-
In Portland, some nonprofits are borrowing an idea used in commercial real estate. Through master leasing, organizations support people who are unhoused by acting like their landlord.
-
Seattle will create a database of homeless camps and provide more than $100 million to a regional group trying to tackle the region’s ongoing crisis of people without homes. Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the plan on Tuesday.
-
The City of Kirkland and King County are being sued over the county’s plan to convert a Kirkland hotel to a permanent supportive housing site for people experiencing long-term homelessness.
-
Pierce County Council members passed a regional plan to “end homelessness” in Washington state’s second-largest county. The plan calls for the county to set up a Tacoma-Pierce Unified Regional Office of Homelessness by July 2023.
-
Amazon, Starbucks, Microsoft Philanthropies, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, billionaires Steve and Connie Ballmer and others say they’ll spend more than $10 million to combat homelessness in Seattle. The money will help fund a team from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, designed to triage and alleviate homeless camping in downtown and the city’s International District.
-
Today is Bruce Harrell's first Monday as the mayor of Seattle. He's taking over during a difficult time for the city: Omicron is pushing caseloads and infecting vaccinated people; homelessness is a monumental and growing issue without clear solutions, and the city's future of policing is still up in the air.
-
Jenny Durkan has been mayor of Seattle during a time of incredible change. She oversaw the city's initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, protests against racist policing and the controversy over police tactics that followed. On Friday at the stroke of midnight, she passes that responsibility on to Bruce Harrell.
-
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on Wednesday proposed a host of efforts to address homelessness in the state, including a plan to help people stay in their homes, increasing emergency shelters and permanent supportive housing and expanding services for addiction or mental health issues.
-
KNKX reporter Will James tracked down some of former residents of Tacoma's Merkle Hotel to see where they are now, and it created a picture of the forces driving homelessness in the region and their effect on people’s lives. His three-part series aired last week. He sat down with Morning Edition host Kirsten Kendrick to talk about it.
-
Throughout the history of residential hotels like the Merkle, there's been a push and pull between concerns about the buildings’ safety and living conditions and the critical role they played in housing markets.