The big Seattle Nice City Council District 5 debate is right around the corner! Join us at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 21, at the National Nordic Museum, where we’ll be drawing out candidates Nilu Jenks and Julie Kang on their positions – and their differences. It’s free and will be an informative and illuminating debate. We hope to see you there!
In this episode of Seattle Nice, taped a couple of weeks ago while Erica was away, Sandeep and David invite Walter Hatch, a former Seattle Times journalist, retired professor of politics at Colby College, and frontline homelessness volunteer, to discuss why Walter, the co-author of two recent pieces on the topic at Post Alley, believes Seattle’s homelessness response is failing. Walter is a staunch progressive, and our conversation exposes disagreements over housing costs, addiction, encampment removals, and government spending, but also substantial agreement: Seattle needs more housing, more shelter, better services, and a system that people can actually navigate.
Walter contends that Seattle’s homelessness crisis reflects a community failure rather than simply a collection of individual failures, and he argues that Seattle’s primary obstacle to making progress on homelessness is a fragmented system organized around nonprofit providers rather than the needs of homeless individuals, along with an inhumane overreliance on sweeps. He argues that inconsistent data sharing, disconnected caseworkers, and weak coordination force people to repeat their stories and paperwork without making progress. Drawing on examples from other cities, he calls for stronger political leadership, shared information, and clear responsibility for getting each person appropriate help.
We don’t entirely agree with Walter’s diagnosis, with Sandeep and David defending both Katie Wilson’s continuation of the previous administration’s relatively fast pace of encampment removals and Sandeep arguing that the biggest problem with the current response is insufficient resources commensurate with the scale of Seattle’s homelessness problem.
“Our system here in Seattle can’t even be called a system,” Walter contends. “What we have in Seattle is just a shit show of failing both at the political, moral, economic level, and I think we’re all responsible, and I think we can fix it.”
Walter Hatch and Mark W. Garrett, "The Homelessness Blame Game: Let's Challenge That," Post Alley, May 6, 2026.
Walter Hatch and Mark W. Garrett, "Seattle Homelessness Is a Complex Problem: Here's How to Solve It," Post Alley, Sept. 10, 2026.
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