Washington cuts funding for homeless encampment removal program

SEATTLE – Washington state is taking a step back from resolving homeless encampments despite protests from Seattle and King County officials.

In the most recent budget, state lawmakers reduced funding for the Encampment Resolution Program, which will halt its work removing additional encampments.

The program’s creation in 2022 had been a somewhat unusual foray by the state into removing homeless encampments. Most of the time, cities do that work.

But during the pandemic, tents proliferated along state highways at an unprecedented scale, and former Gov. Jay Inslee was increasingly hearing calls from constituents to do something about it. Plus, transportation officials said people living next to speeding cars were causing safety issues. Inslee directed state agencies to find a solution.

Officials drew from a model developed in Seattle early in the pandemic that removed encampments without scattering people to other locations outside. That required creating new shelters and housing since existing units are usually full. The state paid for hundreds of new housing units in five counties, mostly along the Interstate 5 corridor – King, Pierce, Snohomish, Thurston and Spokane – and began moving people from the street into those units.