Former Seattle City Council President Bruce Harrell held a mayoral campaign event Friday in front of a homeless camp on a playfield at Broadview-Thomson K-8 School in Bitter Lake. Harrell avoid the word “sweep” or “camp removal” but still argued the homeless people shouldn’t be camped there.
“Last week I called for the City to dedicate the majority of federal ARPA relief funds to this exact effort — with a priority of addressing encampments in sensitive and incompatible areas — like school properties, parks, playfields and sidewalks,” Harrell said in a statement. “Instead, we saw a peanut butter allocation of funds that will only result in further delays in buying and building housing, and hiring the service providers needed to make real progress.”
Harrell had called on the City to dedicate at least another $20 million of its $128 million allotment of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) dollars on homelessness, adding to the $50 million that the Mayor and Council already tabbed. A McKinsey analysis last year found the Seattle would need to spend between $450 million and $1.1 billion per year to end homelessness.
As Harrell was delivering his remarks, a group of incensed locals interrupted him and demanded removal of the encampment, which they associated with needles, human waste, and crime, KING 5 reported. On Friday, Mayor Jenny Durkan did oversee a sweep of an Olga Park encampment in Ravenna, which was spurred by the murder of one of the campers by someone who lived elsewhere. However, in the case of the Broadview-Thomson playfield, Mayor Durkan has sought to foist responsibility onto Seattle Public Schools (SPS). She has been ramping up pressure on SPS to stand up their own Navigation Team equivalent in order to conduct homeless outreach and disperse encampments from its properties. Durkan has also been pushing service providers to participate in sweeps and belatedly snuck terms in contracts obligating them to so, before backing down from these strong arm tactics earlier this week, Erica C. Barnett reported.
Durkan was roundly criticized for her SPS ultimatum, including from Harrell.
“It is both inappropriate and inhumane for the City of Seattle to expect a school district working overtime to educate and support 54,000 students to hire, train, and bring to scale a homelessness outreach and services program,” Harrell said in a statement. “Providing housing and support for vulnerable people is the job of the city and county, working together to provide immediate housing, wraparound services, and the support needed to rebuild lives.”
Council President M. Lorena González, who is also running for Mayor, criticized Durkan, but also her opponent Harrell who her campaign argued was “exploiting the suffering of others” and fixated on symptoms rather than causes and solutions. “Instead of meaningless photo ops or proposing to build a dashboard to study homelessness, Lorena is working to secure resources and broad cooperation necessary to address this humanitarian crisis,” González’s campaign manager Alex Koren said in a statement.
