© Andrew ConstantinoA 'low-barrier' community: two of the tiny houses of Seattle's Licton Springs Village.
"A suspected WOUND BOTULISM case has been reported in King County. Health officials believe the case may be related injecting [sic] black tar heroin," it reads. "Injecting heroin that contains the bacteria that causes botulism can cause serious infection and even death."
Of course, one might think that the flyer could simply warn that black tar heroin contains...black tar heroin. Heroin is an unusually dangerous drug-wickedly addictive and far more lethal to its abusers than cocaine or alcohol. But Licton Springs Village, a microcommunity of 30 tiny houses and a couple of large dormitory tents-one that is officially sanctioned by the City of Seattle-takes a permissive view of drug abuse. It's a "low-barrier" community, meaning that people can use drugs freely here. Most homeless shelters and encampments demand residents live drug and alcohol free. But here, clean needles are distributed to the residents to prevent the spread of disease, and Narcan is available to resuscitate people who overdose.
Open since April 2017, on a formerly vacant lot squeezed between fast-food joints and low-budget motels, Licton Springs Village is home to nearly 70 homeless people who were "sleeping rough" until they moved in. The residents include several married couples who live together in simple, tiny homes-basically, wooden boxes 12 feet by 8 feet-donated by local groups. Children aren't allowed because of the open drug use. The village is operated by local nonprofit SHARE/WHEEL, and the on-the-ground support staff are all formerly homeless themselves. Conditions are makeshift: There's a shower, but the toilets are all of the port-a-potty variety; there are no individual kitchens, but residents are eligible to eat once each day in the communal dining area.
Licton Springs Village, unique in many ways, exists to address a common and once again growing problem: American homelessness. The problem is particularly acute on the West Coast. Here in Seattle, the homeless population skyrocketed by 44 percent between 2015 and the end of 2017, mirroring the experience of other Pacific coast cities, notably those in the Bay Area, which is also experiencing a homelessness crisis of mammoth proportions. King County, home of Seattle, now boasts the third-largest homeless population in the country.
"We're in kind of a perverse competition with San Francisco," says Daniel Malone, the executive director of Downtown Emergency Service Center, an advocacy group in downtown Seattle, noting the extraordinary surge in visible homelessness throughout his city. Tents abound, even downtown. It's hard to find a bridge that doesn't have people sleeping under it. Because of the growing number of people sleeping in cars, city leaders are moving to scuttle long-established parking restrictions.
The growth in the homeless population comes from all kinds of people experiencing homelessness; not just the chronically homeless, who are usually severely mentally ill, but also people who not that long ago were gainfully employed and had fixed accommodations.
Nationwide, the homeless population is ticking up at about 1 percent a year. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development's most recent point-in-time count, 554,000 Americans were homeless, and the vast majority were sleeping outside. (The HUD census tries to assess how many Americans are homeless on one given day.) The American homeless population is larger than the populations of Miami, Pittsburgh, or Atlanta.
But growth is being driven by a surge in just a few areas, chiefly Seattle, Portland, the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading authority on homelessness, points out that because those areas are experiencing such rapid gains and the total population has increased by only 1 percent, other areas of the country are actually reducing their homeless populations. Culhane says further that certain populations have been dealt with effectively: Veteran homelessness has declined by about half in recent years, he tells me, as HUD and Veterans Affairs have made addressing that particular population a priority.
But the broader numbers-and the simple experience of visiting San Francisco or Seattle these days-raise a couple of questions. Why are some of the country's most prominent cities seeing such a surge in homelessness? And why now, when the economy is booming, nowhere more so than in the Emerald City, which is drowning in Amazonian riches? The answer may provide a cautionary tale about the perverse impacts of a hypercharged tech economy.
Tent cities in Seattle
There wasn't a job Bebe wouldn't do. Throughout the 1990s, the Seattleite worked as a bartender and a house cleaner. She worked in retail and in delis. But in 2001, she was struck with a degenerative bone disease in her leg and slowly lost her ability to work. The pain became unbearable and, after years of taking painkillers, she turned to heroin. With her sole source of income her disability check, not nearly generous enough to cover Seattle's sky-high rents, Bebe eventually became homeless.
Today, she tells me, sitting in the tiny home in Licton Springs Village that she shares with her husband Mike, she's a "heroin addict." She's not a happy person-she wishes she could work, she says, and she hates being an addict-but the tiny house is a marked improvement. Before the Village opened she and Mike "were sleeping under the freeway," she says. Now, at least, she has shelter.
Duane, a middle-aged Native American man originally from Arizona, agrees. "Being homeless sucks," he says. "It's not a fun life." Licton Springs Village is a huge improvement. A gregarious man who worked on horse farms in Louisiana, Duane invited me into his small, extremely messy, tiny home, which Duane's large frame dominates. I find a seat on the edge of the cluttered bed. Before moving in here, he spent four months on the streets.
What went wrong? "I've been a drunk all my life," he tells me. "And I can't read or write." Duane is clear-eyed about the effect that homelessness could have on Seattle. "It's destroying the tourism industry," he tells me. "You think tourists want to visit downtown Seattle and see a bunch of homeless people?"
While tourism numbers have yet to fall in this picturesque city nestled on Puget Sound, it indeed was partially due to concerns like Duane's that Licton Springs Village came to exist in the first place. For years, as Seattle's homeless population grew, unsanctioned tent cities began to pop up. In a way, they demonstrated man's impressive capacity to impose order. They were self-governing, and many did not allow drug or alcohol users. The local governments often assigned residents important tasks, like working security.
Charlie Johnson, who lived in a tent city shortly after becoming homeless a few years back, said the tent city's governance model was a plus for him. Within a few weeks of moving in he was "in leadership, which was super helpful for me, because [when I became homeless] I was despondent... Just the fact that I had to be social, that there were people around" was beneficial. Johnson, a well-spoken middle-aged man, speaks to the diversity of Seattle's homeless: A graduate of the University of Washington who has lived abroad, he says simply that his own dysfunctions led him to "blow up his life."
Greg Nickels, Seattle's mayor from 2002 to 2010, regularly cleared the unsanctioned encampments. (In a cheeky protest, one roving tent community dubbed itself "Nickelsville.") But Nickels lost reelection in a primary, and as the homeless population continued to grow, the city began to rethink its approach to the problem.
In 2015, the city council voted to create Seattle's first three legally sanctioned encampments. The logic, according to a city press release, was that "authorized encampments offer a safer alternative that can help stabilize the person before transitioning indoors." They could be on either city or privately owned land. Three more were legalized in 2016. Each encampment is allowed to stay for 12 months, with the option to re-up for another 12. After two years, however, they must be dismantled or moved. People found by the city of Seattle's "Navigation Team," which actively searches for homeless people to offer them services, would be funneled into one of the encampments so long as there was room.
Barbara Poppe, who served as executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2014, initially opposed the move to legalize the encampments. They "were not providing basic human needs," she tells me, like electricity and plumbing. In other words, they were barely superior to sleeping rough. Poppe also feared that the setup of the encampments-the chain-link fences that surround them, in particular-was inherently "stigmatizing." Today, the fears over utilities have been allayed at least, as the tent cities all have electricity hookups. But the chain-link fences remain.
Particularly controversial was the notion of legalizing a "low-barrier" community like Licton Springs Village. After all, homeless shelters and encampments are almost always contentious among their neighbors. One of the selling points shelters make to the broader community is that they will insist that their residents be clean and sober. But Licton Springs Village turned this model on its head: "Our main goal is to be nonjudgmental and just be cool as we can," says Charlie Johnson, the former tent city resident who now helps manage Licton Springs. "We just want to let people accept themselves, accept us. That's our main goal: to provide a safe, stable, relatively harmonious place." To that end, only violence or theft can get somebody evicted. The leadership does not attempt to push residents into treatment or, for that matter, encourage them to enter the labor force. Originally billed as a way station before people could transition into real housing, Licton Springs Village looks increasingly like a final destination.
Speak Out Seattle! (SOS), which bills itself as a "grassroots coalition of residents, business owners and neighborhood groups with members living and working in every district of Seattle," led the charge against the controversial settlement. Last year, the group sent a fiery letter to then-mayor Ed Murray, who had backed Licton Springs Village's establishment. SOS said it had "hoped to hear that the city would be extending extra services to the area to protect it from any adverse consequences of moving 50-70 people with active addiction, mental illness, behavior problems and criminal histories into an approximately 5,000-square-foot lot adjacent to a family neighborhood." This was not the case, however: "This 'make it up as we go' approach is a recipe for disaster and a significantly modified proposal is required," the group charged.
Barbara Poppe, on the other hand, says there might be a use for such places. For one, if you insist on sobriety, "you keep out the neediest people," she says. Also, a lot of people: According to HUD data, a third of the homeless population are serious substances abusers. (When I asked experts whether the opioid epidemic was having an appreciable effect on homelessness, they said yes-but only anecdotally. Little academic research has been done on the topic.)
Moreover, if you don't allow addicts, you "eject people back into the neighborhood," Poppe points out. In a way, places like Licton Springs Village, therefore, reduce neighborhood annoyances. Think of it as a form of containment. Charlie Johnson, for his part, says the success of the settlement has allayed many concerns that neighbors had beforehand.
The Paradox of Prosperity
Marty Hartman, executive director of Mary's Place, a nonprofit that helps families and children facing homelessness, mostly by operating its own shelters, has been fighting homelessness for 18 years.
She says something has gone terribly wrong in Seattle. "For the first decade [at] Mary's Place, we never saw children. We were open to having children, but very rarely did we see a mom and a baby. Whereas in 2009, we saw a huge surge in the numbers of moms with children seeking services and a place to stay," she says. That, perhaps, is intuitive: The United States was hit by a nasty recession in 2009, and what ended up being the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression saw huge increases in unemployment. But Hartman has noticed a disturbing trend: Even as the economy has turned a corner, the number of homeless families has only grown. This has manifested itself in appalling ways: Barbara Poppe told me she has seen babies living in Seattle tent encampments.
Daniel Malone of the Downtown Emergency Service Center reports similar observations. His group helps the long-term homeless-single folks, rather than families-focusing on people with "mental health problems or serious addictions." The people served by Malone's group are, on average, in their 50s. (Nationwide, the average age of homeless people has been rising for decades. It's not entirely clear why; some experts believe it might just be a function of the demographic bump of the baby boom generation.) The homeless often die young, and those who live into their 50s are already contracting illnesses usually associated with the elderly. James O'Connell of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council examined the homeless population in several cities across the country and found that the homeless died most often between the ages of 42 and 52.
Malone says that the recession barely affected the size of the single adult homeless population that his group serves. Indeed, it was only over the past three or four years that the numbers have grown. "It used to be that the people who were sleeping outdoors, five years ago and prior to that, they were in one or two kinds of conditions," Malone says. "They were either in highly visible yet temporary places, like doorways downtown... that often was sort of a solitary group. Or they were in extremely remote locations where, to know they were there, you had to go looking for them... Those people tended to be pretty solitary, but also very functional. They were very able to take care of themselves."
"We started to see this rise in 2013 of people in these areas where you never used to see people sleeping outside. Now you just can't miss them... it really is a rise." In other words, vast chunks of Seattle's previously unoccupied land have become home to the city's homeless.
Inside this growing population are different kinds of homeless. "There are plenty of problems going on with the lives of people who are out there," says Malone. "They're not waiting to be called in for an interview with Boeing or something like that," he says. But, he adds, while many of Seattle's homeless struggle with addiction, "they by and large are not people with serious mental illness."
The inexorable rise in Seattle's homeless population has coincided, seemingly paradoxically, with an extraordinary economic boom in this city. Before this trip, it had been about five years since I'd been here. Today, much of Seattle-particularly the northern part of downtown, near the Space Needle-is unrecognizable, and not just because of the omnipresent marijuana smoke, since Washington state legalized pot a couple of years ago. Shining glass towers, many owned by Amazon, now dominate the area, which used to be characterized by low-slung, modest structures, like the famous Elephant Car Wash, which happily still stands. And then there are the absurd Amazon spheres: three glass bio-domes, housing tropical plants, conspicuously situated on a downtown plaza. (Known locally as "Bezos's Balls," the gauche structures have reinforced my fervent hope that the Internet giant does not select Washington, D.C., as the site of its second headquarters.) The numbers back up what is apparent on the ground: According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a government agency, of the top 15 metro areas in the country, Seattle's GDP grew third-fastest in 2016, behind only Silicon Valley and Austin.
With great prosperity have come great rent increases, however. As of February, the average monthly tab for a one-bedroom apartment within a 10-mile radius of central Seattle is above $2,100, according to Rent Jungle, which monitors real estate trends. The growth rate in rents has been among the nation's highest for years.
A fascinating study commissioned by Zillow Research adds further ballast to what might seem at first like simpleminded Marxian analysis: higher rents, more homelessness. "The relationship between rising rents and increased homelessness is particularly strong in four metros currently experiencing a crisis in homelessness-Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle," authors Chris Glynn and Melissa Allison found.
The scholars "investigated the relationship between increases in the Zillow Rent Index and increases in the homeless population" to come to their conclusion. They determined, among other findings, that "in Washington, D.C.,... a 5 percent average rent increase in 2016 would have translated to 224 additional people experiencing homelessness, for a total of 8,722. In Seattle, that increase would add 258 people to the homeless population for a total of 12,498." Cities such as Washington and San Francisco have strict limits on building heights and, like Seattle, are home to energetic NIMBY movements and restrictive zoning codes-all of which make it difficult to add to the housing supply.
Elizabeth Bowen, a professor at the University of Buffalo School of Social Work and a leading authority on homelessness, agrees with Zillow's analysis and adds a second component: It's not just rising rents; it's also the question of wage growth. Bowen tells me that in cities like Seattle, "housing costs are far outpacing wage [rises]." Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, concurs. "With rents rising faster than incomes, we need to bring everybody to the table to produce more affordable housing and ease the pressure that is forcing too many of our neighbors into our shelters and onto our streets," he said in a press release last year.
The relationship between rising rents and homelessness plays out in myriad ways; it's not always as simple as a working person's losing his apartment to a rent increase. For one, many homeless people are disabled, and their only source of income is their Social Security disability check. The amount they receive is not place-specific-it's related to how much they earned during their working years-so people are receiving the same amount of money whether they're in low-rent Abilene or expensive Seattle. High costs also make it harder for the city and nonprofits to offer shelter beds or affordable housing units, simply because real estate is so expensive. Cities like Philadelphia and Houston, by contrast, have had a much easier time housing people, in part because property is so much more affordable there. Seattle has far fewer shelter beds than it needs to cope with its growing homeless population.
And then there's drug addiction, which dramatically affects individuals' ability to earn a living- and the open question of whether places like Licton Springs Village encourage addiction through their tolerant attitudes. The closing of state mental institutions also had the perverse effect of throwing many mentally incompetent people onto the streets-a benefit neither to them nor the communities they live in.
Just about everybody who works on homelessness-from Secretary Carson to liberal advocates in Seattle-supports a policy known as "housing first." The idea is that you immediately move people off the streets into housing, then get to work on other issues, like drug addiction. But in a market as expensive as Seattle, that would be an immensely difficult and costly undertaking. There simply is not a lot of vacant property to house the homeless.
What does seem clear is that Seattle, a quintessential 21st-century boomtown, offers a stark warning about what our society could look like as it is increasingly dominated by the tech economy. It also shows what happens when social support organizations and local governments decide not to try to end homelessness, but rather attempt sympathetically to "contain" it. Ultimately, Daniel Malone says, we need to decide whether we're okay "living in this third-world society where there's a whole lot of affluence, and there's a lot of visible, Mumbai-like slums right in our midst."
Ethan Epstein is associate editor of The Weekly Standard. He has also written for Politico Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, City Journal, and other publications. He holds a BA in history from Reed College.
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