Seattle broke the record with more than 2,800 sweeps of unhoused people
New data obtained by Real Change indicates that Seattle’s sweeps of unhoused people and their encampments tripled in 2023 under Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell. The figures, as well as other public records and testimony by unhoused Seattleites, suggest the city has instituted and expanded a policy of systemic displacement and dislocation against its homeless residents.
The removal data comes from public disclosure requests submitted to the Unified Care Team (UCT), the $26.6 million cross-departmental body that coordinates and executes Seattle’s encampment removal policies, as two separate logs. The records indicate that the city of Seattle conducted 2,827 sweeps in 2023, compared to 922 in 2022, an approximately 207% increase. This averages to 7.75 sweeps a day. They peaked at the end of June 2023, with 94 sweeps recorded in single week.
In analyzing and processing the spreadsheets, Real Change encountered a duplication rate of 10.48% between the two spreadsheets, raising questions about the accuracy and record-keeping practices of UCT. The numbers used in this article are after deduplication. In an email to Real Change, Harrell’s spokesperson Callie Craighead wrote that UCT may record removals of vehicles and tents encampments at the same site and on the same day separately, potentially leading to the duplicated figures. Regardless of the precise 2023 total, the removal logs confirm a multifold increase in the scale of sweeps conducted by the city of Seattle, correlating with reports by homelessness activists on the ground.
The records also indicate that more than 99% of all sweeps conducted by UCT were considered “obstruction” sweeps under the city’s administrative rules, exempting them from requirements like giving three days’ notice and offering shelter to encampment residents. In 2022, almost 83% of sweeps were considered obstruction sweeps.
Breaking records
Historical sweeps data obtained by Real Change show that Seattle conducted more sweeps in 2023 than at any time since recordkeeping began in 2016, surpassing the previous record of 1,192 sweeps in 2019.
This rise in sweeps coincides with the recent publication of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s biennial Point-In-Time count, which revealed that an estimated 16,385 people were experiencing homelessness on any given night in King County in 2024, a 23% increase over the 2022 survey. The jump primarily comes from an increase in the number of people living unsheltered, with more than 9,800 people sleeping on the streets, in vehicles or in parks. This means that at any given time, 1 in every 143 King County residents is currently experiencing homelessness and 1 in 244 is living without any formal shelter.
The Point-In-Time count also shows enduring racial inequities within the homeless population, with Black and African American people comprising 19% of homeless King County residents and Indigenous people making up 7% of the homeless population, despite only being 6% and 1% of the total county population, respectively. A final report with further demographic data is expected by July 31.
In addition to record-high levels of sweeps and homelessness, 2023 also saw a marked increase in deaths of people presumed as homeless. In 2023, 299 unhoused people in Seattle died, an increase of 35% from 2022. The sharp increase in mortality is fueled in part by the opioid epidemic, which has intensified with the greater availability of fentanyl. According to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, three-quarters of the deaths in 2023 were associated with drugs or poison, compared to two thirds of the deaths in 2022.
Sweeps and health
While these numbers can give us a sense of scale, the impact of sweeps is personal. Chanel Horner, a long-time unhoused Seattle resident and an activist with the group Stop The Sweeps, said she’s seen the devastating impact forcible removal can cause. Oftentimes, people are given just a few hours’ notice to pack up all their belongings and move. If someone happens to be at work or running an errand when their tent or vehicle is swept, they could be out of luck. Horner said the constant threat of UCT contractors dismantling and removing one’s shelter at any time creates a pervasive sense of fear and hypervigilance.
For people like Horner, who lives in a bus, an impound not only costs hundreds of dollars but also deprives a person of their home. If a person’s vehicle is in a degraded condition, as is often the case, they may not be able to get it back at all. Horner recalled a time when she and a fellow activist were helping someone move his RV during a sweep. After they left, his vehicle broke down and the city towed it. The loss sent him spiraling into despair.
Horner has also had her bus towed by UCT contractors, which she claims was illegal. With representation from the Housing Justice Project, she is suing the city to request an injunction prohibiting the impounding of a vehicle when it is someone’s residence.
“I want to see it [the lawsuit] make a difference to everyone else that’s getting towed out here,” Horner said. “So many people have lost their homes lately, and I’ve literally seen people die a few weeks later after they got towed because they started doing fentanyl. He would never do that stuff if it weren’t for the fact that he had nothing left,” Horner said of the unhoused person whose RV was towed. “They took everything from him.”
Horner’s personal account correlates with a growing body of research that suggests encampment sweeps and other policies of continual displacement directly contribute to increased rates of death and illness. Real Change previously reported that an April 2023 study by the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated sweeps were associated with a 19% increase in deaths and 2.5 times more overdoses among unsheltered homeless people who inject drugs. In November 2023, the American Public Health Association published a statement describing sweeps as dangerous and “a temporary cosmetic fix [that] does little to effectively connect unhoused people to services and housing.”
The rise of UCT
For as long as Seattle has been conducting sweeps of homeless people and their encampments, there has been resistance. In 2016, as the city was sweeping the infamous “Jungle” encampment near I-5, protesters disrupted a press conference by then-mayor Ed Murray, chanting, “Stop the sweeps.”
At the time, the city was informally coordinating sweeps between multiple departments, requiring employees to take time out of their normal work schedules to assist with encampment removals. But this proved unsustainable, and in 2017 Seattle formed the Navigation Team, an interdepartmental squad that carried out sweeps alongside homelessness outreach. In the three years the team was active, it had an annual budget of between $8 million and $10 million. That was also the time the city codified its administrative rules regarding removals, including requiring 72 hours’ notice, providing outreach before sweeps and creating the category of “obstruction” sweeps that don’t require prior notice.
Progressive activists fought back against the Navigation Team, calling it harmful and a waste of resources. Meanwhile, the ACLU of Washington filed several lawsuits on behalf of unhoused residents who had been swept, claiming their rights to property and privacy had been violated, but most of these proved unsuccessful.
Things changed in 2020 with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In mid-March, Seattle paused almost all sweeps in accordance with public health guidance from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Then, amid a national Black Lives Matter uprising against police brutality, activists persuaded the Seattle City Council to defund the Navigation Team in August 2020.
During the 20-month period between April 2020 and December 2021, Seattle conducted only 68 sweeps of unhoused people. The effects were visible throughout much of the city, with encampments remaining in place in many parks and green spaces.
When Harrell ran for mayor, he pledged to disperse the large encampments and clear parks of homeless people. After his inauguration in January 2022, his promise materialized in the form of UCT. This new formation was essentially a revamped Navigation Team, carrying out the same mission and basic tactics.
But, there is a key difference between UCT and the Navigation Team: The new team is bigger and much more expensive. In 2023, UCT had a budget of $25.9 million, which has grown to $26.6 million in 2024. It has become a sprawling bureaucracy, encompassing seven different departments with leadership from Harrell’s office. The bulk of the money — $20.4 million — goes to nine different companies contracted by the Parks Department, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) to disperse encampments and throw away any trash and belongings. Another $2.2 million covers police officer wages while they are assigned to UCT.
According to Craighead, the Parks Department is responsible for removals in Seattle’s North End, while SDOT works in the South End. SPU mainly focuses on vehicle removals and illegal dumping.
While the city says it is able to store belongings for unhoused residents when they get swept, people familiar with the on-the-ground realities say this is a rarity and that the vast majority of the time, UCT contractors fail to distinguish between people’s belongings and genuine garbage.
The sharp increase in sweeps during the first two years of Harrell’s administration has inspired a revamp of Stop The Sweeps and other groups who advocate against the forcible removal of homeless people’s encampments. Activists frequently show up at sweeps to help residents with relocation and provide mutual aid. Others disrupt Harrell’s press conferences and testify at city council meetings. Some have also resorted to legal action.
One reason sweeps may have increased so much in 2023 could be because UCT is carrying out almost exclusively obstruction sweeps. Last July, the King County Superior Court ruled that the city’s sweeps policy was unconstitutional because it covered encampments and vehicles that were not true obstructions. The case is currently being litigated in the first division of the Washington Court of Appeals.
Real motivation?
To justify the sweeps policy, Harrell and many city council members who support it have said the purpose is to bring people inside. Indeed, about $1.7 million, making up 6.3% of UCT’s budget, goes to paying seven homelessness outreach workers who offer shelter and other services to homeless residents at encampment sweeps.
However, given the frequency of sweeps with little to no notice, only a fraction of removals involve prior outreach and/or offers of shelter. In a report to the city council analyzing performance between July and September 2023, UCT staff recorded providing 1,830 offers of shelter to encampment and vehicle residents. However, only 209 ended up entering shelter, making up a small fraction of people contacted. The vast majority of declines involved offers for congregate shelters, which provide your typical and traditional form of temporary overnight sheltering.
Data obtained by Real Change points to another explanation for Seattle’s aggressive sweeps policy — the massive volume in complaints from housed residents about their homeless neighbors.
In 2022, people sent 29,304 complaints to the city of Seattle about unhoused people’s encampments and vehicles. This figure grew by 41.7% in 2023, to a total of 41,536 complaints. Most of the complaints were filed through the city’s Find It, Fix It app, which allows residents to report everyday issues like utility outages or broken street signage. UCT handles so many complaints that it allocated $209,800 in 2024 to cover the salaries of two customer service representatives dedicated exclusively to encampment-related inquiries.
Horner said she thinks sweeps are intended to assuage constituents’ anxieties about visible homelessness in neighborhoods like Downtown and Little Saigon, which have large populations of unsheltered people.
“They want to try to keep those areas clean and sweep anything that looks dirty, just sweep us under the rug like we’re not there,” she said. “But I mean it’s not really actually solving anything. It’s actually hurting a lot of people.”
Horner thinks this persistent policy of forcible displacement amounts to institutional violence. She said the loss of housing and shelter in combination with police enforcement leads directly to people dying.
“I’ve had friends that died as a result of sweeping,” Horner said. “My friend ... he said, ‘My biggest fear is that I’m going to run out of gas and then they’re gonna come tow away my home.’ And that’s literally what happened. They had called SWAT on the 80-year-old man. … So they just lost their home … and he died.”
This article has been updated to reflect the correct name of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Guy Oron is the staff reporter for Real Change. He handles coverage of our weekly news stories. Find them on Twitter, @GuyOron.
Read more of the June 5–11, 2024 issue.