Shelters Address Symptoms. Housing Solves Problems.
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson's second executive order calls for the creation of 1,000 new shelter beds by June, and we need to slow down and really think about what that means.
In winter of 2016 I was living under an overpass with my “street sister” in North Seattle when an outreach worker approached us with what she believed was good news: she had housing to offer me.
She said that there wouldn’t be a lease, and my friend could not come because the housing was segregated. She wasn’t allowed to visit, there was a curfew, and I was only allowed to take what I could carry - well, her exact words included “a garbage bags worth of stuff.” And I only had two hours to get there before they offered it to someone else.
I looked at her and could see that she genuinely wanted to help. She was so excited to offer what she saw as an opportunity - a way out of the cold. What she did not understand was what she was asking me to give up: the person I trusted most, the belongings I worked every day to protect, and the freedom that was oftentimes the only thing I had possession of.
I didn’t want to disappoint her, but I said no. She marked something on her clipboard and moved on without saying another word to me. I’ll never forget that feeling - it was one of shame and desperation because the reality is I wanted help - I needed help so badly - and I didn’t want her to think I didn’t. I was not choosing to live outside. I was refusing an alternative that I couldn’t afford, despite the City paying a premium price for it.
What she was offering me was not housing. It was shelter.
In this article I will argue that the ways in which we interchange these two terms in our language, our policies, and our budgets is at the epicenter of why homelessness in this country keeps getting worse.
Why People Refuse Offers of Shelter
Becoming a service provider was extremely validating because I quickly learned that many people perceived shelters as a net loss in their overall wellbeing, just as I had, and that the reasons I had were only a few of the many reasons the people I worked with would refuse shelter offers. In 2020 and 2021, only one in five people moved inside during sweeps. By 2024, that figure had dropped to less than one in ten, and the percentage of shelter offers that converted to enrollments reached a record low of 8.55%.
Shelters impose rules most of us would find intolerable on a population so vulnerable that they have difficulty abiding by them. They expose people to unpredictable and institutional settings for lease-long lengths of time, all for just a chance at securing actual housing.
The system is convinced people refusing shelter are "service resistant" and is too full of hubris to consider that it might be wrong. Service resistance occurs when we are guiding people in a direction they are unwilling to go. It doesn't even consider asking why people say no or whether we should be guiding them anywhere in the first place.
After founding Anything Helps, the first thing I did was conduct interviews with people in encampments who refused shelter during homeless sweeps. Some of the reasons people shared included accounts of sexual, physical and verbal abuse from both shelter staff and residents, bed bug and lice infestations, the confiscation and theft of property, retaliation for complaints and grievances, unhygienic living conditions and facilities, unpredictable behavior, open drug use with no staff intervention, lack of privacy and security, and an overall lack of dignity. These were common experiences.
"All I can say is that my fear of the unknown, of what might be waiting for me at that shelter, was worse than the known risk of staying on the street. That was where I was comfortable...people, we're creatures of habit. We can get comfortable in some of the most uncomfortable positions, and camp had become that for me." - David P.
The inability to receive mail at shelters further complicates attempts at self-sufficiency. My PO Box was how I got notified that I was eligible for the housing program that got me off the streets. Mail is how you receive a replacement ID, a benefits determination letter, a court date, a social security card. Without mail, the most basic steps toward stability are cut off at the source, and shelter providers have a financial and legal incentive to keep it that way. If residents could receive mail, they would begin to establish tenancy, which would trigger protections under the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act and require providers to follow formal eviction procedures. The Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), King County's largest operator of tiny house villages, suspended mail service at several of its villages and has argued in court that its tiny houses are not housing, precisely to avoid this reclassification. The result is a system where the things a person needs to obtain housing are deliberately withheld in order to preserve the legal and financial status of the facility they are living in.
If more than 90% of potential utilizers perceive shelters as a net loss in welfare, the problem is not the people declining it. The problem is what's being offered. When shelter is the only alternative to a tent under a bridge or alongside a highway, the tent is not their choice in any meaningful sense when it is perceived as the lesser of two evils.
The message received by some people I surveyed when presented with a shelter offer was "you don't deserve what we have" and those people consistently told me they choose to remain outside. This made sense to me, because the alternative would be reintegrating into a society that has ignored, mistreated, and abused them, and that does not understand them or listen to them.
The people who choose to live outside are choosing it over the alternative: being us. That reflects poorly on us, not them.
What Encampments Tell Us
Encampments are not proof that people want to live outside. They are self-organized attempts to shelter in place, allowing their members to distribute the daily burdens and risks of unsheltered living amongst each other. They provide a sense of safety and security rooted in the familiarity of people and places. They are almost exclusively inhabited by the fastest-growing homeless population: the chronically homeless.
That is why sweeps and shelter referrals so often fail. They threaten the only stability people have managed to create for themselves. Seattle conducted 2,504 encampment removals in 2024, about 6.8 per day. The sweep operation budget was $26.6 million, of which 77% went to cleanup contractors. Only 6.3% funded the seven outreach workers actually offering shelter. Of the people offered shelter during sweeps, only % showed up and stayed one night. Of items stored during sweeps, 91% were disposed of. The city spent $166 million on homelessness that year. Total homelessness hit an all-time record of 16,868 people, a 26% increase since 2022.
Sweeps and shelter are all about optics over outcomes and the two are inextricably dependent on one another. Shelters need sweeps to fill their beds, and sweeps need shelters to justify their execution. In 2021, Anything Helps mapped the actual sweep process through observational research conducted in collaboration with The ACLU of Washington and frontline staff at other agencies.
Article content An overview of the encampment removal process in 2021The entire operation is engineered around a single legal requirement: the offer of shelter.
Acceptance and suitability of that offer is irrelevant. At high-profile encampments with media attention, providers operating more appealing shelter settings - those with private rooms and locking doors - would exit "disengaged" so the City could point to accepted offers as evidence that this process was working. Those exited clients returned to the streets. The people displaced by the sweep landed at other camps, increasing the visible tent count in a new location, generating new complaints, new political pressure, and the justification for the next sweep.
The problem is that this works in the short-term: people confuse motion with progress and assume that more shelter will create less homelessness, but this is simply not the case.
The only two consistent factors in the forty years we have been addressing modern homelessness in the United States have been shelters and failure. This is not a coincidence.
Our Addiction to Quick Fixes
Shelters were introduced during the Great Depression as a temporary response to a crisis that was expected to be short-lived. Nearly a century later, that temporary response has hardened into a permanent industry, complete with career ladders, college courses, marketing budgets, executive salaries, and little evidence that it consistently leads people out of homelessness.
Only 26% of emergency shelter exits in King County, WA lead to permanent housing, below the national average of 32%. 63% of exits are unaccounted for, meaning the King County Regional Homelessness Authority does not know where those people went.
Systems theorists like David Peter Stroh recognize our response to homelessness as a common systems archetype called "shifting the burden." It occurs when a system addresses a problem symptom instead of the problem itself.
Article content Adapted from thesystemsthinker.com/thinking-and-acting-systemically with sweeps dynamic added.Unsheltered homelessness is the symptom. It is the part people have to see. It is the tents, the sleeping bags, the bodies in doorways, the visible evidence that something has gone terribly wrong. Shelter can make that symptom less visible very quickly. An encampment disappears. A sidewalk clears. A crisis looks contained. From a distance, it can look like progress. But so often it feels like putting Band-Aids on bullet wounds. Something has been covered up, but nothing essential has been healed.
Housing First advocates for permanent housing without preconditions, but when all trailheads to housing are in shelters, then shelter itself becomes a precondition and institutionalization becomes a readiness condition.
What makes this harder to sit with is that the temporary response does more than distract from the real solution. It can also weaken our ability to pursue it. When unsheltered homelessness becomes less visible, the pressure to invest in permanent housing starts to fade. The public sees less suffering and assumes less suffering is happening. Political urgency ceases to exist as resources follow the visible emergency response instead of the structural fix. And over time, the system becomes more practiced at managing the appearance of homelessness than resolving homelessness itself.
Chronic Homelessness is Learned Helplessness
When I was homeless, I was haunted by the thought that I may never have a place to live again. I did try to get help. I tried many times. But help was either unavailable, ineffective, or harmful enough to make things even worse. The helplessness and despair this caused was unbearable. My drug use escalated, my mental health deteriorated, and eventually I reached the point of trying to kill myself.
That experience shaped how I understand chronic homelessness because I know what it is like to reach the point where your mind has to change in order to keep you alive. I have watched many people reach that same point. Survival demands it. Acceptance can offer a thin layer of relief, even if it is only the relief of no longer fighting reality every second of the day. Over time, the unbearable starts to lose its sharp edges. The life you once could not imagine enduring becomes the life you know.
Seen from there, chronic homelessness can take shape through a slow surrender of hope that life is going to go back to what it was, followed by an equally slow adaptation to life as it is. After enough time, saying you choose to live outside can become a way of protecting yourself. It can be a way of making sense of something that feels senseless, and a way of reclaiming some autonomy in a world that has taken so much from you. That helps explain why around 33% of encampment members say they choose to live outside, even though 98% also say they would accept permanent housing if it were offered.
This is not a small problem happening to a small number of people. Nearly half of all people experiencing homelessness in Washington are chronically homeless, the highest proportion of any state. Between 2023 and 2024, that number grew by 55.8%, the largest single-year increase in the country. By 2025, Washington had surpassed every other state in raw numbers, including California and New York. These are people who are experiencing this form of cognitive self-preservation, and it is happening on a large scale.
I know what it feels like on the other side of that threshold because I crossed it. And I know that the only reason I came back is because someone eventually offered me something worth coming back for.
I know how tempting this response is. When suffering is right in front of you, the urge to do something immediate can feel overwhelming and it can feel dispassionate not to. People want movement. Politicians want results they can point to. Agencies want numbers they can report. Shelter fits neatly into all of that because it produces something visible right away. The tents thin out. The complaints go down. The city gets to say it acted. But the deeper problem is still there, and this awful thought will continue to haunt people, whether you see them or not.
That is the part of this story that should keep people up at night. But the reason I founded Anything Helps to begin with is that these mechanisms that drive chronic homelessness are reversible. We just have to offer people something worth hoping for.
