How King County executive candidates plan to tackle homelessness
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An encampment in Seattle in 2022. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images
The three candidates running for King County executive have different ideas and priorities for tackling the region's ongoing homelessness challenge.
Why it matters: Washington had the third highest number of people experiencing homelessness among U.S. states last year, a recent federal report found, with more than half of those people living in King County.
On the regional homelessness authority
King County Assessor John Wilson told Axios that he would seek to dismantle the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which he has criticized as ineffective and unaccountable.
- The authority was formed in 2019 to help coordinate the region's homelessness services.
What they're saying: "I think we're probably at a point where we need to face the reality and scrap it and start over," Wilson told Axios.
- King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci said the principle the authority was founded on — "that homelessness is a regional problem" — is "absolutely correct."
- She said she wouldn't seek to eliminate the authority, saying the agency needs to set benchmarks for success and show that it can deliver those results.
King County Councilmember Girmay Zahilay, the third candidate for executive, said he agrees the authority hasn't achieved its mission and that the county's homelessness response needs to "focus on outcomes."
- But he said getting rid of the regional authority would mean going back to a system in which individual cities provide homelessness services that are "disparate and disconnected and fractured."
- That would create "bureaucratic redundancy" that is "inefficient" and "a waste of taxpayer dollars," he said.
On housing and encampments
Zahilay said the county needs to immediately expand its supply of shelter and emergency housing while improving its behavioral health system and building more housing in general.
- Balducci said she wants to build on the success of the state's encampment resolution program, which clears unauthorized encampments alongside freeways while offering subsidized housing, and do more of that work throughout the county.
- She described that program as "a slow and patient approach" in which outreach workers determine what type of help people in encampments need and offer those services to them. The workers give them "a reasonable amount of time" (think "a couple of weeks, not a day," she said) to accept the offer.
Wilson said the county needs to expand housing that requires residents to be clean and sober while at the same time providing them with treatment and wraparound social services.
- "Treatment without housing doesn't work, but housing without treatment doesn't work either," Wilson said.
Go deeper: King County will elect its first new executive since 2009