homelessness

Developing An elderly homeless man is dead after being hit by a car near the Fred Meyer in Bellevue. It happened late Thursday evening along 148th Ave NE in a busy shopping corridor. Unclear if the rain and slick conditions played a role in what appears to be an accident. The driver stopped and is at the scene talking to cops. This is a developing story.

Another Day in Seattle Another drug encampment fire along Seattle’s Aurora Ave N. Neighbors reported several tents in this area before flames erupted Tuesday afternoon. Look at all the taxpayer dollars being wasted on this hot mess. Just another routine day in the city.

Skid Row I spent the last several days on Skid Row Los Angeles with @choeshow and what we documented is some of the best and most shocking footage I’ve ever done which is gonna come out soon in a longer form. Fix Homelessness Special thanks to @DiscoveryCWP who funded my trip.

Homeless Crisis Amid Stars The Hollywood walk of shame. I spent the last several days in Los Angeles, California documenting the homeless crisis with @choeshow. A majority of the time I spent on Skid Row, the highest concentration of homelessness in the United States, but I spent half a day at the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where, despite this obvious wealth, has its own Homeless crisis. I witnessed people smoking me standing on various stars. Full-Blown Crisis There was a lot of mental health issues and a lot of panhandling. It was extra busy as they were preparing for the Oscars. California is in a full-blown crisis with no plan in sight. Go to https://fixhomelessness.org to learn more.

After decades of working inside homelessness services, I’ve learned that the greatest lie we tell ourselves is that we don’t know what works. We do. The problem isn’t a lack of data, innovation, or funding. The problem is that real solutions require decisions we are unwilling to make and truths we are afraid to say out loud.

It is easier to expand systems than to fix them. Easier to signal compassion than to practice it in ways that are uncomfortable. Easier to manage homelessness than to end it.

Most people assume homelessness persists because it is too complex to solve. In reality, it persists because solving it would disrupt an entire industry built around its permanence. Over time, the system stopped being accountable to outcomes and became accountable to itself. Programs are judged by how many people they touch, not how many people leave the streets. Success is defined by engagement, not transformation. In this environment, homelessness is no longer a crisis to be resolved, but a condition to be administered.

One of the hardest truths is that housing alone does not stabilize people who are deeply addicted, severely mentally ill, or both. I have watched housing placements fail because we insisted on treating housing as the solution rather than the setting in which recovery might occur. For people actively using fentanyl, methamphetamine, or alcohol at life-threatening levels, housing without treatment can become a slower form of self-destruction. When it collapses, we try again and call it trauma-informed care, quietly accepting failure as inevitable.

Real solutions begin with recovery, not as a moral requirement, but as a practical one. A person cannot stabilize while in the grip of serious addiction. No amount of case management, harm-reduction supplies, or wellness check-ins can substitute for sobriety when the brain itself is hijacked. Cities like Portland and Seattle know this, yet continue to build models that treat recovery as optional. We call this compassion, but too often it looks like abandonment.

Last weekend, former President Barack Obama acknowledged a blunt political reality: “The average person doesn’t want to have to navigate around a tent city in the middle of downtown … and we’re not going to be able to generate support [for treatment] if we simply say, ‘It’s not their fault, they should be able to do whatever they want,’ because that’s a losing political strategy.”

What makes the remark notable is not merely its candor. It is the history behind it.

It was the Obama administration that institutionalized the federal government’s one-size-fits-all embrace of Housing First in 2013. They promised the approach would end homelessness within a decade by prioritizing immediate housing placement.

The theory was simple: Housing would stabilize lives.

But the results have been anything but stabilizing.

Playing Whack-A-Mole Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson’s homelessness strategy is turning into a game of Whack-A-Mole. The MLK Way encampment cleared last month has already come roaring back. There are at least 20 people living here. Open-air drug use is rampant. During her State of the City address on Tuesday, Wilson will say she’s building more shelters in the city. But anyone in the outreach world will tell you the mayor has ZERO plan for the “service resistant.” In other words, Wilson can build all the shelters she wants. But unless there is a mechanism to force people indoors, the crisis will get worse and the sweeps will continue. So far, we are seeing a repeat of the Bruce Harrell administration. Read More ›

The Seahawks Super Bowl parade drew hundreds of thousands of people into Seattle. You would think Mayor Katie Wilson would sweep tents near the Space Needle, one of the crown jewels in the city. Instead, a massive drug tent stood out like a sore thumb. Cops walked by without batting an eye. Another embarrassing moment for the Wilson administration that clearly isn’t ready for the big time.

In a recent ruling that defies both logic and compassion, a federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s effort to reform the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Continuum of Care program — the federal government’s primary funding mechanism for homelessness assistance.

The lawsuit — filed by a coalition of 20 mostly Democratic-led states, local governments, and nonprofit organizations and spearheaded by groups such as Democracy Forward — warns of “funding gaps,” winter instability, and the potential displacement of people currently housed. These alarms are sounded even though HUD includes a nearly 12% increase over last year’s funding allocation.

At the core of the complaint is a revealing claim: that reform would “upend longstanding projects that have been thoughtfully developed to comport with evidence-based, best-practices services delivery.”

But HUD’s own data make clear that the evidence on which they have long relied is catastrophically wrong.

I’ve spent years working directly with Seattle’s homeless population, not studying them from university offices, or analyzing data sets from a comfortable distance, but on the streets, in the encampments, doing street-level engagement and intervention. When I read yet another opinion piece (“Homelessness in Seattle: We can’t unsee it.” Dec. 28, 2025) attributing our homelessness crisis primarily to housing costs, I have to ask: Are we really going to continue trusting consultants and researchers over what our own eyes tell us?

The December piece by Walter Hatch follows a familiar pattern in academia: Start with a conclusion, in this case, that “it’s a housing problem,” then find data to support it. However, those of us working on the ground are aware of a critical fact that these analyses consistently overlook: There’s a fundamental distinction between the “crisis population” living in visible squalor on our streets and individuals who are the working poor — couch-surfing, living with family or struggling with roommates to afford rent.

We cannot conflate these populations. They are not the same.