On May 31, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his new “One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan,” along with the city’s acquisition of an apartment building in Greenwood and the launch of a brand new interactive dashboard to track homelessness. As far as having a plan goes, he’s walking a well-worn path.
Having a named plan to combat homelessness has been a hallmark of Seattle mayoral administrations all the way back to Norm Rice, who presided over the city from 1990 to 1997. While it wasn’t a plan per se, he launched the Partnership for Homeless People, which raised public awareness of the issue while also sourcing private funding for homelessness services. After Rice, Mayor Paul Schell made the “Christmas Pledge,” in which he promised to get every woman and child experiencing homelessness off the street by Christmas of 1998. Ultimately, he couldn’t fulfill that promise.
Mayor Greg Nickels and the city’s Committee to End Homelessness (CEH) launched the now-infamous 10-year plan to end homelessness in November 2005, in partnership with King County. This plan came to be known simply as “the 10-year plan,” and its scope well outlasted Nickels’ administration.
Mayor Mike McGinn could have been the one exception to the named plan rule, as his tenure fell within the confines of the 10-year plan. That said, he still announced and launched a six-year plan. After McGinn, Seattle elected Mayor Ed Murray, who was, among other things, very attuned to the nuances of messaging. Thus, the launch of “Pathways Home,” which, per a KING 5 article about it, focused on “getting homeless people quickly into housing, creating a more streamlined system by using a centralized database, prioritizing families and the long-time homeless to housing and creating a performance-based, data-driven funding process.” This may not have been the first time one of these plans described itself as “data-driven,” but it certainly would not be the last.
Mayor Jenny Durkan debuted the slightly more urgent-sounding “Seattle Rescue Plan,” which was technically targeted to provide relief during the pandemic, but included homelessness funding and her strategy. Durkan, not to be outdone by her data-driven predecessor, touted as a part of that strategy a “data-driven app for outreach to Seattle’s unsheltered population and help them more quickly and easily access shelter and services,” developed by her Innovation Advisory Council.
That brings us all the way back around to the One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan. What’s different this time?
“We know that only real progress can be made by examining the data. Even if we run the risk of looking at the soft underbelly of the city, we have to look at the data such that we can track our progress,” said Harrell, speaking at the plan’s in-person announcement.
How are these data different from previous data-driven efforts? These data are “not previously collected or released” and have now been released in the form of a convenient interactive online dashboard, updated quarterly. The release also said that the dashboard is six-in-one:
“The Harrell Administration for the first time combined six different databases into one, laying the groundwork for the City to collect, manage, and display the never-before-seen data included in the plan’s dashboard.”
Okay, so what’s in it?
First up, we’ve got a pie chart breaking down the city’s spending. If you hover your mouse over the sections, little tooltips pop up describing what kinds of stuff each category represents. For example, hovering over “Access to services & healthcare” opens a box explaining that the $10 million therein goes to “programming to improve access to medical care and other resources to homeless individuals.”
The city is spending $172 million overall, with $118 of that going to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA). Next is a KCRHA budget breakdown, this time in a horizontal line graph format, followed by a bar graph showing offers of housing made during sweeps so far this year. Next to that graph is a map of closed encampment sites, with active camp counts by neighborhood. This map does not include specific locations of active camps, as King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn’s most recent proposed ordinance would.
After that, there is a dot graph with color-coded dots for each new unit of housing or shelter built so far this year. You can view it by project status, name or type, which reveals that 1,001 of those units are permanent housing and only 299 are emergency shelter spaces, and that 553 are open for business while 241 and 506 are being built or getting ready to be built, respectively. Next up, the site presents some simple statistics, reminding us that there have been 3,707 emergency calls at encampments this year, along with 608 fires and 53 shots fired.
That’s it for data, but the dashboard isn’t the only thing the plan includes. The plan also promises to fast track affordable housing by requiring all permits for affordable housing projects be approved within one year. It calls for government to engage in more public-private partnerships, keep the map and outreach offer graphs updated, form a “Housing Sub-Cabinet,” explore non-police responses to encampment emergencies and add more housing and shelter for the unhoused. Per the press release, the city will identify 2,000 units of shelter or permanent housing by the end of the year, with 1,300 already under its belt.
The dashboard includes the King County Department of Health and Community Services estimate from 2020 that more than 40,000 people experienced homelessness at one point during 2020 but does not have an estimate of how many might be in Seattle. It does, however, include a one-time count of only 763 tents and 225 RVs, taken this May.
Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is the associate editor for Real Change.
Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is the associate editor at Real Change.
Read more of the Jun 8-14, 2022 issue.