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."

In the midst of a prolonged heat wave two years ago in July, I talked with Washington State Representative Nicole Macri about her work on homelessness, housing justice, and behavioral health issues. Macri has worked at Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) in various capacities for the past twenty-two years. In the Washington State House of Representatives she serves on the Health Care and Wellness Committee.

In Seattle, as throughout much of the West, we're in another prolonged heat wave. Excess heat is deadly, especially for the elderly, people living with mental health and substance use disorders, and people who have to work--and live--outside. People who live in isolation. Excess heat events are becoming more frequent due to the effects of climate change. When I spoke with Rep. Macri two years ago, she had visited Harborview Medical Center, our area's Level 1 Trauma Center.

When she visited Harborview Medical Center, all the area hospitals were on alert because of the extended heat wave causing heat-related injuries. “The emergency room Medical Director said, ‘This afternoon, we had no available ambulances to go on call in Seattle because they were all at emergency departments waiting to transition their patients to the ED,’ but they struggle to do that because the hospitals are all backed up.” Rep. Macri told me that at that moment, she realized that our medical system is going through a crisis similar to what the behavioral health system has been in for years. She said, “So we have all these people who are homeless, living with severe behavioral health conditions. They are trying to get in the front door, usually through the crisis system, and the crisis system is totally overloaded and can’t respond.”

Rep. Macri went on to talk about her legislative work on community behavioral health policy and investments. "It's a long endeavor. I knew that going into it, but it seems like every year we go back to the Legislature, we discover how a gap in the system is really profoundly harming people. It's like a dam that's just spurting water everywhere... And as behavioral health concerns have become more universal as more families have seen the impacts of the stress of the pandemic, there has been more of a focus on behavioral health. But we certainly didn't have a system that is or will be anytime soon ready to respond to the growing needs we see in the community." Towards the end of our conversation Rep. Macri added, "I just wonder and hope that we continue to have the same conversation of not making the sam mistakes; that tightening of the belt has a disproportionate harm to vulnerable communities and does not help us recover economically as quickly as investing in the communities that need the most support during these challenging times."

Seattle architect Rex Holbein and I talked about his work and views on the issues surrounding homelessness. Rex founded the nonprofit Facing Homelessness in 2014 with its Window of Kindness in the University District of Seattle and the innovative BLOCK project of tiny homes. These projects still existed when I talked with him in late February 2024. Unfortunately, due to a lack of sustainable funding, Facing Homelessness closed its programs beginning in April. However, Holbein's podcast, "You Know Me Now," and the Circle of Ten projects he discusses in our interview continue. As Rex puts it, we have a "community crisis instead of a homelessness crisis." All of his work around homelessness has as its core the value of community building. We discussed the ethics involved with 'helping' people experiencing homelessness and the importance of being honest with ourselves about why we do (or don't do) work like his or mine--checking in on our personal agendas. As health or social care professionals, we have baked in professional norms of clear boundaries between us and our clients/patients. There are important benefits of these professional boundaries but there also are negative consequences. Rex mentioned how any person experiencing homelessness walking into most places of service knows they are "providing care to a person who is broken" and the unspoken idea of "I have, and you don't; therefore, I'm above" hovers around the interactions.

During a time of great turmoil in our country, along with a Supreme Court of the United States-sanctioned criminalization of homelessness, the kindness, humanity, and community-building of people like Rex Holbein are more important than ever.