A plan for failure

Seattle is spending $50 million to build housing for the homeless, but the cash is only a drop in the bucket—and the wrong bucket, at that.

“The homeless problem is more about mental illness and addiction than it is about physical buildings,” said Paul Guppy, vice president of research at the Washington Policy Center in Seattle. “The basic public misperception is this idea that building affordable housing will solve the homeless problem, and that’s just not true.”

Seattle has about 12,000 homeless people.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Seattle has the third-largest homeless population of any major city in the country, falling behind only New York City and Los Angeles. Activists in the city regularly promote more affordable housing as the solution, pointing to rapidly rising rents driven by booming development and business in the region.

Local politicians have floated a lot of ideas to fix the problem.

Last year, Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant of the Socialist Alternative party promoted a plan to tax big businesses like Amazon to build more housing. The council adopted her proposal but repealed it four weeks later amid widespread opposition.

Mayor Jenny Durkan earlier this month signed housing legislation to divert $50 million in sales taxes to build homes for low- and middle-income families. The initiative, called “Housing Seattle Now,” takes advantage of a new state law that lets city governments spend sales tax money on affordable housing.

“Seattle needs to act with urgency to respond to this crisis, and we know what works to solve homelessness: permanent supportive housing, with wraparound services and medical care for those who are disabled or mentally ill,” Councilwoman Teresa Mosqueda said in a statement.

But building houses won’t necessarily fix homelessness.

Guppy described the $50 million initiative as “a symbolic gesture to try to manage the political controversy.” In a city governed almost entirely by radical Democrats, homelessness has stirred up an almost unprecedented controversy heading into city council elections in November, he said.

“The first step in solving these intractable issues is to address the real problem,” wrote Christopher Rufo, a research fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center for Wealth and poverty. “Addiction is the common denominator for most of the homeless and must be confronted honestly if we have any hope of solving it.” He argued homelessness in Seattle is “an addiction crisis disguised as a housing crisis,” pointing out that King County, home to Seattle, cited the growing homeless population as a major problem in its lawsuit against opioid distributors.

In a policy recommendation released by the Discovery Institute, Rufo suggested a new approach focused on getting the homeless into shelters, providing more support for those suffering from addiction and mental illness, and enforcing camping restrictions. He argued the biggest problem is not a lack of housing, but a lack of relationships. And that problem can’t be solved by continuing to pour money into the same old intended solutions.