If Mayor Wilson Wants To Keep Her Campaign Promise About Shelters, She Needs To Take Money From The Sweep Team

A central promise of Katie Wilson’s mayoral campaign was to add 1,000 units of shelter by the end of 2026. It’s a promise Seattle desperately needs her to keep. After declaring a state of emergency on homelessness over a decade ago, our city has failed to expand shelter capacity at the pace and scale required to tackle the crisis. As a result, homelessness in King County has increased year over year since the state of emergency was declared. Shelter expansion is obviously necessary, but Wilson has a major problem: how will she pay for it?

The 2026 budget passed by council doesn't contain the funds needed to build and run 1,000 shelter units while also maintaining existing operations. This is especially true when accounting for the projected $140 million deficit in the 2027 budget. In addition, millions of dollars that could have gone toward shelter have been set aside to backfill potentially devastating federal cuts to Continuum of Care funding. Roughly $65 million in crucial funds serving some of the highest need folks in our state are at risk. If Wilson wants to make good on her 1,000 unit promise, she needs to get serious about finding funding. However, her office instead is wasting precious dollars on the same cowardly tactics we've seen for the past decade --- just keep sweeping.

In an announcement on February 10th, she announced that the City would move forward with sweeping an encampment in Ballard that her office had previously delayed. This drew sharp criticism from housing advocates, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to sweeps.

Sweeps have been the default means of “dealing with homelessness” for years now. In 2024 alone, Seattle performed 2,504 sweeps, a massive increase from just a few years prior, all while homelessness continued to rise. In over 84% of the sweeps performed in 2024, residents received little-to-no notice, meaning the city made no real attempts at outreach. In cases like this, people will simply move to a new place nearby. At this very sweep, residents of the encampment did exactly that, in a process one man fittingly compared to musical chairs. It’s precisely this kind of constant upheaval, particularly when performed with no notice, that led a King County superior court to uphold sweeps as a cruel and unusual form of punishment in the ACLU-driven lawsuit, Kitcheon v. City of Seattle.

In addition to being inhumane and ineffective, sweeps are also extremely expensive. The city spends around $30 million a year moving people around and throwing their possessions away. That’s an enormous price tag, especially when considering only $5.6 million of that funding goes to the Human Services Department to fund outreach and support. Virtually all of the remaining $24.3 million go to the sweeps themselves, including nearly $3 million for cops to just sit around doing nothing. If Wilson is looking for money to fund shelter expansion, she should look no further than the UCT budget. 

There’s one thing standing in her way today. In 2025, the outgoing city council placed a proviso on the funds for the sweep crew. Provisos essentially lock funds in place so they can only be used for a specific purpose. This proviso means that Wilson can’t reroute these funds, even towards shelter or supportive services. With our affordable housing system in crisis, existing shelter systems under massive strain, homelessness on the rise, and the federal government actively working to undermine efforts to keep people housed, this proviso essentially prioritized cruel, useless sweeps over expanding shelter to get folks inside. They could have put the sweep money in a reserve to backfill CoC funding, but instead they chose to pause shelter expansion while continuing to sweep people every single day of the week. 

Fortunately, the proviso only received 6 votes in favor, with Council Member Alexis Mercedes Rinck voting against it and Council Members Dan Strauss and Joy Hollingsworth abstaining. With two of the votes in favor no longer in office, and Council Members Eddie Lin and Dionne Foster much less likely to support such a proviso, a clear path forward to remove it exists.

Our coalition is encouraging you to email your city council members. Tell them to lift this budget proviso and put this money towards the solution our electeds keep saying they want - actual housing and resources.

While our voices are vital in this fight, Mayor Wilson ultimately needs to be the progressive leader she promised to be. She wasn’t elected to fail on shelter expansion, while continuing to oversee the largest sweep budget our city has ever seen. She certainly wasn’t elected to reinforce a narrative that casts sweeps as essential work. She needs to act boldly and set a clear vision for how we will get out of this unending nightmare of sweeping people from street to street while services remain woefully inadequate.