1/18/2023
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The Spokesman-Review
Range Media
The Wall St Journal
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The Spokesman-Review
Outreach workers stretched to limits
The 911 caller thought Trenton Harris had overdosed.
Slumped over a wooden Seattle park bench, his head down and arms limp – the call came in during the afternoon, 2:45 p.m., Seattle police reported, but his body had been there all day.
His mom, Jennifer Dobbins, said that she would have been prepared for a call like that. He had struggled with substance use disorder for years and was living outside at the time. But that wasn’t the call she received.
Harris, 30, was fatally shot four times in July 2022. His death was ruled a homicide by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office.
He was one of 18 homeless people who died by homicide in King County last year, a number that more than doubled from 2021.
The jump is made more alarming because violence usually makes up a small portion of the ways homeless people die. But 2022 was exceptionally brutal for people living outside.
A record-setting 310 people died while homeless in Seattle and across King County, a 65% jump over 2021 and an increase of over 100 people from the previous record set in 2018 (195 deaths), according to medical examiner records.
“That’s just appalling,” said Chloe Gale, policy and strategy vice president for REACH, the largest homelessness outreach provider in Seattle.
The county’s homeless death toll is an undercount because it relies on the Medical Examiner’s Office, which only investigates people who died of sudden, unexpected or unnatural causes. Most people’s cause of death is determined by a physician rather than a medical examiner.
Still, 2022 marked the sharpest increase in homeless deaths the county has ever reported, following years of counts that broke or approached records, only to be broken again.
In 2021, 188 homeless people died. And December 2020 set a recent record for the most people dying without housing in a single month, at 29, a number that seems small compared with 2022’s monthly counts.
King County officials said it has recently directed Public Health – Seattle & King County to work with the county’s Department of Community and Human Services and the King County Regional Homeless Authority to survey homeless service providers to learn more about what’s working to mitigate the risk of fatal overdoses among their clients and to find out what more is needed. The county is also increasing funding to support harm-reduction work.
Beyond that, however, Seattle and homelessness officials said they don’t have any specific plans to try to curb this trend. They instead pointed to existing law enforcement, public health harm reduction strategies, and shelter and housing efforts already planned.
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said these numbers underscore his administration’s urgency to get more people indoors, working in collaboration with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.
Anne Martens, spokesperson for the authority, said these deaths were “preventable” and that it’s “a result of deep holes in our social safety net and an ongoing national opioid epidemic,” and pointed to Public Health for solutions.
Public Health in 2022 distributed more than 10,000 naloxone kits – the drug reverses fentanyl overdoses – and about 100,000 fentanyl test strips. The agency is leading public awareness campaigns about the synthetic opioid, as well as helping people find treatment.
But no agency said it was focused specifically on the uptick in fatal violence.
The Seattle Police Department noted that homicides rose across all populations, with 56 criminal homicide investigations reported in 2022. Homeless people make up more than 32% of those.
Agency officials declined to say what could be causing this increase or whether combating the rise in violent deaths for homeless people requires different strategies than for housed people.
Some homelessness outreach workers said that as the pandemic made informal work, like odd jobs, harder to get, some turned to selling drugs to maintain their habit.
Dobbins, who lives in Bonney Lake, doesn’t know who or what led to her son’s killing six months ago, and Seattle police have not publicly released any information.
Dobbins said she found out three days after her son was found dead in Kobe Terrace park in the Chinatown International District.
He didn’t have an ID on him, so they had to identify him using his fingerprints, she said.
After Harris became homeless and couldn’t keep hold of a cellphone, Dobbins would show up in Seattle on the same day every month to meet him. She would take him out for pizza. Bring him fresh socks and a Mountain Dew.
No matter what kind of shape he was in, she would give him a hug and a kiss.
Harris entered treatment several times for opioids, but it never stuck.
“I was worried all the time,” Dobbins said.
Before she left for home, Dobbins would take a selfie with her oldest child. She has loads of them on her phone. He was using fentanyl at the time of his death and living outside, and she wanted to have recent photos in case he ever came up missing.
Fentanyl-related fatal overdose deaths made up more than half of all reported deaths of homeless people in 2022. The Medical Examiner’s Office found many people had a combination of fentanyl and other drugs, such as meth or cocaine, in their system.
The synthetic opioid – which is easy to produce and currently cheap to buy – is driving a national epidemic that crosses social and economic borders.
As of November, fentanyl was involved in 70% of all confirmed overdose deaths, regardless of housing status, last year in King County, compared with less than 10% before 2018, according to a recent report by Public Health – Seattle & King County.
Brad Finegood, who leads the opioid and overdose response for Public Health, said researchers keep watching the monthly overdose numbers, hoping to see rates plateau.
“Maybe we’re plateauing at a really bad rate and maybe it’s going to get worse,” Finegood said.
I don’t know when it’s going to stop.”
On the longest night of the year, during one of Seattle’s coldest weeks, Dobbins joined more than 50 people gathered outside Seattle City Hall to remember every person who died while homeless in 2022. Joined by four other family members that evening, she stood on Seattle City Hall’s steps, holding a white poster board with her son’s name written in black.
At the time, the Solstice Vigil’s organizers, WHEEL and Women in Black, handed out pamphlets with 269 names. It should be 270, organizers said, because they had just learned a man died, blocks from where they stood the night before.
“The long emergency of homelessness keeps getting worse, not better, while politicians posture and governments plan a new initiative and housing comes with agonizing slowness,” Michael Ramos, executive director of the Church Council of Greater Seattle, said at the event.
Many people died from common symptoms of homelessness – compounding health effects that come from living without stable housing or regular medical care.
Ten people died from hypothermia or environmental exposure, according to the medical examiner. Seven died from suicide.
And many more died from natural causes, at a much younger age than is typical.
The average age of death for people presumed homeless in King County last year was 48, according to the medical examiner’s report.
While drug use always ranks high as a driver of deaths for people who are homeless, these other factors cause the majority of deaths in average years.
Paige Killinger, who oversees homeless outreach in Sodo for REACH, said that for many of her clients, getting into housing is a matter of life and death.
Killinger said her team worked with a client this fall to find housing using an Emergency Housing Voucher, which the federal government created as part of the American Rescue Plan Act to get more people into permanent housing.
The client was one day from moving into her new space, Killinger said, when she died from overdose.
She kept telling caseworkers that if she stayed on the streets, she’d die, Killinger said.
“And she did,” she said.
It’s exhausting, Killinger said, for people working in homeless services – which have seen significant labor shortages during the pandemic – to be so close to so much preventable death and despair.
“It’s hard to keep people in this work when it’s constant death,” she said.
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Range Media
Valerie Osier
Clarifying three common misconceptions about Spokane's proposed ordinance.
“I'm not putting up with this bullshit,” said Spokane landlord Howard Haisley at a town hall last Tuesday night. That “bullshit” is a landlord-tenant ordinance the city has been mulling over different versions of for nearly five years. The city had invited landlords, tenants and tenant advocates to a January 10 town hall to hear everyone’s perspectives. Haisley joined a chorus of landlords claiming they’ll stop renting and instead sell their properties if the ordinance passes. Two closed-door sessions, one for landlords and one for renters, preceded last week’s town hall.
Spokane is in desperate need of more housing and rental options. At the same time, the city is trying to balance protections for its more housing insecure citizens — renters — by creating additional laws that guide the rental market in the city.
As RANGE has previously reported, the housing crisis is not cooling down for renters, and as rhetoric heats up, it’s imperative to understand what the proposed landlord tenant ordinance does and doesn’t include.
In November, the Spokane City Council introduced the most recent draft of an ordinance that would establish a local program to “implement common-sense, baseline standards for the rental of residential real property in Spokane, and to streamline and make more affordable the process of obtaining rental housing by establishing universal background checks, tenant relocation, and landlord mitigation programs.”
While many landlords generally believe the ordinance — and any attempts at regulation — are too much, renters and tenant rights advocates are generally asking that the ordinance go further to protect tenants. Which side the final legislation lands on, or if it can strike a delicate balance between the competing interests, will largely depend on whose needs and desires are being prioritized: landlords or tenants.
This was obvious at the town hall. At one point a man asked the room how many people knew about Washington’s Landlord Tenant Act that was updated last year. About a dozen people raised their hands. When he asked if they think it favors landlords or tenants, cries of "landlords!" and "tenants!" rose up simultaneously.
With so much riding on the details and passage of this ordinance, for renters and property owners alike, RANGE decided to add context and clarity to three common, repeated misconceptions about the ordinance.
Misconception #1: Landlords will need to raise rents because costs and uncertainty will increase
One representative of a property management company said at the town hall that they were going to start raising lease renewal costs if this ordinance passes because they don’t know how much it will end up costing them.
It’s not uncommon for businesses to take proactive measures to offset new costs and protect their investments. It’s common financial sense. But, the costs this ordinance adds aren’t mysterious. They’re in the legislation. So, let’s break that down.
For property managers with less than four units, so-called “mom and pop landlords,” here’s what the costs and requirements from the ordinance:
Obtain a business license at a cost of $127 per year. This is already required by the state of Washington, it’s just not enforced in Spokane.
Take a free online training of less than 1 hour the first time they get the business license.
Register each unit annually and certify that they comply with minimum habitable living conditions outlined in city code. This registration is free for people who own fewer than 4 units.
Use the approved universal background check systems that prospective tenants pay for, or use a different system and pay for it as the landlord.
Provide tenants a link to a notice of tenant rights, a voter registration form and a change of address form.
Property managers who have more than four units would be required to do the above and pay an additional $10 per unit per year.
The ordinance also provides some protection for landlords by creating a fund that would provide for repairs of damage in excess of the deposit by tenants that are under a housing assistance program. The fund will be paid for from the business license and unit registration fees. It also requires periodic and cause-based inspections from the city at no cost to tenants or landlords. The frequency of those inspections is to be determined, and all inspections need the consent of the tenants or a court order.
If a landlord is liable for providing a unit that is below the standards of habitability, they will have to reimburse the city for relocation costs of their tenant. This section of the law could create major costs for landlords who are renting uninhabitable housing to tenants.
So, assuming you’re not renting housing that violates city and state codes, a “mom and pop” landlord managing three units who opts in to the universal background check program, would have the additional hard costs of the business license, at $127 per year — which again, is already required by state law. If you wanted to pass those costs to your three tenants, you would need to raise each of their rents by about $3.52 per month.
The larger unknown — which would vary from property to property — is the theoretical cost of repairs that might be required as a result of an inspection by the city. Which, if a landlord is wanting to take good care of their properties and provide safe housing for their tenants, they would have to do no matter what.
Another important thing to note is that a common complaint from both landlords and tenants is that the city doesn’t enforce building code laws now, so additional laws won’t make a difference. But code enforcement costs the city money and resources. So, unlike other city fees that end up in the general fund, the landlord business license fees will go directly to inspections, the landlord mitigation fund and the tenant legal fund.
Misconception #2: The city will be conducting universal background checks
A concern voiced at the town hall was that a city department would be responsible for the background checks, which would open the process to bureaucratic ineptitude. This is the easiest misconception to correct because the ordinance, as it is currently written, states that the city will be contracting with a private company to do universal background checks. Here’s the exact phrasing from page 4:
“No later than one hundred twenty (120) days from the effective date of this section, the City of Spokane’s department of neighborhood services and code enforcement shall publish a request for qualifications (“RFQ”) from organizations that have the capability to provide certified universal background and credit checks.”
An RFQ is the process the city uses to find vendors for services, which means private companies will be selected to manage the background checks. This is similar to how the city contracts with ParkMobile to administer the digital payment system for downtown parking meters. Council President Breean Beggs said that it shouldn’t cost the city anything to contract because the RFQs will basically generate a list of approved companies that prospective tenants can use that will be accepted by all landlords. Additionally, landlords are still free to use their own service if they want to, they just can’t charge prospective tenants for it.
“Notwithstanding the remainder of this section, landlords may use a background and credit screening service other than the universal background and credit check service established by this section, but shall not impose any fee on a prospective tenant for doing so.”
Misconception #3: Seattle lost (insert large, fluctuating number) of rental units when they passed any landlord regulations.
This was the scariest assertion of the evening. We understand why it would freak people out. Spokane can’t afford to lose a single unit of housing, let alone thousands. Also, there’s nothing Spokanites of all stripes hate more than thinking we might become more like Seattle.
But it’s also the hardest assertion to validate. The underlying facts aren’t easy to pin down and, even if they were, it’s unclear how comparable Seattle and Spokane are in this regard.
Each person who spoke about Seattle phrased it differently, but they all had the same core argument: Seattle lost a large amount of rental housing because of costly, draconian renter protections, and Spokane will too.
There are three discrete pieces of that single short argument that need clarifying:
Is Spokane passing similar renter protections to Seattle?
Did Seattle actually lose units?
If, so what caused that loss?
First, Spokane is not implementing nearly the same level of renter protections that Seattle has been implementing for the last 40 years. Seattle’s first renter protection ordinance was its Just Cause Eviction Ordinance passed in 1980 (Washington lawmakers passed a bill in 2021 to limit reasons for evictions statewide).
A more controversial ordinance was adopted in Seattle in 2016 called the First-In-Time ordinance that requires landlords to offer units to the first qualified renter that applies in order to reduce discrimination. Spokane is not considering any similar measures.
The most recent protections Seattle passed in 2021 require landlords to give 180-day notice of rent increases and provide financial relocation assistance to tenants who have to leave because their rent went up. Spokane’s notice requirement currently sits at 60 days, along with the rest of the state, and the new ordinance doesn’t change that.
In short, nothing proposed in Spokane comes close to the protections offered by Seattle’s tenant-landlord ordinances.
Lots of numbers were thrown around at the town hall about the impact Seattle’s tenant ordinances had on the rental market. Andrew Rowles, representing the Downtown Spokane Partnership (DSP), said that when Seattle passed regulations on landlords in 2021, landlords sold off their properties and 9,000 rental units went off the market from June 2021 to June 2022. Others said that these properties left the market completely — meaning they weren’t sold to other landlords and presumably became owner-occupied homes or short-term rentals.
Darin Watkins, governmental affairs director for the Spokane Association of Realtors claimed at the town hall that Spokane would lose “6,000 to 8,000 units” if the ordinance passes. He did not specify if he was talking about rental or housing units. We reached out to Watkins for clarification and he said he got those figures from Rowles, a vice president at DSP. We reached out to Rowles and haven’t heard back. We will update if we find out where that figure came from.
As for Seattle, the most recent official data analysis we have is the latest Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance (RRIO) reports from the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections for the year 2021 and 2020. According to the report, the city had 156,172 rental units registered by the end of 2020 and 149,099 rental units registered by the end of 2021, meaning the total registrations decreased by 6.2% from January 2020 to 2021.
The report notes that new properties and units coming onto the market offset the percentage lost.
The report does not specify whether or how much of the decrease is due to properties being sold to be owner-occupied, landlords deliberately failing to re-register their units or because enforcement of renewal and registration was down at this time because of the pandemic.
There are unofficial data analyses that are more recent, but they’re paid for by landlords, so they come with significant asterisks. This report from Rental Housing Association of WA (RHAWA), a landlord advocacy group, found that between May 2021 and January 2022, Seattle lost a whopping 9,759 rental units.
Another report from RHAWA’s partner organization, Washington Multi-Family Housing Association (WMFHA), declares “Seattle's Exodus of Rental Properties Continues” with “a net loss of 313 properties and added 240 units” between January 2022 to June 2022. To be clear, during that time — according to their report — the number of units went up from 149,125 to 149,365, despite the supposed “exodus of rental properties.”
It’s important to note that neither of the reports explain the methodology on how the data was processed or analyzed, only that it came from Seattle’s RRIO database.
The losses between May 2021 and January 2022 were still significant, especially when it comes to the number of single-unit properties (i.e. single family homes) lost. Here, context is important. In 2021, home prices were surging and people were willing to pay crazy sums for homes. The median home in King County sold for $828,111, up 14.2% from 2020, according to The Seattle Times. By the winter, the housing market in Seattle started cooling, which follows what the WMFHA report said when only 313 units were lost after that.
While we don’t have any hard data from landlords on why they sold their units, we can see that the sales mirrored housing market trends. The sell off of rentals in Seattle can just as soon be attributed to landlords cashing out in a hot market as it can be tied to any tenant protections.
Recently, Spokane’s torrid real estate market has also incentivized landlords to cash out. Both in Seattle and in Spokane, there’s little proof that tenant protections, and not historical convergences (think low supply, pandemic and good interest rates) that have driven the housing market through the roof and caused the sell-off of rental properties. In short: we could not find definitive evidence that passing regulations directly causes rental units to disappear, it’s not clear that Seattle definitively lost units during the time in question, and if they did lose units, it’s unclear how renter protections factored into that loss.
Read the DRAFT ordinance yourself here.
The city council is scheduled to vote on the ordinance on January 23.
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The Wall St Journal
Lawsuits across the U.S. call the policies cruel and counterproductive
Laura KusistoJan. 17, 2023 at 9:00 am ET
Local governments have been experimenting with a range of homeless policies, such as involuntarily removing people from the streets when they appear to be mentally ill, confiscating belongings or evicting the homeless from public property. City officials say the measures are necessary to address situations that are threatening public safety and leaving homeless people themselves living in conditions that are unsafeand unsanitary.
Rates of street homelessness around the country have been on the rise for more than a decade, driven in part by the skyrocketing cost of housing in many places. The challenges have been concentrated in large, often liberal, cities where officials are facing public calls for a more forceful approach to the problem.
But moves to take a tougher stance have prompted objections from homeless advocates who say the policies are cruel, counterproductive and often in violation of constitutional protections including the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments, the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures and First Amendment protections for speech in public places. Some lawsuits also have alleged violations of federal laws protecting the disabled.
New York Mayor Eric Adams said the city would involuntarily take homeless individuals for psychiatric evaluation if deemed necessary.Photo: Lev Radin/Zuma Press
“Where homelessness is highly visible, there’s going to be more pushback and more urgency, a sense that something needs to be done now. The easiest thing is to pass a criminalizing law,” said Eric Tars, legal director for the National Homelessness Law Center.
Courts in some instances already have limited the tools at cities’ disposal, municipal lawyers say. Most prominently, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction covers a number of West Coast cities that have among the worst homelessness problems, in recent decisions has limited how aggressively cities can treat the problem if they don’t have adequate shelter to offer the homeless an alternative.
“It is a serious, serious, problem, probably the biggest crisis we’re facing right now, and I think these decisions are at the heart of what has gone wrong here,” said Theane Evangelis, a partner with Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP who has helped cities defend their homelessness policies. “They’ve caused paralysis at a time when we need action.”
In New York, Mayor Eric Adams late last year announced the city would begin training police officers to involuntarily take homeless individuals for psychiatric evaluation, even if they don’t pose a threat to others but are deemed unable to care for themselves.
“It is not acceptable for us to see someone who clearly needs help and walk past,” the mayor said when introducing the policy.
Mental-health advocates and plaintiffs with mental disabilities are challenging the policy. A Manhattan federal judge in December declined to immediately block the city from implementing its new enforcement guidance because it hadn’t yet gone beyond basic training for high-ranking officers. Further proceedings are set for early this year.
“We believe that a lot of harm has already been inflicted on the people affected by the policy,” said Marinda van Dalen, an attorney representing the plaintiffs. “They are people who feel they cannot safely go onto the streets, travel on the subway or be in public spaces without a police officer deciding their behavior is unusual and warrants being taken in for a psychiatric evaluation.”
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Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesman for the New York City Law Department said, “When all the evidence is heard, we are confident that the court will agree that the city’s compassionate efforts to assist people suffering from homelessness and severe mental illness comply with federal and state law.”
Municipal officials in states including Arizona, New Mexico and Texas are facing similar legal challenges. In Dallas, homeless and formerly homeless individuals and others sued the city in December over a newly adopted ordinance that limits standing or walking on road medians. City leaders say the measure is needed to protect public safety. The plaintiffs argue the real intent is to attack panhandling, which is protected by the First Amendment in public spaces.
Homeless advocates in San Francisco say the city is conducting sweeps of encampments.Photo: Godofredo A. Vásquez/Associated Press
The Ninth Circuit could play a crucial role in shaping homelessness policy in West Coast cities and beyond. In 2018, the court ruled that two city ordinances in Boise, Idaho, that banned sleeping and camping on public property violated the Eighth Amendment by essentially criminalizing people for being homeless. As long as there are more homeless people in a jurisdiction than the number of available shelter beds, a government cannot prosecute people for sleeping on the streets, a three-judge panel said.
The court later declined to reconsider the case, over the objection of some conservative Ninth Circuit judges. In a subsequent case last year, the court reaffirmed the Boise decision and ruled against the small Oregon city of Grants Pass, saying in a 2-to-1 ruling that even civil penalties against the homeless can violate the Eighth Amendment. The court also said the city couldn’t prohibit the homeless from sleeping in public with rudimentary protections from the elements, such as blankets.
The Ninth Circuit is currently considering the city request’s for the court to rehear the case with a larger roster of judges participating. The dissenting judge in the panel ruling said the court was effectively requiring municipalities to allow the use of its public parks as homeless encampments.
In San Francisco, homeless advocates and current or formerly homeless individuals have sued the city over what they say is a practice of fining and arresting homeless residents in an effort to drive them out of public areas. They say the city is conducting sweeps of homeless encampments and disposing of tents and other belongings without adequate prior notice or an opportunity to recover them.
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco, which is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said the policy doesn’t solve the problem of homelessness but simply moves people down the street. It also makes it harder for them to exit homelessness, she said, when medicine, paperwork or identification is caught up in the sweeps and as a result they miss out on an opportunity to secure housing or employment.
“The idea is to make it really uncomfortable for people with the idea that they would disappear. Unhoused people just don’t have disappearing powers,” she said.
A federal judge has temporarily blocked the city from engaging in the disputed practices while litigation proceeds, saying that given the shortfall of shelter beds in the area, officials can’t penalize people for being homeless, in accordance with the prior Ninth Circuit rulings.
“The court’s order puts San Francisco in an impossible situation, practically and legally,” said San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu. “It defies logic to require that San Francisco have shelter for all persons experiencing homelessness before San Francisco may enforce these laws against any one person.”
Write to Laura Kusisto at Laura.Kusisto@wsj.com