A lot of reports you see about street disorder in downtown Seattle these days are because treatment beds for people in crisis have been rapidly disappearing for years.
Since 2018, King County has lost more than a hundred beds for people who need residential mental health treatment. Wait times have shot up to 44 days on average, according to the county.
It's enough of a crisis that the county is now making the uncommon move of buying a facility to keep it from closing.
This year Cascade Hall in North Seattle was set to close; if that happened, the county would've lost a quarter of its remaining beds.
County executive Dow Constantine at a press conference said the 64-bed facility was originally built in 1985 as one of a number of facilities to replace old state hospitals and asylums. Many of these facilities have been shut down recently as they aged.
"A number of these were stood up then — not nearly enough to meet the need, even then," Constantine said, "but the capital funding for for maintenance had never followed on to the initial construction."
It will be the only mental health facility the county owns.
The county used $4 million of its own money from the Mental Illness and Drug Dependency levy, combined with $6 million from the state, to buy the facility.
