Harger: Housing First and Recovery First shared a Seattle stage, and nobody walked out

Friday night, I moderated a panel discussion on homelessness and addiction. Before we started, I looked out at a room full of people frustrated with homelessness in Seattle and asked for a show of hands. How many had lived through addiction or homelessness themselves? A good number of hands went up. Then I asked how many had a family member who had.

Nearly every hand in the room.

That’s who shows up to a conversation like this: people whose own families are in the fight. So I told them what I believe: The people we were there to talk about are human beings in crisis, suffering, loved by families, and deserving of recovery.

Then I laid down the ground rules. This wasn’t going to be a food fight, and it wasn’t going to be an episode of Jerry Springer. We were going to disagree, out loud, and listen anyway.

I’d been invited to help moderate, and the original idea was no recordings. Keep it off the record, and people might talk more candidly. The audience had other ideas. They wanted to remember this one, and phones and cameras were everywhere. I counted at least 20.

It worked out better that way. Whatever candor the panelists showed, they showed it knowing it was on the record. That’s admirable.

So here’s what happened.

We Heart Seattle put Housing First and Recovery First in one room

The event was put on by We Heart Seattle, Andrea Suarez’s group. Two of my panelists, political consultant Sandeep Kaushik and Lisa Daugaard, co-founder of the LEAD diversion program, knew the room would lean against them. They came anyway.

Sandeep later called it “a very un-Seattle thing” for him to do. We Heart Seattle is seen as the opposite of what his side believes, and plenty of people on his side would rather not engage with the group at all. He decided the conversation mattered more. Wise call.

Across from them sat Tom Wolf, a recovery advocate from San Francisco who once lived on the streets there himself, and Eric Zimmerman, the mayor of Normandy Park, who studies homelessness for the Washington Policy Center, a free-market think tank.

The easy way to describe that split is left versus right. You’d be wrong.

Seattle’s real dividing line runs somewhere else. On one side are the people defending how the city does things now: Housing First, permanent supportive housing, the approach we’ve had for years. On the other are the people asking whether it’s working, and whether recovery and sobriety deserve a bigger seat at the table.

People in that second group have usually voted the same way as everybody else in this town their whole lives. Most of them had their hands up Friday. But in a city where almost everybody agrees on almost everything, one disagreement starts to look like a defection. Say you’d like to see more recovery requirements alongside the housing, and people assume you must disagree on everything else, too. One question about sobriety, and somebody’s already measuring you for a red hat. Once that MAGA label sticks, nobody’s listening anymore.

San Francisco changed course on addiction. Seattle hasn’t

So did anybody change their mind?

Not really, and I’d be lying if I told you otherwise. Nobody changed their minds. But if everyone on the panel started the night at 100% certain, a few left at 98 or 99. In this city, on this subject, that’s an earthquake.

Tom Wolf made the sharpest case. His city has spent the last 18 months doing what Seattle won’t. San Francisco voters decided the old approach wasn’t working and elected a mayor who agreed. Mayor Daniel Lurie signed a “Recovery First” law last year, and this summer he signed another requiring new city-funded supportive housing to be drug-free. Tom’s pitch was more than one path, running at the same time, instead of the single lane Seattle keeps driving in.

Lisa Daugaard made an observation I didn’t expect. She pointed out that harm reduction started in the 1980s as a way to get clean needles to addicts in order to slow the spread of HIV, and acknowledged that what it’s become is a different thing today. Eric Zimmerman leaned toward that same more-than-one-path idea.

And Sandeep Kaushik was the most curious person in the room. He showed up at a We Heart Seattle event knowing he’d disagree with most of it, and afterward told me he was eager to talk to Tom more about the supportive housing ideas coming out of San Francisco.

That openness is the whole ballgame.

Seattle’s homelessness debate needs more rooms like this

And the crowd? Nobody left during the discussion.

You know how these things usually go. A few minutes in, people drift to the bar, check their phones, slip out the back. Not Friday. A full hour, and nobody wandered off. We could have gone two. These were people hungry for answers, and afterward plenty of them came up to tell me it felt like maybe a little progress.

We didn’t solve homelessness on a Friday night. People were responding to something simpler: Four people who disagree, in the same room, looking each other in the eye and listening.

Seattle has forgotten how to do that. So has the rest of the country. We’ve talked ourselves into believing the other side is the enemy, and that the only choices are to win or to shout. The fix is an old-fashioned one. You sit down with someone you disagree with, you try to understand where they’re coming from, and you look for the inch of ground you share.

That room found it Friday night. The question is whether the rest of us want to.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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