A storm brewed at the special Human Services and Public Health committee meeting on Oct. 14, and it wasn’t just the mini-typhoon bearing down on the Washington coast.
A review of proposals to govern how Seattle deals with homeless encampments sparked tense exchanges between Seattle City Council members and Mayor Ed Murray’s staff as the electeds accused the mayor’s office of scaring residents with false information about where encampments would be permitted.
Councilmember Mike O’Brien indicated a map released by the mayor’s office with shading in places that it claimed homeless people would be able to camp. The map sparked public outcry, confirming housed people’s fears that an encampment could come to a park near them.
After several reiterations from multiple councilmembers that under no proposal would camping be explicitly sanctioned in the parks, O’Brien asked who had released the inaccurate map.
“This is not what the legislation that we’re working on states,” O’Brien said.
Mayoral Counsel Ian Warner demurred, saying that it was a “difficult conversation” to determine where each proposal would actually allow camping, and that the office was “happy to work with you in good faith to get this right.”
O’Brien’s bill received a lot of attention in the days leading up to the discussion. Four councilmembers reached out to the Department of Justice to ask the federal government whether or not the measure considered was constitutional. DOJ officials signed off on the measure, calling it “consistent with the constitutional principles the Department has previously articulated.”
This was not an overt endorsement, the department clarified with staff the morning of the meeting, but advocates pounced on the letter nonetheless.
“The DOJ’s comment on Seattle’s proposed ordinance rightly points out the importance of recognizing the Constitutional Rights of persons experiencing homelessness,” said Elisabeth Smith, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, in a press release.
The letter also breaks the ordinance down in clear, concise language, which advocates hope will prevent misunderstandings.
“I am glad some of the harmful misinterpretations can be cleared up,” said Yurij Rudensky, attorney with Columbia Legal Services.
The damage was done, however. Councilmember Kshama Sawant noted that her office received a deluge of calls and emails in protest of the plan under the assumption that it would permit unfettered camping in parks. An online petition stating the same and calling to recall O’Brien had 21,287 signatures as of press time.
Councilmember Tim Burgess fanned those flames as well, sending out a newsletter indicating his opposition to permitted camping and going on a media blitz with newspapers, podcasts and radio shows to explain why he felt that opening up the city to camping would have a negative impact on Seattle.
The proposal creates an “onerous burden” on the city to find enough housing for people, and will result in an increase in encampments, Burgess told Real Change.
“Are we always going to have adequate housing for everyone who wants to live in Seattle?” he asked. “Probably not. That requirement that we cannot move people out of an ad hoc encampment, that’s basically a block to ever moving someone out of a tent.”
He had some of the few applause lines during the meeting, to the point that he had to ask people to hold their applause until the end or he “would never be able to finish.”
Sawant, in contrast, had to get help from Councilmember and committee chair Sally Bagshaw to quiet the crowd so that she could explain why allowing encampments during “the gap” between the present and when new housing could come online was critical.
“The problem is, and this is the challenge to elected representatives, you cannot say we need a housing-first approach and then not use every option available to city officials to provide affordable housing,” Sawant said.
O’Brien’s proposal, released in early October, is one of three currently in play that would clarify rules about when an encampment can be swept, how much notice residents should have, how their belongings will be stored and the city’s responsibilities to find them housing or other services. The other two belong to Bagshaw and Mayor Ed Murray.
Encampment cleanups, which most people refer to as “sweeps,” have been taking place under the direction of Multi-Departmental Administrative Rules (MDARs) since they were instituted in 2008. Over time, under different administrations and as the number of people experiencing homelessness continued to rise, those rules became muddied as different departments such as Parks and Recreation or the Seattle Police tried to cope with unauthorized encampments.
Sweeps are wildly unpopular among people experiencing homelessness and their advocates because they uproot people already in a fragile situation and send them packing, often to return to the previous site or move to an adjacent one. This process, which takes place arbitrarily under existing guidelines, can deprive people of the few belongings they have and make it difficult to recover those that do get stored by the city.
Each of the new legislative proposals ostensibly seeks to change that by creating room for places that are neither “unsafe” nor “unsuitable” that people may stay at with access to basic hygiene and sanitation services while they receive offers of services and housing.
Bagshaw’s and O’Brien’s plans apply to sweeps on city-owned property and focus on encampments over homeless people living in vehicles. They require that sweeps prioritize unsafe and unhealthy encampments over those that don’t present a danger to residents of the encampment or their housed neighbors. They also expire after two years.
They differ in several respects.
One is the amount of time that people get in advance of a sweep. Under Bagshaw’s bill, campers could be swept from an unsafe or unsuitable encampment immediately, even if they are not present. O’Brien’s allows for immediate sweeps, but requires a 24-hour notice if the individual is not present at the time of the sweep.
If conditions are “hazardous,” Bagshaw’s bill provides those living there an opportunity to fix the situation, and immediate removal if they cannot. O’Brien’s builds a 48-hour notice into the latter case.
Places that are not unsafe or unsuitable can also be swept. Under Bagshaw’s proposal, that would require 72-hours notice after outreach and offers of service have been made. O’Brien wants a 30-day period over which to make connections and set people up for housing.
Finally, O’Brien proposes a $50 penalty if the city messes up. Bagshaw has been opposed to penalties from the start.
If you were looking for that level of detail in Murray’s plan, don’t. His version was a surprise entry late in the game. He announced it at a 5 p.m. press conference on Oct. 13, the night before the committee meeting.
It described authorizing four new sanctioned encampments in addition to the Navigation Center, a 24-hour shelter modeled after a San Francisco program of the same name that is expected to open in December. People would have access to some showers and there would be a big push to clean up waste and needles that help create hazardous conditions and public outcry.
Actual details will wait until next week, staff said.
Councilmembers seemed tepid about the plan. Sawant and O’Brien questioned its efficacy given that there were 2,100 people on the streets of Seattle during the One Night Count held in January, and the four camps and shelter spaces identified would house a fraction of that number.
“We are not trying to solve for the full 2,100,” said Scott Lindsay, public safety adviser to the mayor.
As The Stranger has reported, the mayor’s eleventh-hour intervention might derail the other two legislative attempts because Bagshaw won’t bring them to a vote in her committee until after the budget process in December, leaving Murray to push forward with his proposal. This will likely involve using his increased executive powers under the state of emergency declared a year ago.