ORCAs, STARs, and Trump's Baleful Eye: the State of Seattle's Homelessness Services

[00:00:10] Hello and welcome to Seattle Nice, the only podcast that tells you what's really going on in Seattle. I'm Erica C. Barnett, and I am joined today by my co-host, Sandeep Kaushik. Sandeep, how's it going? Hey, Erica. Yes, David is away at an undisclosed location. Undisclosed even to me. I don't know where the hell he is or when he's going to be back. I don't know that he knows where he is. Today, our guest is Daniel Malone, the Executive Director of Downtown Emergency Service Center.

[00:00:38] And we are very excited to have you. Welcome, Daniel. Thank you so much. Glad to be here. Yeah, repeat guest. I should say at the outset, I am on Daniel's board. So there's no incestuous, nepotistic, nothing going on. No, total coincidence. I mean, there may be, but we're disclosing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're disclosing it. It's all good. So I want to kick us off by talking a little bit about the Orca Center in downtown Seattle.

[00:01:07] It is celebrating or about to celebrate its one-year anniversary birthday. And Daniel, I was hoping we could just kind of start by talking a little bit about what the Orca Center is, what need it's filling, and how things are going. So can you just give us the overview, first of all? Sure. Thanks for focusing on this.

[00:01:30] So the Orca Center, Orca stands for Opioid Recovery and Care Access Center. And it is a healthcare clinic that is one component of a larger clinic that DESC operates in the Morrison Building at 3rd and Yesler in downtown Seattle. Our larger clinic we call our downtown behavioral health clinic.

[00:01:57] Orca occupies a section of it. And Orca is unique in that it operates 24-7. It's technically an outpatient clinic. People don't stay there longer than 24 hours, but they can stay up to 24 hours.

[00:02:16] And as would suggest from the fact that it's open all the time, people can be brought there after an overdose event at any time of the day or night. So it was really important in the design of the clinic that it would be available to first responders, Seattle Fire in particular,

[00:02:40] to be able to have a place to bring people other than an emergency department any time that they were involved with helping somebody recover from an overdose event. So we opened just over a year ago, early September of 2025.

[00:02:59] And we have been receiving people over this past year brought by Seattle Fire Medics, but also a lot of people just walking in for care. So one feature of the Orca Center is that it's an opioid use disorder treatment clinic. And so people can refer themselves there. It doesn't have to be in the immediate aftermath of an overdose reversal.

[00:03:29] They can come in because they're interested in treatment. And we accept those walk-ins most hours of the day from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m. So it's quite unique compared to typical clinics in that it's got that much wider set of hours, including on the weekends,

[00:03:48] so that people who are interested in treatment or interested in restarting treatment or needing to do a follow-up visit don't have to adhere to a really rigid, limited clinic schedule. That is usually the case in other kinds of places. So we're a year in, Daniel. Well, let me start by asking this. What happens to somebody who is either brought to the Orca Center or walks in the door and says,

[00:04:18] Hey, man, I need help. Can you help me with my fentanyl addiction? Right? What's the play? Yeah. So they're greeted by a team of healthcare professionals that includes doctors and nurses and peer providers, substance use disorder professionals, who talk with them about what their interests in treatment are, what's going on with their particular situation.

[00:04:46] They're provided with a comfortable place to sit. These devices are often called recliners. They're kind of a cross between a nice, easy chair and a hospital bed. And somebody is able to go into this quiet space, sit down, get comfortable, be provided with food and hydration and talk with somebody about what medicine they may be interested in.

[00:05:16] And they can be provided with a variety of medical services, including ones that are just aimed at making people more comfortable. And they can also be started on medications for treatment of opioid use disorder. And that includes buprenorphine, both the oral film formulation of it, as well as long-acting injectable forms of buprenorphine and methadone as well.

[00:05:45] While the Orca Center is not, in a legal sense, an opioid treatment clinic, which is a term of art for methadone clinics, we can start people on methadone and get them going for up to 72 hours on that. And then they can transfer to a more formal methadone clinic and so-called OTP, opioid treatment.

[00:06:13] So I have seen the pictures. I think there's like eight of these recliners. And it seems, I mean, it seems like you described, I mean, those are comfy chairs. But it seems like a very limited, small, you know, room and without a ton of capacity. Have you found that there's enough capacity? I mean, we look at the fentanyl problem in Seattle and it's obviously quite vast. You know, do you have to turn people away?

[00:06:39] Is there enough capacity there to help all the people that come to come through the door? I don't think we've been turning anyone away. Most people who come there don't need to be there for a really extended amount of time. People, even in the aftermath of an overdose reversal where they're getting different kinds of stabilization services

[00:07:04] and made more comfortable, even if they're starting on medication for opioid use disorder, people might stay for 12, 13, 14 hours. But a lot of people are coming in for a much briefer sort of visit. They might need their next monthly long-acting injectable buprenorphine shot, for example.

[00:07:27] And they're going to get that and maybe get some brief counseling and some food and beverages and then leave within a relatively short period of time. So it does seem like we've had capacity to handle the demand thus far. I mean, I guess the reason that I ask this of you, you know, director of DESC, is because you guys have this great program called 1811 Eastlake that, you know, I've written about.

[00:07:57] And it's for a different type of addiction, alcohol addiction. But it is a one-off and I am just sort of anticipating, you know, in a year's time, in five years' time, writing about this Orca Center and it still being a one-off. And maybe that's fine. Maybe it has enough capacity to sort of help everybody who is coming through the door and wants help. But I'm just wondering, you know, do you think of this as a one-off solution or enough?

[00:08:25] Or is this something that DESC wants to see expanded, you know, either by you guys or by other organizations, this approach? Well, we certainly want to ensure there's enough capacity in the community to meet the level of need. But I would make some pretty significant contrast between the Orca Center and a program like you named, 1811 Eastlake.

[00:08:51] First of all, I don't think 1811 Eastlake is really a one-off because it has spurred quite a lot of new supportive housing that takes the same approach, basically, of finding people with the highest needs and moving them into housing and providing them with an array of services that help them remain housed

[00:09:15] and stabilize and decrease their use of other kinds of services and decrease their level of crisis events. But it's fundamentally housing for people. It's a place for them to be permanently, bring some healthcare services to people where they live, but it's not a clinic. And the Orca Center is a clinic that's intended to provide short-term stabilization care

[00:09:41] and ideally connect people if they need a place to stay with that place, which we're able to do to some degree at least. So if the demand grows and the community needs more than what the Orca Center is able to handle, then certainly I'd like to see more of that happen in the community. But I think we've got a ways to go before we really determine if that's the case.

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[00:11:06] How much of this is people being brought to you by, as you said, like Seattle Fire or some other, you know, entity? And how much of it is walk-in traffic? Like what's the scale of this thing? I'll do my best to try to answer that. There's – it gets a little complicated for us because I don't have the data broken down as well as would be ideal to answer your question.

[00:11:33] So the Orca Center has a component of it that we call OrcaPod, which stands for Patient Outreach Division. And that's where – Well, you guys are really working the euphemisms. I'm sorry, the – Acronyms? Acronyms, thank you, not euphemisms. Maybe euphemisms too. Anyway, it's pretty clever though, you've got to admit. Yeah. So cute. So cute.

[00:12:01] So OrcaPod takes these same kinds of services out in the community and delivers them to people where they are. A lot of that is focused on permanent supportive housing sites where people with these kinds of conditions live, but also on the streets. And so we've got overall data for how many visits we're conducting, how many encounters we have with people through these Orca programs.

[00:12:28] But what I don't have in front of me is how many of those are at the Orca Center of people who were brought in or walked in versus how many happened in the field with OrcaPod. But over the last 12 months, we've had 10,000 encounters with people. And so given that it's a 365-day-a-year program, that's 27 – average of 27 encounters a day.

[00:12:58] So some portion of those happen at the Orca Center and then a bunch of them happen out in the field somewhere where other people are. Most of these events are not immediate post-overdose. Most of these are either walk-in visits of people who are seeking treatment or they are people who are there for follow-up, whether their initial visit was post-overdose or not.

[00:13:27] So we've had, however, more than 500 post-overdose visits, essentially defined by – they were brought there by Seattle Fire after they had been provided with some life-saving care in the field. And then many people using the services at the Orca Center

[00:13:51] have started on medication for opioid use disorder. And a lot of that is these long-acting injectable forms, as they're called. So it's essentially a shot of the medicine buprenorphine that in the ultimate maintenance formulation is a shot you get once a month. And it provides protection for you against overdose

[00:14:18] and it reduces cravings for using opioids and so forth. So a lot of people have started on those injections and then a lot of people have started on methadone and then some people have started on the oral form of buprenorphine. So it's been quite a range of different kinds of activities that have happened there. How much of this population that's visiting the Orca Center or being interacted with via the Orca pod efforts are homeless?

[00:14:49] Are you getting non-homeless people walking in off the street? What's the story on that? I unfortunately don't have those data in front of me. But yeah, I'm quite sure the vast majority of people coming into the Orca Center are homeless. And if they're not homeless, they probably were at some point in the semi-recent past. And they may be living in a setting now like emergency housing

[00:15:18] or shelter setting or, well, which would still be homeless, I guess, technically. Or in support of housing, which is permanent housing, but for people with significant ongoing needs who need care. Certainly some people, we don't restrict access to people who are experiencing homelessness. But so some people who are living in market rate housing in the community,

[00:15:47] I'm quite sure are part of the population that comes in for care there. But I think that this problem of heavy fentanyl use is heavily concentrated in people experiencing homelessness. And so I suspect that either the current condition of homelessness or a somewhat recent condition of homelessness is the vast majority of people using the facility. So that's a good segue into the thing I think we wanted to talk a little bit about next, which is the STAR Center.

[00:16:15] This is a downtown shelter that DESC runs that kind of replaced the Navigation Center around 12th and Jackson, which is the intersection that we talk about a lot on this podcast that people complain about a lot. A lot of people blamed the Navigation Center for at least some portion of the kind of open fentanyl use and drug sales and stolen goods sales and all that stuff that is, by the way, still going on there at 12th and Jackson.

[00:16:45] But the STAR Center, which is downtown, I really have not heard that much about, which makes me think that Como and the other news outlets that are up in arms about 12th and Jackson don't really have anything to complain about there. So can you just talk to us a little bit about this new facility and sort of how it differs from the Navigation Center, if at all, and what kind of services are available there to people? Sure. Yeah.

[00:17:12] The STAR Center is an 85-bed shelter providing relatively short-term accommodations for people experiencing homelessness with really high needs. And it's really focused on people who have been in a crisis situation very recently, especially behavioral health crisis is what I mean by that. So it might be somebody who had had a recent overdose event,

[00:17:38] might be somebody who had gone through the psychiatric crisis system recently, a population group that has been prevalent on the streets over the years and for whom shelter had become much less accessible in the years of the pandemic

[00:18:00] and following because shelter capacity used to be relatively easy to access on any given night at a given moment when there were much larger congregate shelters that had a fair amount of churn.

[00:18:19] So a hospital social worker, for example, very readily could contact us or maybe another shelter operator and find a bed for somebody they were discharging who had a serious mental illness, for example. And the jail psychiatric unit, when somebody was being released from jail, could often find a bed for somebody in those kinds of circumstances.

[00:18:45] Or an outreach worker from like DESC's host program focused on people with serious untreated psychiatric conditions could often find a place to bring somebody to for a shelter bed. When shelters changed in the pandemic to non-congregate settings and there stopped being as much churn, it was just tough to find an open bed at any given moment in those kinds of scenarios.

[00:19:15] And so you had this really high needs population group that remained outside a lot. And the STAR Center was aimed to fill some of that gap that had been created. It ties to the Navigation Center in that it was sort of a successor program to the Navigation Center, but intended to be a different kind of operation.

[00:19:40] The priority population to stay there is a little bit different, as I've just described it, whereas the Navigation Center had been designed by the city of Seattle to be a place where police in particular could identify people who were in encampment situations and refer them to that shelter for a place to stay.

[00:20:10] The Navigation Center was in a building at 12th and Weller that was understood to be a time-limited option. The building itself was not going to be able to be used for that kind of purpose for more than five, six, seven years because of the condition of the building and the future plans of the owner of the building.

[00:20:38] And so we always knew when we started the Navigation Center in 2018? 17, maybe? 17, yeah. Yeah. That at some point it was going to have to at least move from that location, if not closed down entirely. And then as we began some discussions with the city of Seattle, as the lease term was ending a couple of years ago,

[00:21:08] we conferred with them about, you know, it would be good to do things a little bit differently in order to meet some of these needs that I was just describing about the really high needs population group not having anywhere to go to get off the streets. And so we redesigned the program. We had to get a new location.

[00:21:30] We found one at 3rd and Cherry in a building called the St. Charles that had been unoccupied during the pandemic. And we designed a new service program there to bring in much more robust behavioral health care services so that we could bring in people with really serious untreated psychiatric conditions

[00:22:00] and substance use disorder problems and shelter them safely in this spot, but work intensively with them and as much as possible get them to engage in behavioral health care services. And so we've had intake specialists there, psychiatric specialists there,

[00:22:28] including prescribers like psychiatrists and nurse practitioners. And we've been able to get, as of really over the last six months, 95% of the people staying there enrolled in ongoing behavioral health care services. So it's been really quite incredible. And then that helps us get people to a sort of lower level of intensity need so that we can help them move out of there.

[00:22:58] Sometimes we can find permanent housing for them. Sometimes permanent housing is still a ways off for them because it's not available. And so we can find another shelter for them and then free up one of the beds in that facility for somebody else with those really high needs. And so people have been staying there on average of just over 90 days.

[00:23:26] And as I said, most of them, almost all of them, getting connected to behavioral health care services and really on a path to much better stabilization. So you mentioned, Erica, the kind of difference in the neighborhood conditions that have been remarked about the Navigation Center and then now the Star Center.

[00:23:52] There was a lot of really difficult stuff that happened neighborhood dynamics-wise with the Navigation Center, where our program was often sort of pointed to as a cause of or related to the really problematic scene of open drug markets at 12th and Jackson

[00:24:21] because we were nearby. And we nevertheless had very clear and strict rules for the people who were staying at the Navigation Center that they were not permitted to be involved in any of that kind of problematic behavior in the neighborhood. And people pretty much adhered to it.

[00:24:44] And so it was – we were sort of blamed by association of being nearby. And I think also just the timing of it all, of those problems had predated the existence of the Navigation Center in that neighborhood, but they really grew in the same sort of timeframe that the Navigation Center came along. And while the people at 12th and Jackson were not Navigation Center clients

[00:25:13] and the people at 12th and Jackson were not going into the Navigation Center to deal drugs or that kind of thing, the association was made there. Since we've been in the Pioneer Square area with the Star Center, there has not been that kind of concentration of behavior in front of the Star Center like had been sort of worried about.

[00:25:42] There is some of that street scene, open drug market scene, that exists in some of that immediate vicinity around the – where the Star Center is located. But it's not in front of the Star Center. It's not involving Star Center people there. And so I think by and large, the neighborhood-level concerns have not pointed at the Star Center

[00:26:11] the way that other neighborhood concerns in Little Saigon have pointed at the Navigation Center. Well, it seems like – I mean, one reason for that is that you – our DESC is sort of aided by daily sweeps that happen in front of the Star Center and on that whole corridor. Not necessarily of, you know, encampments happening there, but more of, you know, people who are kind of hanging around, sitting behind umbrellas, setting up kind of temporary sites.

[00:26:40] And those do seem to be getting swept at least daily. I see the unified care team out there all the time. So I'm curious, you know, is that also part of what's contributing to the lack of that street scene? Yeah, probably. That – although that behavior on the nearby block, not in front of the Star Center but nearby,

[00:27:09] has really intensified in the last month or so. Yeah, right around the corner there. We've been noticing a lot, including in front of the next building down, which has been really problematic for us because we run housing in that next building down. That's the Lion building, right? Yeah, exactly. And it becomes a really difficult environment for our tenants and staff to come and go from. And so we're regularly working with our neighbors,

[00:27:39] with our own teams of staff who spend time outside engaging with people, making sure that our own clients and tenants aren't participating in that behavior, but also trying to encourage other people not to do it there or to see if they have unmet needs that we can help meet as an organization. But we also engage with the Downtown Seattle Association's cleaning crews

[00:28:06] and law enforcement from both Seattle Police and the King County Sheriff's Office because there's a bus stop in front of that building, so the sheriffs have some jurisdiction there too. But it's one of those things, it's been a really persistent challenge for years and years there. And because of that, it becomes just a known destination for people who are engaging in drug sales and drug use

[00:28:34] to go to a spot like that, which just really makes it a difficult dynamic to change. But yeah, I think there is a regular presence of people being moved along that to some degree stops it from being as entrenched as it might be, although it's still been quite difficult of late.

[00:28:59] Just one quick point to make to come back to the reputation of the NAV Center in Little Saigon as being kind of a creator or instigator of the problems there. Daniel, you've made this point to me vehemently many times that the problems kind of in Little Saigon predated the arrival of the NAV Center, right? And really probably had more to do with the clearing of the jungle during the Ed Murray administration era,

[00:29:26] right, where there was that area kind of under I-5, the jungle, that was a kind of large geographical area, large scale, essentially extended series of homeless encampments that there were some shootings down there and stuff. And then that all got kind of cleared out. And so that activity ended up moving to Little Saigon, again, predating the arrival of the NAV Center then. And it's also worth pointing out, NAV Center left more than a year ago. Little Saigon is still a fucking shit show, right?

[00:29:55] It's like nothing changed from the NAV Center left. So it clearly wasn't the kind of locus of the activity. I always thought that was a kind of misplaced, you know, finger pointing, right? Yeah, yeah. It was very frustrating to us. In fact, the building itself was demolished. Like, I don't know, nine months ago or something like that.

[00:30:17] So, yeah, but the 12th and Jackson scene is quite difficult still. And so super worrisome. And it's such a weird scene too. It is, you know, I think the public hears about 12th and Jackson a lot. And, you know, rightly so.

[00:30:40] It is a persistent locus of suffering, you know, so many people out there. But I bet you that if a lot of people sort of put their eyeballs on it, they'd be really surprised at what they saw, that it isn't so much a really, you know, what would be the word for it?

[00:31:08] Like fast moving scene. It's like this slow motion kind of thing where some people I know in my life who aren't in this type of work have gone by either with me or separately and then remarked to me about it. And they're like, oh, my God, all the people in wheelchairs and walkers who are there. It's really incredible what's going on there. So, you know, it really is a pretty –

[00:31:39] a lot of people in the group there are pretty debilitated and need way more help than they're getting. So switching gears a little bit, there is a lawsuit that has been going on for quite some time by the National Alliance to End Homelessness Against the Trump administration over some new criteria that would – for homeless shelter and housing funding that would affect DESC quite a bit if it goes into effect. But the –

[00:32:07] essentially, the Trump administration has proposed moving away from housing-first policies and also moving away from funding permanent supportive housing, which is a housing-first solution. And there's – this lawsuit has most recently been found in favor of the Alliance to End Homelessness. And so these new criteria for federal funding have not gone into effect. But I am just curious, Daniel, you know,

[00:32:35] if you can talk about sort of where things stand with this HUD situation and with DESC and kind of what the impact would be if these new criteria go into effect. And I don't want to get into all the details because it is quite complicated. I've covered it a bit on Publicola if people want to look. But just kind of where do things stand and what is the potential impact? Yeah, great. Yeah, we are in our second round of lawsuits now.

[00:33:06] The first one was focused on the funding competition last year basically. And that's all been resolved and through the results of the lawsuit and then some related action in Congress, HUD was required to renew the grants for another 12-month period. All these grants renew at different points throughout the year.

[00:33:32] And so at DESC, we've got nine different – they're called continuum of care grants. We've got nine different ones and they all have a different 12-month start and end date to them. But they're each for 12-month stretches. And so because of those renewals from last year's lawsuits,

[00:33:59] we are having our grants that expire here in 2026 extended for another 12 months into 2027. So our first ones won't start expiring until May of 2027 and then others of them go later into 2027.

[00:34:20] So the HUD then has attempted to take the next year's funding pot and revise what the money can be used for. And so they released a new funding competition at the beginning of June and a new round of lawsuits was filed.

[00:34:45] And there are technically two different lawsuits that two different groups are part of. The state of Washington is actually the lead plaintiff on one of the lawsuits with a consortium of states, about two dozen states. These are basically Democratic AGs. So Nick Brown and the attorney general's office is in the lead on that. Yeah, that's right. I believe that there is one or two states where it's the Democratic governor

[00:35:12] that is the named plaintiff when that state's attorney general is not a Democrat, not suing, I think is how that is. And then the other lawsuit involves the National Alliance to End Homelessness and some other nonprofits as well as some local governments. And King County is a plaintiff in that lawsuit. They're very similar suits.

[00:35:38] They were heard by the same judge in a U.S. court in Rhode Island. And she issued summary judgment to prevent HUD from proceeding with this new funding competition basically because they were radically changing what the money could be used for and they hadn't followed the required procedures,

[00:36:07] something called the Administrative Procedures Act, I believe, where they have to issue notice and take comment and so forth. And they didn't do any of that. And so the judge voided the funding competition. HUD has appealed that. And it is now under consideration at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

[00:36:32] And the parties are in a rapid process right now of exchanging arguments or briefs in that process. So we should expect some kind of ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals soon. But it would appear to be impossible for HUD to complete the funding competition,

[00:36:57] to issue a new competition, receive applications, review all those applications, make funding decisions, and award the funds by the statutorily required date of December 1st of this year. Because these things just take time and there are not that many months left. So it's very much up in the air what's going to happen when there are no awards made,

[00:37:26] when they're supposed to, and people's funding starts to expire in the early part of next year. Can I ask quickly just how much money are we talking about here? For both kind of how big is the universe of federal HUD money for Seattle, King County, and then DESC specifically, how much of that is DESC money? Nationally, it's like $4 billion.

[00:37:52] Washington State gets a couple hundred million. King County combined, all the King County programs, using this fund source, about $65 million per year. DESC is the largest recipient of those funds because we have just the largest number of programs that provide supportive housing for high needs people.

[00:38:21] And we have about $16 million of annual funding that comes from that fund source. And then on top of that, we do a bunch of what we call scattered site supportive housing where people live in private rental market apartments and then have a rent subsidy that goes to them. That rent subsidy money mostly doesn't flow through DESC, so it's not part of the $16 million I mentioned,

[00:38:48] but it's another approximately $4 million to support hundreds of people living in apartments in the community who then get behavioral health care services from us. So it's a huge deal to us if this money will stop flowing. Yeah, and just, I mean, for listeners who might not be familiar with all this, with what's going on with Trump and housing, I mean, maybe it's kind of obvious, but they are wanting to impose all kinds of requirements about getting rid of DEI,

[00:39:18] getting rid of all kinds of inclusive language, like about trans people, and they want to move more towards what they call a treatment-first approach, which is basically the idea that you have to get sober in order to be qualified for housing. And so, I mean, it would be a radical change. And, you know, and I wonder if, you know, through all this litigation, if there's a possibility of just kind of waiting out the Trump administration.

[00:39:48] You know, when Trump came in, I remember there was, you know, a huge amount of, and still is, a huge amount of sort of predictions of doom and gloom on the housing side, just because of their different priorities. But none of that has happened yet, thanks largely to this, you know, ongoing litigation. I mean, is it possible that, you know, the day when all these programs just get drastically cut

[00:40:15] and everything changes completely, is it possible if that day never comes, just because, you know, the litigation goes on so long that the Trump administration expires? I suppose it's possible. I'm not banking on that. I think it's more likely than not that the administration is going to get its way, at least mostly or partially, to make some major changes to these programs. They have a lot of leeway.

[00:40:44] They just have to follow the rules. And thus far, the court keeps slapping them down because they haven't been following the rules to be able to implement these changes. Presumably, they're going to learn from that. And proceed in a way that won't get them struck down in court. So I'm super worried about it. One of the implications of the changes they want to see, as you said,

[00:41:12] are, you know, not funding permanent supportive housing for people, but wanting to fund transitional housing, meaning time-limited support for people with the expectation that people are going to be sort of made self-sufficient, that they will overcome their disabling conditions and no longer need that kind of support. And so some providers and some communities are grappling with the idea that they will convert

[00:41:41] current permanent housing programs to transitional housing programs, which will then install a time limit on how long people can stay in those, with the hope that that time limit will never be reached by the time there is a new regime in the federal government, and they can sort of somehow restore it back to the way that it was. But, wow, that's all really risky kinds of stuff.

[00:42:09] So I don't really know what's going to happen. One other comment I make about this whole thing is that I do think that it is fundamentally rooted in this idea that they don't accept that behavioral health conditions are like legitimate disabilities for people.

[00:42:32] In fact, they have said publicly that they believe that federal funding for permanent housing should be restricted to people who are elderly or have, quote, physical disabilities. Which is also super ableist. I mean, it's not as though people with physical – I mean, it's not as though physical disabilities are inherently, you know,

[00:42:59] so just life-changing that you need permanent help. Totally, yeah, of course. I mean, all of us obviously know people with all kinds of physical disabling conditions who work full-time and support themselves that way and so forth. But this is really, I think, an attack on people with disabilities overall, but especially people with long-term psychiatric disabilities and other behavioral health disabilities.

[00:43:30] And so the administration has said in response to some questions about whether, you know, they regard psychiatric disabilities as legitimate conditions that require kind of ongoing support for some people.

[00:43:56] They've conceded that, well, yeah, there needs to be some permanent supportive housing, but right now there's an imbalance. And permanent supportive housing should be about a third of what the federal government spends on homelessness. Now, they haven't said what the number of permanent supportive housing units ought to be is.

[00:44:21] They've just sort of come up with this loose, and I don't believe founded in any kind of analysis, notion that, well, whatever we're spending today, we ought to do about a third of it for supportive housing without really recognizing that we probably need way more supportive housing than we have right now,

[00:44:47] let alone just sort of this arbitrary, it ought to be a third of what we got now. So, you know, obviously this, the Trump administration has been in power now for almost two years. This is this sort of sort of Damocles has been hanging over DSE and Seattle and King County's, you know, heads for pretty much all of that time. So I know there's been a lot of conversation locally about what happens when, you know,

[00:45:17] federal doomsday arrives and, you know, the money goes away. So what is the status of that conversation about either trying to backfill that money or taking different approaches or what have you done? Yeah, there's been a lot of leadership at the local level in the mayor's office, the county exec's office, the city of Seattle council, the King County council,

[00:45:42] and the state legislature, all to assess this situation and plan for dealing with the potential loss of all these federal dollars across the state for permanent housing for people with disabilities. And that is getting into budget planning conversations.

[00:46:04] So coming into 2026, the city of Seattle had earmarked some funding as a contingency fund. If the federal money was going to be lost this year, it could have backfilled some of that. That did come to pass thanks to the results of the litigation and action in Congress. But something similar needs to happen for next year. And those conversations are very active.

[00:46:30] Of course, it makes for a really difficult budget planning set of scenarios at the city and county where they need to have some money in reserve to deal with this potential. But of course, they've got tons of other priorities and budget deficits to close and all that. So I just think it's a really difficult environment for them to be operating in right now.

[00:46:56] But I think there is very strong political support at both the city and the county to ensure that we're not going to have to close down these programs that are housing people with disabilities if the federal money ends up getting yanked during next year. Well, it looks like we're at time.

[00:47:20] So, Daniel, I want to thank you for coming on with Erica and I to give us an update on where things stand on both the progress that's been made around some of these new DSC buildings and programs, but also where we stand on the federal front in terms of the relationship with the Trump administration and what's going on there. So anyway, super informative. Really helpful. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for your interest.

[00:47:50] I hope you didn't lose too many listeners as a result of this. We're boring in a good way. All right. That's it for another episode of Seattle Nice. I'm Erica C. Barnett. He's Sandeep Kaushik. David Hyde will be back at some point. And thanks for listening.