Harger: The King County Homelessness Authority can’t find $13M. People are dying on our streets. Do we take this seriously or not?

There is a scene in the HBO series Succession where aging media patriarch Logan Roy looks at the wreckage his adult children have made of things and delivers his verdict in five words: “You are not serious people.”

I thought about Logan Roy the moment I read that a forensic audit of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) cannot account for $13 million in taxpayer money.

Thirteen million dollars. Meant for people dying on our streets. Gone. And the people running this agency cannot tell you where it went. They cannot tell you because nobody was watching. Sloppy records. Delayed reimbursements. A negative cash position approaching $45 million. The auditors say they did not find fraud, but they also say the record-keeping was so poor that they cannot rule it out. People are sleeping outside in the rain while the bureaucrats lost track of the money that was supposed to help them.

You are not serious people.

Say it out loud. Because that is the only conclusion available. And the missing money is just the most recent proof. These were never serious people. Serious people believe the human beings in those tents are capable of getting better. Serious people steer them toward detox and treatment instead of leaving them to use. Serious people do not build a philosophy around waiting for someone in the grip of addiction to ask for help, as if that is ever how addiction works. The KCRHA’s entire approach was built on not believing in the people it was supposed to serve. And then, on top of that, they lost the money.

Serious people lose sleep over a missing $1,000, let alone $13 million.

These are not serious people. And people are dying because of it.

Why I’ve been critical of this region’s approach to homelessness

I have been critical of how this region handles homelessness for years. I think we are doing it wrong. We let people stay in their tents and use. We wait for them to ask for help instead of steering them toward detox and treatment. We do not insist on accountability from the people we are trying to help. We let them languish because doing the hard thing, insisting they get well, telling them they can’t continue to use, well, that feels mean.

But that criticism comes from caring, not from indifference. The people suffering on our streets are human beings. Each one of them is somebody’s child. They are capable of getting better. But we don’t insist on it. We let them just stay in their current state. They deserve better from us. They deserve guidance. Insistence. And if I can demand accountability from someone living in a tent, I can demand it from a government agency handling their money. The standard does not change based on who is being asked.

The $13 million that is now unaccounted for was supposed to reach those people. Every dollar of it.

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority and the homeless industrial complex

The KCRHA is a pass-through agency. It sits between the city and county on one side and the service providers on the other, managing contracts and moving money. King County and Seattle created it in 2019 to coordinate the regional response to homelessness.

What it became is a textbook example of what I call the homeless industrial complex.

Here is how it works. Politicians respond to pressure about homelessness by creating agencies and programs. Those agencies hire administrators and build bureaucracies. They contract with service providers, many of whom donate to the politicians who fund them. The money circulates. The system sustains itself. The person in the tent is an afterthought because the person in the tent is not writing checks to anyone’s campaign.

Nobody in this system gets paid when someone gets clean. The incentive is to manage the crisis. Not end it. A solved problem does not need an agency.

Budget records show that Seattle and King County provided more than $260 million to the agency’s efforts between 2022 and 2024 alone. And now we learn that $13 million of it cannot be accounted for, that the agency was carrying a negative cash position approaching $45 million, and that the people running it apparently did not think any of that was urgent.

That is what a system looks like when it has lost sight of the people it was built to serve.

Elected leaders are shocked. They shouldn’t be

King County Council member Rod Dembowski says it is time to dissolve this failed experiment. Seattle City Council member Bob Kettle called the findings damning. Council member Maritza Rivera says she is outraged. Mayor Katie Wilson said all options are on the table.

Good. But where were you? The KCRHA was established in 2019. Seattle and King County have been funding it to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The audit was commissioned last August after a string of financial and operational problems. Were they watching? Were they demanding accountability before it reached this point?

Part of the answer is structural. Seattle, King County, and Olympia are run top to bottom by one party. That is just a fact. And when one party controls everything, the natural friction that keeps government honest disappears. Nobody on the inside asks hard questions because everyone on the inside is on the same team. The watchdogs become cheerleaders. The oversight becomes a formality. An agency like the KCRHA can run a $45 million negative cash position for nearly two years, and the people who should have caught it were too busy congratulating themselves for caring about homeless people to notice.

We get what we tolerate

We all own a piece of this. Not just the agency. Not just the board. Not just the elected officials who created and funded the KCRHA without adequate oversight. All of us, as voters and taxpayers, for not demanding more.

I have been asking questions about how this region spends money on homelessness for years. Not to score political points. Because people are suffering and dying, and the system built to help them is far more focused on sustaining itself than on getting anyone well.

$13 million unaccounted for. People still dying on our streets. And the people in charge are just now getting around to being shocked.

Logan Roy’s characters never did get serious. They just kept failing upward while people around them paid the price.

Sound familiar?

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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