Does nothing work? Unfortunately Seattle has another case study

The problems with the Regional Homelessness Authority are all broadcast right in the name.

The 5-year-old agency wasn't ever regional. It has spent too much energy and political capital on stuff other than homelessness. And it has had no real authority.

When you fall short on every word of your title, the scent of failure is inescapable.

It's a failure that may well have been baked in from the start, as several Seattle and King County council members indicated this past week when they moved to disband the struggling agency.

The immediate cause of all this is a fiscal audit that found the authority in the red by $48 million, as of last summer. Another $8 million could not be accounted for at all. But officials pounced in a way that made it clear this finding was only the latest straw.

"It has added an unnecessary, ineffective layer of government that has not been accountable to our region's most pressing challenge," charged King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski. "And it is time to end it."

Man, the hits just keep on coming with government around here. Does nothing simply work?

Back to that question in a minute. But first, the fate of the RHA. Its structural and performance flaws have been glaring enough for long enough that three years ago, I was able to write a column titled "What's the point of the Regional Homelessness Authority?"

"Something's just off about the whole enterprise," that column said, in May 2023. "There's a chance to reset its work and direction. I'm also wondering: Should we keep this agency at all?"

The point of it was supposed to be a sharing of the burdens among the county's 39 cities, but that has not happened. In the 2026 budget, which totals $203 million, the 38 cities not named Seattle provided just 0.15% of the funding. Bellevue, Kent, Federal Way and so on have refused to join with any resources, probably wisely. So this "regional" agency has really just been a new bureaucracy through which Seattle and King County can both fund human services work as well as shield themselves from accountability.

Then there's the work. The agency just wasn't very good at getting results. It failed to pay contractors on time and often clashed with Seattle. It got bogged down in social controversies and its own mantra about the central importance of lived experience.

That's the notion that only someone who has been through something can fully understand it. It reached absurd depths when one of the RHA boards tried to seat a registered sex offender - on the grounds that committing sex offenses was a valid lived experience, too. This backfired when someone already on the board said she had been molested by the offender as well.

Fox News sure loved that one - and who can blame them? Everyone gape at the left-wing circus out in Seattle, self-destructing on the altar of identity politics.

Dembowski said the agency remains distracted by this sort of infighting.

"You have this federated board of electeds that meets once a month," he said. "If you go look at the minutes, much of the recent meetings seem to be about internal problems and executive sessions, and not about driving a solution for homelessness. You saw fighting for years on those boards."

This gets to the last word of the name, the authority part.

Even as Seattle and King County pay for the agency, both have increasingly short-circuited it in exasperated efforts to try to do something faster.

I highlighted in 2023 how Seattle had been doing its own encampment work because, a director said, the RHA "is not in the position to take that work on, today." In 2024, Seattle clawed back about $11 million worth of outreach work, again on the grounds that the RHA wasn't succeeding at it.

This spring, both King County and Seattle have announced emergency shelter plans that completely sidestep the RHA. Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson's pledge to stand up 4,000 units of new shelter is being attempted entirely in-house, even though shelter is the RHA's main budgeted purpose.

It's distressing for citizens, as Seattle and King County hardly have strong track records either.

Last winter, I lowlighted how the county's ongoing 0.1% sales tax to convert hotels into homeless shelters had also failed to meet its goals. The marquee purchase, the Inn at Queen Anne, is sitting empty, while the overall goal of 1,600 units up and running by the end of 2022 is short by 40% - three and a half years later.

Amid this checkered history, the County Executive Girmay Zahilay announced this month he wants a new property tax as part of an effort to build 500 units of shelter or housing in 500 days.

Is it too much to ask that something, anything, be shown to work first?

"Why Nothing Works" is a recent book with a big theory for all this. It doesn't mention the Regional Homelessness Authority, yet it describes its travails perfectly.

By Brown University's Marc Dunkelman, the book suggests that progressives are bollixed up by competing impulses. One is to empower governments to do big things, like solve climate change or, in this case, end street homelessness. The other, dominant today, is to "return power to ordinary people who would otherwise be bulldozed by the establishment" - a worthy desire that tends to impede goal No. 1.

Modern progressives "have prioritized speaking truth to power over exercising power effectively," he writes.

Take the homelessness agency's focus on lived experience. It's a valuable concept, to a point. But incorporating all the street-level viewpoints in the region won't manage a budget or get a building permit to stand up a shelter. It can't be a substitute for expertise - for getting concrete things done.

As the book sums up: "Our cultural aversion to power renders government incompetent, and incompetent government undermines progressivism's appeal."

Which is where the region finds itself today. Here, the worthy mission of getting homeless people off the streets is in peril. Nationally, the stakes are higher.

"If you render government incompetent, voters are going to turn to the party that vilifies government - it only makes sense," Dunkelman said in an interview. In other words, frustrated voters turn to populism. To would-be authoritarians. To Trump.

There's a lot more, but he concludes: "The impulse for writing the book is to say we need to fix our own house. We need an agenda that makes government work."

When I was going over this column, I realized I had cast the Regional Homelessness Authority in the past tense. As if it were already dead. The reason why is that last quote.

Few communities could benefit more from tearing down to the studs - getting back to basics, to just making government function - than ours. The sooner they fast forward to that would still be long overdue.

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