Homeless encampments are on the decline, Seattle officials say. But where do those people land?

Seattle and King County have struggled for decades to address the issue of homelessness. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority's plan to end homelessness, "Partnership for Zero," was shut down in 2023 due to a lack of funding and slow progress.

So, what's the reality now for people in the Seattle area experiencing homelessness who want shelter? Seattle Times reporter Anna Patrick has been exploring that question for the "Project Homeless" series. She told KUOW’s Kim Malcolm what she found.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Kim Malcolm: What did you find for how many beds are available on a daily basis. Just how full are the shelters?

Anna Patrick: What I found looking at the data shows that, for the most part, shelters across King County are at or near capacity pretty much all of the time. We can get into the weeds of where we see some of those shifts, but generally across the board, I think the best way to summarize it is that shelters are very much full, or almost full, pretty much all the time.

Based on the data I pulled, which goes back to January of 2019—so before the pandemic—we saw shelter occupancy rates across the county hovering around 90% every single month up until the pandemic hit.

People hear the term "congregate shelters." Are most beds currently in congregate spaces?

I don't have an up-to-date bed count for you, but I do have a program count. If you look across the county through our homeless management information system, we actually have more programs now that are considered non-congregate, which means someone has a door that they can shut, and some more privacy versus congregate shelter, and that has really shifted much more since the pandemic hit. We still have, according to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, around 75 programs that are considered congregate. So, there's still a lot. But we now have 85 programs that we would call non-congregate.

Let's talk about sweeps for a moment. You wrote in your piece that the mayor's office said it cleared nearly 200 encampments in 2023, giving residents notice and offering shelter. Do we know how many of those people accepted or were offered shelter?

According to the mayor's office, everyone is offered shelter, but through my reporting, I was able to find that they actually don't have many beds to offer people on a given day. I think we assume there's all these people living outside, and they all turn shelter down. That means there must be all these empty beds. But what my reporting was able to show is there's actually just a handful, and they offer those beds again and again and again.

You also note that the city cleared nearly 2,000 encampments categorized as obstructions or hazards, and for those kinds of encampments they're not required to offer shelter. Were you able to account for what happens to folks in those situations?

For the large part, no, I was not. I did hear from the city that in some cases, people are still given a heads up and warning, and in some cases people are still offered shelter, but not all the time. Anecdotally, I do hear from a lot of case workers that what this often means is that people are just sort of moved around the city from place to place.

Bigger picture, have you been able to get a sense of how many people are turned away? How many people who want shelter are not able to get it?

I will say that this is where homelessness data is so tricky to work with. I think the best way that I can answer that is I looked at just family shelter data. We have a family shelter intake line here in the county. They track all the calls that come in every single day. What they were able to show is that for the majority of this year, they've seen anywhere from 40 to 50 families calling every single day asking for a shelter bed, and on average, they were able to help one to two families a day.

Bruce Harrell became Seattle's mayor about three years ago. What have you learned about his approach to the shelter situation at this point in his tenure?

Mayor Harrell inherited lots of encampments because during the pandemic there were health instructions to not move people around. Under Harrell's leadership, encampment removals really increased. At the same time, though, he has said he's a supporter of shelters. His recent budget allocated money to try to stand up two new congregate shelters or to expand current non-congregate shelters.

What I'm told is that the mayor sees shelter as a key part of addressing homelessness, and he wants to see more shelters that give people privacy, give people higher quality through services and resources. But there is a balance there between saying you want to add more shelter, but it's not enough to meet the need, and it's certainly not enough for everybody who is living outside and currently kind of being cleared from place to place.

You point out that there's shelter, which is temporary, and housing, hopefully more permanent. And you spoke to Gregg Colburn, the co-author of "Homelessness is a Housing Problem." What did he tell you about bridging the gap between these two?

When it comes to our shelters being at or near capacity all the time, he said, there's two ways to solve that. You could just keep building more shelters. There are places like New York City, where there is a right to shelter law, where they've done that. For the most part, people have shelter beds. Everyone is kind of held in shelters for very, very long periods of time.

Or, you can try to increase what they call the "throughput," which is getting more housing at the end of this system, so that people stay in shelter shorter, and transition out. It's either we've invested in more housing, which takes a long time, or we stand up more shelter in this short-term, intermediary period.

What kind of demand exists for housing opportunities for people experiencing homelessness?

Oh, boy. I mean, this is the biggest question, right? And I think some of what drew me to this reporting was I often hear from readers who kind of assume that people are choosing to live outside, or sort of want to be homeless. I reached out to the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. They told me that — through our Coordinated Entry program, which is the program that we use to nominate people who are homeless into permanent housing — for every housing spot that opens up in the county, 34 people on average are nominated for that one spot. There is high demand for very limited housing. It's been that way for a very long time. I think it will continue to be that way, unless we make some pretty big shifts around how we address this crisis.

You did a very deep dive into this data. What was the biggest surprise for you as you were working your way through all of this?

One thing that stood out to me is that starting in 2022 moving all through last year and now into this year, we're actually seeing our shelter occupancy rates higher than where we were before the pandemic. People are really using our shelter system right now. There is great demand for this. There is great need. I've heard anecdotally from shelter providers that because we've improved the quality of our shelter, people are staying longer. That means there are less daily opportunities to get someone new into shelter, which means people are living outside longer.

But the biggest thing that stood out to me, and the reason I wanted to tackle this, is I often heard from people that, because we clear encampments so often, and we have a narrative that says, "Hey, we offer shelter beds to everyone. We cleared this encampment. Not a lot of people took our offer," I think people rightly assumed there were just all these vacant beds sitting across the county. What this data shows is that that is entirely not the case.

Listen to the interview by clicking the play button above.