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.

This past week, I had the privilege of participating in a panel discussion on the history and practice of behavioral health outreach, specifically for people experiencing homelessness. One of the panelists was the Rev. Craig Rennebhom, a longtime behavioral health advocate in the Seattle area. He developed and worked as a chaplain for the ecumenical companionship ministry called the Mental Health Chaplaincy, which has taken off nationwide.

The panel was for the 2024 Annual Outreach Academy, which provided training and networking opportunities for outreach workers in Washington State. It was put on by the Washington State Health Care Authority and the University of Washington Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. He had done an earlier workshop on the companionship model for outreach workers who were early in their work. Before and after the panel, I enjoyed hearing participants thank Craig for his workshop and overall work. A longtime outreach worker from the Downtown Emergency Service Center stopped to tell Craig how much his book (written with David Paul), Souls in the Hands of a Tender God: Stories of the Search for Home and Healing on the Streets. His book has been helpful to me as well in my work on homelessness over the years.

On February 2, 2016, I interviewed Craig from my Skid Road oral history project. He told me that his "deepest bias" is as follows: "My time at the hospital working with folks who were homeless and mentally ill, I realized that if we can't bring some level of peace to our neighbors on the streets and our communities, there's no hope for us being a more peaceable presence in the larger world. We need to learn how to be peaceable and healing at the most fundamental levels of our common life as families, neighbors, cities, and towns--communities."

I am so grateful to have met and worked with Nanci Amidei, social worker extraordinaire, for several decades in Seattle. I first met Nancy when I interviewed for my job at the University of Washington (UW) in 1993. She had just started the University District Partnership for Youth (PFY_, a monthly conversation, planning, and advocacy group for teens and young adults experiencing homelessness in the U District of Seattle. Young people, service providers, sometimes community police officers, and a few people from the UW met monthly at the UW School of Social Work where Nancy worked. At the time, I was living in Baltimore City, working on health care with teens experiencing homelessness. At my first PFY meeting, I was hooked on Nancy's optimism, pragmatism, kindness, and positive energy. She is a big reason why I accepted the UW job.

On June 16, 2015, I sat down with Nancy to interview her about her life and work. She began with the story of what got her involved in homeless youth issues in the U District soon after she moved from Washington, DC. Josephine Archuleta, a fierce advocate for people experiencing homelessness and poverty, walked into Nancy's UW office one day and said, "The University of Washington is the biggest neighbor in the neighborhood and when it comes to homelessness, you people aren't even at the table." That conversation led to Nancy's establishing the PFY and many other programs benefiting homeless youth, families, and adults.

In my interview, she discussed her twenty-five-year career in various political jobs in Washington, D.C. She helped fight back against the Reagan administration's attempt to declare ketchup a vegetable for school lunch programs. She worked on poverty and hunger issues before moving to Seattle, where she still lives. Of homelessness in Seattle, she said, "Housing is a human right. People should not have to live on the streets. We should not be so concerned about judging people. We should be more concerned about housing people."

Bonus interview content: Nancy's advice on advocacy 101 and her telling of the political classic, The Butter Story.

And here are more of my photos of Nancy in action:

On October 6, 2023, I spoke with the Rev. Bill Kirlin-Hackett about his work on homelessness in the Seattle area. His advocacy and program work, especially for vehicle residents, began in 2001 and continues today. He is the director of the Interfaith Task Force on Homelessness. He spoke with me about the various renditions of the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness, his work on the Scofflaw Mitigation Program (vehicle residency outreach) that he co-founded in 2011, his work on Safe Lots Programs and vehicle outreach programs, including at U Heights, and his work with various leaders of faith-based communities on a more compassionate approach to homelessness. Kirlin-Hackett highlights compassion, charity, and justice as all three being necessary to counter what he views as the "contempt for humanity" that prevails among many elected officials and the general public. He calls on all of us to "affirm your gift" and work to do what we can to ameliorate the suffering of people surviving (and too often not surviving) homelessness in our midst. I've talked with other people recently who have been working on homelessness in our area for a long time. Along with them, Kirlin-Hackett asks what it will take to create the political will to end homelessness.

David Bloom is a retired Baptist minister who headed the urban ministry of the Church Council of Greater Seattle (1978-1997). He fought bank redlining and the destruction of low-income housing. He was a founder of the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), Common Ground, and the Seattle Displacement Coalition.

I talked with Bloom recently about his life and work related to poverty and homelessness. He said, "Homelessness is simply a symptom of the larger systemic problems. It's the most dramatic manifestation of poverty." He quoted an early director of DESC as saying, "Homelessness in America is a growth industry." Bloom added, "And that was forty years ago, and nothing, nothing has turned that around. ... It's a growth industry because we don't care about poor people." I commented on the sense of despair in his voice. Contrary to common perception, despair is only opposed to one sense of hope, that of hopefulness. Despair is compatible with hoping. (That's from my own reflection and research into despair after our conversation. Cursory, at best, but it seems to be important to parse out for ourselves.) Bloom also said, "In the course of my activism, if there was any success, it was to ameliorate the pain, to mitigate problems. ... You and I both know that the problem of homelessness, lack of affordable housing (it's) now worse than it's ever been."

David Bloom recalled the leaders of Seattle calling for an effort to "house elephants in the zoo--don't we need housing for people?"

On May 29, 2024, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Sparrow Etter Carlson to discuss her work and perspectives on homelessness in Seattle. Sparrow now works for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority in sub-regional planning for Seattle. She is co-founder of the former Green Bean Coffee Shop, Aurora Commons, the SHE (Safe, Healthy, Empowered) Clinic at Aurora Commons, and the founder of Sacred Streets. She describes these as a way to "build a bridge across otherness." The SHE clinic is for female-identified people who sleep and work along Aurora Avenue and is run by the University of Washington Medicine/ Harborview Medical Center. The clinic has expanded and includes a full-time nurse at Aurora Commons.

Sparrow is committed to encouraging each other and facilitating "deep conversations across the political divide." She states, "I'm not a pessimistic human. Pessimism is a privilege. We have a real need, especially in this city, to focus on possibility--to be really honest about where we're at--there's a lot we can do with the resources we have--and I think pessimism truly gets in the way of us collaborating towards future possibility." She encourages us all to bear hope: "I think hope is a discipline."

She talked about being in meetings recently to interview and hire a new CEO for the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. This position has been difficult to fill for various reasons, including our Seattle-area propensity to complicate decision-making by having a multitude of process-heavy committees. Sparrow described her current sense of "exhaustion and tenacity," adding "the deep commitment we have here; we must encourage each other."