San Francisco is trying something different on homelessness. Seattle should be watching

Seattle and San Francisco have wrestled with many of the same problems for years: tents on sidewalks, open-air drug use, untreated mental illness, and enormous public spending that has too often failed to produce the progress residents were promised.

But today, the two cities are moving in noticeably different directions.

In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie has made addiction and mental health central to his homelessness strategy. His “Breaking the Cycle” initiative explicitly links shelter with treatment, behavioral-health care, recovery housing, street outreach, enforcement, and greater accountability for the organizations receiving public money. 

The goal is not simply to find someone a bed for the night. San Francisco is trying to create different places for people with different needs.

That has included hundreds of new stabilization, treatment, and recovery beds, including drug- and alcohol-free transitional housing. By April 2026, San Francisco’s Department of Public Health said it had added more than 200 behavioral-health residential treatment and care beds and converted another 100, including withdrawal-management beds, recovery housing, and a 24-hour crisis stabilization center for people experiencing serious mental-health or substance-use crises.

Lurie has also reorganized the city’s street response. Instead of a collection of separate outreach programs operating alongside police and other agencies, San Francisco moved toward neighborhood teams coordinating public health, homelessness services, police, fire, the sheriff, public works, and emergency management. The purpose is to connect people with appropriate services while also responding to encampments, public drug use, and other street conditions. 

And this year, Lurie advanced the RESET Center, which is designed to take people arrested for public intoxication to a staffed stabilization facility rather than simply cycling them through jail or a hospital emergency room. Once there, they can be evaluated, stabilized, and connected with treatment. 

Former Seattle Mayor Tim Burgess recently argued in Post Alley that the changes are significant enough that Seattle should be paying attention. He pointed to fewer encampments, falling crime, expanded shelter, and Lurie’s willingness to experiment with treatment and recovery models that go beyond a predominantly low-barrier approach. 

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson started the year with a different emphasis.

Wilson acknowledged in February that Seattle’s existing homelessness response had not produced acceptable results and made rapidly expanding emergency shelter one of her administration’s biggest priorities. She initially promised 1,000 new units of shelter or emergency housing in 2026, part of a broader campaign pledge to add roughly 4,000 during her term. Tiny-house villages were a significant piece of that strategy. 

Now that promise has been substantially scaled back.

Wilson’s newly released plan calls for about 960 additional shelter beds by the end of 2027, rather than 1,000 each year. The mayor has cited the city’s roughly $175 million budget deficit and the practical difficulty of bringing that much capacity online as reasons for the change. 

The administration says several new shelters will include specialized mental-health care, medical services, and substance-use treatment. It also proposes roughly $11.2 million next year for rental assistance, eviction prevention, case management, and related programs intended to keep people from becoming homeless in the first place.

What Seattle still does not have is a direct equivalent to Lurie’s broader framework.

San Francisco has put treatment capacity, recovery-focused housing, crisis stabilization, coordinated street intervention, public drug-use enforcement, and measurable provider outcomes under the same homelessness and behavioral-health strategy. Seattle’s approach remains heavily anchored to Housing First, which has never generated results commensurate with its costs.

That choice is becoming more consequential as Seattle and King County also restructure the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, bringing many contracts and spending decisions back under direct city and county control. It gives local leaders another opportunity to decide not simply how much to spend, but what outcomes taxpayers should expect from that spending.

San Francisco’s experience does not prove that every element of Lurie’s model would work the same way in Seattle. The cities have different governments, housing markets, service systems, and street populations, and San Francisco still faces serious homelessness and addiction problems of its own.

But it does provide a current example of a major West Coast city treating homelessness, addiction, and serious mental illness as interconnected problems rather than separate policy areas.

The contrast with San Francisco also comes as questions about Wilson’s leadership extend well beyond homelessness. Her administration has faced criticism over public safety, its response to the deadly Bite of Seattle shooting, and now whether the city has a clear path forward on one of its most persistent crises.

Those concerns led Change Washington to launch a petition calling for Wilson to resign as mayor. The petition, which is not a recall and carries no legal force, cites homelessness and drug use among a broader set of concerns about the direction of the city. 

The response has been incredible, with more than a thousand people signing on already and offering comments. Paula C., for example, writes, “When you’re responsible for a city this important, the mayor’s office should not be where you learn how to run one. Seattle is paying too high a price for on-the-job training.”

And Margo H. said, “I have been horrified at her lack of adult behavior, her inability to communicate and have anything meaningful to say (other than a prearranged script) and blaming others, instead of admitting she is out of her league.”

Please continue to share the petition with friends and family.

The petition aside, Wilson still has an opportunity to show what her administration intends to do differently. San Francisco offers one example of a city putting addiction treatment, mental health care, recovery, and accountability more squarely into its homelessness response. For Seattle residents, the question now is whether Wilson will pursue a comparably clear strategy, and what they should conclude about her leadership if she does not.

Photo: Shutterstock | San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie