Walk Rainier Avenue on any given morning and you’ll pass many of the same people in the same doorways you passed last week. You’ll also pass city-funded outreach workers, nonprofit vans and shelter referral flyers handed to people who drop them on the sidewalk. Everyone’s moving, yet nobody’s going anywhere.
I recently met with Artie Nosrati, the point person on homelessness in Mayor Katie Wilson’s office. He was genuinely proud of the work his team is doing: 90 new shelter beds coming online, van rides to connect people to food and a goal of 1,000 shelter beds by the end of the year, which is real progress by historical Seattle standards.
But when I asked about coordinated entry (whether those beds, outreach vans and referrals could be visible in one shared system, matched to actual people in real time) the answer was that this function sits outside the city with a different organization. That’s the sentence that stayed with me.
I recently attended the opening of Bayside Enhanced Shelter, a 75-unit village in Interbay of Pallet tiny homes. Bayside houses residents living on sidewalks and in parks who need intensive services. It includes 24/7 on-site management, case management, healthcare and three meals daily. Residents have shared bathrooms, showers, laundry, common spaces and a dog run. Research shows 1 in 3 tiny home residents go on to permanent housing.
At the event, Mayor Wilson said the community is working toward a shared goal: helping more people come indoors and access the support they need. She is right. I asked her about other holes in the shelter network, like an RV shelter Councilmember Dan Strauss mentioned. She laughed and said there are lots of holes. I think the city can do more than fill holes one at a time. Seattle can build a physical and social system that connects people to programs that already exist.
What the mayor’s office is describing is 1,000 beds, with van rides connected to them. It’s a real effort, and I don’t want to dismiss it. But 1,000 beds is a project. We need a system. The question isn’t just “do we have enough shelter?” It’s “do we know where each person is, what they actually need and how to match them to something that fits?” Those are three different questions. The 1,000-bed goal answers one of them, and the city chooses to close its eyes to the rest instead of taking the political risk of saying: Let’s end homelessness.
Here’s what a coordinated system looks like. Start with a shared map of where people are and where they fit. Where is someone in terms of housing stability? A tent, a car, a shelter, a group home, a tiny home, an apartment? Each step comes with different supports, different costs and different next steps. And alongside housing, where is someone in terms of mental health and recovery? That sounds soft until you realize that peer counseling, Recovery Cafe, Peer Seattle, the library, AA meetings and art classes are often what make the difference between someone staying housed or cycling back to the street. Both need to be visible in the same system.
King County does run a coordinated entry system through King County Regional Homelessness Authority, and I know it firsthand. I have bipolar disorder and enrolled in it multiple times. Downtown Emergency Service Center helps homeless people in Seattle, providing case management, housing, and emergency day-center and shelter services. I completed intake paperwork at DESC one month ago (a coveted spot as they take a maximum of two new clients daily) and was told I would receive an email with the name of my case manager, an email I never received.
The safe parking lot program I participate in is counted as a shelter by the system. I have never been placed in an emergency shelter by DESC, Department of Social and Health Services or Catholic Community Services. KCRHA’s own website says it plainly: “There is no guarantee that a household will be connected to a housing resource through Coordinated Entry.”
Seattle does have the components of a strong support system. I have received a lot of help as a homeless person. Compass Navigation Center for food/showers, Recovery Cafe for peer support, SHARE for community, St. Francis House for clothes, Vehicle Resident Outreach for licensing help and Urban League for a safe parking lot program. These are the resources that I and others rely on while we wait for housing.
The city has a lot of housing resources. What’s missing is a live system that shows what’s open, matches people by fit rather than first-available, and tracks whether it worked. The city treating coordinated entry as someone else’s problem, when the system it’s pointing to isn’t working, is more than a minor gap: it’s a blind spot.
Houston built a system. Its homelessness response relies on shared intake, common data, coordinated outreach and a large provider network. It has helped house tens of thousands of people since 2012. Beds are inventory. Shared intake, shared data and shared accountability; that’s a system.
The city could also think physically. Coordination should not only happen in software, but also on city streets. Shelters, clinics, libraries, light rail stations, recovery spaces and day centers should be planned as a connected network, not scattered sites that people are expected to navigate alone. Instead of just building beds, Seattle should build a coordinated network in both program design and physical arrangement.
Nosrati, in the mayor’s office, is doing what he can within the scope he was given. Indeed, his acknowledgment that food access needs to be planned with housing is exactly how a system works. But scope is the problem. Ninety beds next month, a thousand beds by December, that’s the plan. These are good things, but built in the absence of a blueprint to actually end homelessness.
I applied to a low-income housing unit recently with the Low Income Housing Institute. The application asks for my case manager. Having done intake with so many places, I was unsure what to write. I wrote “Urban League / VRO (Vehicle Resident Outreach) / CCS (Catholic Community Services) / DSHS (Department of Social and Health Services).” I mixed up DSHS with DESC. My application is pending, and I hope the alphabet soup of case management places will show that I tried to find a case manager.
Seattle is good at effort. We’re less good at coordination. The mayor’s 1,000 beds should be the beginning, not the plan itself. Build the beds, please. But build the system too: shared intake, live availability, by-name coordination, placement by fit and public accountability for whether people stay housed. Effort matters most when everyone is pointed at the same goal: ending homelessness.
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