John Wayne has been homeless in Seattle for almost 15 years. In that time, Wayne has become familiar with the sweeps. They happen all the time.
When the city cleans up his tent, he can lose everything. Some of the items he prioritizes over others: hygiene materials, clothing, his sleeping bag. The rest, he says, can be replaced relatively easily.
“I know I can start all over again,” Wayne said.
Wayne, like others living in the large encampment nestled against a wall where I-90 curves east away from I-5, has had to start over many, many times.
City officials argue that encampment cleanups — they cringe at the term “sweeps” — are necessary to address public health and safety concerns for the people living in the encampments and for the general public. Critics respond that constantly moving people creates a public health crisis of its own by disrupting people, taking their belongings and trashing important documents, even medicine.
Service providers report that people have died from losing their insulin in a sweep. Others have taken their own lives, overcome by despair and desperation.
In the middle are people experiencing homelessness who just want the space they need to survive.
But much about the sweeps is opaque, made more so by shifting criteria and strategies as the response to homelessness formed haphazardly over time. The city was “making it up as we go along,” in the words of former Mayor Ed Murray. How much sweeps cost, their efficacy, even how many have been conducted is not only unknown but unknowable, according to the city.
The unclear and inconsistent information has been weaponized by both sides of the debate, and never more so than during budget season, when politicians must show their priorities in the dollars and provisos they choose to back.
Opponents of the sweeps use the lack of clarity as a cudgel to challenge the city to demonstrate progress on a crisis that is claiming lives. Officials use the bad data as a shield, deflecting until they have the quantity and quality of data they say they need.
In the middle are people experiencing homelessness who just want the space they need to survive.
The Field of Dreams
Michelle, a middle-aged woman with long, steel-gray hair, lives in the same encampment as Wayne. She says that hers was one of the first tents to appear in an encampment that would later be called The Field of Dreams. She arrived before the city decided to populate the patch of land at Airport Way South and Royal Brougham Way with people displaced from The Jungle, an infamous network of encampments that the city swept in October 2016 after reports of sexual assault and violence.
“It’s upsetting more than disruptive,” Michelle said. “Disruption is normal when you’re homeless. It’s the harassing.”
Eventually The Field would also be swept. By the time the police and outreach workers came in March, it bore no resemblance to its name. Rain had turned the dirt into a swamp, which residents traversed by walking on slatted wooden pallets between tents in various states of repair. Piles of garbage attracted rats, which scampered through the encampment and into people’s living spaces during the day.
Nighttime was different, a resident said: The rodents were everywhere.
It was a health hazard and crime-ridden, city officials said. Getting people into shelters was better. Homeless people and their advocates pointed out that the city created the health hazard that they now felt so compelled to remove.
Michelle made it a point to leave before the officials came. She always does.
“It’s upsetting more than disruptive,” Michelle said. “Disruption is normal when you’re homeless. It’s the harassing.”
At their current home base at the encampment near I-5 and I-90, Michelle and another neighbor, Kayla Willis, work hard to keep the space clean and inoffensive. There is no garbage on the ground, no needles visible. Art hangs from trees, a framed set of pegs strung up with brown and white fabric to look like a boat, a Starbucks sign. The tents and semi-permanent structures that comprise the camp form a neat, orderly line.
Disorder in one of the larger unauthorized encampments cannot be tolerated. It’s what, in Michelle’s experience, separates her community from those that are swept.
That’s because homeless encampment sweeps are driven by complaints, like potholes. People call a hotline and report the location of an encampment. Those calls are logged in a database called the Seattle Encampment Response Information System (SERIS).
After that, a sweep becomes a question of priorities. Since the beginning of 2017, those priorities have been articulated in the new version of the rules around sweeps, called the Multi-Departmental Administrative Rules, or MDARs. Is the camp a “hazard” or “obstruction”? Sweep immediately. If no, conduct outreach and provide at least 72 hours notice before the cleanup. Remove the encampment only if “a meaningful offer of shelter” can be made to campers.
In past years the priorities were based on health and human safety, wrote Julie Moore, a spokesperson for Finance and Administrative Services in an email. But the city didn’t coordinate sweeps as a whole until the beginning of 2016. Before that, various departments were responsible for cleaning up the belongings of homeless people and excluding them from public spaces.
That means between 2008 and 2015, people were not being moved because they were the highest priority. They were moved — their belongings taken, their lives disrupted — because they were top of mind for a given department.
Now, the city coordinates cleanups across departments with an eye toward dealing with the most dangerous situations first.
But what Willis and Michelle know from experience is that the perception of disorder becomes fodder for a complaint, which then puts an encampment on the radar.
Take their home, for example. The Navigation Team — a mix of police and outreach workers — visited the encampment again on Oct. 25. William Lemke, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office, walked to the end of the camp and took a photo of a large shelter.
It had been reported as dangerous because callers felt it was too close to the edge and might fall. It didn’t appear to be dangerous, he concluded.
The sin of visibility
What’s clear is that there is pressure on homeless people to fly under the radar and to remain, if not invisible, at least unremarkable. What also seems evident, based on an analysis of the SERIS data and results of the most recent point-in-time count of homeless folks, is that it’s difficult to do so.
The city is more likely to receive complaints from encampments that are within 150 feet of high-traffic areas, such as bus stops and bike paths.
According to an analysis by undergraduate students at the University of Washington Geography Department, the city is more likely to receive complaints from encampments that are within 150 feet of high-traffic areas, such as bus stops and bike paths. Most were coming from four neighborhoods: SODO, South Lake Union, Ballard and Wallingford.
The work was based on data from seris that Real Change obtained through a public records request. The city noted that the SERIS data is a log of complaints and does not reflect encampment cleanups that have occurred.
That said, the resulting maps show logged complaints and when those complaints were deemed “closed” between 2008 and the end of 2016.
The locations of the complaints lined up with data from Count Us In, the 2017 point-in-time count required by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. This is the first year in which that data was publicly available, and also the first year that it was broken down by census tract.
When displayed side-by-side, the map showing logged complaints and the map showing where homeless people are actually found on a given night look remarkably similar.
Exact comparisons are not possible with these data sets — there are too many confounding factors.
“It looks really similar to the outputs we created,” said Kory VanDyke, one of the students who created the report. There were only two outlying areas, one in the north and one in the south, that differed.
They are living in high-density areas that provide them access to everything else they need: their jobs, treatment services, food and transportation.
Mapped out, it appears that the largest populations of homeless people are not living in remote areas or camping in people’s front yards. They are living in high-density areas that provide them access to everything else they need: their jobs, treatment services, food and transportation.
Those survival instincts appear to get them noticed and potentially swept.
A sweep by any other name …
Lemke does not like the term “sweeps.” The spokesperson for the mayor’s office explained multiple times that the preferred nomenclature is “removal” or “cleanup.” And, insofar as the process of “removals” and “cleanups” has changed since the new MDARs debuted at the beginning of 2017, it seems there are reasons to try to differentiate from past practice.
On Oct. 25 the city’s Navigation Team was already at work at the encampment near I-5 and I-90 where Wayne and Michelle live. Lemke accompanied Real Change onto the site.
As we entered the encampment, an officer with the Navigation Team was leading out a 22-year-old woman who had accepted an offer of services. At least one other person accepted a space in the a men’s shelter that morning.
Officers work in tandem with outreach professionals to make contacts. It’s a special kind of officer that applies to and is accepted on the Navigation Team, said Sgt. Eric Zerr, who heads up the law enforcement side of the team.
“It takes a certain personality and skillset to do this,” Zerr said.
It’s the soft skills, the warm personalities, the approachability that the Navigation Team needs because while some people will feel comfortable approaching an officer, many will not. The team needs members that people can talk to in order to be effective.
The city does not intend to sweep the large encampment at this time. It’s not yet considered a hazard, although they will bring in professionals to assess the likelihood of a mudslide down a steep slope that could impact drivers on the freeway just yards away from the tents.
The Navigation Team makes multiple visits to meet campers and provide them a menu of open spots in other shelters or programs that they compile each morning from service providers.
Instead, the Navigation Team makes multiple visits to meet campers and provide them a menu of open spots in other shelters or programs that they compile each morning from service providers. Some accept services, including the 22-year-old woman escorted from the site for a “warm handoff” to a service provider. Others don’t want contact with a nurse who comes out to the camp, such as a middle-aged man with open sores on his leg.
City officials stress that this new approach — building relationships, offering services, holding off on sweeps until things get untenable — is an improvement on past practice. There’s a committee reviewing sweeps to determine further enhancements, although exactly how they will accomplish that task remains a mystery even to members.
Clear information on how well the new system is working is hard to come by, said Mark Putnam, director of All Home King County, which coordinates homeless services countywide. The Navigation Team approach as described seems to be happening and working in some instances. But he asked whether the approach is universal, happening across the city consistently.
“I think that’s the city’s challenge with the scope and scale of the homelessness crisis,” Putnam said. “How many police officers are there? How can we ensure that we have enough outreach teams to do the work? It’s difficult to be consistent. How can the city do its best to do that? I don’t know.”
A report released last week by the Office of Civil Rights found that the approach may not be as effective as policymakers and the team had hoped. According to the report, The Seattle Times said, 79 percent of people who receive offers either decline them or are deemed ineligible.
Interim Mayor Tim Burgess and FAS have already pushed back on the report, saying that the Office of Civil Rights only included information from REACH, a program under Evergreen Treatment Services that is part of the Navigation Team. It did not include information gathered by the police, according to The Seattle Times.
So what we have is a situation in which information that runs counter to the narrative advanced by the city and pro-cleanup forces is suspect and discredited, even when the source of the data is the city of Seattle and its partners.
Lies, damned lies and statistics
What do you do when a city with a data-driven culture collects data and then declares it virtually useless? How do you move forward with evidence-based policy when the organization responsible for policy rejects its own evidence?
The city’s strategy seems to involve sweeping the sins of the undocumented past under the rug while moving forward with its new strategies, full-steam ahead.
Anti-sweep activists want to put an end to the sweeps, full stop.
The conflict reached an apex on Nov. 1 when frustrated members of the advocacy group Housing For All testified at a budget hearing. A proviso which would have prohibited department spending on sweeps had been replaced with one encouraging the city to follow its own rules. The proviso likely wouldn’t change much. The OCR report confirmed that the city already was following its own rules.
Councilmembers listened for four and a half hours as groups and individuals took turns either urging the sweeps to continue or calling on them to end. Those who support conducting sweeps asserted that stopping the sweeps entailed allowing homeless people to camp in their neighborhood parks and engage in lawless anarchy. High school students calling for an end to the sweeps rattled off statistics around homelessness with the fluency of policy experts.
The hearing ended and the night continued, turning into an occupation of the Bertha Knight Landes room in City Hall by anti-sweep protesters. They laid sleeping bags on the floor while a brass band held a surprise concert, belting out popular tunes while people danced around them.
“We’re here to bring music to you, because what’s a protest without a party?” called out a member of the band.
The energy frustrated one woman currently experiencing homelessness who was there to testify against the sweeps and also because, for the first night in a while, she had the chance to sleep indoors.
There was a jubilance to the night, a sense that the movement had won a victory by successfully taking over City Hall, by making their point forcefully and peacefully. The energy frustrated one woman currently experiencing homelessness who was there to testify against the sweeps and also because, for the first night in a while, she had the chance to sleep indoors.
She wasn’t interested in the housed taking a self-congratulatory bow, or their self-professed desire to speak for their houseless neighbors, articulated by a speaker during public comment.
“Let the homeless speak for themselves,” she said.
And homeless people have, many times. They’ve stood before the City Council and other elected bodies and told their stories, described how difficult their lives are and what they need to address their needs. In response, policies and new sources of revenue have been suggested to help, but the response is always that we need more data, that we need to hear more voices.
One can only hope that the need for more information is satisfied before those voices die out.
This story includes data analysis by Kory VanDyke, Lauren Thompson, Mary Kim and Nick Sun. Ashley Archibald is a Staff Reporter covering local government, policy and equity. Have a story idea? She can be can reached at ashleya (at) realchangenews (dot) org. Twitter @AshleyA_RC
Special Report: Understanding sweeps
Why Sweep? The swirling logic behind Seattle’s mass evictions of unauthorized camps
Rough count: How the city has counted the sweeps has changed over the years
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
Wait, there's more. Check out articles in the full November 8 issue.