Did the Left Get It Wrong on Homelessness?

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to the latest edition of Seattle Nice. I'm David Hyde. And guess what? I'm here as always with Erica C. Barnett of Publicola. Hi, Erica. Hello. And political consultant Sandeep Kaushik. Hi, Sandeep. Hey, David. We've got a very special guest this week, the co-founder and general secretary of the Transit Riders Union and also columnist Katie Wilson, whose most recent piece in The Stranger is titled Where the Left Went Wrong on Homelessness.

[00:00:38] And my guest here in wanting to do this, that Sandeep kind of loves the headline, but that Erica might like the subhead better, which is this issue could mean reclaiming power for the progressive left. And we're going to hear from Erica and Sandeep in just a minute. But I wanted to start out with you, Katie, about, well, first of all, before we get to what the problem is, like what is, from your understanding, the left's story about homelessness?

[00:01:02] Sure. Thank you. Great to be here. And I also just want to note at the outset that although I am indeed associated with the Transit Riders Union, the opinions that I expressed in this column are mine alone. And I think people have a lot of feelings all over the map. So, yeah, I mean, I think that for the last 10 years or so, the left in Seattle has had a certain narrative about homelessness, not uniform, but kind of roughly, roughly shared, which goes something like this.

[00:01:29] We have a deep shortage of affordable housing. That's really the root of this crisis. We need to put more funding into housing, shelter and services. And, you know, this is this has a long history, right? There's there's been decades of kind of neoliberal underinvestment in subsidized housing. We have a long history of exclusionary zoning in Seattle. And then we've had this enormous kind of economic growth due to the tech sector.

[00:01:57] And all of these have contributed to this housing crisis. And that's really that's really the root of of the homelessness crisis. And so the response of sweeping people from one place to another basically doesn't doesn't work. So that's kind of the short version, I think, of the narrative, which which, to be clear, I think is, you know, I still think is basically right in a lot of ways. Just maybe incomplete.

[00:02:20] So incomplete, how you get into in the article where you think the left story about homelessness hasn't worked. So is it it's kind of a kind of denialism as as I read it? Yeah, I mean, I think that it just it's simple in a way that does not respond to the reality that people see on the streets every day around them.

[00:02:43] Right. And I think on the left, we tend a little bit to underestimate or under emphasize aspects of the crisis that involve mental health and drug addiction in ways that then when people are walking around and seeing, you know, people who are clearly having a mental health crisis, people who are actively using drugs. It kind of looks like we're not it looks like we're not kind of accepting that that is the reality out there.

[00:03:12] And and I think that, you know, the right has kind of grabbed onto that to promote an alternative narrative, which I think is much less correct than ours, which basically says homelessness is not a housing problem. It's a mental health problem. It's a drug addiction problem. And, you know, you need to to people need treatment before before they should be getting housing. So, Katie, I got to say, I read your article. It felt like it was aimed at me and I don't consider myself, you know, the furthest left person.

[00:03:41] And I know it wasn't literally aimed at me. But a lot of the the you know, what you're sort of calling the narrative of the left. I mean, I agree is basically correct. We need more housing. We need more shelter. We need more mental health care. The solution that you outline in this article, and I think I'm going to be the one pushing back most on you on this panel. So I'm going to display that role. I don't think that talking about things differently with the right works.

[00:04:07] I just don't think that there is a lot of evidence that if we said, you know, and I think some people, in fact, do say that, you know, it is terrible. The situation we've seen in the streets. Things have changed. There are more people in mental health crisis on the streets. They scare people. They can be very intimidating. It is just not a good situation. We can say all that. But I don't think that that's going to I think that's just going to move the right to choose another rhetorical standpoint and do that.

[00:04:34] I mean, we've seen it with Housing First, just a massive amount of disinformation that's out there about what Housing First even is. So what is there that makes you believe that folks who are, you know, maybe more moderate or on the right in Seattle will respond to this kind of approach where we acknowledge things more than deny them? Which I agree with you. We do deny a lot of that stuff or the left does. And I'm putting myself in that. But but how will that help? Yeah. And I mean, to be clear, and I think this is clear if you read the article, I'm putting myself in that, too. Right.

[00:05:03] I've I've been doing this for years now. And yeah. And I guess what I would what I would say to that is that although I do think this is a narrative issue, it's not only a narrative issue. It's also about the actual policies that that we are pushing for. So let me try to get at this from another angle.

[00:05:20] So, like, personally, as an activist who advocates for more funding for housing, shelter and services, you just kind of want to assume that the people in charge of the details of how that money spent, the organizations has been funneled to, like are doing a great job. Right. That it's being spent as well as possible. And then when the right talks about wasteful spending, you want to be able to say, well, actually, the problem is that we're not spending enough money. Right. So the money that we are spending is just a bandaid. Housing is the bottleneck. Right.

[00:05:49] So, like, we don't have enough deeply affordable housing. So, of course, all this money that we're spending on shelter and services, like it actually is helping people. Right. It's keeping people sheltered. It's keeping people housed. It's getting people services and, you know, improving their quality of life. But because we don't have that deeply affordable housing for people to move into, it's going to look like it's being spent inefficiently. Right. Because, you know, people are just hanging out in shelter for months and months. So, like, I think that's basically true. Right.

[00:06:18] The narrative that I explained before about the root problem being the housing shortage. But I think the difference, the shift is that before, like, I thought that was like 100 percent true. And now I think it's like 75 percent true. And I think that 25 percent matters. It matters both politically and it matters in terms of people's lives.

[00:06:39] So, basically, there's like a range of what is actually on the ground possible to accomplish in the short term before, like, totally profoundly fixing the housing crisis. And right now we're kind of at the bottom end of that range instead of at the top. And that's what matters. So, to get that into a few of the actual, like, policy things that I think we could be pushing for differently. So, I say and I mentioned in the article, like, the Just Care program and more recently, WSDOT's encampment resolution program. Right.

[00:07:08] So, this is not sweep. So, this is intensive outreach to people in encampments that then, you know, people actually want to move into housing, right, if it's going to be housing with all the services that they need, etc. And so, I think that, like, really focusing on solutions like that and scaling them up is something that we need to be, like, aggressively pushing for.

[00:07:30] Now, that is not cheap, right, because, like, a program like that only works if you actually have that housing, like, the true housing first, right, not housing only. And, you know, there was that – Will James, I thought, had that really good piece in KUOW recently about housing first and about how, you know, it works. But the problem is that a lot of what's being called housing first now is basically housing only.

[00:07:51] So, we really need to push on, like, true housing first, housing that actually is sufficiently supportive, that has all of the services that people need. So, that's just, like, a kind of a policy difference from what I think we're focused on now. And this is something I really started realizing – the housing first stuff is something I started thinking about this year as we've been working on the issue of renter protections. And, you know, we're expecting some bad proposals to come through at the city to weaken Seattle's renter protections.

[00:08:20] And, unfortunately, some of the organizations pushing for those are affordable housing nonprofits. And they basically want to be able to evict people more easily and faster. And you look at that and you're just like, where are those people going to go? Where do we think they're going to go? Like, something's really broken here. And so, I think it's just really clear that we need to change the way that we're thinking about housing first to, like, actually do it right. And, you know, that's something, like, that I think that we need to both call for and then also, like, figure out what needs to happen to make that work.

[00:08:48] And it's hard because it's not just a Seattle solution, right? Like, that's going to require, like, coordination from different levels of government and, like, real buy-in from the affordable housing providers. And then, I guess, the one other thing I'll say here, another kind of focus, I think, is, you know, Danny Westmeat had this column relatively recently about this 2024 annual homelessness assessment that shows, like, how abysmally Seattle is doing at creating, like, emergency shelter compared to a lot of other cities.

[00:09:17] Like, we've added, like, 8% shelter capacity since 2015. And, you know, the way he describes it, we're doing that because, like, there was a policy decision made that we should be focusing on affordable housing. And he kind of attributes that to the left. Now, I think that's a little bit unfair because I think the left constantly is, like, more shelter in addition to more housing. And I would actually like to see, like, are we doing better than other places at building housing? I'm not sure.

[00:09:44] But anyway, I do think that, like, pushing for more emergency shelter is important. And that doesn't even necessarily mean, like, a ton more resources. Like, there's stupid things. Like, for example, like, Nicholsville, right, which operates a few tiny house villages. They've been trying to open a new tiny house village. And they had a site all lined up, Brighton Village, down in Rainier Valley. And then, like, the mayor, HSD, like, pulled the plug for no reason that I'm aware of other than, like, a couple of cranky neighbors.

[00:10:13] So we need to be a lot more aggressive about standing up more emergency shelter as well. So, Katie, there's a lot to, I think there's a lot to unpack with what you've been saying here and what you said in the piece, which, by the way, if people haven't read it, it ran January 8th in The Stranger. They should go read it for themselves. There's a lot in it. I won't call you a cranky centrist since you go to great pains in the piece itself to deny that you are becoming a cranky centrist.

[00:10:43] Erica was saying she felt like the piece was in some sense directed to her. When I read that line, I kind of was like, hey, that's me, right? That said, like, when, and I didn't read the piece when it first came out, but somebody emailed it to me last week and said, you've got to read this, man, Katie Wilson's mea culpa on Compassion Seattle. And so I went and read it. And that's sort of how it was presented to me. And you do say in this piece that, hey, I was one of the big opponents of Compassion Seattle,

[00:11:11] which was a proposed ballot measure a couple of years ago that would have established a framework and some sort of, you know, fairly high level policy commitments on the part of the city about how they would go forward to address homelessness. It included some provisions like requiring the city to produce 2,000 units of, I think, housing and shelter in year one to devote 12 percent of the general fund budget towards homelessness policy

[00:11:41] and a series of other kind of vague, but commitments about funding treatment. Unfunded mandates. Yeah. I would call it. Well, it didn't have funding attached to it. They're totally right. But it was this policy framework without funding that was put forward mostly by the business community in Seattle. And obviously the left immediately rose up to oppose it. Katie, yourself included, as you say in the piece. And you say, you kind of do a mea culpa here and say, you know,

[00:12:08] maybe we should have looked at Compassion Seattle differently. So let me just start by asking you. So talk a little bit about Compassion Seattle and how your thinking has evolved on it. And I have some thoughts about what happened there, too. And I can weigh in after. But I'd love to hear from you. Yeah. And, I mean, I would not call it a mea culpa exactly. I mean, I think. Not your language. Someone else said it to me. Yeah. Yeah. Katie Wilson's mea culpa. I will never cross Tim Burgess again.

[00:12:39] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I. It was not Tim Burgess. For the record, it was not Tim Burgess. It was literally Tim Burgess. Oh, I see what you're saying. It was Tim Burgess's. I thought it was Tim Burgess calling you. I was thinking the same thing. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand. Compassion Seattle was very much Tim Burgess's baby, as I understand it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, Compassion Seattle was, you know, a ballot measure that was run in 2021.

[00:13:08] It was in the context of the, you know, mayoral citywide council city attorney election of that year. And the way that I kind of explain it in the piece, which I think is correct, is as part of this larger strategy of the Chamber of Commerce and business interests to kind of change their political approach to something that would be more successful than what they had done in 2019, which was that very visibly throw lots of money at city council elections

[00:13:34] and then find that voters didn't actually want their city council bought and paid for by Amazon. And so instead, they decided on this more issue focused approach. And they came out in 2021 with this charter amendment proposal that sounded very good, I think, to just kind of like a normal person. Like, basically, you know, we're going to create lots more emergency housing.

[00:13:59] We're going to get people off the streets and into that housing and provide all of the services that they need. Yeah, sounds great. Right. And as Erica mentioned, it was definitely an unfunded mandate. There was no funding attached to this, apart from a requirement that a certain percentage of the general fund be spent on homelessness, which is like, I mean, actually already happening. So that was just kind of like more, more of like a smoke and mirrors kind of thing. But anyway.

[00:14:27] It would have resulted in a very short. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But marginal. Yeah. And I think, you know, my at the end of the piece, I kind of say like, you know, I, the transit routers union played a role in bumping that off the ballot. There were a number of problems with the measure, right? Like you can't actually do some of the zoning stuff it wanted to do through an amendment, blah, blah, blah. But in any case, I kind of say at the end, like maybe politically that was a mistake in hindsight. Right.

[00:14:54] Because I think what we've seen subsequently, of course, is that like, even though that was booted off the ballot, the centrists, which it was designed to propel into office, still won their elections. Bruce Harrell and et al, Sarah Nelson. And then we got this much more conservative city council in 2023. And now really nothing, no one's effectively holding their feet to the fire on homelessness. And, you know, if Compassion Seattle had passed, there would at least be on paper this like,

[00:15:23] where are those 2000 units of emergency housing that were supposed to be built? Right. And also, like, I think I believe that there was kind of a requirement in there that that housing came with like wraparound services. Where are those services? Right. So there would just be a little bit more accountability there. Now, of course, I'm saying this like, you know, if the left had gotten into power, right, like, you know, there would be all these reasons why we couldn't deliver. But like, from my point of view, I'm like, yeah, we should be holding these bastards accountable.

[00:15:52] So, you know, that's just kind of like a reflection on how we might have another tool to actually point out that they're not making progress that we don't have because it didn't pass. I don't know that like I'm not saying in retrospect, we should have known at the time and we shouldn't have fought it. I still think like, you know, we made the right decision given the information we had. Erica, do you agree with Katie that it's been a strategic problem for the left? I mean, they're they're facing a council they don't like.

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[00:17:16] I mean, if you're talking about rhetoric and the way that we talk about homelessness, sure, maybe we should be talking more about underfunded programs like Just Care, supporting things like the WSDOT encampment resolutions that do get people into, you know, more stable housing and sometimes permanent housing. I don't think that that would have resulted in a different electoral outcome. And I don't think that having Compassion Seattle on the books and giving us something to hold over

[00:17:43] them would actually have made any difference in part because I think they would have figured out a way to say that they had produced 2000 units of housing in some form or fashion. I've seen it, especially in the Durkin administration. They were always building more shelter than ever. They were always housing more people than ever. And obviously that wasn't true because homelessness kept getting worse. And I did some reporting on the numbers and the numbers weren't true either. So I think never underestimate the power of a politician to use facts and statistics to

[00:18:11] support their narrative, whether it's true or not. But so I am just I'm just not as optimistic, I guess, that having more rhetorical tools to use against people in power would have would have done a lot. And I think, you know, yes, we should be advocating for those things. And the left should not be saying that every single encampment resolution is a bad thing is if we want to have encampments on the ground. And Katie, you talked about that in your story. And I think that is a really good point that sometimes, you know, the left can sound like

[00:18:40] we think things are great and we think things are fine. And this is just how it's always been. And don't you remember 20 years ago, it was exactly like this. And like, we all know that's bullshit. I just I just am skeptical about the power of admitting of doing something that we should do and being, you know, realists and looking at the situation as it is. I'm skeptical that that would make any difference in terms of policy, because, I mean, the council

[00:19:05] has known since early in the pandemic that approaches that actually got people into semi-permanent lodging like Just Care does worked a lot better. Like Just Care was very successful and other, you know, purpose-digney action programs in the pandemic were really successful at keeping people inside and getting them wraparound services. But we have never funded them adequately. And the last council didn't, the progressive council didn't, and this council certainly isn't going to. Yeah, I think that's fair.

[00:19:32] And, you know, in the piece, I say that, like, it's very possible. I'm not saying that, like, oh, if we had done these things, then we wouldn't have lost those elections. Right. I think that losing them was kind of overdetermined, especially in the context of the pandemic and, you know, homelessness got worse for a lot of reasons that are were basically out of local control. But I do think that it's useful to think about moving forward what we could do differently and do differently than the progressive council that lost did. Right.

[00:20:02] And so just to try to put something concrete out there, and I'm not 100 percent sure about this by any means, this is just an example of the kind of way that we could try a different approach. Right. So let's say, like, progressives, you know, sweep into power, mayor, council, the whole shebang. You know, what if we decided we are going to really make a priority to tackle visible homelessness?

[00:20:29] That is something that, like, the leftists really shied away from. And what that's going to mean is that we basically take a program like Just Care and we are going to put all the resources we can rest away from other things into making that work. And that means, you know, having the buildings, having the services and having, like, kind of a really coherent overall strategy to tackle homelessness, you know, not just downtown,

[00:20:58] but, like, a lot downtown. And we're going to just, like, do it. So, like, really, instead of going at things piecemeal and just being, like, throwing a lot of money at housing, shelter and services in a general way, like, we're really going to going to tackle this. And that's going to mean new revenue. So we're going to, like, pass a local capital gains tax. We're going to bump up Jumpstart. But that also is going to mean probably diverting revenue from some other things, right? And so it's going to make people on our side angry, too, right?

[00:21:26] Because we're going to just take all the resources we can and have this really coordinated push for, like, two or three years. That's going to make a real dent in chronic homelessness. Let's not say visible homelessness. That will be, like, an effect of it. But let's really tackle chronic homelessness. So that's the kind of, like, initiative that I don't think that the previous, like, progressive council leadership, like, tried to make, but that I could imagine, like, a future administration making. And it would be very different than what's going on now because I don't think that Harold's

[00:21:55] administration has been successful in homelessness. And this council, God even knows what they're thinking. But I think that, yeah, I don't know. That just seems to me like a policy thing that hasn't been tried. It would involve new revenue. So it would piss off some of the business people. But, like, also, like, they're going to see results in a way that they haven't for years and years. You're not just dealing with a revenue and spending problem and, you know, targeting the money. I mean, you know, you're also dealing with NIMBYism.

[00:22:23] And I know that it's incredibly difficult to cite even one homeless shelter. And the Navigation Center, I mean, it's going to get opposition in its new site, too. And that's not serving that many people. It's leaving 12th and Jackson. We're not going to get another homeless shelter there. It's just the NIMBYism in this town against shelter, against any kind of permanent housing is incredibly powerful. I mean, just like it is about, you know, just market rate apartments going into people's neighborhoods. So I just I think that and I'm sorry to be like such a naysayer.

[00:22:52] It might just be because of, you know, the Trump administration and the fact that we're going to have federal dollars probably pulled from the city. And I just don't think we're going to be in these conversations realistically about how are we going to spend all the money that we have? And then on top of that, just the incredible opposition you see anytime a solution is proposed anywhere near anybody. So, Katie, when I read your piece in The Stranger, I think the reason it really jumped out at me was not, you know, I mean, some of the narratives you said about the sort of battle

[00:23:20] between what the left believes on homelessness and what, you know, maybe they've missed. I thought, you know, that's good, but that's that's sort of sort of well-trodden ground. I think we know what those divides are. But what really sort of ran through the thread that ran through that piece was, as I read it, a call not for the left to kind of abandon its belief system on homelessness, right? You're fully standing behind the basic outlines and contours of the narrative that you set out

[00:23:49] and that the left believes that this is a housing problem and that we need more resources and all of those things. But it was a call towards for political pragmatism and a willingness to compromise on the ideological edges of where left progressivism has in recent years not been willing to sort of try to find common ground with the center left.

[00:24:15] So whether it's on things like, you know, I find this to be the most one of the most stale and idiotic debate about whether homelessness is caused by housing and rising rents or addiction and mental illness. I mean, yeah, it is a housing problem, but addiction and mental illness are also a real problem, right? You know, and so can we just shut the fuck up about like having a dumb argument about this

[00:24:42] or that and realize there's an all of the above thing and we need to kind of figure out a way to address a whole range of different issues that feed into the current problems that that everybody agrees is is is is causing these problems on our streets. So so so first of all, let me ask you, do you agree with that? Was that really what you were doing there is sort of making a call for. Let's kind of figure out what the deal is here rather than.

[00:25:11] Planting our flag and, you know, you know, dying on the hill of of left progressive ideology or am I getting that right about where you're headed on this? I think that's partly right. Where I disagree is that I would not frame that as a compromise with centrism. I would I would say that it's just an appeal that the left needs to look at reality and adjust our our narrative and our policy proposals based on reality.

[00:25:40] So it's not like, you know, oh, we need to make common cause with these people that we don't agree with. It's well, actually, maybe, you know, our our story is not the whole story. So what I'm saying is I'm not I'm again resisting the cranky centrist label. I'm not tacking right here. I'm not tacking right. I am trying to point a path for a true what I still believe is a true leftism, a true radicalism. But that is that is just more more reality centered.

[00:26:09] Well, and the so-called center left in Seattle does not want to raise progressive taxes to solve any of our problems so far. Well, it depends on who you mean by the center left. Yeah. But the ones with the ones we've been talking about, the I think the business community doesn't want to raise taxes. Yeah. I have a question which is just back to Erica's personalization of the whole thing. How much blame does the press get here?

[00:26:36] But taking it beyond Erica, in my experience a few years ago, many reporters took a similar approach to the one that you're describing here. Homelessness is about what providers tell us it's about, which is about housing and other root causes. We shouldn't even talk about mental illness or drug addiction in stories about homelessness. I had one reporter actually tell me that, in part because providers would be disappointed with their reporting. And at the time, no, no, I'm not talking about you. I'm not talking about you.

[00:27:05] And at the time, what occurred to me was, look, the Seattle is dying sort of mythology. That happens if you leave a vacuum. Who do you think is going to enter into that space? What's the sort of responsible mainstream media doesn't capture the full complexity of these stories? And that's exactly what we saw happen. And the centrists took advantage of it in Seattle.

[00:27:30] And I suspect that most people listening to this, for whatever reason, will not get this message that you're sort of laying out here. That's really my question for you is, how likely is it that people will listen to you, hear the clarion call and say, hey, this is a more successful strategy for us if we really want to have more power and more success with all of the good progressive left things that I want to see happen? Meaning you, Katie.

[00:27:59] I don't feel right answering that question because I think we just have to see. I mean, you know, since I wrote that article, a lot of people have reached out to me and I'm having lots of good conversations with people, right? I don't want to overestimate my influence. So, like, I'm not saying that something's going to come of that. But I do think, I mean, I think that what the article did was expose some fault lines that already exist on the left, right? But that people weren't talking about that much because I've gotten a lot of very, very

[00:28:29] positive feedback from people who are, you know, very solidly on the left. And so, you know, one article is one article. But I do think and hope that people on the left will continue to discuss these issues and that there might be some openings for doing things differently. And I don't know what that looks like, right? It could happen around candidate campaigns, right? As we come up to local elections where there are progressive left candidates running who

[00:28:55] might decide to kind of have a different message and a different set of policy proposals. And it could come in the form of kind of coalition building campaigns where different kind of organizations, activists might decide on coming together around some new policy initiative or what have you. So, yeah, I mean, I, you know, I don't think that one article is going to change everything. But I do think that, like, I mean, I wrote this article, to be clear, like last year before the election, even though it only just came out.

[00:29:24] So it's not at all a response to the national elections. But I do think that the national elections kind of combine with the recent or the last couple rounds of local elections to create a good kind of environment for self-reflection on the left. So I hope that people will keep talking about these issues and that things will start to shift. I do think, David, if I can respond to you and then ask the question.

[00:29:51] I do think this sort of call to acknowledge the center left leaves out the fact that there actually is, I mean, despite what Sandeep says, there actually is a right in Seattle. And there are people who are conservative in Seattle. And, you know, I mean, you can see on one side when Will James wrote this article and interviewed Andrea Suarez, who is, you know, I would say a chaotic kind of online personality. But, you know, and there's a lot of issues with, you know, ethical issues with the way

[00:30:19] that she behaves with homeless people. But I mean, I'd say that her views are pretty much, you know, mainstream Republican Party views, you know, pre-MAGA. And that is somebody who lives in Belltown and is in Seattle and has a lot of influence. And, you know, I mean, Will got a bunch of pushback from the left. But I think that those of us who are, you know, in the left or the center left need to

[00:30:43] acknowledge that these folks are also, you know, going to respond in the ways that they do. We cannot prevent them from doing that. We do need to fight them and their rhetoric and narrative, those of us who consider ourselves to be on the left. And I don't know. I mean, I don't know what the question is exactly. It just feels like sometimes it's not just fighting amongst ourselves. We also have to acknowledge that there is, you know, a big part of Seattle that is saying

[00:31:11] things that are not true about homelessness and that are, you know, promoting divisiveness and that actually are something the left needs to deal with as well. So if I can sort of do sort of my cut at the political typologies of Seattle, and I've said this before on this podcast, right? I do think there's probably about 25% of the city or its voters who fall into a, what I would call the Seattle is dying camp, right?

[00:31:38] Like that, Erica, to your point that they're, they are sort of the city's going to shit. It's, you know, it's the progressives fault. They've pushed shit too far. I, you know, some of, some of that I agree with. Right. But, um, and then I think there's probably like 35% of the city that is sort of the Katie Wilson, Erica Barnett and to their left, left. Right.

[00:32:03] Like, um, but there's a, everybody else is in kind of like a center left middle, right? 40% of the city is sort of like, uh, Katie. To be clear, I don't think Katie and I are on the farthest fringes of the left. I know. I'm saying you two and people to your left. Right. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was, I was giving you some credit for not being, you know, uh, NTK or whatever,

[00:32:30] you know, the super crackpot left. Uh, and, and those people are like, they don't really have answers. Right. They, they're, they're progressively inclined. They're kind of, you know, they like Elizabeth Warren, you know, or, or maybe Bernie Sanders. And, and it, to the Katie, what I think one of the strongest points of your piece is you quote a New York times, an anonymous New York times commenter who happens to be from Mercer

[00:32:55] Island, just saying like, you know, I really want to believe the progressives and they tell me, you know, what's going wrong here and what we need to do. But then I walk out and I see this homeless encampment and like the trash and the needles and the, you know, and I don't know what the answer is here, but something's really wrong with the, with, with the narrative. And I think that's where there's a, there's a bunch of people that could be brought along to coalesce behind some solutions.

[00:33:26] If the ideologues and the, if we could break down some of the silos and get past some of the, some of the kind of ideological blinders that, that you get from the Seattle is dying crowd or some of the more uncompromising folks on the left. Right. And that involves, we do need more funding for a whole range of things, right? Whether it's tiny homes or, you know, enhanced shelter or all of those things.

[00:33:51] Danny was right to criticize our, our lack of success in, in building more of that compared to other cities. But we also probably do need better policy tools to address some of the issues that we're seeing on our streets. And Katie, you mentioned involuntary commitment in the piece that there, there are probably some people where we need some better, you know, uh, civil commitment opportunities to get people who are too impaired to make rational judgments about their own wellbeing on their feet.

[00:34:21] And this is a conversation I've been trying to broker fitfully, but trying to broker for a while about why can't we get to a bargain where we're creating the funding and the psychiatric beds and the enhanced shelter. But we're also doing some of the things I think we do need to do to address some of the really significant, some, some of the things that we're seeing on our streets that are really freaking people out.

[00:34:50] So Katie, do you think we can get there on an agreement on something like involuntary commitment along with greater funding for psychiatric beds and treatment? You know, this is in my mind where the solution to some of our problems actually lies. And can we bring enough, bring along enough people on both, you know, all sides of this divide to get that done? I, I think it's possible, but it requires, it requires people to put it, putting their guns down.

[00:35:18] Well, to be clear, I absolutely don't think that involuntary commitment should be the centerpiece of some future strategy on homelessness. And like, I doubt that that is a piece that you're going to get, you know, broad, broad agreement on, on the left. And, you know, the reason why I, I hesitated to mention it at all in my article, article, because I know that it's, you know, going to be kind of like a controversial point, but

[00:35:43] like, and, you know, there was, the Seattle Times did, I think, a good, like, podcast series called Lost Patients, um, some time ago, which went into this issue a little bit that I thought was very interesting. And it, you know, I, I am no expert in this by, by any means, but from, from the reading that I've done, people I've talked to, you know, it does, it does seem like it is too hard in some circumstances to get people into involuntary care.

[00:36:09] But I think it is very dangerous to try to open that up very, very widely. So like, again, I do not think that this should be the centerpiece of any, any future strategy. I just wanted to mention it because I do think that like, subjects like that cannot be taboo on the left. And right now I feel like they're taboo, but I do want to warn strongly against like some kind of approach where we're like, oh yeah, well in return for some new progressive revenue and opening lots of, you know, beds and, and treatment, we're just going to like sweep people in whether they want to go or not. Right?

[00:36:37] Like, I think there, there's a much, much larger space for the just care type strategy and they've had extremely high success with, you know, people want to get into housing actually, right? If, if it's housing that works for them. And so, yeah, I mean, I would hope that that would be the kind of the area of agreement that, that could be forged for, you know, first and first and foremost. Katie, you talked about, you know, wanting to have a positive and realistic plan. What do you think success, you know, what, what, what is that?

[00:37:07] What are the outlines of that plan and what do you think success would look like in, let's say five years from now? Because this obviously is not going to be a, it's not a short-term problem and it's not going to be a short-term solution. Yeah. I mean, I think that in terms of measuring success, there would be a few like really clear metrics that you would want to look at. One would be just the number of chronically homeless people sleeping unsheltered in Seattle. And so I don't know what that number is now. It's pretty darn high.

[00:37:34] So maybe the goal is like cut it in half or something like that, right? Whatever, whatever that is. So I think that's one very clear type of goal that you could, that you could set out. Another would just be like reducing the number of homeless deaths, right? Which has been, you know, very, very high in recent years, starting to come down for reasons that have, you know, that are more national, I think, and have nothing to do with, with what's been going on locally per se. But so like, I think it's very, it's very easy to, to kind of come up with a few metrics like that, that you would want to, to tackle.

[00:38:04] And then in terms of the strategy, I do think it is having this kind of like comprehensive plan, which involves like outreach to encampments, especially encampments, you know, people who are chronically homeless and in areas where, you know, there are like disruption to civic life or whatever, you know, in public space and in ways that is, that is disruptive. And so you would want to be over some period of months to like a couple years, basically

[00:38:34] trying to like move really significant numbers of people inside into really sustainable, supportive situations. So yeah, I don't know. It seems, it seems, it's easier said than done, but I think that that kind of pathway seems, seems important. And, and, and I think like, um, the, you know, the, the, the services once people are in housing is really key. And, and I really do recommend, um, the, the Will James documentary.

[00:38:59] If you can, you can get past the Andrea Suarez bits to where he's talking about, um, the housing first, it's, it's pretty illuminating. Well, and to be clear, you know, just on that doc, on the documentary that he did, you know, I mean, I think he was for KUOW. Yeah. For KUOW. Um, I think he was setting up Andrea Suarez as the avatar of one side and then sort of knocking it down by defining what housing first really is, which is not housing only. It's not putting people, you know, inside four walls and leaving them there.

[00:39:27] Um, and so, and I, I think he did that very effectively through that narrative device, but you know, there's obviously some on the left who disagreed and were, um, saying that he was, uh, you know, interviewing the KKK. I saw that, uh, that going around on Twitter, which is, you know, outrageous and stupid, but, um, but yeah. I didn't know he interviewed the KKK. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Katie Wilson, thank you so much for joining us.

[00:39:57] Thank you. Great to be here. Katie, thanks for coming on. That's it for another edition of Seattle Nice. She's Erica C. Barnett. He's Sandeep Kashuk. I'm David Hyde. Our editor is Quinn Waller. And thanks everybody so much for listening.