Seattle Votes on a ‘Wicked’ Homelessness Problem: A Q&A with Author Josephine Ensign
This November, homelessness will be on the ballot in Seattle. Voters will decide on “Compassion Seattle,” a referendum on a proposed City Charter amendment mandating a minimum level of funding for emergency housing and homelessness services while also easing the removal of outdoor homeless encampments by City officials. Josephine Ensign, author of Skid Road: On the Frontiers of Health and Homelessness in an American City (Johns Hopkins University Press), describes what’s at stake.
Urban Matters: Before going into the specifics and merits of Compassion Seattle, let’s get some context. What’s the current extent and state of homelessness in Seattle, and what effects has the Covid-19 pandemic had?
Josephine Ensign: Even before the pandemic, Seattle had our nation’s third-highest level of homelessness, behind New York City and San Francisco. It has increased significantly during the pandemic, as crowded shelters were closed due to infection control concerns. We do not have anywhere near an accurate count of the extent of unsheltered homelessness now. But its visibility indicates it’s at levels not seen since the Great Depression when Seattle had our country’s largest and longest-lasting tent Hooverville.
With the end of the nationwide moratorium on residential evictions most people working on the frontlines of health and social services here in Seattle and elsewhere expect to see another surge in homelessness. This is especially problematic in Seattle with the rapidly escalating cost of housing.
UM: How did Compassion Seattle originate? How does it relate to previous governmental policies about homelessness that you describe in Skid Road?
Ensign: From my perspective, Compassion Seattle sprang from the long-simmering frustrations of many business leaders and residents over the magnitude of visible homelessness, and their belief that this was largely the fault of local political inaction and a wrong-headed approach to addressing the problem. We had a ‘10-Year Plan to End Homelessness,’ culminating in November 2015. But homelessness in our city and county continued to worsen. A ‘state of emergency’ on homelessness declared in 2015 still stands today. Homelessness also has been the subject of some unfortunately sensationalized ‘so-called’ documentaries on local television, including one called ‘Seattle Is Dying.’
The problem is real. Homelessness is a wicked problem, meaning it is complex, multifaceted, causing a high degree of conflict because there’s little agreement on its causes, much less its solutions.
But for me, Compassion Seattle is not a viable solution. When I first heard about it, I was suspicious due to how misused terms like ‘compassion’ are, especially when applied to problems like homelessness. But I was willing to be open-minded about this seemingly new approach.
However, I’m now convinced that it is a bad idea. It would force City Hall to budget 12 percent of general funds to building temporary housing for 2,000 people experiencing homelessness without adding a new funding source, so existing social and health services that low-income people depend on would be cut. That, combined with mandated encampment clearances, would worsen homelessness instead of helping. I will unreservedly vote ‘no’ on the Compassion Seattle referendum.
UM: Skid Road outlines the multifaceted history of homelessness in Seattle: the transient sailors, prospectors, and loggers and dispossessed Native Americans of frontier days; the Grapes of Wrath-style economic refugees of the Great Depression; the runaway young people and aged-out foster care youth of modern times. To what extent are such varied populations represented in Seattle today?
Ensign: The ‘rubber tramps’ of the Great Depression were, of course, not only economic refugees, but also climate refugees. Their modern-day counterparts, people fleeing extreme drought and fire-plagued regions of the western parts of our country, are steadily increasing in Seattle. As this June’s extreme weather events proved, even the maritime, typically mild-climate area of Seattle is not immune to the effects of climate collapse. Of course, unsheltered homeless people and others living in poverty and social isolation are at the highest risk of extreme weather events, as evidenced by emerging statistics on deaths attributed to that heat wave.
Native American and Native Alaskan people are still the most overrepresented sub-population of people experiencing homelessness in Seattle, followed by Black people, highlighting the effects of historical trauma from settler colonialism and racism. Seattle has current fallout from our history of racial restrictive housing covenants, redlining, and racist, single-family zoning laws.
Seattle has long had many transient people. This continues today, from seasonal workers in the fishing industry to construction workers who come to live here temporarily. Even though the vast majority of homeless people here are originally from this region or state, there are people who move here in hopes of finding jobs, or they have a job offer that falls through when they arrive, and they end up precariously housed if not outright homeless. They do not anticipate the high cost of housing in our city.
Teens and young adults experiencing homelessness and the close interaction between our child welfare system/foster care and homelessness has been, along with homelessness among veterans, more of a success story.
Intervening early to address and prevent child and youth homelessness is the most cost-effective use of our resources. This is consistently overlooked, including in the American Rescue Plan Act provisions for local government support to address homelessness, which mainly addresses adult chronic homelessness. People either don’t realize, or they forget about, the powerful connection between child and youth homelessness and the risk of episodic and chronic homelessness as an adult.
UM: The Compassion Seattle referendum coincides with the election of Seattle’s next mayor. How large a role is homelessness playing in that election?
Ensign: Homelessness is playing a central role in the election, with a recent survey indicating that homelessness is the top concern for voters.
There were 16 mayoral candidates on the August primary election ballot. All addressed the issue of homelessness in various ways. Bruce Harrell, who is Black and Asian-American, and is a former Seattle City Council member who was briefly acting mayor in 2017, states the homelessness crisis is his number one priority, and ‘inaction and finger-pointing is not only frustrating; it is inhumane.’ He supports Compassion Seattle. Seattle City Council President M. Lorena González is opposed to sweeps ‘which force people out of encampments without providing them with clean, safe options to relocate that do not separate them from their communities.’ She is opposed to Compassion Seattle. González and Harrell received the most votes in the primary and will be the two mayoral candidates on the November ballot.
Many candidates also spoke of a need to address homelessness through a countywide, coordinated response, something which has been talked about for years and is finally underway with the establishment of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. Marc Dones, who identifies as Black, queer, and with the lived experiences of homelessness and mental illness, is its first chief executive officer. Although their job would appear to be both gargantuan and thankless, I am excited by their prioritization of listening to people currently or formerly experiencing homelessness. A group in the UK I’ve done some work with, Pathways, refers to such people as ‘experts by experience,’ which I think is an apt description.
UM: Final question: What do you think will happen if Compassion Seattle prevails, or if it fails?
Ensign: If the referendum passes and is implemented, it would be a major step backwards and would reinforce the same tired, expensive, and ineffectual iterations of criminalizing poverty and homelessness. If it fails but a sizable number of residents vote in favor of it, I fear that it will further polarize people over the issue of homelessness and could contribute to an increase in violence against people perceived as living homeless. That has already been occurring in Seattle, especially after the airing of ‘Seattle is Dying.’