Washington state is taking a step back from resolving homeless encampments despite protests from Seattle and King County officials.
In the most recent budget, state lawmakers reduced funding for the Encampment Resolution Program, which will halt its work removing additional encampments.
The program's creation in 2022 had been a somewhat unusual foray by the state into removing homeless encampments. Most of the time, cities do that work.
But during the pandemic, tents proliferated along state highways at an unprecedented scale, and former Gov. Jay Inslee was increasingly hearing calls from constituents to do something about it. Plus, transportation officials said people living next to speeding cars were causing safety issues. Inslee directed state agencies to find a solution.
Officials drew from a model developed in Seattle early in the pandemic that removed encampments without scattering people to other locations outside. That required creating new shelters and housing since existing units are usually full. The state paid for hundreds of new housing units in five counties, mostly along the Interstate 5 corridor — King, Pierce, Snohomish, Thurston and Spokane — and began moving people from the street into those units.
The program was wildly successful, closing nearly 80 encampments in which more than 2,200 people were living. More than three-quarters of them moved inside to shelter or housing, a reversal from the status quo of most cities, where officials lose track of where many people go afterward.
Most cities also do not guarantee people will go into permanent housing from the encampments, or from shelter, after clearings. But people who moved inside from these state-cleared encampments said they agreed to outreach workers' offers because of their assurances they would move on to permanent housing.
The state faced a multibillion-dollar shortfall heading into budget discussions this year, and the new governor, Bob Ferguson, and other officials indicated the state had much larger problems than keeping a single program.
"I think there's very strong support for the approach. I think the challenge is the limited resources," said Rep. Nicole Macri, D-Seattle, in an interview last fall.
State officials also said they heard from some cities that questioned whether it made sense to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the program, which targeted a specific sliver of the state's homeless population.
A few days before state lawmakers voted to reduce funding for the program, a half-dozen elected officials from Seattle and King County attended a news conference praising the program's approach, with one calling it the "gold standard" of addressing street-level homelessness. They urged state lawmakers to maintain full funding for it, but ultimately, those calls were not heard.
The state reduced annual funding for the program from $75 million to $45 million. This round of funding will pay for the people already brought inside through the program to stay housed. Purpose Dignity Action, a Seattle nonprofit that helped administer the state program in King County, said it had already stopped resolving new encampments.
"It's a real shame," said Lisa Daugaard, co-executive director of the nonprofit. "The ramifications are likely to be diminishing confidence that government knows what to do to address some of our most obvious and pressing problems."
But Daugaard said she was encouraged to see strong support for the program's approach among Seattle and King County officials and said she hoped new funding sources would emerge to continue it.
There were more than 156,000 people who were homeless across Washington, according to the Department of Commerce's snapshot count in 2024.
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