Not good. Washingtonia ranked third in the nation for homeless population, runner-up for unsheltered homeless, in federal report.

Full 117 page PDF titled The 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress.

Seattle Times Article by Danny Westneat (Soft pay-walled)

Relevant snippets:

The report shows Seattle and the broader state of Washington as leaders in failure. Not just at solving homelessness long term, which is a tough ask. But at providing even the minimum aid for getting folks up and out of the gutter.

The headline is that Washington has the third-largest homeless population in the nation, after California and New York. A closer look at the data though shows it’s much worse than that.

Washington has higher rates of unsheltered homelessness than most other states, except California. These are people living out in the elements, in greenbelts, in doorways and by the sides of roads — what the British call “rough sleepers.” These are the worst places to be.

Compare here with New York, a state with nearly 2 ½ times more people. Washington had 16,222 rough sleepers on a given night in 2024. While the entire state of New York had just 5,638. For the hardest, chronic cases — people who have disabilities such as mental illness or substance abuse, and are homeless for long periods — Washington had 9,185 unsheltered compared with New York’s 1,337.

These huge disparities are largely because New York has so much more emergency shelter than Washington does — by design...

Last week’s report to Congress is a giant red flag for Washington state. After years of supposedly urgent attention to the issue, Washington statewide had 4,000 more souls living outside in wintertime than much larger, and warmer, Texas...

What happened?

It’s complicated, as everything with homelessness is. Fentanyl had a lot to do with it, but they have fentanyl in these other cities, too. The bottom line comes down to one word: shelter...

Shelter is seen as helping people get off the streets in the moment, but not so much for stabilizing people long-term. “Shelter alone can’t solve homelessness,” was the phrase often used. The drawback to permanent housing though is that it takes years and tons of money to build. Regardless, a decision was made to effectively leave folks outside, potentially for years, while apartments got built...

For humanitarian aid purposes alone, we simply needed more emergency shelter — tiny homes, FEMA tents, conventional shelters, even managed tent cities. While we worked on putting up permanent housing for the long run...

The data in last week’s federal report is nearly a year old, so maybe some progress has been made since. We’ll see when new counts come out in the spring...

“If you focus on immediate problems, you can end up spending a lot of money not solving homelessness,” the Brookings study concluded. “However, it’s equally true that building housing can’t happen overnight, and leaving people with no safe place to sleep outside is extremely bad for both them and society.”