Seattle says the bad times are easing. Do you feel it?

Have you noticed much of a difference around town? 

The city of Seattle, in a surprising report last week, says it has finally made some major progress on homeless encampments. The headline claim is that it has cut the number of tents inside the city limits by 42%, compared with early last winter. 

“We have completed over 200 site resolutions,” Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington told the City Council recently — in other words, cleared the encampments.

Seattle went from a high of more than 700 tents or other structures in unauthorized encampments reported in December, to what it says is a hard count of 414 tents now, scattered among several hundred remaining sites. 

It also says the number of RVs being used as homes inside the city has dropped 29%, to 320 from a high of 449 in December. 

Those are big drops, and bold claims. Counting tents and RVs across 84 square miles is more of an estimating process than an exact science. For one thing, they move around. But if true, this would be the first concrete sign that Seattle is making a major dent in street homelessness going back years, since well before the pandemic.

Anecdotally my sense is the picture is a bit mixed. I’ve been relieved to see people get help in several entrenched encampments in my part of town, such as a small one parked for years on a sidewalk median behind a Grocery Outlet in the Central District. According to the city, the folks hunkered down there since 2020 were all offered shelter in March, and accepted it. 

On the flip side, a chronic RV encampment along Martin Luther King Jr. Way near Powell Barnett Park has been cleared away at least twice, but always returns. (Tuesday there were about a dozen RVs, vans and other vehicles there, including one stretch limo.) 

Something has shifted, though: When city officials presented their encampment-clearing highlights to the City Council, no council members lambasted them for doing inhumane sweeps. After years of fighting about how to approach homeless encampments — with police teams, then navigation teams, then hope teams and now the United Care Team — our city of perpetual process reinvention finally seems to have hit on a formula that works. 

First, score the site by how hazardous it is. Then send outreach workers (preferably with no cops). Offer shelter that’s better than mats on the floor. Return and repeat until everyone has gotten an offer, before posting signs that the camp has got to go. 

When I said this formula “works,” it still unfortunately results in only about half the people using the shelter they’ve been offered. The rest move on and stay outside. That is up from them rejecting shelter three-fourths of the time a few years ago. 

Washington told the council that there still isn’t enough better shelter to get everyone indoors. 

“Folks have just decided they aren’t going to go into congregate shelter,” Washington said. “They say ‘I want a door.’ “ 

Given that, it’s maddening to me that we haven’t stood up more tiny houses — which, among their other attributes such as being cheap, have doors. The city reported in March that the top reasons people refuse to come in out of the cold are “does not want shelter (24%)” and “wants tiny home (21%).” With a couple of hundred more tiny homes, which we could have easily put in years ago, a sizable share of those 414 tents that are still out there could also be gone. 

But I digress — this is supposed to be a positive column. The city is reporting its first progress in years, so the polite thing to say is: More, please. 

The new data also captures another benefit of clearing the most dangerous encampments: Shootings have been cut in half.  

Last spring, the city was seeing an alarming average of 3.5 shootings or shots-fired episodes per week in and around the encampments — or one every other day. Now they say encampment gunfire has plunged to an average of once per week. 

All of this is part of a broader encouraging trend noticed recently by crime analyst Jeff Asher. Despite the epidemic of mass shootings, gun violence overall is down from the pandemic surge in most of the nation’s largest cities. It’s especially so in Seattle. He reports gun incidents in which someone was killed or injured are down 50% in Seattle for the first quarter this year compared with last year — 54 incidents last year versus 27 this year. That’s the largest percentage drop of any of the cities he studied. 

Crime overall seems to be ebbing so far in 2023, after peaking at 25-year highs last year. Aggravated assaults are down 18% the first third of the year compared with 2022. Robberies are down 30%. Seattle police reports show that thefts are off 29%, from 10,349 through April last year to 7,314 this year. That’s 3,000 fewer reported thefts. 

Have you noticed any of these differences around town? Maybe it’s too little, too soon to tell. Or do we only notice crime when it’s rocketing up? 

Nordstrom announced Tuesday it’s pulling its stores out of downtown San Francisco. So if Seattle is on a journey back from a dark place, it can’t arrive soon enough.