Seattle's longest-running mayor (1978-1990), Charles Royer, died this week at his home in Oregon. He was a good man and a good public servant. I had the pleasure of interviewing him in 2017 for my Skid Road oral history project. At that time, he was living in the Pioneer Square area of Seattle.

As a three-term mayor, Royer oversaw Seattle's growth from a backwater town to a major city, with all of its attendant growing pains. He was mayor during our country's wave of what is now referred to as "new homelessness." Royer told me the story of getting to know a homeless veteran on the streets of Portland, Oregon. The man had been married with a house and a car but lost them as he spiraled into alcoholism, drinking mainly to mask the pain of a work injury in his job as a garbageman. While recounting this story, Royer teared up and said, "Damn! I didn't see that coming. As you can see, he got to me a little bit, his story." Royer was working on a documentary about homelessness and alcoholism. When Royer tracked this man down to ask permission to use video content about him, the man was living in the Bread of Life Mission in Pioneer Square in Seattle. The documentary Man Down won awards. It must be stored in some dusty archive in Portland.

As mayor, Royer worked on the expansion of community health clinics, low-income housing, and anti-poverty initiatives. Royer said, "It helped me as a mayor to see housing as a way out of the homelessness problem, but not the only way. You can't build your way out of the problem of people not having shelter. People need to have options and choices of where they can stay." Royer emphasized that people experiencing homelessness need to be known, but that law enforcement and even private non-profits, "who have become pretty big businesses now in housing in Seattle. They've gotten very big, very bureaucratic." He added, "In healthcare, in housing, in shelter, in policing, in homelessness, the people doing the work need to know the people they're working with, or they're watching. They do a good job of watching, not a good job of knowing them. I think if you can just get a big, tough bureaucracy like Seattle's, that would take you a long way."

After leaving office, Royer worked for twelve years at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, with their demonstration project that became Health Care for the Homeless.

Part of my oral history interview with Charley Royer is included in my video, "Listening to Skid Road."