The number of homeless individuals in King County has risen again.

The suffering grows in encampments, vacant buildings, and in urban green spaces, despite billions of taxpayer dollars being spent on building large housing bureaucracies at multiple levels of government.

While those in charge of our region’s failed homeless strategy have become very wealthy, more people are without shelter and a growing number have lost hope that they will ever recover from their untreated mental health and addiction issues.

With absolutely no fanfare (not even a short press-release on its website), King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA) updated the latest Point-In-Time count of homeless individuals in mid-April. The latest count revealed that 16,868 people are suffering from being homeless in the county. This is a 3% increase from last year’s count of 16,385, and a 26% increase since 2023.

Even worse, this represents a very disturbing 68% increase since King County Executive Dow Constantine declared homelessness an emergency in 2015 when “only” 10,047 people were counted as being without shelter.

We will quickly note that KCRHA appears to have been successful in keeping this bad news out of the media. We found it only on a political insiders’ blog.

This lack of media coverage raises concerns about why the Seattle Times once again failed to report on data which proves that our very expensive “Housing First” homeless strategy is not working. Despite assigning three reporters to its “Project Homeless” beat, they did not believe it was newsworthy that for the tenth straight year (since homelessness was declared an emergency in 2015) homeless numbers rose.

Instead, the region’s largest newspaper felt it was more important to help Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell push his narrative that the city is removing encampments three times faster than they did in 2022 (when almost no encampments were being cleaned up).  This refusal to scrutinize progressive leaders for their handling of the homeless situation allows politicians to evade responsibility and postpones the adoption of more effective, treatment-based strategies.

Money is clearly not the problem since in the last decade the City of Seattle, King County, the KCRHA, the State of Washington, and the federal government have each spent millions (some billions) on ending the homeless suffering. Local businesses have also given millions to local charities who are focused on helping people off the streets.

In 2017, the Puget Sound Business Journal studied homelessness spending in the region and determined that $1.06 billion was being spent annually on homeless services. The figure today is likely three to five times as much. If we accept a very conservative estimate of $2 billion (i.e. spending twice what was spent eight years ago) being spent annually, this means we are currently spending more than $118,500 a year on each homeless person – the true figure is likely far larger.

There is so much taxpayer money being spent on the homelessness issue from dozens of different government departments that political leaders are unable (or unwilling) to tell the taxpayers how much they have spent.  Readers will recall ChangeWA’s exclusive interview with then King County Executive Dow Constantine last December when he refused to provide an estimate on how much money he had authorized to spend on the issue. This lack of accountability is one of the reasons why so much money is being wasted on programs that fail to help people who are homeless.

Where is this money going since it obviously not going into programs that places homeless persons into permanent homes? 

Unfortunately, nearly all of tax dollars are going into building a large homeless and housing bureaucracy where many annual salaries are well over $100,000—with outstanding benefits (for example, at KCRHA they receive unlimited vacation days).

While the 2025 Point-in-Time count is the latest evidence that Housing First is an ineffective and cruel homeless strategy, there is no incentive to change to an effective policy that focuses resources on mental health and addiction treatment.

The one person who has had most control of the region’s homeless strategy has been former King County Executive Dow Constantine.  Not only was he responsible for the creation of the KCRHA, he has also been the most ardent defender of Housing First policies, with him often repeating his fictitious statement that drugs and mental health issues are NOT a cause of homelessness (to justify his spending of a half-billion dollars to house homeless individuals in 15 former hotels across the county at a cost of $333,000 per room).

What has been the fate for Executive Constantine after he constantly spent more of our tax money on an obviously flawed homeless strategy? In April, the Sound Transit Board, which Constantine appointed, gave him a $6 million+ salary/benefits package (including a $400,000+ annual pension) to become the CEO.

This very lucrative career move is a likely reason why two months ago KCRHA was so quiet in its release of the data showing homeless figures continue to rise. Constantine served on the authority’s Governing Board since its inception and likely didn’t want this bad news to be made public just as the Sound Transit Board (on which he also served) was concluding its behind-closed-doors process to hire him to lead the financially dysfunctional agency.

How bad do things have to become before government officials shift their primary focus toward providing actual help for those who are suffering through effective mental health and addiction treatment?  This is the centerpiece of successful homeless policy found in many cities (including Austin, Texas) and one advocated by scholars and experts at the Discovery Institute.

A decade of failure is long enough. Let’s show true compassion and adopt measures that help people become self-sufficient, not a strategy that hands one person $6 million who caused more homeless suffering.