Harger: HUD pulls funding from Housing First. King County spent 20 years and billions on it. It got worse

King County adopted a 10-year plan to end homelessness in 2005. We are in year 20. Homelessness has roughly doubled. The plan to end it has, over 20 years, presided over the largest homelessness crisis in the county’s history.

And the answer from the people who wrote the plan, ran the plan, and built their organizations around the plan is that the plan needs more money.

Use your eyes. Walk through Pioneer Square. Drive past the encampments along I-5. Drive past the RVs in SODO and Georgetown. Talk to a parent in North Beacon Hill whose kid walks past a tent on the way to school.

Things are not getting better. They are plainly, visibly, measurably worse.

This week, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it is moving about a third of $4 billion in homelessness funding away from the Housing First model. The Seattle Times reported Tuesday that about $26 million of King County’s annual federal support is now at risk, money that helps maintain housing for roughly 4,500 households across the region.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner’s verdict was blunt.

“The Housing First experiment failed Americans by warehousing the vulnerable without results. Housing alone will not solve a crisis driven by addiction and mental illness,” he said.

You can agree with President Donald Trump on nothing and still see that those sentences are accurate.

The providers say the model works. They deserve a fair hearing

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson walked onto the Civic Cocktail stage at Seattle CityClub Wednesday night and made the case for the model the region has been running for 20 years. She got a grilling from FOX 13 Seattle anchor Hana Kim and a room so loud the organizers had to remind people about decorum before intermission.

The mayor said housing costs are the real driver of homelessness. She said drugs are a factor, but not the root cause. She said the answer is “low-barrier, high-service” shelter, meaning a shelter that does not require sobriety as a condition of entry. Requiring sobriety, she said, creates “a very narrow funnel” and leaves people outside.

Hana Kim asked the question that a lot of taxpayers are asking. Is Seattle too lenient in giving people who are addicted to drugs housing first with no requirement of treatment? Why are those things not combined?

The audience applauded the question. Loudly.

The mayor’s answer was the answer the homelessness establishment has been giving for 20 years. People come into homelessness from different directions. What works for one person does not always work for another. A low-barrier, high-service model is the best approach.

These aren’t unserious arguments. Housing costs in this region are crushing. People do fall into homelessness for reasons that have nothing to do with drugs. Recovery is hard, and relapse is part of it.

But you can grant all of that and still notice what is missing from the defense.

The Seattle Times story this week quoted providers. It quoted advocacy directors. It quoted the executive’s office and the regional homelessness authority. The mayor stood on the Civic Cocktail stage and described the model. None of them quoted a single person who has lived inside one of the buildings.

I’ve talked to two of them.

Cory Ratliff has lived inside these buildings. He says every one of them was the same

I sat down recently with Cory Ratliff. He is sober now. He got there through We Heart Seattle and Battlefield Addiction, two organizations the region’s homelessness establishment treats as something close to heretical because they insist on sobriety as the goal.

Cory has lived inside the permanent supportive housing buildings King County has been constructing for 20 years. I asked him what was happening behind the closed doors.

“To be honest with you, it’s ugly,” he told me. “You get in these places, police are barely there. You’re being given the tools to get high. You get permanent housing, you get fed once a day. You can go out and do all your crime and have a safe place to hide.”

He kept going.

“Behind these closed doors, there’s prostitution still, there’s still drug dealers on every floor, five floors, six floors high. Every person in that whole complex is high,” he said.

I asked if that was rare or common. Cory has been inside a lot of these buildings.

“Every single one I’ve been in has been just like that,” he said. “They pick us up off the street in a tent or in an encampment, they’ll put us in a hotel, or they’ll build a brand new building and fill it with us from the streets. And if you think that’s gonna make us magically stop doing what we’ve been doing for years overnight, you’re crazy.”

Cory’s words match the HUD data. A 282% increase in overdose deaths inside permanent supportive housing buildings in King County between 2020 and 2023. Inside the buildings.

Ginny Burton has filmed inside these buildings. She is describing the same thing Cory described

Ginny Burton spent a lot of time addicted to drugs, spending years of her life behind bars, until she had enough. She is now a recovery advocate, a friend of “Seattle’s Morning News,” and someone who has done what almost no journalist in Seattle has done. She went inside the buildings with a camera. Her series “Behind Closed Doors” on her Modern America channel is firsthand reporting from inside the permanent supportive housing buildings our region has spent 20 years constructing.

Her footage tells the same story Cory told me.

Residents describe a monthly cycle that runs on the benefit check. First of the month, the money arrives, and people disappear into their rooms to use. By the second week, the drugs and the money run out, and the hallways fill with fights and accusations. By the end of the month, residents are sick, malnourished, and begging for help. Then the next check hits, and the cycle starts over.

Ginny has interviewed people who entered the buildings weighing 85 pounds and got sicker. She has documented residents whose organs were failing while staff kept handing them beer. She has covered the murder of a vulnerable woman strangled in her bathtub, after months of assaults, the staff did not stop.

A former staff member told her the supervisors said it plainly. We’re not here to change behaviors. Keep them fed. Keep them warm. Keep them alive until tomorrow.

About 40% of residents, that staff member said, hit a moment of clarity near the end of the month when they were sick and broke and scared. They asked for a treatment bed. There were none. The next check arrived. The window closed.

This is what Housing First looks like from inside the buildings. Not from a press release. Not from a grant application. From two people who got themselves out of addiction and went back to show you what is happening to the people who did not.

The mayor’s description and the residents’ description do not match

The mayor calls it “low-barrier, high-service.” Cory and Ginny describe something different. They describe low-barrier, low-service, no-expectations, no-exit. They describe staff told not to change behaviors. They describe residents begging for treatment beds that do not exist.

The mayor is describing the model on paper. The residents are describing the model in practice.

The HUD numbers point in the same direction Cory and Ginny do. Overdose deaths inside the buildings went up 282% in three years. That is not a model that is working and underfunded. That is a model operating as designed and producing the outcome the design produces.

The audience at Civic Cocktail knew which description to trust. They applauded the question, not the answer.

The incentives in this system do not point toward recovery

Most of the people working in homelessness services in King County are trying to do good work. Case managers, outreach workers, and building staff. Many of them are underpaid, burned out, and watching the same people cycle through the same buildings year after year. They are not the problem.

The problem is the structure they work in.

The region’s homelessness response has grown into a multi-billion-dollar sector. Providers, contractors, consultants, nonprofits, and regional authorities. Grant cycles, lease agreements, capital campaigns, board seats. The funding flows toward bed counts and units built, not toward people who recovered and moved on. The metrics reward keeping people housed. They do not reward getting people well.

When the measure of success is how many units you operate, the incentive is to operate more units. When the measure of success is how many people you serve, the incentive is to keep serving them. Nobody has to be cynical for the system to drift this way. The incentives do the drifting on their own.

And nobody inside the sector has any reason to call for its contraction. Even the staff who privately know the model is failing the people in their buildings are not going to publicly argue for fewer buildings, fewer contracts, fewer jobs.

And think about what our state, county, city, and other leaders tell you. You are going to be told the sidewalks are not as bad as you think. The data is more complicated than it looks. That the buildings are working, mostly, in the aggregate, when measured correctly, by the right people. You are going to be told to trust the experts and ignore what you can see with your own eyes.

Trust your eyes. Trust Cory. Trust Ginny. Trust the small business owner in the Chinatown International District who is closing up at three because the block is not safe. Trust the bus driver who has stopped pulling up at certain stops. Trust the EMT who answers the same overdose call at the same address for the fourth time this month.

The street is bad. The buildings are bad. Both things are true, and the people running the system need both things to stay quiet.

And the answer from the establishment is more money for the same model.

People getting well should be the first approach

I’m not against housing people. I am against warehousing them.

The first approach should be recovery. A treatment bed when somebody asks for one. And they should be told about treatment first thing. Programs that expect something of the people they are trying to help. Organizations like We Heart Seattle and Battlefield Addiction that have actually gotten people sober and back on their feet, instead of being treated as heretics by a system that prefers managed decline.

Some people will not get well. That is true. Severe mental illness, decades of addiction, traumatic brain injuries from years on the street. For those people, we need a serious conversation about what comes next, and it is a conversation this region has refused to have for 20 years.

But permanent supportive housing where drug use is permitted in the units, where staff are told not to change behaviors, where the providers get a blank check and no measurable outcomes, should not be the default. It should be a last resort, with conditions, and with accountability.

Right now, we have it backwards. Recovery is the exception. The blank check is the rule.

The federal government is not asking King County to abandon the homeless. The federal government is asking King County to stop abandoning them to a system that leaves addiction untreated and calls it compassion.

We have spent 20 years and billions of dollars. It got worse. The plan is to double down.

The casino does not care if you ever win. The casino only cares that you keep playing.

It’s time to leave the table.

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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