At a press conference on Monday, Mayor Bruce Harrell took the stage in Kasama Pioneer Square, an event venue at the north end of Occidental Park, to announce his new “Downtown Activation Plan.” The plan represents his “holistic approach” to curing what ails downtown, including an executive order and a legislative package set to be introduced in early summer.
What’s in the plan? A better question might be, “What isn’t?” The mayor and his fellow speakers, which included Councilmember Sara Nelson, Office of Economic Development Director Markham McIntyre and two business owners participating in the Seattle Restored program, listed a lot of different ways to improve downtown.
Erika Vazquez and Jessica Ghyvoronsky, owners of the multipurpose Belltown event space River, highlighted the Seattle Restored program, which aims to fill empty storefronts with small, women- and BIPOC-owned businesses. They credited the program with allowing them to bring a number of fun events to Belltown. Events like, according to Vazquez, “night markets, concerts, and shows, workshops and art shows, art activism and puppy yoga.”
It was unclear if puppy yoga is performed by the puppies themselves or is a yoga class for humans enhanced by the presence of puppies, but Real Change will update this post with more information if anyone in the office can be bothered to Google it. The mayor’s plan did make it clear that the city plans to add 20 more Seattle Restored storefronts to the existing 58.
McIntyre laid out a broad package of other quality-of-life improvements on top of that goal, like an extended and expanded Metropolitan Improvement District, more outdoor lighting in “areas of downtown where crime and disorder is concentrated,” graffiti cleanup in the CID and special “Sip ‘n Stroll” permits from the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board (WSLCB), which would allow Pioneer Square Art Walk attendees to gallery hop without ditching their clear plastic cups of Yellow Tail.
The plan’s proposed upgrades to downtown life even included some things urbanists have long asked for. Well, maybe they didn’t exactly ask to close streets to traffic so people could play pickleball, but the people desperately crying out for a walkable city on Twitter surely aren’t above stepping around a match or two of the petit bourgeois’ new favorite thing to get what they want.
The meatiest part of the plan — the executive order — included a shift in overdose response and access to treatment for substance use disorder that could potentially save a lot of lives. The order would expand the Seattle Fire Department’s Health One program to respond to most overdoses and stay with patients after other first responders left. By way of enhancing post-overdose care, it would also direct city agencies to site and find funding for a “post-overdose diversion facility” that would help overdose victims recover and connect them with treatment and other services. The order also directed the city to increase access to harm-reduction and overdose treatment supplies like drug testing strips and Narcan.
Perhaps most significantly, the executive order would create a pilot program for a new, research-supported form of treatment called “contingency management.”
One sign that contingency management is a step in the right direction is that Nelson and PubliCola editor Erica Barnett both like it, which should have you looking up in the sky for flying pigs, but another is that the model has been shown to be remarkably effective. The program offers addicts small incentives to keep them attending treatment and hitting recovery goals, the idea being that because drugs rewire the brain’s reward centers, replacing that reward with something else will work. According to several studies, it does.
A meta-analyses in the journal “Addiction,” all the way back in 2006, concluded that, “Study findings suggest that CM is among the more effective approaches to promoting abstinence during the treatment of substance use disorders. CM improves the ability of clients to remain abstinent, thereby allowing them to take fuller advantage of other clinical treatment components.”
Coupled with those efforts was a pledge to pursue greater enforcement against active drug distributors.
“Recognizing the harm caused by illegal opioids and synthetic drugs, the Seattle Police Department will prioritize enforcing sales and distribution related crimes to the fullest extent permissible,” the executive order reads, promising to organize a task force on the topic that includes local prosecuting attorneys, federal prosecutors and every three-letter agency except the CIA.
Asked how they would handle the fact that many of the recipients of the aid are also the ones criminalized — plenty of small-time fentanyl or methamphetamine dealers are dealing to support their own habit — SPD Chief Adrian Diaz said, “What we’ve been focusing on is large scale distributors. We’ve been focusing on the cartels. We’ve been working closely with the federal partners and actually identifying those people. We’ve recovered close to, over the last three years, almost 400 million pills, which is obviously enough to kill this entire city.”
Besides those matters of life or death, there was one more significant promise: the long-awaited reopening of City Hall Park, now set for June 15, 2023. When it reopens, the mayor’s plan promises, it will include “new programming, safety, and lighting enhancements, 24/7 security every day of the week, and activities designed to draw people to the park, including movie days, jumbo chess board, concerts, food trucks, and more.”
Some big questions remain.
Q13 FOX reporter AJ Janavel wanted to know what, exactly, was different about offering voluntary treatment and sending cops after drug dealers.
In the case of contingency management, at least, the difference is that it seems to get more people to opt for and benefit from voluntary treatment.
As for ending drug abuse via enforcement, well, Janavel’s query aligns with the decades of evidence from the drug war that enforcement does not end demand.
Discovery Institute employee Jonathan Choe, stationed behind Janavel, asked, “Mayor, the city and county spends more than $1 million a year alone on harm reduction supplies: needles, rubber bands, meth pipes and so on and so forth. With the record number of overdose deaths, do you believe this strategy needs to be reassessed?”
Harrell, while not giving Choe an inch on the benefits of things like needle and pipe exchange programs — ”I’ll take that criticism when it’s saving someone’s life” — had just finished telling Stranger crime reporter Ashley Nerbovig that, in San Francisco, safe injection sites hadn’t had the effect advocates had hoped.
“I don’t think it was working there as optimal as they had hoped it would,” he said, elaborating that he was not against such sites, just not convinced.
A more straightforward harm reduction solution, according to recently published research in the Journal of the American Medical Association, might be to end encampment cleanups.
The report, authored by a nationwide group of health and homelessness researchers, created a simulated model of deaths in unhoused individuals suffering from substance use disorder and concluded that “Continual involuntary displacement may contribute to between 15.6% and 24.4% of additional deaths among unsheltered people experiencing homelessness who inject drugs over a 10-year period.”
Under the Harrell administration, the city conducted over 900 encampment removals in 2022. Sixty-six of those were just outside the doors of the press conference, in Occidental Park, while hundreds more occurred across downtown, the Chinatown-International District and Belltown.
At the beginning of the media event, activists flanked the venue’s corner doorway, handing out flowers to represent homeless people who have died outside, as well as copies of Women in Black’s latest list of those deaths. As the press conference wore on, they scrawled messages like, “Harrell’s sweeps kill.”
At the close of his remarks, McIntrye reminded attendees that “downtown is for you,” pointing out at the audience. As far as this journalist could tell, no homeless people were present.
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Tobias Coughlin-Bogue is the associate editor at Real Change.
Read more of the Apr. 26-May 2, 2023 issue.