Twenty years later, in early 2009, Mary would finally achieve stability, employment, and reunion with her daughter. The journey between those two points is captured in her self-published memoir Sheltered by Hope—one of the rare firsthand accounts of homelessness written by someone who both experienced tremendous hardship and developed the voice to tell her story clearly and beautifully.

I strongly recommend it to anyone seeking to understand homelessness beyond statistics and policy debates.

It Could Happen to Anyone

Mary’s story dismantles the comforting myth that homelessness only happens to people who have made bad choices, lack education, or somehow deserve their circumstances.

Mary had a master’s degree. She had what she thought was a safety net: family who would catch her if she fell. But after her commitment and the collapse of her marriage, her mother kicked her out and prevented her from even collecting her belongings.

Her story shows how easily any of us, without the redundant safety nets many of us possess, could slip through the cracks with just one or two misfortunes.

For Mary, what followed was nearly two decades navigating life on the streets. She learned to survive, made friends, even met a romantic partner who was also experiencing homelessness. Together they had a daughter who would eventually become Mary’s beacon and motivation to climb out of homelessness once and for all.

An Untapped Resource: Harvest for the Hungry

Between her two periods of homelessness, Mary did something remarkable. She achieved a dream I’ve heard expressed many times during my Handful of Coins project: she started a business employing and serving homeless people.

The organization was called Harvest for the Hungry. Mary worked with local churches to sponsor meals one night per week at their respective locations—a compromise with community concerns about concentrating services in one area. She pioneered a gleaning model, initially collecting unclaimed Pizza Hut orders and later expanding to other food sources. Each church hosted one night, creating a distributed network that fed roughly 1,500 people per month.

But Mary didn’t stop with meals. She partnered with a local medical school to establish a clinic where medical students provided services to her clients. The model proved so effective that it was replicated in over a dozen additional communities.

To me, this proves two things that many people don’t understand about homelessness.

First, our homeless neighbors are a tremendously smart and resourceful untapped resource. Given the opportunity and support, they can create sophisticated solutions to complex problems.

Second, people with lived experience of homelessness often harbor more altruistic dreams than the rest of us. When we help someone climb out of homelessness, there may be residual effects: people that they, in turn, will help, creating a chain of goodwill extending far into the future. Mary didn’t escape homelessness and walk away—she built something to help others still struggling.

The Long Road Back

Mary’s journey to stability wasn’t straightforward. She experienced homelessness a second time, now with her high-school-aged daughter. Her brother intervened, taking her daughter to live with him in Western Washington.

Mary knew she wanted to be reunited with her daughter, but she was committed to County Mental Health in Pacific Beach, California, following multiple police calls. This time, though, she made a choice: she would follow all the rules, take her medication, follow her doctors’ advice, and do whatever it took to improve.

Gradually, her condition stabilized. The facility eventually released her and allowed her to move to Washington State to reunite with her daughter. It took twenty years, but Mary made it back.

A Rare and Necessary Voice

Firsthand accounts of homelessness are rare. Most homeless people are focused on survival, not documentation. Those who do escape homelessness often want to leave that chapter behind, not revisit it in painful detail.

Mary May is the rare combination of someone who experienced homelessness and developed the writing ability to articulate that experience clearly and beautifully. In this way, her story reminded me of Stephanie Land’s Maid, another memoir that captivated readers and was recently adapted into a successful Netflix series.

But Mary’s story goes further than most in showing not just the descent into homelessness, but the long, difficult climb back out—and the ways someone with lived experience can give back to others still struggling.

Why You Should Read This

Sheltered by Hope matters because it gives voice to an experience that’s too often reduced to statistics and stereotypes. It shows the human being behind the crisis. It demonstrates the intelligence and resilience of people we too often dismiss.

It also reminds us that when we invest in helping someone escape homelessness, we’re not just changing one life. We’re potentially unleashing someone who will help dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of others.

Mary’s happy ending—stability, reunion with her daughter, a life rebuilt—is exactly what I hope for Seattle’s homeless neighbors. Her story proves it’s possible, even after twenty years.

I’m grateful to Mary May for having the courage to share her story so others can learn from it. I’ve added Sheltered by Hope to my recommended reading page. If you’re looking to understand homelessness from the inside, this is a great place to start. Find it here.

If you’ve been following along, you know FareStart as the Seattle organization that provides job training for people experiencing homelessness, preparing them for careers in foodservice. Their annual gala in October raises money which all goes directly toward upskilling students and preparing them for every aspect of a lucrative career in food service. It’s one of the most effective organizations I’ve seen in actually lifting people out of homelessness in Seattle.

A Different Kind of Volunteering

This is a very different type of volunteering than what I’ve been doing all year.

Instead of serving meals, sorting clothes, bagging groceries, building tiny homes, or going tent-to-tent delivering hot chocolate and sleeping bags, I’ll be making phone calls and talking with friends in the Seattle food scene.

It’s different, but it might be even more impactful — the auction needs to raise a significant portion of FareStart’s budget to ensure the organization can serve its target of 400+ people next year.

It’s also a chance to work with some impressive people: not only FareStart’s leadership team, but other volunteers from Amazon, Deloitte, local sports teams, and so on.

One of my big responsibilities is procuring auction items for the live and silent auction. And I’d like to ask your help!

The Ask

If you’re reading this, I’m hoping you might be able to help in one of two ways:

Do you have connections in the food space? Restaurants, chefs, culinary experiences, cooking classes, winery tours, farm-to-table experiences—anything food-related that might work as an auction item. If you’re connected to anyone who might be willing to donate, please let me know.

Do you have good ideas? Even if you can’t help procure items, I’d love your help brainstorming. What kinds of experiences or items would you bid on at a gala supporting job training for people experiencing homelessness? What would get you excited enough to open your wallet?

Past auctions have included things like:

• Private chef dinners

• Cooking classes with notable Seattle chefs

• Wine country getaways

• Restaurant gift certificates and tasting menus

• Culinary equipment and kitchenware

But I’m open to creative ideas beyond the obvious.

Why This Matters

FareStart changes lives. I’ve done mock interviews with their students and seen firsthand how transformative their program is. These aren’t just cooking classes—they’re providing wraparound support including housing assistance, mental health services, job placement, interview training, and more.

Every dollar raised at this gala means another person gets the skills and support they need to build a sustainable career.

So if you can help—whether by connecting me with potential donors, brainstorming ideas, or even just sharing this post with someone in the Seattle food scene—I’d be incredibly grateful.

You can reach me by commenting below or sending me a direct message.

Thanks for your help!

These organizations can be incredibly helpful in preventing homelessness, and yet I had barely heard of them before starting A Handful of Coins.

They mostly don’t ask for volunteers, because helping requires a fair amount of specialized training. They mostly don’t ask for money or host fundraising galas, because most of their funding comes from government grants for housing projects. As a result, they simply aren’t “out there” marketing themselves to the community.

And yet… in a certain light, they are really a lot more cost-effective than other forms of support for homelessness, like emergency shelters.

The Cost Comparison: PSH vs. Emergency Shelters

The organization I’m working with, Plymouth Healing Communities (PHC), houses about 30 people on a budget of about $1 million annually.

That works out to about $33,000 per person annually. Since residents contribute 30% of their income toward rent (often from disability checks), the organization needs about $25,000 per person in external funding - roughly the cost of renting a modest Seattle apartment.

But when you compare that cost to the alternatives, it starts to look like a real bargain.

Emergency shelter: Providing emergency shelter typically costs closer to $150 per bed, per night. This works out to ~$55K annually per person, per year - over twice the cost of permanent supportive housing. The additional cost isn’t waste: it’s necessary to provide the supervision and wraparound services needed in a shelter environment. But those extra services wouldn’t be needed if the residents weren’t homeless. PSH doesn’t require 24/7 on-site staff, since residents live independently in their own apartments with periodic check-ins from case managers. PSH doesn’t require commercial kitchens, security systems, or intake processes. There are no shelter curfews, bed assignments, or shared spaces requiring staff time. And there is no need for expensive on-site mental health treatment, since PSH residents can connect with much more efficient existing community mental health services.

Emergency rooms: A single ER visit for a mental health crisis costs $3,000-5,000. Without permanent supportive housing, many of these individuals would have multiple visits per year.

Jail: The average cost to incarcerate someone in King County exceeds $50,000 per year. People with untreated mental illness are vastly overrepresented in our jails.

High Leverage Philanthropy

One of the things I’ve loved about this year is identifying opportunities to help that have high leverage—interventions that cost less and accomplish more.

Plymouth Healing Communities is exactly that kind of opportunity.

This month, Jen and I are giving to Plymouth—enough to provide one person with permanent supportive housing for half of a year. The way we see it, it’s worth twice the amount of money spent on emergency shelter, while simultaneously giving people the opportunity to stay out of emergency rooms or jail and avoid the immeasurable trauma of living on the streets with mental illness. Our hope is that we’re giving someone a realistic chance at managing their condition.

Finding These Organizations

If you’re looking for cost-effective ways to address homelessness, seek out PSH programs in your community. They won’t find you—you’ll have to find them.

Look for organizations that:

• Provide permanent (not transitional) housing

• Serve people with serious mental illness or disabilities

• Operate on relatively modest budgets despite housing dozens of people

• Get most of their funding from government grants rather than individual donors

These are the organizations quietly doing the work that actually keeps people housed. They deserve more support than they’re getting.

For those of us there to celebrate, it was a minor inconvenience. For the people who will actually live there, it was the whole point.

I’ve been building tiny homes with Sound Foundations NW for a few months now, showing up on weekends to frame walls, insulate, paint, and generally make myself useful in ways that don’t always require actual carpentry skills. But I’d never seen the finished product — a real village, up and running, with people about to move in. The Tukwila opening gave me that chance, and I’m glad I finally went.

The village has 40 brand-new tiny homes. Each one has a bed, a dresser, a heater, an air conditioner, a window, and a door that locks. There’s power, an outlet to charge your phone, and an electric light. The village is fully secure, with a guard shack and a fence running its perimeter. There’s a shared kitchen with refrigerated storage, and restrooms and showers.

Three additional tiny homes serve as offices — one for the village administrator (run by the Low Income Housing Institute), and two for case managers whom residents are required to meet with periodically as a condition of living there.

It’s not luxury. But standing in the rain, watching the water run off those roofs, it was hard to argue with what this place offers: everything you need to get back up on your feet.

This village accepts single residents as well as couples, families, and people with pets. That’s relatively relaxed compared to most shelters and many other tiny home villages, which often impose restrictions that make them inaccessible to people with complicated living situations. A rule that sounds minor on paper — “pets allowed” — can be the difference between someone accepting help and sleeping outside with their dog instead.

The land is provided by Church by the Side of the Road, a humbly named ministry whose senior pastor I had the chance to speak with. He described their role as “keeping an eye on the village” — not intrusive oversight, but the kind of quiet stewardship that makes a place feel like a community rather than a facility.

The Tiny Home Solution - a Big Puzzle Piece?

I’ll be honest: when I first heard about Sound Foundations NW — and its incredibly energetic leader, Barb Oliver — I was a bit skeptical. It was just so much less expensive than all the other solutions! I was sure it was a piece of the puzzle. But, as one year-old Rosie is learning, puzzles have a lot of pieces (ok - hers have between 5-10 pieces, but she’ll learn this soon).

But as the year has progressed, I’ve come to believe that the tiny home puzzle piece is a disproportionately large one, at the least. The homeless people I’ve met and talked with — at shelters, at food banks, during outreach — have consistently mentioned tiny homes. Not as a distant policy concept, but as something they actually want. A place of their own. A door that locks. Most of them follow that up with something like: yeah, but the waitlist is impossible. Demand dwarfs supply, and most people I’ve spoken with don’t realistically expect to ever get in.

Seeing a village up close made me understand the appeal viscerally in a way that talking about it never quite did. These are not tents. They’re not cots in a gymnasium. They are small, private, secure, and — crucially on a day like last Wednesday — dry.

I don’t think tiny homes are the solution for every homeless person. But I do think that with enough of these villages, we could dramatically raise the floor of what homelessness looks and feels like for a lot of people. That’s not nothing. That might actually be quite a lot.

How many people could tiny homes help?

Well, four tiny home villages opened in 2025 — three in Seattle and one in Tacoma. Sound Foundations expects up to six more to open in 2026. Taken together, that’s close to 400 new units of housing over two years.

In a city with nearly 10,000 homeless residents, 400 units doesn’t solve the problem. Tiny homes are also, almost by definition, temporary. These villages have leases, typically for 2-3 years, after which the land is often used for other purposes like building a permanent structure.

Still, 400 units for three years is 438,000 nights, and that’s a lot of shelter.

Know Anyone with a Vacant Flat Lot?

Standing there in the rain at the end of the ceremony, I found myself wishing I owned land I could offer for something like this. Church by the Side of the Road has a rare combination: space, willingness, and proximity to the people who need help most.

If you happen to own a vacant, flat lot (or know someon

e who does), and you’re open to exploring what hosting a village might look like, let me know. Mayor Wilson has made expanding tiny home villages a clear priority, and the operators — like LIHI and Sound Foundations — know how to move quickly when land becomes available. I’m happy to connect the right people.

For the past few months, I’ve been volunteering with Plymouth Healing Communities as a companion to a resident in one of their permanent supportive housing programs.

PSH residents aren’t homeless—Plymouth maintains modest but clean apartment buildings around the city, with on-site property managers who have lived experience with homelessness. But without PSH, these residents almost certainly would be homeless.

Here’s why: The resident I’m working with is likely autistic. They can hyperfocus on a task, recently staying up all night on a passion project. But they frequently forget important appointments and need Plymouth’s transportation to leave their building safely. After just a few hours together, it’s clear that finding and holding down a job—let alone one paying Seattle’s market-rate rents—would be extremely challenging for them.

This is the population the Trump administration wants to move out of permanent supportive housing and into “transitional programs” paired with mental health treatment. The theory: give them treatment, get them working, move them to market-rate housing.

The reality: some people genuinely cannot work, no matter how much treatment they receive.

How the Program Works

Plymouth’s companionship program pairs volunteers with PSH residents who need help maintaining friendships—someone to talk to, run errands with, take a walk with. Most residents are living with mental illness and are referred by Harborview hospital.

The model is elegant: residents contribute 30% of their income (whether wages or disability checks) toward rent, giving them investment in their community without being cost-burdened. In exchange, they get permanent housing—no deadline to move out—plus case management, a supportive community, and companionship.

Getting approved wasn’t easy. Plymouth put me through a job interview and full-day training, then made me wait six months before starting. At first this felt excessive. Now I understand: these residents are vulnerable, and the wrong volunteer could do real harm.

What I’ve Learned

Working with my resident has illuminated something I didn’t previously understand: there are people for whom entering the workforce just isn’t realistic. Not because they’re lazy or unmotivated, but because their cognitive challenges make it genuinely impossible.

If you or I suddenly became homeless, work requirements might be reasonable. We have the cognitive capacity, social skills, and ability to navigate unfamiliar situations. But for individuals like my resident, work requirements are completely beyond their abilities.

The level of investment needed to get this person ready for full-time work might exceed their realistic lifetime earning potential.

That’s a hard truth. But it’s an important one.

Why This Matters

My resident is stable, safe, managing their condition reasonably well. They’re not cycling through emergency rooms or jails. They’re not vulnerable on the streets. They have dignity, routine, and a home.

Is PSH expensive? Yes. But what’s the alternative? Emergency room visits cost thousands. Jail costs more. And the human cost of leaving someone with severe cognitive challenges to fend for themselves is incalculable.

When most people think about mental illness and homelessness, they picture the visibly disturbed downtown—shouting at invisible enemies, unable to care for themselves. Those people exist and desperately need help.

But there’s another group: people like my resident, who can live independently with support but would quickly deteriorate without it. They’re invisible because programs like Plymouth are keeping them housed. They’re the success stories we don’t hear about, because success looks like a quiet life of stability rather than dramatic transformation.

Permanent supportive housing isn’t charity. It’s pragmatism.

An Impossible Invitation

I wish politicians of both parties could have this volunteer opportunity. The extensive screening makes it unrealistic for most people, but I’m certain it would make policymakers more effective.

Because once you sit with someone whose brain simply doesn’t work like yours, once you understand that no amount of job training will change that fundamental reality, the debate about “personal responsibility” and “work requirements” starts to feel obscene.

Some people genuinely cannot work. They still deserve housing. They still deserve dignity. And permanent supportive housing is how we provide both.

This month, Jen and I embraced a movement called Resist and Unsubscribe.

If you haven’t heard of it, the movement was started by NYU Professor Scott Galloway in response to what he sees as tech CEOs’ complicity with Trump administration policies. The basic idea: pressure these CEOs to speak out against harmful policies by impacting their bottom lines and stock market valuations—the only language they truly understand.

The movement isn’t specific to policies about homelessness, but it certainly includes policies about homelessness.

The Policies That Will Push More People onto the Streets

The Trump administration is pursuing several policies that will devastate people experiencing housing instability:

SNAP benefit cuts: The “Big Beautiful Bill” cuts $186 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program through 2034—roughly a 20% reduction. That makes it harder for families to pay rent, which means more evictions.

Medicaid rollbacks: The same bill cuts over $1 trillion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. That means people with mental health conditions and substance abuse disorders lose access to treatment, making it much harder for them to maintain housing.

HUD funding redirection: Federal housing assistance is being redirected away from permanent supportive housing programs like those I’m volunteering at that actually work. The change could put as many as 170,000 at risk of losing their housing again.

Immigration enforcement: The administration’s inhumane immigration crackdown falls disproportionately on our most vulnerable neighbors. Those fearing ICE (even those who are here legally) can’t go to work (or school). These people will lose their jobs, their housing, and ultimately end up on our streets. Fortunately Seattle hasn’t yet become a hotbed in the way Minneapolis has, but that may only be a matter of time.

These aren’t abstract policy debates. These are concrete actions that will push precariously housed families into homelessness.

And where are America’s tech CEOs while all this is happening?

The Morning of January 24th

On the morning of January 24, 2026, Alex Pretti—a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA—was shot and killed by Border Patrol agents while filming immigration enforcement operations with his phone. Video evidence shows agents removed his firearm from his waistband one second before another agent shot him multiple times. Alex was a legal gun owner with no criminal record. He was exercising his Constitutional rights.

That same evening, Andy Jassy (Amazon CEO) and Tim Cook (Apple CEO), along with other tech executives, attended a private White House screening of the Melania documentary. Amazon had paid $75 million to acquire the rights to “Melania” and market the film, $28 million of which went directly to Melania Trump herself.

Three days later, on Wednesday, January 28, Amazon announced it was laying off 16,000 employees—including several of my friends and former colleagues.

The message could not be clearer: These companies will pay $75 million to curry favor with an administration enabling extrajudicial killings, but they’ll stay silent about those killings while cutting thousands of jobs in the midst of record profits.

Jen and I decided we can’t support that in good conscience.

What Else Could Amazon Have Done with $75 Million?

Amazon claims to care about homelessness in its communities. And yet it chose to invest $75 million in what was and is expected by most experts to be a huge financial flop (the film has earned about $16 million to date) to curry favor with the Trump administration, which, as mentioned above, is making life vastly harder for the homeless and guaranteeing large increases in their numbers.

I don’t doubt Amazon will generate a positive return from its investment, perhaps in the form of reduced regulation, taxation, tariffs, or other government benefits. But there’s a term for spending money to influence government officials: bribery.

Imagine if Amazon had invested that $75 million in our homeless crisis instead. The money could have:

• Funded about 50,000 months of rent payments for needy individuals, statistically keeping about 1,300 families housed that would otherwise lose their homes (about one in 40 rent payments results in a “successful” diversion - that is, a family keeps their home that would otherwise lose it).

• Built over 16,000 tiny homes through Sound Foundations NW: enough to supply one for every homeless individual in King County

• Built 250 permanent units of affordable housing (at a cost of ~$300K per unit) that could have provided long-term, stable housing for 500 people or more (assuming ~2 people per household unit)

What We’re Doing About It

I went through our 2025 spending and calculated what we spent on Amazon last year:

• $8,961 at Amazon (234 separate transactions!)

• $894 at Amazon-owned Whole Foods

• $271 on Audible

• $237 at Amazon Go

• $227 on Kindle purchases

• $132 on Amazon-owned Ring

• $99 on Amazon-owned One Medical

• $20 on Amazon Web Services

We also spent $1,027 on Apple products and services, for a total of $11,869.

These organizations are harming homeless people in Seattle. That’s a lot of money to spend supporting them.

So we’re not going to do it anymore.

Here’s what we’ve changed:

Amazon:

• We’ve gone cold turkey on consumer products from Amazon. I doubt we’ll drop to $0 this year, but a 90% reduction feels completely attainable. We’re shifting most of that spend to Costco, which is actively fighting the Trump administration’s tariff policies.

• I’ve cancelled my One Medical subscription and am now searching for a new primary care doctor.

• Instead of Audible, I’m using Libby (the library app), which is actually wonderful—I just need to plan ahead since popular titles have 5-10 week waitlists.

• I’ll still use my Kindle but only as hardware—I can get e-books through Libby too.

• We’re shopping at Metropolitan Market and PCC instead of Whole Foods.

Apple:

• We’ve cancelled Apple Music, Apple News, and Apple TV for a total savings of $27/month. We’ll probably subscribe to Spotify instead for music, and just watch more Netflix instead of the shows on Apple TV

What we’re keeping (for now):

• Ring security system—candidly, I want to know when my teenager comes and goes, and who’s with her

• Apple iCloud storage—allows us to back up iPhone photos dynamically without risk of losing them

This Isn’t Just About Amazon and Apple

The Resist and Unsubscribe movement targets multiple companies whose CEOs have remained silent or actively complicit. Jen and I felt Amazon and Apple were our top priorities given our spending patterns, but we’ll be looking at our spending with other targeted companies too.

If interested, you can learn more at resistandunsubscribe.com.

Why This Matters for Homeless People

I know some readers are thinking: “Drew, this seems off-topic for a blog about homelessness.”

But it’s not.

The policies these tech CEOs are enabling through their silence will push thousands more Americans onto the streets. The SNAP cuts alone will devastate families who are already choosing between food and rent. The Medicaid rollbacks will leave people with treatable mental health conditions untreated, spiraling into homelessness. The HUD funding redirections will eliminate the permanent supportive housing programs that actually get people off the streets.

When CEOs with enormous platforms choose silence over speaking out, they’re complicit. When they spend $75 million on vanity projects for the First Lady while cutting 16,000 jobs, they’re showing us their priorities.

We can’t change federal policy directly. But we can change how we spend our money. We can refuse to subsidize this complicity.

This Isn’t for Everyone

I recognize boycotts aren’t feasible for everyone. Maybe you need Amazon for affordable goods on a tight budget. Maybe you’re locked into an Apple ecosystem for work. Maybe you just don’t have the bandwidth to research alternatives right now.

That’s okay. This isn’t about purity tests or moral superiority. It’s just about sharing a different type of investment we can make if we choose to and which has an impact on homelessness. That, after all, is how I see the point of this blog.

If you do want to participate, even small actions, like cancelling a few subscribe & saves or reducing spending by 10% matter.

If you do decide to participate, please let me know in the comments!

I’ve spent the past year volunteering at shelters, food banks, and housing programs. I’ve served thousands of meals, sorted donations, and built tiny homes. But this was different. This was the best opportunity I’ve had all year to have real conversations with homeless people.

I wouldn’t call them in-depth conversations—I was administering a standardized survey, after all. But I got to talk to each person for 10-15 minutes, and you could definitely get a sense for how they were doing and what their needs were.

What struck me most was the sheer diversity of people’s circumstances, and how radically different their paths back to housing might need to be.

The People I Met

Let me share a few examples (these are composites to protect identities):

The young couple in a tent: A 20-year-old white woman who could have been me or Jen at that age. She lives in a tent with her fiancé. I know it’s ridiculous that it hits me harder when it’s a young white woman, but it does—either because I don’t see it as often (minorities are disproportionately represented among the homeless) or because it doesn’t feel as real when it’s someone who doesn’t look like me. Seeing her made it visceral: this could happen to anyone.

The man who couldn’t stay on track: A white man in his 50s who really struggled to answer the survey questions. Each question would send him off on a new tangent. At a certain point, I had to enter some educated best guesses about what his answers were because I just couldn’t pin him down. Whether it was mental illness, cognitive issues, or just the fog of living on the streets, he clearly needed more than just a job and an apartment.

The woman abandoned at five: A Black woman who became homeless for the first time at age five. The survey asked what caused you to become homeless initially, with two relevant options: “Family couldn’t afford for me to live with them” and “Family didn’t want me to live with them.” She was clear her situation was the latter. This broke my heart. Natalie was five once. I cannot imagine not wanting her to live with me.

Two Very Different Groups

By the end of my shifts, I’d interviewed about 30 people across a wide range of ages, races, and circumstances. As I reflected on these conversations, a pattern emerged.

Most (maybe two-thirds?) seemed clearly struck by bad circumstances. Give them some job training, a place to look for work with a shower and clean clothes, and I’d bet dollars-to-donuts they’d be fine. These were people who were motivated, coherent, and just needed a break.

The other third seemed like it was going to take a lot of work to get them re-integrated into society. They needed mental health treatment and/or substance abuse treatment, and a lot of support before they’d even be able to live independently. A couple seemed like they might not be able to re-integrate no matter how much investment we made in them.

Why This Matters for Policy

Of course, my observations aren’t professional in nature—I’m just a concerned member of the community trying to learn. I could be dead wrong about these assessments.

But what the experience underscored for me is that there is no single solution to homelessness, because these people are so different.

For the first group, requiring sobriety and mental health treatment as a precondition of housing is probably a reasonable approach. These people are motivated and capable. They just need a bit of structure and support.

But for the second group, that approach feels like it will never work. They just aren’t ready, and it’s obvious when you talk to them. Asking them for sobriety in exchange for housing is like asking a 41-year-old woman with a torn ACL to win gold in an Olympic slalom race. Sorry Lindsey Vonn, but it just isn’t going to happen. Many of them will need permanent supportive housing more or less forever, but at a minimum they’ll need housing first, without strings attached, to get them off the street, and the offer of treatment.

This is why I’ve become such a strong supporter of Housing First approaches for people with serious mental illness and substance abuse disorders. It’s not because I think sobriety doesn’t matter. It’s because I’ve sat across from people who simply cannot achieve sobriety while living on the streets, and demanding they do so before we’ll help them is demanding the impossible.

An Invitation

I wish there was a way for everyone to complete 30 brief interviews with a broad cross-section of homeless people. I think it would help ground the entire homelessness debate in our city.

There probably isn’t a practical way to make that happen. But if you ever get a chance to help out with a Point-in-Time Count, I suggest you jump at the opportunity.

You’ll spend a few hours of your time. You’ll have conversations you won’t forget. And you’ll come away with a much deeper understanding of who our homeless neighbors actually are—not as a political abstraction or a policy problem, but as individual human beings with wildly different stories and needs.

San Francisco: The Breaking the Cycle Fund

In January 2025, Daniel Lurie began his term as mayor of San Francisco. Within weeks he launched the “Breaking the Cycle Fund.” Within four months, the fund had already raised $37.5 million to support expanding shelter and treatment bed capacity, mostly from four donors:

• $11 million from Tipping Point Community (Lurie’s former nonprofit)

• $10 million from the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation

• $10 million from Michael Moritz’s Crankstart Foundation

• $6 million from Keith and Priscilla Geeslin

These funds helped stand up 500 new beds, including over 70 behavioral healthcare beds specifically for people with mental health or substance abuse issues.

At 822 Geary Street, SF opened a 24-hour stabilization center funded by the program. In the first five months it’s been opened, 344 people have been admitted. Of those, 88 entered residential treatment programs. Not bad for a brand-new program.

I should be clear: these funds aren’t transformative on their own. San Francisco spends about $700 million annually on homelessness services. So $37.5 million represents a roughly 5% boost—significant, but not revolutionary.

Still, $37.5 million in four months is remarkable. And 500 new beds in five months represents the kind of rapid deployment that cities usually claim is impossible due to permitting, NIMBY opposition, and bureaucratic inertia.

San Francisco, like Seattle, will complete its Point-in-Time Count this month. When those results are published, perhaps we’ll have a better sense of whether this accelerated approach is actually reducing street homelessness.

Would this work in Seattle? I’m a bit disappointed we haven’t tried something similar yet. Seattle has its share of wealthy individuals, foundations, and corporations that claim to care about homelessness. We have the Gates Foundation. We have Amazon, Microsoft, and a dozen other tech giants. We have billionaires and near-billionaires in every neighborhood with water views.

Where’s our Breaking the Cycle Fund?

Mayor Katie Wilson pledged to create 4,000 new units of emergency housing and shelter over four years. That’s an ambitious goal that will require funding beyond what the city budget can provide. A privately-funded $40-50 million initiative—similar to San Francisco’s—could jumpstart that effort and demonstrate that Seattle’s wealthy are willing to put their money to work.

Portland: Moving at Disaster Speed

A year ago, Portland elected Keith Wilson as mayor (no relation to Katie Wilson, though they share a determination to actually do something about homelessness). He ran in part on a promise to stand up 1,500 units of shelter fast—“as if a natural disaster had struck,” as the Seattle Times reported.

A year in, he’s actually done it.

Portland has added 1,200 overnight shelter beds in twelve months and an additional 400 “flex” beds, more than doubling the city’s shelter capacity in a single year. Those beds served 3,174 people in 2025—roughly half of Portland’s unsheltered population.

Would this work in Seattle? Too soon to know if Portland’s approach will actually reduce chronic homelessness or just shuffle people around temporarily.

But here’s what Portland demonstrates: cities can move incredibly fast when they have the political will.

We always hear that opening new shelters takes years due to permitting, community opposition, construction timelines, and funding cycles. Portland proved that’s not actually true. When you treat homelessness like the emergency it is—when you move with disaster-response urgency—you can double shelter capacity in twelve months.

Our new mayor, Katie Wilson, certainly seems determined to try something similar. The question is whether Seattle has the political will to actually make it happen. Will we allow sites to open quickly, or will every project get bogged down in neighborhood meetings and appeals?

If you’re not familiar with PIT counts, they’re our primary tool for understanding the homeless population: for instance, how many people are experiencing homelessness, whether they have children, whether they’re sheltered or unsheltered, what percentage struggle with substance abuse and the like. The counts happen every other year in King County, and they’re required for any community to receive federal funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

When I signed up, I assumed the count worked like it does in most cities: an army of volunteers fanning out across the county at night, clipboards in hand, literally trying to “find” as many homeless people as possible before dawn.

Turns out, Seattle does it completely differently.

A Statistical Innovation

King County is one of only two communities in the United States that uses a methodology called Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS). We’ve used it since 2022, and it’s actually much more accurate at counting hard-to-find populations than the traditional approach.

Think about the limitations of the traditional method. Volunteers walk designated routes for a few hours one night in January. If someone is sleeping in the woods, under a bridge, in a car parked on a side street, or anywhere else volunteers don’t happen to look, they’re missed. And this is a population that often doesn’t want to be found—many have suffered significant trauma and have good reasons to avoid strangers with clipboards. In rural areas especially, it’s remarkably easy for homeless people to remain invisible.

How Respondent Driven Sampling Works

Here’s the process:

Step 1: Volunteers give a “coupon” and bus ticket to a small sample of homeless individuals across the county.

Step 2: Coupon recipients can travel to a nearby “HUB” site using the bus ticket.

Step 3: Volunteers at the hub—like me—greet each person, scan their coupon, administer a 15-20 minute survey, and then give them three additional coupons to share with other homeless people in their network.

Step 4: Respondents receive compensation for participating: $20 for individuals, $40 for heads of families. They can earn an additional $5 for each of their three coupons that gets used by someone else.

Instead of volunteers trying to find homeless people, homeless people recruit each other. They know where their friends are sleeping. They know who’s hiding under which bridge. They have access to networks that are invisible to housed volunteers.

Why This Generates Better Data

RDS is more effective than traditional counts for two key reasons:

First, participation is voluntary. Homeless individuals choose whether to travel to a hub and take the survey. This matters enormously. When you’re not being counted by a stranger who woke you up at 2am and is asking invasive questions, you’re much more likely to provide complete and accurate data. The $20-40 incentive doesn’t hurt either—it shows respect for people’s time.

Second, the survey captures network data. Respondents are asked to name everyone in their homeless network, providing just the first two letters of their first name and first two letters of their last name. This protects confidentiality (you can’t identify someone from “JOHA”) but provides enough information to eliminate duplicates in the statistical modeling.

So if “JOHA” is identified by three different people, the University of Washington statisticians can identify that those referrals are probably the same person and adjust the count accordingly.

Still an Undercount (But Better)

Let me be clear: the PIT count will still yield an undercount of homelessness, even with RDS.

RDS is better at finding hard-to-reach populations than a traditional one-night count. But like any point-in-time methodology, it only captures people who are homeless on one specific day in January. It misses everyone who becomes homeless in March, or July, or October. The true count of people experiencing homelessness at any point during 2026 could be as much as 3x higher than the PIT count will show.

Still, RDS represents a significant improvement. And I’m genuinely excited to see it in action.

The Statistical Complexity

One downside of RDS: it requires significant statistical modeling work, which will be performed by the University of Washington.

While traditional visual counts are simple, RDS is complex. Statisticians must weight the referral networks to generate population estimates. This complexity requires peer review, so results take longer to publish. We probably won’t see initial findings until May.

What I Expect to See

I wish I could say I’m optimistic about the results.

Sadly, the count is almost certain to continue the upward trend from 2024, which showed a 26% increase from the 2022 baseline.

The factors driving homelessness haven’t gotten better. They’ve gotten worse:

Housing costs keep climbing while wages stagnate. The gap between what lower income people earn and what rent costs continues to widen, pushing more people into precarious housing situations.

Federal benefit disruptions. The government shutdown created chaos in programs like SNAP. More significantly, eligibility restrictions passed in the “Big Beautiful Bill” are only beginning to take effect. Those impacts probably won’t hit this count much, but they’ll definitely show up in 2028.

Emergency Rental Assistance ended. The pandemic-era ERA2 program ended in September 2025. Many local programs closed even earlier as funds were depleted. These were the prevention programs that kept people from becoming homeless in the first place. Without them, more people slip through the cracks.

So yes, I expect the numbers to be bad.

Nonetheless, you can’t solve a problem you can’t measure. So next week I’ll be at the Lake City Hub scanning coupons, asking questions, and hopefully making a few people feel seen and heard in the process.

I’ll report back on what I learn. And when the results are published in May, I’ll break down what they mean for Seattle’s approach to homelessness.

Not metaphorically stuffed. Actually, physically packed so full that the driver couldn’t see out the rear window. Cardboard boxes flattened and stacked. Plastic wrap wadded into bags. Mountains of individual packaging from tuna canisters, Nutella packs, and granola bars. Enough waste to fill the entire cargo area of a medium-sized SUV, with a recycling-bin-sized container left over that I volunteered to haul to the dump on my way home.

This wasn’t from a party or a home renovation project. This was from one hour of volunteer work with Seattle Homeless Outreach, preparing backpacks for people living on the street.

The Assembly Line of Waste

Here’s what we did that afternoon: We broke down Costco-size quantities of everything you might need on the street and reassembled it into individually-sized portions to go in inexpensive vinyl backpacks.

Hats. Gloves. Hygiene kits. Chapstick. Hand wipes. Tissues. Granola bars. Nutella packs. Ritz crackers. Oranges. Sleeping bags. Jackets. Tents. Bottles of water.

For an hour, about a dozen volunteers worked an assembly line. Open the bulk package. Distribute the contents into individual backpacks. Throw away the packaging. Repeat.

The generosity of the donations and the efficiency of the volunteers were both admirable. But what struck me was the sheer volume of packaging waste we were generating.

Reams of cardboard from bulk boxes. Plastic wrap by the armful. Vast quantities of individual packaging—every six-pack of socks had its own plastic wrapper, every pair of gloves came in a sealed bag, every tuna canister sat in its own plastic cradle.

By the end of the hour, we’d assembled over 250 backpacks. And we’d generated enough waste to fill an SUV.

Not an Argument Against Giving

Let me be clear: I’m not saying we shouldn’t be providing this stuff. Of course we should. People living on the street desperately need warm clothing, food, water, and basic hygiene supplies. Seattle Homeless Outreach does vital work, and I’m grateful to be part of it.

My point is simpler and sadder: It would be so much more efficient if we just housed these people.

The Economics I Already Knew

I already know—and I suspect most people know—that having a homeless population is economically wasteful. I’ve written before about how a single night in a homeless shelter costs between $100-150. That’s $3,000-4,500 per month. Easily enough for a pretty nice apartment, even in a high-cost city like Seattle.

We spend more money NOT solving homelessness than it would cost to actually house people. That fact alone should be enough to change our policies.

But watching that SUV fill up with garbage made me realize we’re wasting more than just money.

What Housing Would Actually Change

If those 250 people had homes, they wouldn’t need those backpacks at all. Or rather, they’d need one decent backpack that might last them a few years, not a cheap vinyl one that will fall apart in a few weeks.

They’d have a place to put a decent pair of gloves that would last more than one season. A coat they could hang in a closet instead of stuffing into a damp backpack every morning. A drawer for socks that wouldn’t get soaked and thrown away.

They’d have a kitchen where they could cook actual meals—nutritious food that doesn’t come wrapped in three layers of plastic. They could buy a head of lettuce, a bag of rice, a dozen eggs. Things that feed you without filling a landfill.

They’d have a bathroom with a shower, eliminating the need for individually-wrapped hygiene wipes. A medicine cabinet for chapstick and toothpaste. A towel that hangs on a rack instead of staying damp in a plastic bag.

The Hidden Environmental Cost

We talk a lot about the human cost of homelessness—the trauma, the health consequences, the loss of dignity. We talk some about the economic cost.

But we rarely talk about the environmental cost.

Every week, outreach teams across Seattle distribute thousands of these supply packages. Multiply that by every city in America. Multiply it by 52 weeks a year. The packaging waste is staggering.

And it’s not just the packaging. It’s the inefficiency of the entire system. Manufacturing thousands of cheap tents that will last a few months instead of providing permanent shelter. Distributing single-use everything instead of giving people access to reusable items. Trucking supplies around the city instead of simply paying rent.

It’s wasteful in every possible dimension: economically, environmentally, and humanely.

Just One More Sad Reality

As I drove to the dump with my cargo area full of cardboard and plastic, I kept thinking about how absurd the whole thing was.

We live in a society wealthy enough to mass-produce and distribute thousands of supply packages every week. We have volunteers willing to spend their Saturday afternoons assembling backpacks. We have donors generous enough to fund it all.

But we can’t quite manage to just help these people find and keep apartments.

So instead, we create this elaborate, expensive, wasteful system that sort of helps people survive on the street but doesn’t actually get them off the street. And in the process, we generate SUV-loads of garbage.

I’m not criticizing the outreach workers or the volunteers or the donors. We’re all doing what we can within a broken system.

I’m just pointing out that the system is broken in more ways than we usually count.

Homelessness wastes money. It wastes human potential. It wastes dignity.

And apparently, it also wastes SUV-loads of packaging

I was, and remain, pretty shocked.

I’ve always thought of this year as an opportunity to learn publicly by asking tough questions as an outsider. The blog exists so others can learn alongside me, if they’re interested. I’ve tried to bring the same analytical approach I used at Amazon to understanding homelessness - examining data, testing assumptions, and sharing what I discover.

Sadly, not everyone wants to be asked tough questions.

Let me explain what happened.

The draft began by describing an interaction I’d observed at the shelter - a young guest not following one of the shelter’s rules and, in my initial reaction at least, not seeming particularly grateful for the support ROOTS was offering him. I didn’t use his name or identifying details.

But I didn’t stop there. The entire point of the post was to push back against my own initial reaction. I walked through the context that might explain his behavior: Many young adults at ROOTS are former foster kids who’ve never had stable parental support. ROOTS requires guests to leave between 8am and 9pm, meaning this young man may have spent his entire day in the literal cold, dark, and rain. Mental illness and substance abuse are common among ROOTS’ population, though certainly not universal, and the shelter welcomes young adults experiencing these conditions.

I concluded that while his behavior was disappointing on its face, it was pretty understandable when you actually thought about the circumstances he might have been facing. I even made a comparison to my daughter Natalie, who also occasionally violates the rules in my house, and noted the absurdity of forcing compliance with every rule as a condition of shelter under my roof.

The post was an exercise in seeking understanding, in checking my own privilege and assumptions - and in challenging readers to do the same.

ROOTS saw it differently.

ROOTS’ executive director wrote that presenting an isolated negative incident could perpetuate harmful stereotypes. She informed me I would be removed from ROOTS’ volunteer roster because the organization “needs to ensure that those who enter our space lead with clarity and compassion.”

Let me be clear: I have enormous respect for the work ROOTS is doing. They fill a critical need for young adults experiencing homelessness, providing not just beds but case management, nursing support, and a pathway to stability. Their services are deeply needed, and I encourage any readers to continue supporting them.

But I couldn’t believe how differently we saw this draft post.

While I agree that sharing negative stories without context can perpetuate stereotypes, this post was attempting precisely the opposite - offering important context that many housed people, including my past self, might not have considered. The whole point was to challenge the “ungrateful homeless person” narrative, not reinforce it.

I also felt the accusation that I lacked compassion was harsh, particularly given this was a request for feedback on a draft, not something I’d actually posted. I’d explicitly written that I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t harm any guests and that I wouldn’t publish unless leadership was comfortable with it. And that’s why I’m not sharing any specifics about the story here.

ROOTS’ executive director is right about at least one thing: I’m obviously an outsider to the world of homelessness. I had two involved parents, attended independent schools, received financial help buying my first home, and worked at Amazon. As a result, of course I don’t always use the right words or think about things in the right ways. All I know for sure is that I want to help.

There are many people who are more compassionate, and more educated about homelessness, than me. I’ve met them this year at every organization I’ve worked with. Some have devoted their entire professional lives to this cause, which certainly dwarfs my single-year commitment. Others are simply passionate volunteers who show up week after week.

But here’s what troubles me most: If organizations eject people like me for perceived lack of compassion - volunteers who are trying to learn, who are asking for feedback, who are genuinely attempting to understand and help - I don’t know how many supporters will be left.

I shared these concerns with the executive director in an email almost three weeks ago. I explained my perspective and intentions with the draft post. But I never heard back.

Homelessness is an enormous problem in Seattle. We have roughly 10,000 homeless neighbors on any given night, with perhaps three times that experiencing homelessness at some point during the year. The need vastly exceeds available resources.

We need as many committed volunteers, donors, and nonprofit employees as we can find. We need people who are willing to set a 5:30am alarm to show up for a 6:30am breakfast shift. We need people who will write checks. We need people who will ask uncomfortable questions and wrestle publicly with their own assumptions.

My hope in sharing this experience is not to criticize ROOTS. I genuinely believe their decision came from a place of passion for protecting the community they serve. But I do think it raises important questions about how nonprofits engage with imperfect allies.

I believe my readers are smart enough to form the right opinions, even when my presentation is imperfect. I believe that talking about homelessness publicly necessarily involves some risk of harm, but that not talking about it is much worse. I believe there is a place for asking tough questions, for examining our assumptions, for learning in public.

We can’t afford to fight amongst ourselves. There is too much work to do.

What Are These Tiny Homes, Exactly?

Each tiny home is 8x12 feet—basically a bedroom. Inside, residents get a bed, linens, a closet, an overhead light, electricity, a window, and both a space heater and an A/C unit. Not luxurious, but warm, safe, and dry. Which is saying a lot when you’re used to sleeping outside and worry constantly about theft.

The homes are placed in villages with shared community spaces: bathrooms with hot showers and flushable toilets, a community kitchen, laundry facilities, and a food pantry.

In theory, everything you need to get back on your feet. At least, if you’re homeless because of a pretty simple economic reason like a job loss or eviction. More complex cases (for instance, those with mental health or drug abuse issues) will likely require more help.

Volunteering Efficiently

Sound Foundations utilizes volunteers incredibly efficiently. I’m not what you’d call a handy person—the handyman actually laughed at me when I asked him to install hooks for our bikes in the garage—but they’ve put me to work painting (an entire house, inside and out, in a single five-hour shift), installing insulation, doing trim work (with nail guns!) and even erecting walls and roofs as part of a team.

I’ve almost never found myself standing around with nothing to do. The shifts are 5-6 hours, which makes much better use of my commute time than the typical 2-3 hour volunteer shift. You show up, they hand you tools and clear instructions, and you actually build something tangible. By the end of the day, you can point to a structure and say, “I helped build that.”

If you’re interested in helping—or just want to learn a bit about construction—I strongly encourage you to volunteer at Sound Foundations. Just sign up for their newsletter (here), and when it arrives on Wednesday evenings, you can sign up for shifts the following week.

The Economics Make Sense

Sound Foundations doesn’t just utilize volunteers efficiently. They utilize financial donations efficiently too.

Each tiny home costs $4,500 in physical materials. Compare that to roughly $300,000 for a unit of permanent supportive housing.

Sound Foundations doesn’t actually operate tiny home villages (they just build the homes), but operating costs are equally impressive. Each home costs about $20,000 per year to operate (covering the shared bathrooms, kitchens, utilities, and site management). Based on what I’ve learned about Seattle shelters, a bed night typically costs $100-150, which works out to roughly $40,000 per year for a shelter bed. And a shelter bed can only accommodate one person, whereas a tiny home can potentially house two.

So we’re talking about half the operating cost compared to shelter, and one-sixtieth the capital cost compared to permanent housing.

Better Than Congregate Shelter

The cost advantage is compelling, but it’s not the only reason I’m excited about tiny homes.

Tiny homes keep people safe, dry, and warm. Shelters aim to do the same, but they have a more dubious track record on “safe.” Theft and violence are not uncommon in congregate shelters (“congregate” shelters offer communal sleeping areas rather than locking, individual ones). For this reason, many of the homeless individuals I’ve spoken with have told me they would love to get into a tiny home village. I haven’t heard as much enthusiasm about congregate shelter.

The privacy matters. Having your own lockable space, where you can keep your belongings without fear of theft, where you can have a moment of peace, where you can feel like a person rather than a number in a bed—that’s not a luxury.

The Outcomes Speak for Themselves

Tiny home villages also have a dramatically better track record of transitioning people to permanent housing than traditional shelters. According to the Low Income Housing Institute (the largest operator of tiny home villages in Seattle), 50% of residents leaving tiny home villages transitioned into permanent housing. In contrast, only 16% of residents leaving congregate shelters found permanent housing.

This makes intuitive sense. Congregate shelter is certainly much better than the streets. But it’s still chaotic and distracting. Shared sleeping spaces, constant noise, lack of privacy, the stress of navigating communal living with dozens or hundreds of other people who are also in crisis—none of that is conducive to getting a job, advancing your education, or doing the focused work of recovery.

Can They Be Deployed at Scale?

One significant limitation to tiny home villages is that, like any form of shelter, they require real estate to be deployed. The real estate must meet several characteristics: it must be large enough to accommodate at least 20+ homes, must be reasonably close to services and transit, and typically must be available for at least 3 years (most tiny home village sites are temporary leases before the land is reclaimed for another purpose such as construction of a large, permanent building).

Given the density of Seattle and King County, there are very few sites that meet these criteria. Those that do must almost always overcome local NIMBY opposition to be approved. As a result, the current bottleneck in deploying tiny homes is not their construction but the real estate required to deploy them.

However, there is clear progress being made. Sound Foundations’ tiny homes will be deployed in four new villages in 2025, and the organization expects six new villages to open in 2026. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 150+ new homes each year greater than the ~115 homes the factory expects to turn out in 2025.

I believe most of the homes being built will be deployed within a reasonable timeframe, in part because the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (which controls the homelessness budget) has been increasingly warming up to tiny homes as a way to get homeless people off the street. This can be seen, among other ways, in its decision to hire Barb Oliver, the gregarious founder of Sound Foundations and a huge proponent of the tiny home solution, as its Senior Advisor on Special Projects.

And even if Seattle can’t deploy all the homes we build, they can be transported to other jurisdictions. Other cities face the same challenges we do. These homes are mobile solutions.

Three Brand New Tiny Homes

This holiday season, Jen and I have decided to sponsor three tiny homes for $13,500 ($4,500 x 3). Each tiny home gets a name, and the organization has graciously allowed me to christen them. I’ve chosen:

Rosie’s Retreat - At 18 months, our daughter Rosie is just beginning to understand what “home” means. Someday I’ll tell her that somewhere in Seattle, someone found shelter in a home that bears her name.

Nat’s Nest - Natalie inspired all of this when she was six. I’m starting to feel I finally have a better answer to her questions. If I can, I’m going to take her to see this home when it rolls off the line.

Jen’s Junction - When Jen married me three years ago, we pledged in our vows that “we will define ourselves by the welcoming home we create.” I hope this home will welcome someone and serve as the end of a difficult journey and the start of something as wonderful as ours.

If you’d like to sponsor a home, volunteer to build one, or just learn more about the work Sound Foundations is doing, visit them here.

If you’re looking for a way to make an impact this holiday season that’s both cost-effective and deeply satisfying, I can’t recommend this highly enough.

(I’ll be spending the holidays with family the next few weeks, so this will likely be the last blog post this year. Happy holidays to all and see you in January!)

Footnote: For my own purposes, and for those following my progress on the “Impact” tab of this blog, I’m choosing to account for each of these three tiny homes as 20% of a person housed, because the construction cost is about 20% of the full first-year cost of operating a tiny home. My hope is that this is conservative, since operating costs likely decline in years 2+ (you only have to construct kitchens and bathrooms once, and the villages last 3-5 years). I also want to be conservative because, while a tiny home is a heck of a lot better than being on the street, it’s also a far cry from what I’d consider a reasonable permanent solution. I may revise this assumption as I learn more in the coming months. But using this assumption, I’ll be adding 60% of a person housed (20% x 3) to my impact tab. This also implies a cost of about $22,500 per person housed, which is around a tie for the least expensive method I’ve found so far with Mary’s Place’s prevention efforts (which I’ve modeled at $21,000 per person).

What jumped out at me was Goldstone’s reporting on the infrastructure that profits from homelessness - the “homeless industrial complex.” These aren’t the nonprofits trying to help people. These are the businesses and systems that extract wealth from vulnerable families, often making it harder for them to escape homelessness.

Credit Scores: The Inescapable Trap

Many problems for the families in this book began with damage to their credit scores. In one case, a family’s rental house burned down due to arson by an ex-boyfriend. The leasing company demanded two additional months’ rent to sever the lease. When the family refused, they were evicted.

An eviction on your record makes securing new housing dramatically harder. The families were forced into extended stay hotels or moved in with friends and family. The cruel irony? Neither situation helps repair credit scores. Consistent payments at an extended stay hotel or contributing to a friend’s rent don’t get reported to credit bureaus, so there’s no path back to good credit.

Application Fees: A Tax on Poor Credit

The last time I rented an apartment was in 2015, in the midst of a crisis for my first marriage. Needless to say my mind was elsewhere so I don’t recall much about application fees, but I would have had to pay them. With a strong job at Deloitte, good credit, and no evictions, I was approved immediately and moved in that day.

In Georgia, non-refundable application fees for low-end rentals routinely run as high as $350, with no guarantee of approval. For renters with poor credit, this becomes an enormous tax. They can’t know if they’ll be approved for any particular property, so they’re forced to submit multiple applications hoping one comes through.

Washington caps application fees at the cost of a credit check. I called my old building and learned it’s $21 per adult - relatively affordable. But this protection obviously doesn’t exist in many states like Georgia.

Extended Stay Hotels: Expensive and Unprotected

Extended stay hotels become a last resort for renters who can’t secure housing elsewhere and don’t want to take their families to shelters. Despite being significantly more expensive than apartments on a per-square-foot basis, they provide none of the basic tenant protections.

For example, in Seattle extended stay guests are ineligible for the Just Cause Eviction Ordinance, which requires landlords to give tenants notice and provide at least 14 days to get current on their rent before initiating eviction proceedings. The ordinance also requires landlords to prove the eviction is being initiated for one of 16 “just cause” reasons. This prevents them from evicting a tenant in retaliation for, say, demanding the landlord remove mold or cockroaches from the property (evictions for similar reasons happened to several Atlanta families profiled in Goldstone’s book).

At an extended stay? You can be evicted for being a single day late on rent, or for almost any reason at all.

Co-Signing Companies: Increasing Costs While Narrowing Options

This was a new one to me. Companies like TheGuarantors and Rhino will cover a renter’s lease if they fail to pay, meaning that families can sometimes get keys to an apartment even if they fail to pass the application themselves.

But the service requires an additional one-time payment from the renter, typically around the size of an extra month’s security deposit. And it’s only accepted by certain landlords, often those managing higher-end properties. These services increase housing costs both directly (through fees) and indirectly (by steering renters toward more expensive properties).

Rent-to-Own Stores: Predatory Financing

Stores like Rent-A-Center target renters with poor credit, financing furniture and electronics at usurious interest rates. At the Rent-A-Center in Burien, a refrigerator listed at $1,230 would require payments of $2,049 if financed using monthly payments over 19 months - an effective interest rate of 69%!

Private Equity: Aggressive Evictions as Business Model

Private equity firms have purchased many homes and extended stay properties over the last 15 years. Unfortunately, corporate landlords are generally much more aggressive than mom-and-pop property owners in moving to evict renters who are late on payments, while also skimping on maintenance to increase profits.

PE-backed companies like Roswell Road Partners and Covenant Capital Group in Atlanta have a policy of automatically initiating eviction proceedings when tenants are even a few days late on rent. From their perspective, the threat may force payment, and they can pass court costs directly to tenants.

What This Means

These systems create a poverty trap. A single financial shock - a medical bill, a car repair, a temporary job loss - can start a cascade leading to missed rent, eviction, and damaged credit. Before long families can find themselves living in an extended stay hotel with no path back to true housing.

Meanwhile there are big profits to be had in exploiting these people. Efficiency Lodge, one of the extended stay hotels profiled in the book with 14 properties in Georgia and Florida, acknowledged in an SEC filing that housing-insecure families and individuals were a target demographic for its properties. Similarly, Greg Juceam, the Chief Executive of Extended Stay America, confessed that rapidly rising rents across the country had been a “tailwind” for his company.

In Seattle, the good news is that we have taken some concrete steps already to protect renters, including the Just Cause Eviction Ordinance discussed above as well as a 10% cap on rent increases annually, which was passed in 2025 (I personally wish this was closer to 5%, but it’s a start).

But we need to do more to protect those already well along the journey into homelessness, who may not have a tenancy to protect. It would be great to see these protections applied to extended stay residents who have lived at a property for a certain amount of time (say, 90 days or more).

Jen and I contributed $25,000 in matching funds for Mary’s Place’s Giving Tuesday drive. Mary’s Place, as I’ve written previously, is a family shelter committed to the idea that no child should sleep outside. It is a clean, bright, and dignified space for families to get back on their feet. They also provide funds for rent arrears (to keep families in their homes) and security deposits (to help them get into new ones), as well as a plethora of needed services.

Our donation will go specifically toward paying the rent arrears of precariously housed families. While Mary’s Place didn’t want to publicize the average size of their assistance payments, I know from my previous research that providing a one month rent assistance payment can decrease the likelihood of a precariously housed family becoming homeless over a three-year period by around 2.5%. Put another way, on average 40 of these payments will serve to prevent a family from falling into homelessness.

The median rent for a 2-bedroom in Seattle is around $2,500, but we can probably assume many of the families receiving these payments are toward the lower end of the distribution - perhaps $2,000 per month. So the cost to keep a family housed is about $80,000 (40 times the $2,000 payment).

Because the average family size at Mary’s Place is nearly 4 people, this means it costs around $20,000 (one-fourth of $80,000) to keep one individual out of homelessness.

This means our donation will provide the support to keep about 1.25 individuals from becoming homeless.

This Tuesday, we’d love to help Mary’s Place increase that figure to a full 2.5 individuals by completing the full match. Will you help by making a donation to Mary’s Place today??

Please visit Mary’s Place (see link here) to make your donation. It’ll be matched 2x and may just be the difference between a family making it through a tough patch or being tossed out onto the street.

Please post in the comments if you make a gift and we can celebrate together!

We have a tradition at my house where we begin every meal saying what we’re grateful for. This is one of my favorite parts of every day because I have a lot to be grateful for, and I love sharing that with my family. Thanksgiving is kind of like a supercharged version of that ritual.

This week was a very challenging one for reasons unrelated to this project. So Thanksgiving couldn’t come at a better time because it reminds me, even during a difficult moment, how much I have to be grateful for.

This year, I’m especially grateful for something that happened in just the last two weeks. Dedicated readers will recall I spoke to the Seattle City Council about the need for funding a reserve for $36 million in federal funding our community will lose that supports our precariously housed neighbors.

I’m grateful to report that the Seattle City Council chose to allocate $20 million for this purpose. The King County Council has also introduced a budget amendment asking incoming County Executive Girmay Zahilay to propose a supplemental budget by March to add to these reserves. It appears possible that we could backfill the entire amount and keep hundreds or thousands of members of our community from returning to the streets.

Other speakers at that City Council meeting spoke about the need to extend the leases of two tent communities: Tent City 3 and Tent City 4. I’m also happy to report that both TC3 and TC4 have been extended an additional six months. Had these leases expired, these villages would have had nowhere to go and would have scattered, losing the only communities many of them have. “Without shelter, people die,” many speakers at the public comment correctly pointed out. I’m sure these extensions will save lives.

Beyond this, I’m grateful for my incredible family. The advice and support I get every day from my beautiful wife, every smile and hug from my two daughters, and the fact that my parents and my brother’s family are, as I post this, flying across the country to join us for a feast in Seattle.

Finally, but certainly not least, I’m grateful to all the readers of this blog. It has been deeply sustaining this year knowing so many of you care enough about me or this project to read these words every week.

Thank you, and happy Thanksgiving!

I get this question a lot, and it always strikes me as odd. There are at least 10,000 homeless people in our city (above 1% of the population) and some of them are quite visible. You’d think it’d be obvious.

It’s not. Interactions with homeless people on the street can be unpredictable, and many volunteer roles seem oriented to minimize interaction with homeless people or allow only surface-level interaction.

In a city with such a significant homelessness problem, I think it’s critical for all of us to have regular conversations with homeless people. It’s much easier to empathize with people you’ve spent time with, or at least met. You’re more likely to correctly understand their needs. And it’s much harder to reduce them to a political talking point or an adjective when you’ve had coffee or shared a meal with them.

When we stop interacting with people who are different from ourselves, we stop feeling a shared responsibility for our collective well-being. You might have noticed this dynamic playing out in our political environment over the past decade. When conservatives stop talking to liberals (and vice versa), they stop wishing them well. And I think something similar is happening with our homeless neighbors.

The good news here is that a lot of people do ask this question. They understand these interactions would better inform them as they debate political questions, such as whether we should place a tiny home village in a particular location, or how we can best balance taxpayers’ reasonable demands for clean public spaces against the needs of unhoused individuals who have nowhere to go.

The bad news is, it takes a bit of effort.

Over the past few months, I’ve taken on many distinct volunteer roles focused on homelessness. Yet few have involved meaningful interactions with the people we’re trying to help. I categorized the 133 volunteer hours I’ve spent so far into three categories:

• No Interaction (50% of my time so far): Sorting food donations, organizing clothing, building tiny homes

• Brief Interactions (40% of my time so far): Serving meals, bagging groceries, making sandwiches. These involve maybe 5-60 seconds of interaction per person, enough to be polite, but not enough to understand their situation

• Deeper Interactions (10% of my time so far): Direct outreach, mock job interviews, companionship with individuals in permanent supportive housing. These involve real conversations about the challenges faced by these individuals, but they are rare and some require extensive training.

As you can see, the time has been weighted toward opportunities with little direct interaction. This is true even though I’ve specifically sought out opportunities for these deeper interactions to better understand the population I’m trying to help this year.

Obviously, homeless people don’t and shouldn’t have any obligation to educate us about their experiences. They’re dealing with survival, not serving as teaching tools for well-meaning volunteers who want to understand poverty. They certainly don’t owe me any material for my blog posts. Nonetheless, I can’t help but believe we’d find more willing voters, volunteers, and donors if more opportunities existed for one-on-one interactions between these different economic segments of our community.

In the interest of fostering this interaction, I’ll share three ways that I’ve had success connecting with the homeless during this time.

• Talking Directly with People on the Street: In my experience, many people on the street are happy to share their stories (in fact, this sometimes works better if you have time on your hands, as they often have a lot to say!). One approach is to ask them after buying them lunch, which at least shows that you’re a friend. There’s a few downsides to this approach. First, it requires a level of comfort with unstructured interactions that not everyone has. And second, it doesn’t provide a full cross-section of our homeless population (for example, you’ll likely miss the sheltered population entirely), so you’ll probably end up with a skewed perspective on who our homeless are.

• Attend Open Houses: Occasionally tiny home villages or tent villages will open their gates to building a shared community with their more fortunate neighbors. Typically this happens when a political process is playing out, such as the need for the mayor to extend a lease on community ground, or authorize a new development. Unfortunately, these opportunities are neither regular nor well-publicized, so finding out about them requires some diligence. I’ll try to point them out in the blog when I hear about them though (one such opportunity is TOMORROW, Wednesday 11/19 at noon when WHEEL/Women in Black will be holding a vigil on the steps of City Hall (4th/James) from noon to 1PM to honor 20 homeless neighbors who died unsheltered this year - I’ll be there if you want to join me).

• Find Volunteer Opportunities with Deeper Interaction: Seattle Homeless Outreach is one that’s fantastic, but they only go out one Saturday a month (two in winter), so it has to work with your schedule. FareStart’s mock interviews are another, but this requires experience interviewing and is also only once a month. I recently completed training with Plymouth Healing Communities to become a companion for residents in their permanent supportive housing communities. This involves a full-day training session and a minimum one-year commitment. They also only offer this training once or twice per year, making it difficult to access. I’m excited about the opportunity to develop real relationships with people who may have mental health conditions or substance abuse disorders, but it’s probably not a realistic option for someone with limited time to commit.

As I’ve tried to highlight above, each of these opportunities have their own downsides. Most importantly, it’s critical to remain within your own level of comfort and safety. As with any volunteer work involving vulnerable populations, it’s important to follow organizational guidelines (if you’re working with a nonprofit), and trust your instincts about appropriate boundaries. But if you can find a way to try one or more of them, I think it’ll be a worthwhile effort. Not only will it teach the housed about the needs and concerns of homeless people, but done right, it can give the unhoused an all-too-rare opportunity to feel heard.

As a community, I think we could likely be doing more to foster these types of interactions. Unfortunately, the separation between homeless individuals and Seattle’s more fortunate residents seems particularly pronounced in our tech-heavy economy. I know from personal experience. When I worked at Amazon, the demanding nature of the job consumed all my time and mental energy. There was no bandwidth to think about homelessness, let alone volunteer to address it. Only after leaving that environment did I have the space to engage with this issue.

This suggests that creating meaningful interaction opportunities could boost support for homeless services. If we could connect Seattle’s tech workers with homeless individuals in authentic ways, I suspect we’d see increased empathy and engagement. The question is how to structure these interactions so they’re beneficial for everyone involved rather than voyeuristic or exploitative.

So I’m putting this question out to readers, particularly those working in nonprofits: how can we create genuine opportunities for interaction between Seattle’s homeless population and its more privileged residents? How do we build empathy without burdening people who are already struggling?

Building bridges between communities seems like it should be easier than building tiny homes, but in practice, it might be the harder construction project.

I was there to ask Seattle and King County to allocate $36 million to backfill federal funds historically used for permanent supportive housing and rapid re-housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is planning to reallocate these funds, and without local action, hundreds or thousands of our precariously housed neighbors will be kicked to the streets.

If you’re so inclined, you can watch my appeal here (I appear at exactly 20:00 for about 90 seconds).

The hearing lasted over five and a half hours, with more than 200 individuals testifying before the council. In addition to my own, I found a few other topics particularly moving:

Tent Cities Face Displacement

Tent City 3 and Tent City 4—two tent cities, one in Ravenna and one in Lake City—will both be forced to move this Saturday when their leases with the city expire. Neither has a place to go.

The most likely outcome, if the mayor and city council don’t take action, is that these communities will scatter, losing connections to their fellow residents, schools for their children, and relationships with their caseworkers. Since many individuals lack both cell phones and permanent addresses, it’s very common in these types of moves for case managers to lose people entirely they have been working to house for months, forcing individuals to start over from scratch.

One resident who spoke has five children. She spoke passionately about how painful it would be to be uprooted and force her children to attend a new school. Another resident brought her service dog to the meeting, testifying about how Tent City 4 was the only safe place for her to go. Since she’s disabled, she said she wouldn’t last long on the street and concluded, “I hope ya’ll see the value in our lives.”

The Violence of Sweeps

Many speakers, including a number of pastors and other faith-based leaders, talked about the contradictions inherent in funding both affordable housing and encampment sweeps. They described them as “violent and dehumanizing sweeps for our unhoused neighbors which don’t help and only harm, and allow us to pretend that our unhoused neighbors don’t exist.”

I was struck by the poise of one high school senior from Lincoln on this topic. She had gathered 200 letters from her peers and carried them in a folder she brought to the dais. She said the city needs affordable housing so they will have a place to live when they graduate from high school. In one month, she’ll be a voter.

Legal Support for Tenants

Several speakers asked for additional funding for the Housing Justice Project, an organization which provides free legal representation for tenants during the eviction process. It’s very hard for tenants without a lawyer to properly make their cases against landlords who are almost always represented by counsel.

My wife, Jen, volunteered for HJP a few years ago, and I believe it might be one of the most cost-effective ways to keep people in their homes and help them avoid homelessness. However, at least according to one speaker, 600-800 new eviction lawsuits are filed monthly in Seattle and HJP has the resources to represent only 33 of these.

A Positive Experience Overall

In general, it was a very positive experience. Attendance was pretty good: seven of the nine councilmembers were present (only Debora Juarez and Maritza Rivera were missing). It would be hard to accuse the council of being impatient—between two sessions that day they heard over 200 individuals over more than five and a half hours of testimony.

However, the true impact will be measured in whether these priorities are addressed. As the budget is finalized this month, I’ll be watching to see:

• Whether Seattle is able to find homes for Tent City 3 and Tent City 4

• Whether we increase or decrease the budget for encampment sweeps

• Whether we increase or decrease the funding for the Housing Justice Project

• Whether the council allocates funds to backfill federal funds for permanent supportive housing and rapid re-housing which are drying up

The title of this post comes from a simple truth spoken by multiple speakers that night: without shelter, people die. Especially as winter approaches, the decisions our council makes in the coming weeks will quite literally determine whether some of our neighbors survive until spring.

I’m grateful I had the chance to speak up for them. Now we wait to see if the council was listening.

Just in case you’re still on the fence or not planning to vote, here’s my own take on why your vote is so important. Or, if you’ve already voted, here’s why you should feel good about it!

The Seattle city budget is $8.3 billion, and roughly 250,000 people will vote in this election. That means your vote, on average, controls about $33,000 a year. Seattle’s mayor and city council both serve four-year terms, so your vote controls over $130,000 over that period.

Of course, I care much more about certain parts of the budget than others, and your priorities may differ. But as the author of a newsletter on homelessness in Seattle, one area I care a lot about is how Seattle spends revenue from the JumpStart tax. JumpStart is a tax on large businesses in Seattle that will generate about $541 million in 2025.

Five years ago, the City Council passed the JumpStart spending plan, which mandated that 62% of JumpStart revenues be spent on affordable housing (that’s about $335 million in 2025). Since then, there’s been a vigorous debate about whether the city should divert the money to other causes. The current budget allocates only $133 million to affordable housing, about $200 million less than the 62% spending plan would have devoted.

$200 million a year over four years is $800 million, which is over $3,000 for every vote cast in the election. That means each vote is, in part, like a decision about whether the city should write a $3,000 check to develop affordable housing or not.

I think that’s a pretty good use of an hour.

Three closing thoughts:

• Can’t easily get to the polls tomorrow in Seattle? Message me! I’m happy to swing by and give anyone a ride!

• Happen to want my advice on who to vote for? See here

• Think it’ll never come down to your vote? Think again. It happened in Virginia in 2017…

The reality? I’m on pace… but only just. 112 days in, I’ve volunteered 115 hours, which is just a smidge over an hour a day. And a few of those hours took place while I was still scoping A Handful of Coins, before I ‘officially’ started the one year timer. So you could argue I’m even a bit behind pace.

I realized recently that my struggle to rack up tons of volunteer hours actually mirrors the vastly greater challenge homeless people face in putting together a full-time work week. It also illustrates, I think, why the federal government’s decision to add 80 hour per month work requirements for food assistance (SNAP) and healthcare (Medicaid) is such a cruel and misguided idea, even if it might seem reasonable to some on the surface.

If I can’t volunteer 80 hours per month when my housing, food, and healthcare are secure, how can we expect someone who’s homeless to manage it?

There are three major barriers that keep me from volunteering more, that I wanted to share here. Homeless people face these same obstacles and many others - except for them the stakes are infinitely higher.

Commute Time: The Hidden Tax on Hourly Work

I live in Magnolia, a quiet neighborhood on Seattle’s west side that’s somewhat geographically isolated. With no through traffic, it’s a wonderful place to raise kids, but it’s far from just about everywhere else in the city. I routinely spend 30 minutes each way commuting to my volunteer shifts.

I don’t mind this time. I catch up on podcasts and audiobooks. But for someone commuting to an hourly job, that’s an hour each day they’re not getting paid.

For homeless people without cars, it’s much worse. Commute times of 90 minutes each way aren’t unusual when you’re dependent on public transit. That’s three daily hours not earning money.

I met a young man recently working a minimum wage job. He told me he was qualified for a construction job paying 50% more than minimum wage—an extra $10 per hour to start, with quick raises from there. But because he lacked a reliable car, he couldn’t take the job. Construction requires commuting to different job sites all around the city, sometimes on short notice. Without transportation, the opportunity was out of reach.

So he stayed at his minimum wage job instead.

Short Shifts: The Impossibility of a 40-Hour Week

Most volunteer shifts are 2-3 hours. This makes perfect sense for housed people trying to fit occasional shifts around jobs or family life. But it creates a major problem for homeless people trying to earn a living wage.

Many homeless people work “short shift” jobs. Some stand outside Home Depot hoping to be hired as day laborers for gigs that last only a few hours. Retailers and fast food restaurants expect workers to be available for four-hour shifts to cover peak periods. Concerts, sporting events, and festivals hire short-term employees for less than full-day shifts.

When working these types of jobs, it’s nearly impossible to string together anything approaching a 40-hour work week. The randomness of scheduling, combined with commute times, makes it extraordinarily difficult to hit even the 80-hour monthly threshold required for benefits.

And that’s before you start missing shifts for childcare…

Childcare: The Unpredictable Schedule Killer

As dedicated readers know, I have a 14-year-old daughter, Natalie, and a one-year-old, Rosie. Spending time with each of them, along with my wonderful wife Jen, represents the highlights of my life. But even though I love it, they require big chunks of time that sometimes conflict with my ability to volunteer.

Take a recent week. Natalie’s school observed Indigenous People’s Day on Monday and had a teacher in-service day on Friday. I take Rosie to preschool each Thursday morning, where she’s learning how to interact and play with friends. These aren’t optional commitments—they’re part of being a parent. That was half my week right there.

To be fair, having a one year-old dependent would exempt me from those work requirements. But what if I didn’t have Rosie? As a 14 year-old, Natalie would not qualify as a dependent for the purpose of these work requirements, so I’d still be on the hook. And I still would have lost two days of productivity that week when she was out of school.

For homeless people with children, these same requirements often mean missed shifts or shifts they can’t sign up for in the first place. And unlike me, they can’t afford the lost earnings.

The Cruelty of Work Requirements

I’m grateful that I don’t depend on my volunteer hours for my roof, utilities, and meals. But my schedule these last 112 days has shown me why, for someone with kids and without full-time employment, working even a modest number of hours can be extraordinarily difficult.

The 80-hour monthly work requirement might sound reasonable to someone who’s never had to navigate the barriers I’ve described. But when you’re homeless, every one of these obstacles is magnified. You’re dealing with unreliable transportation, unpredictable schedules, childcare challenges, and often health issues that make consistent work difficult.

And now, under the One Big, Beautiful Bill, if you can’t manage 80 hours per month despite all these barriers, you lose access to food assistance and healthcare. The very supports that might help you overcome these obstacles are taken away because you couldn’t overcome them.

I’ve certainly fallen well short of my volunteer goals, even with every advantage. I can’t imagine how much harder it would be with even less food and healthcare to sustain me.

The question isn’t whether homeless people deserve help. The question is whether we’re setting up requirements designed to help people succeed, or requirements designed to justify cutting them off.

After 112 days of trying to volunteer just one hour per day, I know which one this looks like to me.

The good news? The right time is right now. Both Seattle and King County will be finalizing their 2026 budgets by mid-November, and of course, city and state elections are only two weeks away, on November 4th.

Local government spends at least ~$500M on preventing and solving homelessness in Seattle. There’s more than a few assumptions here, but the basic idea is:

• King County Regional Homelessness Authority (2025): ~$125M. The KCRHA aligns services for homeless people across King County. The Authority’s 2025 budget is $207M. Given Seattle has 56% of King County’s homeless population, it’s reasonable to believe this spend is disproportionately allocated to our city as well.

• Seattle Human Services Department (2025): $~150-250M. The total HSD budget is $385M for 2025. $139M is directly allocated to the homelessness response, but there’s also $26M for public health, $26M for food & nutrition, and another $130M that includes things like family support programs, so depending on how you define “solving homelessness” it could be anywhere from $150-250M.

• Seattle Office of Housing (2025): $170M. This money is for investments in affordable housing in the form of low-interest loans. So it’s not spending per se, but definitely supports new housing units.

With about 500K voters in Seattle, that works out to about $1,000 of spending per voter, just by local government1.

That’s a lot of coin being spent on our behalf. And, given many citizens are understandably busy and not that politically involved, a small number of voices (at least relative to the number of voters) can make a big difference. For instance, when Seattle Public Schools announced a plan to close 20 elementary schools in 2024, a modest but determined group of students and parents changed their minds: about 300 protested outside SPS headquarters, and 116 people joined the waitlist for the comment period at one SPS school board meeting.

So now I’m speaking directly to readers based in Seattle or King County (though I suspect those in different locations have similar opportunities if they want to do their own research). I’m currently aware of two opportunities to influence local politics to help the homeless that I think are well worth your time:

• Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) Letter Writing Campaign: LIHI develops, owns, and operates over 3,800 affordable housing units in the broader Seattle area. They are currently calling on the City of Seattle to add $10 million to the budget for tenant-based rental assistance. If adopted, this change would almost double rent-based assistance in the Human Services Department budget to $21.4M, from $11.4M. According to Seattle Housing Authority (another low-income housing provider) in 2024, 23% of tenants were behind on rent, a threefold increase over four years. If that percentage is still accurate, that’s about 3,900 Seattle Housing Authority tenants and 1,000 LIHI tenants, not to mention tenants of other affordable housing providers. Write a letter supporting their ask here.

• King County Coalition on Homelessness Letter Writing Campaign: The coalition, which advocates for housing justice in King County, is advocating for Seattle and King County governments to backfill funds for supportive housing and rapid re-housing that the Federal Government has historically provided, but which the Trump administration is planning to withhold or reallocate in 2026. As the coalition points out, if these funds are withheld it will result in the loss of housing assistance for 170K people nationally. The coalition estimates approximately $67M in funds will be withheld from King County: while the campaign is not necessarily asking for a dollar-for-dollar backfill of that $67M, it is demanding a plan to ensure thousands of our neighbors who will be affected will stay housed. Write a letter supporting their ask here.

One thing I’ve learned writing this blog is that it is much more expensive (and vastly less humane) to provide people with a pathway out of homelessness than it is to help them avoid becoming homeless in the first place. Both of these campaigns speak to opportunities for just such an intervention.

Thus, if you live in King County, I’d ask you to take just a few minutes right now and write a thoughtful email to your elected representatives on either or both of the above campaigns. I’ve already written mine. The number of letters the organizations are hoping to send is quite small (100 for LIHI and 800 for the Coalition), so your involvement really should make a big difference.

As of right now, LIHI needs only 74 more signatures to meet its goals and the Coalition needs only 173 more. Let’s make a big push and move the needle on those numbers!

In a few weeks, budgets will be locked for 2026. If we don’t collectively act right now, we won’t have another opportunity like this for 12 months. And by that time, for many of our unstably housed and formerly homeless neighbors, it may already be too late. They may be back on the street.