Mayor pretends she’ll tackle root causes of Seattle homelessness

This week, Seattle and King County governments said they’d work together to address homelessness because, apparently, they haven’t been until now.

Think about that for a moment. Seattle is the biggest city in King County and the driver of our homelessness problem, and the two governments haven’t been working together.

But in the announcement, Mayor Jenny Durkan made a claim that is just hard to believe. In fact, it runs counter to what Durkan is actually doing on homelessness.

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“We’re going to make sure that business as usual is not how we operate,” Durkan said. “We’re not looking at the crisis on the street but the root causes of homelessness [under this new plan].”

She’s going to be looking at the root causes of homelessness? This goal is in conflict to literally everything the City of Seattle is currently doing to address the homelessness problem.

Seattle wants to tax the hell out of Amazon and other big business because, in their infinite wisdom, city officials know how much these businesses can afford to spend to tackle problems the city is actually responsible for. But giving a homeless person a house — affordable or fully subsidized — is literally the opposite of addressing the root causes of why they’re living on the streets.

I know officials want to pretend that people are on the streets simply because they can’t afford the rent (purposefully ignoring that if you can’t afford a $2,000 studio on Capitol Hill, you can, you know, move to a cheaper apartment or get a roommate or two). But the data is pretty compelling: many are living with untreated mental health issues, others are addicted to drugs, and others don’t have the skills necessary to keep a job.

You can, of course, address those root causes, but Seattle isn’t. What are they doing? They’re charging developers insanely high fees to build housing, impose ridiculous fees on building condos, and then stop these developers from building too high. Thus, the few units they can build are expensive, due to Seattle fees, and we still don’t have a supply that addresses the demand, which, in turn, increase rental prices.

Dan Bertolet has a great write-up on this over at Sightline.

Meanwhile, Seattle and King County will create a heroin injection site (one in Seattle and one, potentially, mobile), despite community concern. That literally is the opposite of addressing the root causes, which is heroin addiction. They could address the root causes by offering treatment on demand, but they find that too hard and expensive (though spending $12 million a mile for bike lanes is a sound investment). They’re simply treating a symptom of the root causes.

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So color me shocked that Durkan claims she wants to address the root causes of homelessness because the city’s plan literally does the opposite.

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