For years, as Seattle’s street scene frayed with rising homelessness and drug abuse, there was a bitter joke that went around: At least we’re not as bad as Portland.
But now our sister-city-in-suffering to the south is making news for a different reason. It’s the one suddenly treating the homelessness crisis like a full-on emergency.
Portland just elected a new mayor, an outsider who’s never served in public office. Keith Wilson, a truck company CEO, swept into office in a landslide on the strength of one pledge: to stand up 25 emergency shelters around town to end Portland’s chronic street homelessness.
In his first week on the job, he’s already opened two shelters with 200 beds.
“We are here to come together to treat the crisis on our street like a crisis,” Wilson said in early January.
I think he means he’s not going to just look the other way.
Recently I wrote how Seattle and Washington state are among the worst in the nation for how much of our homeless population is out on the streets at night, rather than in shelter. Nine years after declaring a civic emergency, we have among the highest national rates of people still bedding down in doorways, by the sides of roads and under bridges.
A Housing and Urban Development report to Congress showed that Seattle in 2024 had twice as many people unsheltered on the streets as New York City, six times as many as Chicago, and 10 times as many as Philadelphia.
The logistical reason is that all these cities stood up more emergency shelter than we did. Here, the emphasis has been more on building permanent housing, a well-meaning, long-term effort that has unfortunately also left thousands of people out in the elements for now.
Denny Hunthausen, who for 38 years helped the poor at Catholic Community Services of Western Washington, recalls a cultural shift, too.
“As you indicate, beginning about 2015, developing new emergency shelter became passé as policy,” he wrote. “In my experience, some shelters weren’t even fully occupied at times as we adopted a collective narrative that was critical of emergency shelter. …
“It was as if camping in the green belt of a freeway offramp was better for all involved than a church basement.”
People may have become numb to open misery, he said.
“It’s hard to admit, for those who have authentically labored with deep commitment to do the right thing in this arena,” Hunthausen said.
This same slide down a moral hazard happened in Portland, according to the new mayor. The city got rid of most nighttime shelters, replacing them with 24-hour facilities that were more sophisticated but had fewer beds. Walk-ins were discouraged. The conditions may have been superior for whoever got a spot in an enhanced shelter. But outdoor encampments proliferated.
“Portland has normalized homeless encampments,” Wilson says on the site for his vision, Shelter Portland. “Our least fortunate citizens live outside in dangerous, inhumane conditions while they wait for shelter or permanent housing.”
The stats are brutal. Unsheltered homelessness in the Portland metro area has increased 109% since 2015, to 3,944 individuals. In King County, it’s gone up 157%, to 9,810. In both places, more than half the homeless population is rough sleeping outside. (In the 2024 count, 53% of Portland’s homeless were unsheltered; in Seattle, 58%).
A notion took hold that people on the streets should have more autonomy than was afforded by a system that herded them into communal shelters each night. They should be able to sleep more or less where they wish — including in hideous environments such as The Jungle under and around I-5.
“A fellow board member once told me ‘Seattleites are perfectly happy watching people die in the gutter with their civil rights intact,’” wrote Richard Stevenson, who was on the board of the homelessness-aid group the Downtown Emergency Service Center in the 2010s.
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell has been straining to change these views; to argue essentially that sweeping encampments into shelter is compassionate, not cruel. He’s succeeded in breaking up the city’s most crime-ridden camps, where homeless people were being shot and killed at high rates.
But there isn’t enough shelter. Seattle has committed to funding just 80 new beds in 2025, while Portland has already stood up 200 in January. Nor is there political will in Seattle to coerce people into using the shelter, by, say, enforcing a no-camping rule. As it is, only about a quarter of people offered shelter by outreach teams in Seattle take it and leave the street.
Portland is set to try all this. Last year the city passed an anti-camping ordinance. The new mayor says he intends to start enforcing it, using street counselors not cops, once he stands up hundreds more beds of shelter.
He announced at a City Council meeting that dozens of facilities — churches, community centers, defunct car dealerships — have been identified for new shelters. The goal is 1,000 to 2,000 beds in a matter of months. Many of these will be old-style cots or mats-on-the-floor-type shelters.
Wilson has no political experience, the first such newbie Portland mayor in 40 years. He got elected despite saying some politically incorrect things that you don’t usually hear coming out of Portland. Such as: how his plan to decrease public camping by directing people to nighttime shelters will probably drive a bunch of them out of town.
“We need to see … who is going to remain and be a Portlander,” Wilson told Oregon Public Broadcasting, when asked about what happens next. “Because we know, based on what anecdotal evidence I have, that people may not remain in Portland.”
Getting someone out of the gutter and into a night shelter does not end their homelessness. Without a continuum of help all the way to building permanent, affordable housing units, the Portland mayor may find he’s only treating symptoms.
Wilson’s also been told what I get told every time I bring up these same issues: You can’t compare here to those other cities where unsheltered homelessness is so much lower. We’re different. It won’t work here.
He’s right on though about the moral travesty where we’ve ended up. Lying on the sidewalk, in a park or under a bridge is, by default, the No. 1 shelter option in both Portland and Seattle.
Will the Portland shelter plan work? Doubts abound. Every mayor in both cities says they’re going to fix homelessness, after all.
But one city is treating it with urgency, finally, as if a humanitarian disaster is taking place. While one city definitely still is not. So we’re about to find out.
The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.
