Seattle Nice: Did the Left Get It Wrong on Homelessness?

Special guest Katie Wilson

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Nice welcomed another (!) special guest this week, bringing housing activist, writer, and occasional PubliCola contributor Katie Wilson on the podcast to talk about an article she wrote for the Stranger, "Where the Left Went Wrong on Homelessness."

The premise of Wilson's piece is that while left-leaning homeless advocates in Seattle are generally correct about the root causes and effective solutions to the homelessness crisis (cause: Lack of housing; solution: More housing), they often fail to acknowledge the impact people living on the streets can have on other people just trying to live and work in the city.

"Drugs? Housed people use them too. Anyway, it’s common for people to get addicted after they become homeless. Trash? Actually, a lot of it is opportunistically dumped from passing cars. Bodily excretions? We need public restrooms. Shoplifting and crime? The claims are overblown. Anyway, homeless people are more often the victims of crime than the perpetrators. Feel unsafe? It’s all in your head, really you just don’t want to look at poverty."

As I told Katie, I've definitely made most of those arguments—mostly because I personally find them compelling, not because I think someone who wants to arrest people for public urination actually believes homeless people don't need to pee. Nonetheless, I'm intrigued by the idea that there might be a way for the left to reframe our arguments in a way that captures the hearts and minds of people who actually do want solutions (not just sweeps) but feel frustrated by the city's lack of visible progress.

Wilson believes that the left needs to be advocating for something, rather than just against policies that haven't fixed the problem. ("Stop the Sweeps," for example, doesn't answer the question: And then what?) As an example, she said we ought to be "aggressively pushing for" the expansion of programs like JustCare, which resolves encampments by working with people over a period of weeks to identify shelter, services and housing appropriate for each individual.

Wilson also told us she wonders now if defeating Compassion Seattle—a Tim Burgess-backed ballot measure that would have directed the city to use existing funds to pay for 2,000 new shelter beds—was the victory it appeared to be. After all, the defeat of that proposal was followed immediately by the election of a slate of centrist-to-conservative local politicians like Sara Nelson, Bruce Harrell, and Ann Davison (an literal Republican). Even if the 2021 backlash election was inevitable, Wilson says, a legally binding shelter mandate could have forced the city to build a lot of shelter, fast, reducing pressure from the "Seattle Is Dying" crowd to take more drastic actions.

While I can definitely see the benefit of investment in shelter, I countered that there are many people living in and around Seattle who will never accept any solution that involves spending taxpayer money on the long, difficult work of helping people recover from addictions, find stable housing, and gain financial stability without resorting to survival crimes. Those people aren't part of "the left," broadly defined, but they play an outsize role in our public policy, especially now.

Listen to the discussion, which also features Sandeep arguing for more involuntary commitments and David wondering how much the media are to blame for promoting simplistic narratives about homelessness, wherever you get your podcasts.