No surprise: Seattle voters’ top concern this election year is addressing homelessness

Almost six years ago, in Novem­ber of 2015, the City of Seat­tle declared that home­less­ness in and around the Emer­ald City had become a cri­sis, with then-May­or Ed Mur­ray stat­ing in a civ­il emer­gency order that “mem­bers of our com­mu­ni­ty should not be forced… to live and sleep out­doors and on the street.”

In the time that has passed since, how­ev­er, the num­ber of peo­ple expe­ri­enc­ing home­less­ness in and around Seat­tle has gone up, not down.

The city, coun­ty, and state have all enact­ed new laws and ordi­nances recent­ly in an attempt to address the cri­sis and pre­vent more peo­ple from becom­ing home­less, but our research shows that Seat­tle vot­ers feel strong­ly that the city needs to be doing more — a lot more — to get peo­ple into housing.

A whop­ping 68% of like­ly August 2021 Seat­tle vot­ers sur­veyed last week by Change Research for NPI iden­ti­fied address­ing home­less­ness as the pri­or­i­ty they most want the next May­or of Seat­tle to tack­le once sworn in.

13% cit­ed hous­ing costs and access to hous­ing — a close­ly relat­ed pri­or­i­ty — as a top con­cern they want the city’s incom­ing chief exec­u­tive to act on. And 9% specif­i­cal­ly men­tioned they want to see pub­lic hous­ing for low income Seattleites.

Here’s a word cloud that visu­al­ly demon­strates just how dom­i­nant of an issue address­ing home­less­ness is this elec­tion cycle for our respondents:

“Home­less” and “home­less­ness” appeared over and over again in the respons­es sub­mit­ted to our open end­ed ques­tion about the work of Seat­tle’s next may­or, which are cod­ed below into cat­e­gories based on the themes that Change Research and the NPI team saw after sift­ing through them.

QUESTION: What poli­cies do you want to see Seattle’s next May­or imple­ment to improve the health of the city?

[Note: Respons­es cod­ed from open-end­ed submissions]

TOP ANSWERS:

• Address the city’s home­less­ness cri­sis: 68%
• Police reform (defund, demil­i­ta­rize, change nature of): 18%
• Improve pub­lic safe­ty and tack­le crime: 17%
• Bring down hous­ing costs (i.e. through rent con­trol): 13%
• Police sup­port (increase fund­ing, deploy more offi­cers): 10%

In addi­tion to the five top answers shown above, respon­dents also specif­i­cal­ly expressed sup­port for beau­ti­fy­ing the city (like through graf­fi­ti removal or pick­ing up trash — 9% of respon­dents iden­ti­fied that as a con­cern), pro­vid­ing pub­lic hous­ing for low income Seat­tleites (9% iden­ti­fied that as a con­cern), and bol­ster­ing the city’s infra­struc­ture (8% iden­ti­fied that as a concern).

Small­er per­cent­ages flagged addi­tion­al pri­or­i­ties they want the may­or to focus on:

• more and bet­ter tran­sit (7%),
• increase tax­es on the wealthy and cor­po­ra­tions (7%),
• expand ser­vices for those strug­gling with addic­tion (6%),
• sup­port the city’s busi­ness­es (6%),
• improve parks (6%),
• enforce laws (5%),
• act on cli­mate and pro­tect the city’s envi­ron­ment (5%),
• make down­town Seat­tle safer and more wel­com­ing (4%),
• and help fam­i­lies with bet­ter child­care and edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties (4%).

Final­ly, 3% of respon­dents specif­i­cal­ly men­tioned they’d like the next may­or to focus on low­er­ing tax­es and anoth­er 3% men­tioned cham­pi­oning racial justice.

Many respon­dents’ answers con­sist­ed very sim­ply of “Address home­less­ness!” or some vari­a­tion there­of, while oth­ers offered lengthy and extreme­ly thor­ough com­men­taries on the state of the city and what they think their elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives are or aren’t doing to act on the issues of the day.

Because home­less­ness was such a pre­dom­i­nant theme in the respons­es, we’ve cre­at­ed a sec­ond word cloud that does­n’t have home­less­ness in it so you can see a sam­pling of oth­er words that were com­mon to the respons­es we received.

In all, five hun­dred and eighty-two out of the six hun­dred and sev­en­teen respon­dents answered this open end­ed ques­tion — a pret­ty high per­cent­age. Their respons­es cumu­la­tive­ly total 70,669 char­ac­ters and 11,090 words.

Our sur­vey was in the field through Mon­day, July 12th, through Thurs­day, July 15th. 617 like­ly August 2021 Seat­tle vot­ers took the sur­vey, with all par­tic­i­pat­ing online. The poll was con­duct­ed by Change Research for NPI, and has a mod­eled mar­gin of error of 4.3% at the 95% con­fi­dence interval.

This being Seat­tle, most respon­dents in the sur­vey iden­ti­fied as Demo­c­ra­t­ic or lean­ing Demo­c­ra­t­ic. (The Emer­ald City is one of the bluest places, polit­i­cal­ly, in the Pacif­ic North­west). While most Demo­c­ra­t­ic respon­dents offered just a few words in response to our prompt above, there were a few who took full advan­tage of the oppor­tu­ni­ty to lay out a vision for what they want Seat­tle to be.

One respon­dent sketched out their ideas for Seat­tle’s next may­or pri­or­i­tize cre­at­ing a more con­nect­ed, liv­able city as follows:

Rapid expan­sion of sup­port­ive ser­vices, shel­ters and afford­able hous­ing to address the home­less­ness cri­sis. Sup­port for small busi­ness­es as the city’s econ­o­my recov­ers from the reces­sion cre­at­ed by the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. Invest­ments in tran­sit infra­struc­ture and mod­ern improve­ments to road­way design.

Anoth­er Demo­c­ra­t­ic respon­dent wrote that they want to see the city lead where the state Leg­is­la­ture won’t, and invest tax dol­lars in ser­vices that help peo­ple rather than pun­ish­ing them or lock­ing them up. Their comments:

I want the next may­or to work for the peo­ple, not the police. I want invest­ment in peo­ple, not police. Meet the unhoused and addict­ed where they are with ser­vices. Flour­ish­ing pub­lic spaces. More P‑Patches to meet the grow­ing low-income hous­ing built with­out green spaces. The city mov­ing for­ward where the state won’t (UBI, munic­i­pal broad­band, safe injec­tion sites, no bail, hous­ing the unhoused, social work­ers in libraries) …

Still anoth­er Demo­c­ra­t­ic respon­dent offered sim­i­lar thoughts:

Move fund­ing from police to social ser­vices, includ­ing address­ing [the] home­less pop­u­la­tion. Stay firm on stance toward mega employ­ers. Work with schools, fam­i­lies and child­care providers to serve all chil­dren. Sup­port adults who make too lit­tle to afford cost of liv­ing in Seat­tle. Use research to inform com­mu­ni­ty build­ing ver­sus allow­ing the news­pa­per to point out inequities in our city. Help uni­fy the city. Avoid busi­ness ver­sus socialists.

Help­ing peo­ple rather than cit­ing them or lock­ing them up was def­i­nite­ly a uni­fy­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic we saw across the Demo­c­ra­t­ic responses.

One Demo­c­ra­t­ic respon­dent explained that they want the city to inter­vene when prob­lems like noise pol­lu­tion arise… they just want the city to send first respon­ders who aren’t police to pro­vide a non-puni­tive response:

Find a way oth­er than the police to han­dle civic cas­es. Fire­works go off every sin­gle night in my neigh­bor­hood, and the cops say they can’t respond unless it involves alco­hol or vio­lence. There also was a protest ral­ly for Don­ald Trump last sum­mer in my neigh­bor­hood, and the cops said the same thing. I don’t want to call the cops for these types of things, but I would like to be able to call on some pub­lic ser­vice law-enforce­ment group that could help with­out incrim­i­nat­ing those who are either break­ing the law or caus­ing trouble.

Repub­li­can respon­dents who answered our ques­tion had very dif­fer­ent takes.

“Stop giv­ing mon­ey to the home­less!” one wrote. “It just brings them to our city. Start fund­ing the police. Quit allow­ing pro­test­ers to ruin our streets.”

“Reverse a major­i­ty of poli­cies enact­ed by mayor/city coun­cil over the past sev­er­al years,” wrote anoth­er, with­out elab­o­rat­ing further.

“More police, crack down on crime down­town, get the home­less out of pub­lic parks, get a move on repair­ing the West Seat­tle Bridge. Actu­al­ly charge those arrest­ed for any vio­lent crimes, van­dal­ism, riot­ing, and pros­e­cute the offend­ers instead of releas­ing [them]. Sup­port the police!” wrote a third.

(Empha­sis is the respondent’s).

Respon­dents iden­ti­fy­ing as inde­pen­dents expressed a few of the same sen­ti­ments as the Repub­li­cans who left com­ments, but unlike the Repub­li­cans, many of them expressed inter­est in find­ing and imple­ment­ing “solu­tions” for the unhoused as opposed to dis­man­tling encamp­ments with sweeps, or oth­er puni­tive measures.

One char­ac­ter­ized home­less­ness this way:

It is a com­pli­cat­ed prob­lem that has not been addressed by our city lead­er­ship. The tax­pay­ing cit­i­zens and small street lev­el busi­ness­es are the not get­ting what they con­tribute to the good. Crime lingers in the shad­ows of the home­less camps and is unchecked.

Life has con­se­quences. We can­not con­tin­ue to let peo­ple who are not capa­ble of mak­ing good deci­sions live in the streets.

Not my fault, not the fault of the small busi­ness own­er, but we are the only ones suf­fer­ing the con­se­quences of poor deci­sions. The poor deci­sions have crept into city hall and our cur­rent coun­cil are unable and not equipped to deal with the com­pli­cat­ed problems.

Con­tin­ued street liv­ing is not a solu­tion. It is time for solutions.

“Solu­tions” also stood out in this response from anoth­er independent:

Faster improve­ment to pub­lic trans­porta­tion; real solu­tions to home­less­ness not just clear­ing them away from where we can see them; more activ­i­ties for youth.

Still anoth­er inde­pen­dent put it even more sim­ply, and paired their desire for action on home­less­ness with their desire of action on hous­ing costs:

House the home­less. Do some­thing to curb the cost of housing/home buy­ing and assist those who rent to feel more secure.

The bot­tom line? Regard­less of age, par­ty affil­i­a­tion, gen­der, or race, Seat­tleites real­ly, real­ly want their next may­or to make address­ing home­less­ness and pub­lic safe­ty in the city their top pri­or­i­ties. There is a strong desire for results over rhetoric. While respon­dents diverge on how to get there, they are in agree­ment that there needs to be action. What the city has done to date just isn’t sufficient.

Inter­est­ed in the find­ings we’re pre­vi­ous­ly released from this sur­vey? Then we sug­gest read­ing these Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate posts next:

• Bruce Har­rell, Lore­na González lead in 2021 Seat­tle may­oral race with many undecided
• A three-way race for Seat­tle City Attor­ney: Pete Holmes bare­ly ahead of two challengers
• Tere­sa Mosque­da well ahead of Kate Mar­tin for Seat­tle City Coun­cil #8 with most not sure
• Nikki­ta Oliv­er has a big ear­ly lead over Sara Nel­son for Seat­tle City Coun­cil Posi­tion #9