Harger: Seattle’s homeless crisis isn’t one problem. It’s three. And we’ve been spending billions pretending otherwise.

I got an email last week from a listener named Ben. I’m going to let him speak for himself.

“I am currently homeless because I’m underemployed and could not keep up with bills. I live in my Jeep with my dog and am not an addict of any kind, and continue to work. I really dislike that I’m struggling to find housing, and these people that have taken everything from everyone are given more. The true face of homelessness in Washington is not the street dwellers but the cashiers and waiters and everyone else that’s working but just can’t get that leg up. I have a college degree. I’ve owned a retail business in the Northgate Mall. I owned a home before divorce. It only took six months of no income to completely drown me, and now I’m a statistic. But since I’m responsible and able to work and function in society, THERE IS NO HELP FOR ME.”

Ben is living in his Jeep rather than a Seattle encampment. He doesn’t want to be around the drug use, the chaos, the danger. He’s trying to hold his life together, not watch it come apart around him.

Now picture a woman in a tent in a Seattle encampment in Ballard. Been there two years. Severely addicted to fentanyl. Found unresponsive twice last week. She’s been offered shelter repeatedly. She keeps turning it down.

We call both Ben and that woman by the same word: homeless.

That one word is doing an awful lot of work. And I’m not sure it’s doing it honestly.

Seattle’s homeless population is really three different groups with three different problems

Michael Shellenberger wrote about this in his book “San Fransicko.” His core claim is that the word homeless was never neutral. It was coined deliberately by activists in the early 1980s to frame the whole issue as a poverty problem. A housing cost problem. It was designed to make addiction and mental illness disappear from the conversation before the conversation even started.

Here’s what that word is actually hiding: three completely different groups of people who have almost nothing in common and need completely different kinds of help.

The first group is Ben. Priced out by a run of bad luck, a life event, a few months where everything went wrong at once. He wants stable housing. He’s ready to work. And the system has very little for him.

The second group is the woman in the tent. What we call Seattle homeless encampments are really open drug scenes. People living close to their supply because fentanyl addiction has consumed everything else. Give this group an apartment without dealing with the addiction, and you haven’t solved anything. We just put a roof over her head, hand her clean needles, and call it compassion. Meanwhile, she’s still addicted, still suffering, still dying. We’re letting people rot and calling it a housing strategy.

The third group is the severely mentally ill. Untreated schizophrenia. Psychosis. People cycling endlessly between the street, the ER, and the jail. A housing voucher doesn’t touch what’s actually wrong with them either.

Here’s where Seattle’s homelessness spending gets cynical

When you collapse all three groups into one word, addiction and mental illness disappear from the conversation. Housing becomes the only acceptable answer. And a massive, largely unaccountable industry gets built around providing that answer.

The contractors who build the housing write campaign checks to the politicians who fund the housing. The politicians set policies that generate more contracts. It’s a circle, and it’s very good for everyone inside it.

Washington state has spent more than $5 billion on homelessness over the past decade. Seattle and King County are each spending somewhere between $200 million and $300 million a year on top of that. King County says it needs $4 billion a year through 2044 to address King County homelessness.

It’s a perfect system. Just not for the people sleeping outside.

They took a word that means you can’t afford rent and stretched it to cover addiction, psychosis, and everything in between. They named every crisis a housing crisis. And we let them.

Here’s why it worked. And why it’s still working.

Most people in Seattle are renters or homeowners who are, by some combination of hard work and luck, keeping their heads above water. They walk past a tent on the way to the coffee shop, and they feel something. Guilt, maybe. Discomfort. A vague sense that they should be doing more. That’s a human reaction, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

The activists figured that out a long time ago. They built an entire political strategy around it. If housing is the only problem, then people with housing are part of the solution. It feels good to support more housing. It feels generous. It feels like the right side of history.

But the moment you question it out loud: “What if that person in the tent has a fentanyl addiction that no apartment is going to fix?” You’ve just made yourself the bad guy. You don’t care about the homeless. You’re blaming the victim. You’re heartless.

So people don’t say it. Even when they’re thinking it. Even when they’ve watched the same person cycle through shelter offers for two years and turn them all down. Even when they’ve seen the needle kits and the foil and the burned spoons. They stay quiet because the word has a force field around it.

We’ve taken it so far that Public Health Seattle & King County now distributes harm reduction kits that include glass pipes, tin foil, and printed instructions on how to fold that foil into a makeshift pipe. Not to help people get clean. To help them use more safely. That’s where the logic ends up when you decide the problem is never the addiction.

Question the word “homeless,” and you’re against the people. So nobody questions it. The word stuck. The money followed. And here we are.

Forty years of this, and Seattle’s crisis keeps growing

Suggest that maybe, just maybe, a fentanyl addiction is not primarily a housing problem, and see how fast you get accused of not caring about the homeless.

The word is protected. The people it was supposed to help are not.

We’re not getting Ben housed. We’re not getting the woman in that Ballard tent the treatment she desperately needs. We’re not getting the severely mentally ill off Seattle’s streets and into real care. We’re just spending money, protecting the world, and calling it compassion.

Meanwhile, the contractors cash their checks, the politicians collect their campaign donations, and Ben is still in his Jeep.

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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