Mayor Wilson unveils new Seattle homelessness plan

Well, ahead of the mayor's announcement, she has said this will be a highly targeted strategy to substantially reduce the homeless population in Seattle by reallocating current resources. Now, the most recent update we have from Mayor Wilson on this issue comes from her new city budget that was proposing more than $500 million for services and new beds. But it was a revised goal on shelter beds, 960 by the end of 2027. Initially, she hopes to add 1,000 by the end of this year. Today's announcement will come around 11 years since Seattle made an emergency declaration for its homeless crisis. Since then, we've seen the number of unhoused people go up almost every year. Now, looking at two cities the mayor has mentioned as places to look at successful ideas, Houston, one of them, where they opened a super Hub Transition Center back in June, a partnership between the city and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. It hopes to hold up to 320 people at a time and transition 1,000 people each year into permanent housing and employment. Denver has reported more than 2,500 people they moved indoors in the year 2024. That was while providing access to support services. That city says they accomplished this by removing hundreds of blocks of encampments, and they now try to connect people still on the streets before new encampments form. The mayor will make that announcement here at City Hall. Reporting in Seattle, Sean Thomas, Fox 13 News. And that announcement is happening right now. Let's check in with the mayor. I would like to share with you some major changes that we are making in the city of Seattle in collaboration with many of the people in this room today. First, I want to say thank you to my colleagues on the city council who are standing here alongside me. Council Member Foster, Council Member Lin, Council Member Kettle. Thank you to the Downtown Seattle Association, I see folks in the audience here, thank you for being here. And to all the neighborhood business groups that are partners in this initiative to tackle our homelessness crisis with renewed energy and determination. Thank you to our housing, shelter, and service providers, DESC, REACH, Chief Seattle Club, everyone deserves housing, Lehigh, PDA, who I think are all represented in the room today. Hopefully, I didn't forget anyone. And thank you to all the others who could not make it, but who are no less committed to this work. And thank you to Community Solutions, whose nationally recognized framework we are learning from, and whose annual conference I had the pleasure of speaking at yesterday. And finally, big thank you to my team here at the city, Director Kim and Director Pham, who are here today, to our Unified Care Team, and to the staff at HSD and every department that is involved in our homelessness response. For years, mayors and their teams have come and gone. But the moral outrage of homelessness in one of the wealthiest cities in the richest country in the world has only worsened. In the four years before I took office, unsheltered homelessness increased by over 50%. And this is unacceptable. On any given night, thousands of men, women, and children in this city have no place to call home. Well over half don't even have the benefit of a shelter roof. Let us be clear, homelessness is not a natural occurrence. It is a policy failure. And we see this from Little Saigon to the Chinatown International District, from Green Lake to Roosevelt, Beacon Hill to the Rainier Valley, West Seattle, and Ballard. My predecessor's administration moved extraordinary numbers of people from block to block and from neighborhood to neighborhood, largely without meaningful offers of shelter and services. Those poor outcomes fostered cynicism. I believed that we had to do better, and that was one of the big reasons that I ran for mayor last year. And that is why, when I stepped into office, my first priority was to build a lot more shelter fast. And not just any shelter, but shelter that can accommodate people who need intense support to get back on their feet. I brought together our city departments, and tasked them with figuring out how to accelerate the process of identifying and standing up new sites. And they did. I am proud that by the end of this year, we will have opened over 400 new units of shelter, with a total of nearly 1,000 coming online by the end of next year, pending the city council's approval of the funds in my proposed budget. We are doing this work in a challenging time. Many forces outside our control, including Trump's wars and tariffs and threats to permanent supportive housing, are creating the conditions that will tend to push even more people into homelessness. But precisely because of these headwinds, we have a duty to excel at the work we can control. We have a duty to use our resources carefully and efficiently to achieve the maximum impact. I am not interested in making excuses or kicking the can down the road. So here is what we are going to do. We are going to scale up what we know works. Specifically, we are launching a coordinated effort to use our shelter beds with the most intensive services to the greatest effect by focusing on the unsheltered individuals who are having the greatest impact on our neighborhoods and our public space. This summer's World Cup was a fabulous experience for our city. And part of that was the success of a pilot program in Pioneer Square, which achieved a nearly 90% success rate, placing unsheltered individuals into shelter or housing. So today, I'm announcing that we are expanding this program to other parts of Seattle. And we are doing this with efficiency, using existing resources, marrying my shelter acceleration initiative with this proven model. Here's how it worked. In June, weeks before the first World Cup match, when Belgium drew 1-1 with Egypt at Lumen Field in front of 66,000 fans, the streets to housing pilot launched with the city's support. This was an effort led by the Downtown Seattle Association and a coalition of service organizations using the Community Solutions Framework. These partners shared data, followed individuals from outreach to successful placement into shelter or housing, and monitored what happened thereafter. Not only were 70 out of 80 people placed into shelter or housing, but these were not easy cases. 47% of those individuals had been homeless for more than three years, 77% suffered from addiction or mental illness, and 16% were seniors. The partners used a by name list, identifying every individual living unsheltered in that area and offering wraparound support. Instead of repeatedly referring people between disconnected parts of the homelessness response system, this program was highly centralized, zeroing in on specific barriers that specific people faced and connecting them to the appropriate resource. And it was also successful because of space available at Bayside. The first major new site in my shelter acceleration initiative, which opened up in June. So now we will scale this success. That means working with more neighborhoods across Seattle to proactively develop by name lists that can be used in real time by the city and our partners. It means prioritizing shelter placements for those individuals who are having the greatest impact on our public space. The bottom line is this, our public parks and public sidewalks belong to the public. They should be kept open and usable for their intended purposes. Scaling up this approach is how we can meet this reasonable expectation without merely pushing human beings around our city from one block to the next. We will go as fast as we can and I want to see steady visible improvements. The $37 million for shelter expansion in my budget proposal, a budget that I am proud to say closes the $175 million deficit I inherited, will be crucial to this effort. So what is new today is the commitment from the array of partners in this room to scale this up, with the city leading and coordinating this effort. What is also new is that this brings us into alignment with the nationally recognized community solutions framework, which has been used successfully in cities across the country, such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Anchorage, Kansas City, Houston, and Denver. In Denver, a New York Times analysis published last week showed their unsheltered population is down 64% in three years. Quite simply, we are doing what works for everyone else. This is a commitment to common sense. Make no mistake, this is the kind of striking progress that we're gonna make here in the Emerald City. Changes in the air, let's enjoy the changing seasons. Thank you. You were just listening to Mayor Katie Wilson on her press conference talking about homelessness and how she's approaching that. And she starts right away off by saying homelessness is not a natural occurrence. It is a policy error. And the mayor says her first priority, if you remember, was going to be tackling the homelessness in our city. And she has hopes to get at least 400 more homeless persons placed into housing specific and help them move through the process to reenter the community here. And so a much larger investment into homelessness, which is epidemic proportions in Seattle. The point in time counts indicating that the homeless crisis continues to get worse and a revised goal of 960 shelter beds by the end of 2027. We'll continue to monitor that and we'll be back with more here on Good Day Seattle after this.