Back in the summer of 2014, a resident of The Jungle walked into the Real Change storefront to tell the newsroom about his experience living in the network of greenbelts and viaducts that he called home.
He lived in a tent and said that someone would come and tell him the area had to be cleared as soon as he settled in a new location.
A few weeks later, another man came in with a similar story. And shortly thereafter, two Real Change vendors did the same.
It’s a story that’s echoed throughout Seattle for as long as Real Change has existed, but homeless people have never been moved from one location to the next as frequently as the last three years. The city collects and stores people’s belongings, but some still lose their identification, medications and mementos.
In 2014 Real Change heard the anecdotal stories. But we needed to answer the question quantitatively.
Was the city of Seattle clearing encampments more frequently? How many people does this affect?
Real Change has never been able to find a clear answer because, unfortunately, no one knows or wants to know.
The numbers offered back in 2014 are flawed and duplicative, the city says, and don’t reflect what’s really happening. But the numbers the city offers today intentionally exclude some encampment sweeps.
The numbers offered back in 2014 are flawed and duplicative, the city says, and don’t reflect what’s really happening. But the numbers the city offers today intentionally exclude some encampment sweeps.
The limitations of SERIS
To find an answer in 2014, Real Change turned to the Seattle Human Services Department. At the time, a different department managed each cleanup. If the encampment cleanup happened on Seattle Department of Transportation property (as many of them do), SDOT oversaw and paid for it.
But the city tracked all the complaints about encampments in the Seattle Encampment Response Information System (SERIS). The Human Services Department provided Real Change with a login to an online version of the database. The database revealed that in 2013 the city closed more than 300 complaints, a record that doubled from those in 2009.
By 2015, SERIS was logging more than 600 closed cases in a year. A recent American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit says that the city held more than 1,000 encampment cleanups over two years.
But wait, says the city. Those numbers aren’t the whole story.
“SERIS was never intended to be a system for tracking cleanups,” says Julie Moore, a spokesperson for the city’s Finance and Administrative Services (FAS) department.
SERIS is a system for tracking and closing complaints about encampments, she said, not tracking the frequency of cleanups. There’s a lot of information that could skew the data: Different people could be filing separate complaints for the same site or the city could go out to investigate a complaint and find nothing there.
Counting today
Since the beginning of 2017, FAS has been in charge of coordinating encampment cleanups. The city still uses the SERIS database to manage complaints, but Moore keeps track of the city’s larger cleanups on an Excel spreadsheet managed by her department.
That started this year, using a new method of counting cleanups — and what counts as a cleanup.
So far this year the city has conducted 143 encampment cleanups, according to FAS.
Retroactively applying the same metrics to 2016, Moore reported that the city had conducted 213 cleanups — a little more than a third of the complaints filed in the SERIS database.
This number is also not the full story. The count includes cleanups in which outreach workers visited the camp and provided 72 hours notice. It also includes removing small or large encampments that are hazards.
What it doesn’t include? Any encampment that is in what the city calls “emphasis areas,” where the city no longer allows any camping. City officials and police can tell people to move along without notice.
“The City focuses its limited resources on closing encampments that pose the greatest risk to public health and safety.”
Among the city’s eight emphasis areas is The Jungle, arguably the largest and most popular place for people to camp for decades. Journalist and activist Casey Jaywork said that excluding cleanups in The Jungle was like counting casualties in a war but leaving out the largest battlefield.
It’s a reflection of how the city emphasizes its work. Moore said there are as many as 400 unauthorized encampments in Seattle, and the city is focusing on improving safety, not sweeping any encampment indiscriminately.
“The City focuses its limited resources on closing encampments that pose the greatest risk to public health and safety,” she wrote in an email.
Do numbers matter?
Tracking down these numbers is not merely an exercise in journalistic curiosity. These numbers matter.
Alison Eisinger, executive director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, said that we still don’t know just how much the city is paying to move people along, a practice that gets a small fraction into services but scuttles the rest around the city.
“We are simultaneously funding shelter services and housing and doing good things with public money, and we are trashing people’s lives and making it very difficult to survive and manage while in crisis with other public money."
“We are simultaneously funding shelter services and housing and doing good things with public money, and we are trashing people’s lives and making it very difficult to survive and manage while in crisis with other public money,” Eisinger said.
But we know the human cost. They continue to walk in the front door of Real Change with stories of what they have lost. At the end of October, a vendor walked in having lost everything: his identification, medications, records, but he was most worried about a pink Pirates of the Caribbean wallet his deceased mother gave to him.
Aaron Burkhalter is the editor. Have a story idea? He can be can reached at aaronb (at) realchangenews (dot) org. Twitter @aaronburkhalter
Special Report: Understanding sweeps
Why Sweep? The swirling logic behind Seattle’s mass evictions of unauthorized camps
What does a sweep cost, anyway? The ongoing cleanups of unsanctioned encampments have been a keystone campaign issue, yet no one seems to know how much they cost or what they achieve
An unending cycle: While the city wrangles over policy, homeless people are trying to survive
Wait, there's more. Check out articles in the full November 8 issue.