity, and agency. But this turns into a strange kind of libertarianism when we fail to acknowledge how mental illness and drug use can impair people’s ability to make good decisions for themselves and can lead people to act in ways that harm themselves and others. We need to find an approach that grapples with this reality, while also upholding people’s humanity, dignity and agency. By telling the real story of what’s needed, and the resources it will take to do it right, we can expose the hollowness of right-wing narratives that pretend some “tough love” is all that’s needed to bring “service-resistant” people inside, and shove them through what Daniel Malone of DESC has memorably called a “magical treatment carwash” that people emerge from cured and into gainful employment.   The left response to all this must ultimately be rooted in creating social conditions — of material abundance, of meaningful work and relationships, of community — under which no one is homeless and far fewer people become mentally ill or addicted to drugs. But we also need better answers for the here and now, both for the sake of the people who are currently suffering on the streets, and so we can gain and retain power long enough to make progress toward more lasting change.