González at Capitol Hill Station for a press conference last week on her plan to address homelessness (Image: CHS)
Earlier this month, her opponent stood in front of the site of a sprawling Seattle encampment to unveil his Compassion Seattle-like plan for adding new housing, new spending, and clearing “parks, playgrounds, sports fields, public spaces, sidewalks, and streets” of tents.
Mayoral candidate Lorena González chose the mix of market rate and affordable housing above Capitol Hill Station to unveil hers — including a vow, she said, to leave fear and sweeps behind.
“Nobody wants an encampment anywhere in the city,” González told CHS Thursday at a press conference in the development’s plaza just north of Cal Anderson Park. “Our goal is to make sure that people don’t have to resort to living outside. My plan focuses on bringing that to fruition and doing that urgently in my administration.”
As González espoused the housing and service principals of her homelessness plan, the candidate and current Seattle City Council president chose to draw the hardest line between her vision and the plan put forth by opponent Bruce Harrell on encampments.
Harrell, she said, wants “heat maps” and dashboards to keep parks and sidewalks clear.
“I am not as mayor going to forcibly remove people out of one public space and shift the issue to another public space,” González said.
Headed into November, the housing-focused approach might be a tough sell. Encampments, especially in parks, have continued to be hot button neighborhood issue across Capitol Hill and the city. The latest issues to flare up here are complaints from neighbors around Seven Hills Park where a camp has grown along with reports of street disorder and disturbances.
“This site is a priority for removal and for shelter offering, but this takes time,” a Seattle Parks department email response to one complaint reads. “Closing the park and excluding all from the park would not allow outreach providers the time needed to make connections to services and shelter prior to a removal, and would likely cause individuals to relocate within the neighborhood.”
Word has spread of another planned clearance on the other side of the Hill at the Thomas Street Mini Park where some have set up camp and many of the area’s mutual aid efforts continue to provide meals and services.
Meanwhile, another major encampment fire destroyed a camp down the greenbelt embankment below Bellevue Ave E Belroy Apartments on Friday afternoon, sending a thick column of black smoke into the sky but, fortunately, causing no serious injuries.
Speaking Thursday, González said her hope is that voters will understand that sweeps and clearances are only moving people from temporary place to temporary place. “I am not here to point fingers at people in tents, or call for yet another study, dashboard or app to study an issue that so many of us are all too familiar with,” González said.
Harrell has also called for more housing but says his plan hinges on “a capital campaign” supported by charitable giving from the private sector, not new taxes. Meanwhile, Harrell says parks and streets should be cleared of encampments with increased outreach effort from workers to provide shelter and services.
González’s plan would not emphasize sweeps and would focus on the creation of affordable housing, adding more shelter space and services, and a “revisit” of the wealth tax to help pay for it. In 2020, the state Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling blocking the city from implementing a 2.25% rate on income over $250,000 a year for individuals, or $500,000 for married couples filing jointly. It was expected to generate $140 million a year.
Will voters be patient enough to wait for parks and sidewalks to clear of tents and encampments because the city finally has added cheaper housing and more shelters? At her Capitol Hill press conference last week, González said her plan is the only way to truly end the cycle of sweeps and encampments.
The goal should be, she said, to “humanely connect people to the housing and services they need so we don’t have to tolerate or accept that there are encampments in the city.”
$5 A MONTH TO HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for $5 a month -- or choose your level of support 🖤
Vote for Harrell! She has done enough damage to the Hill! Look around – she and the SCC have really hurt the city. Enough is enough!
If you blame the city council, how can you vote Harrell? He was on the council from 2007-2019, before Lorena Gonzalez (who was first elected in 2015).
So he’s arguably more at fault, because he did little to address the issue for an even longer time.
Because Harrell is a reasonable person and Gonzales believes drug addicts fresh off the bus from Florida have a right to privatize and destroy public spaces and steal to fund a meth addiction without consequences rather then go to a shelter.
There are more homeless now than ever before and people email and call about encampments with no response. A response only happens when someone dies. Except in the case of the encampment near I90 where people were throwing rocks and objects at moving cars almost daily for several months with many near death misses. It’s unacceptable for the homeless to be living in an unsafe situation and for the people driving, working downtown and just living near encampments.
Also have to mention that homeless will not benefit from affordable housing because they have a big transition until they can pay a deposit, pay rent and get accepted for the housing – all these things are required to live in affordable housing. That’s why we really need to focus on transitional house and supportive housing first as Harrells plan does.
This is just more of the same that got us into this situation in the first place. Until our elected officials acknowledge that there are people that cannot and will not function within society unsupervised we’ll continue to have these problems. There simply will be people who refuse help – we *know* this and there will be a small proportion will eventually make the places where they are housed such a toxic and hostile environment that other people will begin refusing to use them too – just like they do now and nothing will change.
This isn’t something new – we know that right now people refuse shelter because they say it’s unsanitary and unsafe – in fact homeless advocates love to throw it up in everyone’s face when we point out how many people refuse shelter – so what makes anyone think just building more will change that?
People who are suffering from severe mental illnesses need to be stabilized, people suffering from drug addictions need to be treated. After that they need to be supervised – Some will be able to live on their own eventually, but some of them may need that forever. I’m not saying that we need to go back to the days of locking everyone up and throwing away the key – but we do need to accept that some people won’t ever be fully independent. They may be perfectly capable of going out into society, but they need to be able to go home to someone who makes sure they have a meal, have their meds and have a reasonably clean place to live – and we just don’t have this right now… There’s very little in between available it’s locked mental ward or the streets.
Couldn’t agree more. There needs to be an alternative to the ‘just more housing’ concept. The idea of housing with different levels of assistance is absolutely needed. Of course there are costs but it still sounds better than camping in pubic spaces (which should be discouraged across the board).
Time to sweep Gonzales and Mosqueda from office
I don’t understand why there is so much money thrown at this problem in the city, yet nothing gets done.
This looks like an easy solution:
1) buy large tracts of land in unincorporated King County so the NIMBY problem is eliminated.
2) Build housing and place services there.
3) Make the housing zero barrier.
4) Resettle every single unhoused person living in encampments there, and provide real services.
5) Have graduated care so as people get better and stable, they can eventually move out of the housing.
6) For those who need continuing long term support, offer it.
7) Establish and aggressively enforce anti camping and anti settlement ordinances. Take free housing outside the city or take a felony. Your housing issues will get settled one way or another.
This plan satisfies the humanitarian side of the crisis, while simultaneously returning the rule of law, reducing blight in the city, and rejuvenating urban spaces.
We have the money. All it takes is the will.
The problem or should I say challenge with this idea is that people in these houses need to be able to live their lives. Like….eat and get to a job. Unless there is adequate public transportation an convenient grocery stores in the area, this approach is not sustainable.
Most of these people are not working. The hope would be that as some people get healthy, they could return to the workforce.
Obviously if housing and services will be provided, funds to make sure that people can eat and be hydrated can easily be built into the model.
Transportation to and from the site could easily be arranged.
This objection falls well short of presenting challenges that cannot be overcome.
My original assertion stands: we have the money. All it takes is the will.
“Most of these people” are not responsible for the crime and other unsightly or undesirable activities that are associated with their very existence. But some are responsible, and you cannot tell the difference.
The people who are most out of touch with reality are those that believe that a majority or even a significant number of the homeless are *not* addicts. I have been one of “these people” for a few years now, and I can report that I have yet to meet a single person that is not a speed/opioid addict. Most also have mental health issues. It’s not a homeless problem…it is drug addiction and mental health… homelessness is a consequence of our failing to deal with both.
The war on drugs…the idea that we can eliminate an undesirable piece of human nature by making a crime out of it…has failed. The crisis that we face is a foreseeable consequence of our attempt to outlaw a piece of human nature. It is an embarrassing condition to be an addict, and no one wants to accept that the potential to be addicted is in *all* of us.
So we wrote laws…we literally created a crime, making criminals out of otherwise decent people. We drove their activities and their substantial exchange of dollars underground. We cannot tax the *billions* of $ that buys street drugs, as we have driven it out of reach. More importantly, we cannot help people that have to live in fear of the law.
The war on drug has saved ZERO lives. It has only destroyed them. It is not possible to win…unless we stop fighting. We are LITERALLY our own enemy in a war that has failed any purpose except spending lives and money. It needs to stop.
My solution is radical, but it was proposed decades ago by a highly qualified group of professionals; we need to treat addiction as if it were a disease.
I do not believe that addiction is a disease. In fact, there is nothing that anyone can tell me that will make me believe otherwise. But I am convinced that the right way to handle the condition is to treat it AS IF it were a disease.
This will never happen until we get mainstream medicine on board. So long as doctors have nothing but contempt for addicts…and most do…there will be no progress. We need doctors and the institutions that create them to be leaders on this.
I know it’s a pipe dream. But it IS the solution. Think about it. “Most of these people” need it.
González is delusional. We have a drug epidemic where people don’t want to stop using and these camps organize around drug dealers. SPD had broken these rings up repeatedly. Enough of city council’s nonsense and inaction, she was the president for years.
An encampment has been across the street from my front door for about a year now. It has grown to over 12 tents. Multiple calls to the police to respond to fights and thefts from the nearby store. Just this morning, four SPD cruisers were there, for what I don’t know. My partner this morning exited our backdoor and ran right into someone actively shooting up. I don’t know if either Harrell or Gonzalez have the answers, but something needs to change.
I talked with a friend in Medford, OR who said that city council allocated fairground space for our unhoused community – including tents and wrap-around services. I recognize that Medford is a much smaller community than Seattle, but this seems like a viable option. With encampments spread out throughout the city, there is simply no way that our overworked social service providers can reach people in need. Here is a link describing that program.
Susan, this is such a good idea! It seems like it’s a less abrupt transition for someone who has gotten comfortable being in a tent, especially if they can bring their own tent with them while they decide if they like it.
Hopefully some of the fire issues would be reduced if there is communal access to food and hot water, and I imagine the environmental impacts are much lower if this is sited away from trees and toilet facilities are provided.
Hope someone with social service experience can weigh in on whether this is a potential solution for making their work easier too.