Police and outreach workers swept dozens of homeless people out of the vacant former headquarters of Seattle’s largest newspaper on Wednesday.
Only 20 people had to be forcibly removed from the premises, and police arrested three of the squatters. Officers estimated that anywhere from 60 to “several hundred” had taken shelter in the former Seattle Times building, according to KOMO News.
“They’ll be back,” Sergeant Paul Gracy told the Seattle Times. “If folks are persistent, it’s tough to keep them out.” The city has warned the owners of the property they will be fined $1,000 per day for continued failure to secure the building against homeless people seeking a roof and thieves hoping to scrounge copper and other valuables from the site.
The building became an unauthorized refuge for the city’s large homeless population after the paper moved its operation to a smaller space nearby in 2011. The Times sold its original home in 2013 for $62.5 million. The Canadian developers who bought it plan to raze the printing facility attached to the original 1930s headquarters. The exterior of that first building must be preserved because it is a historic site designed by the same architect who built the Old Faithful Inn within Yellowstone National Park.
The developer’s proposal calls for two high-rise residential towers bracketing that preserved façade, with a total housing capacity of 1,945 units built to serve either as condos or apartments. It’s unclear how much if any of that housing will be made affordable rather than charging full market-rate rents. The company said in 2013 that it would use city rules that allow builders to exceed height restrictions in exchange for performing affordable housing work, but that zoning exception can be obtained with a cash contribution to the city in lieu of creating actual affordable units on-site.
Questions about how the development might contribute to Seattle’s need for affordable housing aside, Wednesday’s sweep of desperate people out of the former newspaper building highlights another aspect of how Seattle’s efforts to end homelessness have failed thusfar.
The property stands empty because the Times moved to a smaller space nearby four years ago as part of an effort to cut costs. The Times has been Seattle’s primary source of information on what civic leaders are doing with community resources for over a century. But its own resources have withered in recent years as the newspaper industry struggled. The Times’ newsroom staff shrunk from 375 in 2004 to just 210 by early 2009 after multiple rounds of layoffs and hiring freezes. The Times also laid off hundreds of non-newsroom staff, hewing its total workforce by around 20 percent in 2008 alone. Another handful of jobs at the paper disappeared in 2011. The cutbacks helped return the Times to financial stability, and Vice President Jill Mackie said in an email that the newsroom staff currently stands at 200 — almost identical to where it stood after the 2011 cuts.
Media experts have long observed that a decline in local journalism’s potency and resources carries risks for the communities those papers serve. Fewer reporters means less ability to scrutinize official dealings and flush out stories about how budget decisions on housing policy and other public works will affect economic outcomes for individuals in future years.
The fight to reduce and end homelessness doesn’t begin with events like the sweep of the vacant old Times building, or even with making needed investments in Housing First policies that are proven to mitigate homelessness in the long term. The need for such reactive budget decisions today attests to an earlier failure at proactively addressing the causes of homelessness.
The most effective homelessness policies involve preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place, researchers and advocates say. Communities try to ensure that hardworking people can afford dignified shelter through a combination of economic opportunity and public safety net programs to catch those who slip before they land on the street.
Economic prosperity is uneven all across the country, but especially so in tech industry hubs like Seattle. As rent becomes less and less affordable for working-class families, the risk that a bad run of luck can put someone out on the street increases. Housing policy decisions are therefore crucial to heading off homelessness before it begins. Because developers will always seek maximum profit from a project, cities can’t rely on the market alone to ensure that they remain affordable places for their citizens to live.
Seattle spends tens of millions of dollars each year on services for people who have already become homeless. Yet homelessness is rising rapidly in the Emerald City. The 2014 census of people sleeping on the street or in their cars found 2,300 unsheltered homeless in Seattle proper — a 30 percent rise from 2011 — and this year’s survey found that number was up yet again, to over 2,800. The increases prompted Mayor Ed Murray (D) to create three sanctioned tent cities for the homeless, an unusual move considering that many jurisdictions have torn down such camps for years.
The problem is rooted in Seattle’s housing stock and zoning policies. Most of the city’s residential properties are single-family homes, and most of the city is zoned such that it’s impossible to build the kind of dense, affordable housing that Seattle’s working people need. Murray’s own housing braintrust recommended rezoning much of the city to allow more affordable development, but the mayor appears to have abandoned that push.