The Politics of Ruinous Compassion: How Seattle’s Homelessness Policy Perpetuates the Crisis — And How We Can Fix It Christopher F. Rufo ABstract The City of Seattle has failed to address its current KEY POINTS homelessness crisis. In fact, because of ideological capture and poor public policy, the city has created • Seattle spends $1 billion per year on a system of perverse incentives that has only made the crisis, but homelessness continues the problem worse. In order to truly confront the to grow problem of homelessness, the city’s leadership must embrace a policy of realism: dismantle the system of • Seattle’s policy of “unlimited compas- perverse incentives, quickly build emergency shelter, sion” has enabled street homelessness and enforce the law against public camping and and made the problem worse drug use. Ultimately, the city currently has enough • The main driver of homelessness is not resources to solve the crisis—it needs to summon rising rents, but a combination of eco- the political courage to make the right choices. nomic dislocation, addiction, mental illness, in-migration, and broken rela- *** tionships • Seattle’s public policy has created a SEATTLE is a city under siege. Over the system of perverse incentives and an past 4ive years, the Emerald City has endured a unaccountable homelessness bureau- cracy that has failed to show results slow-rolling explosion of homelessness, crime, and addiction. In a one-night count this winter, there were 11,643 people sleeping in tents, POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS cars, and emergency shelters.1 Property crime • Immediately build emergency shelters has skyrocketed to rates two-and-a-half times with 2,500 beds with on-site addic- that of Los Angeles and four times that of New tion, mental health, and medical ser- York City. 2 Cleanup crews pick up tens of thou- vices sands of dirty needles from the streets and • Empower law enforcement to move parks across the city.3 the street homeless into shelter and At the same time, according to the enforce a strict ban on public camp- Puget Sound Business Journal, the Seattle ing metro area spends more than $1 billion on the • End policies that create perverse in- homelessness crisis every year.4 That’s nearly centives for service providers and $100,000 for every homeless man, woman, break up the “homeless-industrial and child in King County, yet the crisis seems complex” to only have deepened, with more addiction, • Recognize that the true cause of more crime, and more tent encampments stak- homelessness is disaffiliation and the loss of human relationships ing their claim in residential neighborhoods. By any measurement, whatever the city is do- !1 ing now is not working. d’état. The socialist revolutionaries, once rele- Over the past year, I’ve spent time in gated to the margins, have declared open war city council meetings, political rallies, home- on the mainstream Democratic establishment less encampments, and rehabilitation facilities and pushed the political center of gravity ever hoping to understand this paradox: how is it leftward. possible that the government spends so much The leader of this faction, Socialist Al- money and, at the same time, makes so little ternative city councilwoman Kshama Sawant, impact? While most of the debate on home- is a scorched-earth warrior against capitalism. lessness has focused on the technical ques- In her telling, capitalism is the single cause tions that make up the superstructure of our from which all problems emerge. She claims public policy — should we build more shel- that homelessness is the inevitable result of ters, should we build supervised injection sites the Amazon boom, greedy landlords, and — I learned that in order to truly unravel this rapidly increasing rents.6 As she told Street paradox, we must to examine the deeper as- Roots News: “The explosion of the homeless- sumptions and beliefs that have come to shape ness crisis is a symptom of how deeply dys- the way we think about homelessness in cities functional capitalism is and also how much like Seattle. worse living standards have gotten with the As I delved into the story, I discovered last several decades.”7 In this story, the ruth- that the real battle isn’t being waged in the less capitalists of Amazon, Starbucks, Mi- tents, under the bridges, or in the corridors of crosoft, and Boeing generate tremendous City Hall. Rather, there’s a deeper, ideological amounts of wealth for themselves, drive up the war that’s currently being won by a loose al- price of housing, and push the working class liance of four major power centers: the social- irreversibly towards poverty, inequality, and ist intellectuals, the compassion brigades, the despair. homeless-industrial complex, and the addic- On the surface, this argument has its tion evangelists. Together, these four groups own internal logic: landlords raise the rent, have framed the political debate, diverted low-wage workers are priced out of their hundreds of millions of dollars towards fa- apartments, and their families fall into home- vored projects, and recruited a large phalanx lessness. They point to the Zillow8 and McKin- of well-intentioned voters who have bought sey9 studies that show a high correlation be- into the “politics of unlimited compassion.” tween rent increases and homelessness in If we want to truly break through the Seattle. But, in reality, correlation is not causa- failed status quo on homelessness in places tion and the individual survey data paints a like Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los remarkably different picture. According to Angeles, we must 4irst understand the dynam- King County's point-in-time study, only 6% of ics of ideological battleield, identify the fatal the homeless cited “could not afford rent in- 4laws in our current policies, and fundamental- crease” as the precipitating cause of their ly reframe the way we understand the crisis. predicament.10 They specify a wide range of Until then, we’ll continue to dream up utopian other problems — domestic violence, incar- schemes that end in failure and despair. ceration, mental illness, family con4lict, med- ical conditions, breakups, eviction, addiction, The Socialist Revolutionaries and job loss — as greater contributors to be- coming homeless. Seattle has long been well-known as Furthermore, although the Zillow study one of the most liberal cities in America.5 But did indeed ind a high correlation between ris- over the past few years, there’s been a coup ing rents and homelessness in four major !2 markets — Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, and solve the homelessness crisis. Even with Washington, DC — it also found that home- Sawant’s recently passed (and then repealed) lessness decreased despite rising rents in "jobs tax" on large employers,11 the city would Houston, Tampa, Chicago, Phoenix, St. Louis, only build a maximum of 187 subsidized hous- San Diego, Portland, Detroit, Baltimore, At- ing units per year, which means it will take at lanta, Charlotte, and Riverside. While rent in- least sixty years to provide housing for all of creases are a very real burden for the working the individuals who are currently homeless. I poor, the evidence suggests that rent increases suspect, however, that Sawant’s real passion is alone do not push people onto the streets. not to build houses for the poor, but to tear In fact, even in an expensive city like down the houses of the rich. Once her new Seattle, the vast majority of working- and taxes fail to usher in the socialist utopia, she middle-class residents manage to respond to will simply 4ind a new scapegoat — corpora- economic incentives in a number of common tions, real estate developers, tech workers, po- sense ways: moving to a less expensive neigh- lice of4icers — and repeat the process all over borhood, downsizing to a smaller apartment, again. taking on a roommate, moving in with family, The hard truth is that Seattle is now an or leaving the city altogether. The reality is expensive city. The local government should that there are more than 1 million people in absolutely strive to create more affordable King County below the median income and market-rate housing by increasing density and 99% of them manage to 4ind a place to live and changing zoning laws,12 but, given the current pay the rent on time. The static aggregate-level reality, for those who are not employed full analyses from Zillow and McKinsey do not time — which is the case for 92.5% of the take into account the vast number of options homeless13 — it’s foolish to think that Seattle that are available even to the poorest families will be the city of Housing for All. No matter — and yet, the socialist revolutionaries keep how many impossible promises the socialists hammering away at “the rent is too damn make, at some point, they will run out of other high” as the explanatory variable for every- people’s money. The scapegoats, who have thing. thus far remained silent, will start 4ighting The socialists are playing a deeply cyni- back. And private companies, which are the cal game, using the homelessness crisis as a primary wealth generators in the city, will symbol of “capitalism’s moral failure” and a simply pack up and move away. justiication for their longstanding policy agenda of rent control, public housing, mini- The Compassion BriGades mum wage increases, and punitive corporate taxation. While one might be tempted to dis- The compassion brigades are the moral miss Kshama Sawant as a cartoon subcoman- crusaders of homelessness policy. They are the dante, she has been remarkably successful in social justice activists who believe “compas- her campaign to use the image of the homeless sion” is the highest virtue and all other consid- to stoke resentment against “Amazon tech erations must be subordinated to its dictates.