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Part One: On Helping Homeless People in Seattle
Last week, KCRHA released its 2026 Point-in-Time Count for King County. The numbers aren’t good.
Homelessness rose 9% since 2024, from 16,868 to 18,365 people. More concerning: the percentage of that population living unsheltered—on the street, rather than in a shelter—rose from 58% to 64% of the total.
KCRHA tried to find a silver lining, noting that the homelessness response system successfully housed more than 10,000 households during the study period. The problem is that more than 10,000 households fell into homelessness during the same period. We’re running as fast as we can on a treadmill that keeps speeding up.
So how do I feel about what I’ve accomplished this past year?
Most observers looking at this report would conclude the past two years have been terrible for homelessness in Seattle. They’d be right. Seattle’s population grew a bit less than 1% per year during this period. Homelessness grew roughly 5% per year. Unsheltered homelessness—the most visible and most dangerous form—grew roughly 10% per year.
The Three Levers
At its root, homelessness is a brutal but fairly simple equation. There are three levers that determine whether the crisis gets better or worse:
Lever #1: Inflow. The number of people who become homeless in a given year.
Lever #2: Quality of life while homeless. Whether someone experiencing homelessness is sheltered or unsheltered, fed or hungry, safe or exposed.
Lever #3: Outflow. The number of people who find housing in a given year.
If Lever #1 exceeds Lever #3, homelessness increases. It’s that simple, and right now, it’s happening.
In theory, KCRHA—and, in our own tiny way, volunteers and donors like me and many of you—have a fair amount of control over Lever #3. We have almost none over Lever #1.
But I want to say something about Lever #2, because it’s the one I’ve spent the most personal time on this year, and I think it’s been underappreciated in my own writing.
I’ve logged hundreds of volunteer hours this year, many of them in food banks, emergency shelters, and direct street outreach. In this time, I’ve come to believe that homelessness with a full belly and a safe, well-staffed kids’ club is meaningfully less brutal than homelessness with neither. A kid who eats dinner and has a place to play is not the same as a kid who doesn’t, even if both are very much still “homeless” by KCRHA’s count tonight. That’s Lever #2. It doesn’t get anyone into permanent housing. But it’s not nothing, and it’s mostly within our collective reach even when Lever #1 isn’t.
Still, Lever #2 doesn’t change the headline number, and the headline number is bad.
Why Lever #1 Is Slipping Away From Us
Seattle is simply unaffordable. The number of people falling into homelessness is mostly outside the control of volunteers, donors, and even local government. We need federal programs that feed people who can’t afford food. We need healthcare that doesn’t cost $35,000 a year for a family of four—which is what Jen and I are paying this year, since neither of us currently has a full-time job with employer coverage. We need programs that provide nutrition for infants and new mothers. Sadly, we’re moving away from all of these things.
The Country Has Changed
The country I grew up in made different choices than the one we live in now.
When I was born, the federal government was actively building public housing at scale, and HUD’s budget represented about 1.5% of federal spending. Today it’s closer to 0.35%. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program reached roughly 75% of families in poverty; today, its successor program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) reaches roughly 23%. The top marginal income tax rate was 70%; today it’s 37%—which affects not just the funds available for redistribution, but the incentives for the ultra-wealthy to give charitably. Housing construction ran at roughly 7.8 units per 1,000 people per year (already down from 11.4 in 1972); today that rate has slowed to 4.2 units per 1,000 people. And the estate tax used to kick in at $147,000, with a top rate of 70%; today the exemption is $13.6 million per person with a top rate of 40% and numerous strategies to avoid even that—ensuring this problem won’t be solved by the mere passage of a generation or two.
We can’t stop trying to help in whatever ways we can. But unless we reverse the direction of public policy, this problem will continue to get worse.
A Word on Katie Wilson
I spent a fair amount of time this year on Katie Wilson’s mayoral campaign, so it feels right to check in on how her first six months have gone, especially since homelessness was one of her signature issues. To be fair, most of the KCRHA report reflects conditions from before she took office.
It’s been a mixed bag, and I think that’s an honest assessment rather than a partisan one.
On the substantive side, Wilson has moved fast. She’s pushed three pieces of shelter-related legislation through the City Council: funding (an initial $5 million, followed by another $8.2 million drawn from underutilized city funds) to open and operate new shelters, expedited authority for the city to sign leases for larger sites, and an increase in the maximum size of tiny home villages from 100 residents to 150 (with one pilot village allowed up to 250). She set a genuinely ambitious goal: 1,000 new shelter units in her first year, with 500 of them open by mid-June, in time for the World Cup.
She missed that first milestone. The Bayside Enhanced Shelter in Interbay—near where I live—opened with 50 units in early June, expanding to 75 by month’s end, but as of this writing it’s still ramping up slowly, well short of full occupancy. When asked whether falling short counted as a failure, Wilson didn’t dodge it: “As long as there are thousands of people sleeping unsheltered on our streets, yes, we are failing.” I respect that answer more than I would have respected spin.
On the political side, she’s had a rougher few months than her supporters probably hoped for. When asked about concerns that Washington’s new millionaire tax might drive wealthy residents out of the state, she waved dismissively and said “bye”—a moment that went viral and drew national criticism, including an unflattering Washington Post editorial. That comment wasn’t actually about Starbucks; it was about the tax debate generally. But when Starbucks separately announced a $100 million, 2,000-job expansion in Nashville (while explicitly keeping its Seattle headquarters), critics stitched the two stories together into a tidier narrative than the facts really support. Wilson had also, months earlier, joined striking Starbucks baristas on a picket line and called for a boycott—comments she later told the New York Times “were not productive... and caused more harm than good.”
I’ll admit I wince a little at the “bye” moment. It’s the kind of unforced error that makes it easier for critics to paint an entire administration as glib about legitimate economic concerns, even when the underlying policy—asking millionaires to pay somewhat more—is one I support. In theory, Katie is right that mayors are supposed to represent the voters who elected them, not the corporations that don’t pay their salary. But as she may be learning, those interests can converge in ways that are politically costly to ignore.
Net-net: I think Katie Wilson is still climbing a steep learning curve as a first-time mayor. But I also think she is pushing hard on new shelter capacity, which is absolutely critical if we want to make a dent in Levers #2 and #3—the two levers actually within our control.
What We Accomplished
Despite all the doom and gloom above, it gives me real joy to report that, by my own admittedly theoretical analysis, our efforts this year may have helped 5 individuals find their way out of homelessness—8, if you count the impact of matching donations we helped inspire.
It is not enough. Of course it’s nowhere near enough, measured against 18,365 people who don’t have a home tonight. But this is Lever #3 in action, at the smallest possible scale. Those are people who will sleep in a bed tonight, go to a job tomorrow, and eat a home-cooked meal with their family after work. That’s not nothing. I refuse to let the scale of the problem erase the reality of five individual successes.
Part Two: On Being the Kind of Person I Want to Be
When I started this blog, I wrote about something that happened years ago: my then six-year-old daughter Natalie asking me, “Daddy, why is that man homeless?” The seed for this blog was planted that day, though it took years to sprout.
I wanted to show Natalie—and Rosie too, once she’s old enough to understand—that their dad is the kind of person who helps people who need help.
It’s sometimes hard as a parent to know whether these messages land. Teenagers, in particular, have been handed the noble mission of separating from their parents and forming independent identities, which means they treat any form of agreement or even acknowledgment as a personal failure. But my heart grew two sizes this week when Natalie chose, entirely on her own, to volunteer at Rainier Valley Food Bank bagging groceries for people in need.
But this project was never only about Natalie and Rosie. As someone who’s benefited from private schools, prestigious internships, married parents, and simply being a white man in a country that still rewards that combination disproportionately, I’ve long felt I hadn’t done enough to help those less fortunate.
Do I feel that way today?
Maybe it’s ironic that after a year spent trying to help, I feel even more strongly that I haven’t done enough. Part of that is because I’m in a better financial position now than I was a few years ago—AI may end up putting millions of people out of work, but there’s no question AI stocks have benefited my personal portfolio. Part of it is because I’ve now seen firsthand, up close, how much this population needs help, and how little most of them did to deserve needing it.
But I think philanthropy is like a muscle. You have to use it if you want it to get stronger. And I feel stronger than I did twelve months ago.
As I’m trying to teach Rosie these days, it’s possible to feel more than one thing at the same time. I feel tremendous sadness that more than 18,000 of our neighbors have no home tonight. I also feel real excitement, grounded in a year of evidence, that my efforts—our efforts, collectively—do make a difference.
There is much more to do. This will be my last post on A Handful of Coins. But I’ll still be involved, still volunteering, still donating, still doing what I can. I feel like this journey is at a beginning, not an end.
See you out there.
Thank you for reading A Handful of Coins over this past year. It's meant more to me than I can easily say.