WA found a better way to remove homeless encampments. Will it stick?

SEATTLE – Moving from a homeless encampment into housing in Washington is unlikely.

More often, people move from one encampment to another like Garrett Hahn, his wife, and dog Tux did five times this past year in Seattle each time one was removed by officials.

That pattern finally stopped in September when Hahn and his family were offered a pathway into a subsidized apartment unit through the state’s Encampment Resolution Program – a new approach that avoids scattering people and cleared off the sides of highways and instead puts them in state-funded shelters and housing.

Local governments have long removed tents and encampments. They have also long provided subsidized housing to formerly homeless people.

But the two rarely went hand in hand.

Since 2022, Washington has closed 47 encampments in five counties, bringing more than 70% of people from them – 1,200 people – inside.

King County has done better, bringing inside 90%.

The strategy upended not only how encampments are removed in some parts of the state, but how scarce housing resources are allocated. Instead of going to who needs it the most, the state program’s housing goes to people living in encampments that officials want to close.

That shift has created incentives to live in those encampments.

Proponents of the program say side effects are acceptable when political goals drive new money into a system in dire need of it.

But as government budgets tighten, and the national sentiment around homelessness changes, it’s not clear whether Washington’s newly engineered approach to encampments will survive.

Accepting shelter

Hahn’s life changed on Sept. 25.

The weekend before, someone had been shot at the encampment where he had been living, tucked between the I-90 East on-ramp and Jose Rizal Park, accelerating the state’s plans to shut it down.

Outreach workers helped Hahn pack two black trash bags full of his belongings and took him, his wife and their scraggly dog Tux to a temporary shelter.

When he turned the key to his room – a microstudio with its own bathroom – there was dog food, a bowl and a toy laid on the table.

The smooth pathway from street to shelter is partly why, in King County, the state’s Encampment Resolution Program has closed 18 encampments, moving about 90% of people from them inside – more than 420 people.

CoLEAD, a program created by Purpose Dignity Action, a Seattle nonprofit working with the state’s Encampment Resolution Program, drives people from encampments to temporary lodging, providing new clothes and hot pizza along the way.

In contrast, when Seattle clears people from encampments, it does not always offer shelter if the encampment is deemed an obstruction to parks and sidewalks.

When people are offered shelter by the city, they accept it less than 40% of the time.

Of people who accept shelter, less than half are recorded as making it there – though the city says the number could be higher since some people don’t give their names.

Hahn said the state’s offer was the first he’d received where his family could stay together. Many shelters are segregated by gender and exclude pets.

Bringing everybody from an encampment inside meant creating shelters that people would accept, said Lisa Daugaard, co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action and architect of the CoLEAD program.

When outreach workers offered Hahn and his wife a spot inside, the first question they asked was what the shelter’s drug policy was. The two are struggling with addiction. Staff said it wouldn’t be a problem.

At the CoLEAD shelter, Hahn smoked a cigarette at the “smoking tent,” an area outside that functions similarly to a safe consumption site, where people are allowed to smoke or use drugs.

CoLEAD also hired a “de-escalation” team at its shelters, staff who talk through conflicts and calm people down because the theft, debt and fights common in encampments often move indoors with them.

But what convinced Hahn most to move inside was the promise of a pathway after temporary shelter.

Without special attention and resources, only about a quarter of people make it from shelter to permanent housing in King County.

Two years in, the state’s Encampment Resolution Program has kept 74% of people who came inside from encampments housed.

CoLEAD staff said Hahn would soon be able to move on to subsidized permanent housing with a one-year lease, get help with accessing addiction treatment, navigate his legal history and get back on his feet with a job. Without those assurances, he said, he would have likely moved down the street.

“It’s more of a life rehab than a shelter,” Hahn said.

Result of pandemic

The pandemic created conditions ripe to address encampments in a new way.

Under federal guidance, cities were told not to disperse people living outside due to the risk of spreading COVID-19. Seattle and many other cities largely left encampments alone, leading them to grow to unprecedented sizes.

The public backlash was loud.

Thirty-three King County judges wrote a letter demanding the ouster of more than 100 tents that had sprung up next to the courthouse. Dozens of tents at Ballard Commons generated more complaints on the city’s app to report issues than any other location.

Seattle had to do something about encampments and had received millions of dollars in federal pandemic relief funding. Daugaard and other leaders saw a political opportunity to move people inside instead of scattering them. They hoped once people saw progress in specific locations, that would generate confidence and additional resources to do more.

A similar line of thinking was happening at the state level.

Gov. Jay Inslee was increasingly hearing from constituents, “Why are there people living on the sides of highways?” according to state housing policy director Tedd Kelleher.

“This is a scourge on our state. And we cannot allow it to continue. This is the Evergreen State. We should not ever allow it to become the ever-homeless state,” Inslee said at an encampment alongside a state highway in 2023.

As state officials strategized about how to address the growing encampments, Kelleher said legislators refused to accept any method that would displace people to other locations.

The state added some shelter, but put more emphasis on adding permanent housing – 228 units in King County. The new units would be earmarked specifically for people living in encampments that officials wanted to remove. Everybody won, it seemed.

Well, not everybody.

‘Unless you’re in a sweep’

While Hahn was moving his belongings out of the encampment in September, several people walked up to outreach workers and told them they lived there, too.

One of them, Sharon Deakle, said she had missed outreach workers earlier because she had been in the hospital the last few days with a skin infection. And sometimes she stays at her friends’ RV in Sodo.

“I don’t like being outside,” Deakle said.

CoLEAD staff said they had seen Deakle at other encampments they were in the process of closing. It’s common for people to arrive at encampments that are being closed once they hear housing is being offered.

“The buzz is out there,” said Johnny Bousquet, a CoLEAD supervisor. “People know when they get into the CoLEAD program, they’re going to be connected to resources.”

But there’s not enough housing for all the buzz. Only the people CoLEAD staff can establish as living there full time are offered a path to housing.

Staff told Deakle they could refer her to a more standard shelter.

“If we gave housing to everyone who walked up to a site, we would never close one site,” said Nichole Alexander, CoLEAD’s outreach director.

This process seems unfair to Deakle.

“There’s not much help out here unless you’re in a sweep,” Deakle said.

State officials say they prioritize closing encampments with the most public safety concerns – where there are fires, shootings, or where people are most at risk of being hit by cars. But mayors and city council members sometimes jockey for encampments in their own districts to be closed.

Because the state solely paid for its new apartments, it can choose whoever it wants to give them to, sidestepping the usual federally regulated process that prioritizes people based on greatest need. The federal process provides housing to people from a mix of places – long-term shelter, hospitals or rehab, street outreach.

Aside from questions of equity, filling an entire apartment building with people from the same encampment creates practical problems, according to MJ Kiser, an independent consultant who helps manage the state’s permanent supportive housing buildings.

She said it can be dangerous for staff to navigate interpersonal conflicts. Living with the same people inside as they did outside can slow down residents’ recovery from substance use disorder and other habits.

“One crab sort of starts pulling themselves out of the crab pot, and the rest sort of are grabbing on to that person and end up pulling them back in,” Kiser said.

Daugaard said it’s not fair to compare the two since the state created additional housing to address encampments, and without dedicating it for that purpose, she said these new resources might not exist.

King County Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Kelly Kinnison wrote in a statement that both systems for prioritizing housing – needs based and location based – have their place.

“At times, funding sources dictate which method is to be used to address homelessness,” said Kinnison, whose agency administers the state Encampment Resolution Program in King County.

Will it continue?

The political and economic conditions that catalyzed Washington’s new approach to encampment removals have shifted dramatically in the last few years.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court made it easier for cities to punish homeless people for sleeping outside even if they don’t provide alternative places to go and public officials, even in Democratic-led states like California, have enacted harsher policies to clear camps.

Pandemic relief money is all but gone, and cities and states are feeling the squeeze.

Seattle still dabbles with the new approach, but it never created permanent housing dedicated for people from its encampment removals like the state did, which limits how effective it can be.

Instead, the city has ramped up more traditional encampment removals to record highs. It removed encampments more than 2,100 times in 2023, where more than 4,100 people were living, with fewer than a quarter recorded entering shelter after.

While this method does not do much to permanently house people, the city reports that gunshots around encampments have decreased 68% since 2022, and tents visible in locations the city’s encampment removal team visits are down by 65%.

The state has reduced its funding for its Encampment Resolution Program each year since it began – from $144 million in 2023 to $70 million in 2025 – and budget leaders in the legislature indicate they may continue to cut.

State Rep. Nicole Macri, D-Seattle, said cities complained to legislators that the state was concentrating its homeless spending on state properties in certain counties and that they wanted more help in their districts.

“We’re balancing needs across the state,” Macri said.

Washington state senate budget leader, June Robinson, D-Everett, said the Encampment Resolution Program was useful to prove to the public that the government could address a visible aspect of homelessness, but she said the biggest factor in continuing the program was federal pandemic relief dollars drying up.

“We just don’t have as much money,” Robinson said.

And the incoming governor, whether it’s Democrat Bob Ferguson or Republican Dave Reichert, will want to make their own mark on the state’s homelessness crisis.

Whatever happens to the future of this new encampment removal model, Kelleher, the state housing policy director, said the program proved that addressing homelessness is a matter of desire.

“We know how to bring people inside,” Kelleher said.

“People can argue about whether they want to do that or not, but they can’t say that we don’t know how.”