Shelter Referrals Are (Still) a Poor Metric for Progress on Homelessness; Burien Sues Minimum Wage Campaign
Today's Afternoon Fizz.
Mayor Bruce Harrell delivers his 2025 State of the City speech.[/caption]
1. During his State of the City speech earlier this month (titled "Seattle On the Rise"), Mayor Bruce Harrell touted the fact that, "paired with" a dramatic reduction in visible encampments, the city's encampment removal team made more than 1,800 "referrals to shelter" in 2024. Some people, Harrell conceded, may initially refuse the Unified Care Team's offers, but "we will always ask and create spaces for people to recover."
For years, the city has used shelter "referrals" as a metric for success. But, as PubliCola has documented year after year after year after year after year, only a fraction of the people the city "refers" to shelter during or before encampment sweeps actually end up showing up at shelter and staying there for even a single night.
Numbers provided by the mayor's office confirm that this continued to be the case in 2024, when only 48 percent of 1,884 "referrals" actually resulted in someone staying in a shelter. That's 903 instances in which a person slept in a shelter as the result of a Unified Care Team referral last year—down from 970 in 2023. This "enrollments" number fluctuates from season to season and year to year; people tend to be more willing to spend a night or two in a shelter bed when it's cold out, for example.
A spokesperson for the mayor's office noted that the enrollment numbers are likely an undercount, since some people don't confirm their identities when they enroll in shelter; others, the spokesperson noted, may end up going to a different shelter or take more than 48 hours to enroll.
Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, said the "referrals to shelter" metric is about as meaningful as telling someone about a lunch place that has a good tofu banh mi and counting that as business for the restaurant. "No contracted outreach provider reports [referrals] because it is such a lousy indicator of the work," she said.
Instead of focusing on "crappy data," Eisinger said, she'd like to see the city working with the state to address the looming $250 million shortfall in revenue from the document recording fees that fund homeless services, or preparing for the likelihood that the Trump Administration will soon decimate the Department of Housing and Urban Development by slashing its workforce and cutting federal grants for housing.
None of the recent numbers Harrell touted in his speech are available on the city's "One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan" dashboard, which does not appear to have been updated since last June. The mayor's spokesperson called this an "oversight" and said the site would be updated with December figures later this week.
2. The city of Burien is suing to roll back a voter-approved measure that increased Burien's minimum wage to the same minimum as Tukwila—currently $21.10 an hour. The lawsuit, first reported by the B-Town Blog, targets the Transit Riders Union, which ran last year's initiative campaign, and its general secretary (and sometime PubliCola contributor) Katie Wilson.
In its lawsuit, Burien claims that the initiative is too vague and "confusing" for voters to understand; additionally, the city argues that the initiative didn't explicitly overturn the old minimum wage, leaving two "competing" minimum wages in place. The lawsuit also claims the campaign "went to exceptional lengths to suggest and imply that Burien had no minimum wage at all."
The city is using the same Seattle law firm to sue Wilson and TRU that it's using to defend against three homeless people seeking to overturn the city's ban on sleeping outdoors, Keller Rohrback.
It's hard to square Burien's outrage with the details of the law its city council passed last year, which includes so many exemptions and carveouts that it could exempt many or most employers from paying more than the state minimum, currently $16.66 an hour.
The biggest carveout is that the law doesn't set a minimum wage, but a minimum "total compensation" that varies by employer size. Total compensation, according to the law, includes not just wages but tips and medical benefits like health insurance. Other cities with minimum wage laws, such as Seattle, phased in their minimum wages over time, allowing smaller employers to count medical benefits and tips toward the minimum, but that initial grace period ended this year. Burien's law permanently exempts any employer that provides benefits, or whose employees rely on customer tips, from paying more than the state minimum.
There are additional exemptions, too. Companies with fewer than 20 employees (which the law itself estimates at about 26 percent of Burien's businesses) are completely exempt from the law. In addition, the highest possible wage—set at $4.50 an hour above whatever the state minimum happens to be—only applies to employers with more than 500 employees in King County. According to 2022 Census data, there are 269 businesses who meet that standard in all of King County, most of them outside Burien.
In the lawsuit, the city of Burien argues that by pegging the Burien minimum wage to Tukwila's (which, in turn, is indexed on the city of SeaTac's), the initiative is "uniquely problematic." Voters in Renton passed a similar law last year, also pinned to Tukwila's minimum; so far, it has not been challenged.