Seattle, King County officials call for state to continue signature homelessness program

Officials from Seattle and King County are urging the state to carve a slice out of its tight budget to continue funding its signature homelessness program, which some described as the “gold standard” when it comes to addressing encampments.

Last month, Washington’s House and Senate proposed budgets that would cut funding for the state’s Encampment Resolution Program by $30 million, 40% of its annual funding.

Since 2022, the program has cleared more than 70 encampments of people living outdoors next to highways across five counties, bringing nearly 80% of them inside — an unusually high rate for people going straight from the street directly to housing.

The state did this by innovating a new model for removing encampments — creating subsidized housing and providing it to people living outside in areas that officials wanted to clear. Until then, people whose tents were cleared in encampment removals had to compete against everyone else trying to access scarce housing resources.

The Department of Commerce, which oversees that program, said the decreased funding would only be enough to continue housing the people already brought inside and largely halt new work.

State officials had said they heard criticism from cities that questioned whether it made sense to spend such a large amount of money on a specific sliver of homelessness.

But Tuesday, at a news conference near an encampment that was removed in Highland Park, King County Council members Teresa Mosqueda, Girmay Zahilay and Claudia Balducci and Seattle City Council members Alexis Mercedes Rinck, Dan Strauss and Cathy Moore took turns calling on state lawmakers to reverse the decision to reduce the program’s funding.

They praised the program for operating differently than the majority of encampment removals which, for the most part, scatter people from one block to another.

“We’re here today not to celebrate a clear green area. We’re here to celebrate the 91% of people getting inside,” Strauss said, referring to the percentage of people who moved inside from encampments the state program removed in King County.

“We cannot go back to a patchwork approach that simply shifts people from one roadside to another,” Mercedes Rinck said.

Balducci said the alternative to the state’s approach was leaving homeless people in a revolving door of jail, hospitals and the streets.

“It is as close to a program that functions exactly as intended as any policy that I can recall seeing,” Balducci said.

Zahilay acknowledged lawmakers face a budget crisis with “incredibly difficult decisions.”

“But when we’re talking about one of the most effective solutions to one of the most complex, biggest, most intractable problems our state faces with respect to homelessness, we have to find a way to work together to prioritize what works,” Zahilay said.

Mosqueda, who called the program the “gold standard” when it comes to moving people living on the streets inside, said funding the program was an imperative defense against impending federal budget cuts that could increase homelessness.

“We are in a moment, right now, in this state where we need to have the antidote to what is happening at the national level,” Mosqueda said. “We need the state Legislature to stand up in moments like this and invest in evidence-based strategies to keep people housed.”

Some state lawmakers have said they support the Encampment Resolution Program’s approach but that there are many important programs and priorities and limited resources. And some advocates worry cuts may more broadly affect a number of other homelessness programs.

In the last week, Democratic budget writers have been scrambling to close the state budget gap, proposing increased taxes to raise billions of dollars over the next four years. Local officials called on state lawmakers to use that to continue funding the Encampment Resolution Program.

The state legislative session adjourns Sunday.