COMMENTARY |Homelessness
Editorial prepared for The Everett Herald from the members of the Snohomish County Partnership to End Homelessness Executive Committee:
Snohomish County Councilmember Nate Nehring recently introduced several ordinances aimed at overhauling the county’s response to homelessness, substance use, and behavioral healthcare. Our community is right to expect better outcomes from these systems. Families want safer neighborhoods. Providers want better tools. People living unsheltered need real pathways toward stability, treatment, recovery, community and a dignified life.
So the question before us is not whether the current system needs improvement. It does. The question is whether the proposed ordinances will actually help us build the system our community needs. As the members of the Snohomish County Partnership to End Homelessness Executive Committee, we do not believe they will.
Councilmember Nehring has called for a shift in County policy toward accountability and recovery-oriented outcomes. Those are important goals and we share them. The people and organizations working every day with residents experiencing homelessness know that housing alone is not the finish line. People need behavioral health care, substance use treatment, recovery supports, employment pathways, case management, community, and clear expectations.
But Nehring’s current proposals create a false choice between housing stability and accountability. In practice, those two things must work together.
People do not become more capable of pursuing recovery, treatment, employment or family stability because they remain outside, in crisis and cycling through emergency systems. Stability is often the ground from which change becomes possible. That does not mean there are no expectations. It means we recognize that lasting change is more likely when people have safety, consistency and support.
The local reality is more nuanced than the public debate suggests. Snohomish County is not operating a simplistic system where people are moved directly from the street into housing with no services, no accountability, and no concern for recovery. Providers across the county are working with people who face complex combinations of trauma, poverty, behavioral health needs, substance use, disability, and long histories of instability.
Effective solutions require a full spectrum of options: outreach, emergency shelter, low-barrier housing, supportive housing, recovery housing, treatment, behavioral health facilities, prevention and deeply affordable homes. No single model is enough. Reducing the conversation to Housing First versus accountability will not help us build what is missing.
We are also concerned about the proposed change to the County’s Affordable Housing and Behavioral Health fund. We strongly support expanding behavioral health capacity. Snohomish County needs more treatment, recovery, stabilization and mental health infrastructure. But we should not create that capacity by reducing the County’s already limited ability to build affordable housing.
Affordable housing and behavioral health are not competing priorities. They are connected parts of the same community crisis. A person leaving treatment needs somewhere stable to go. A person in supportive housing may need behavioral health care to remain stable. A family on the edge of homelessness needs rent they can afford long before they need an emergency intervention. If we weaken the affordable housing pipeline in order to fund behavioral health facilities, we risk making both systems less effective.
Local affordable housing dollars are especially important because they help make projects possible and attract other public and private investment. Snohomish County already struggles to produce enough deeply affordable and service-supported housing. Taking dollars from that limited pool will make it harder, not easier, to reduce homelessness over time.
There is a better path.
If the County Council wants to expand recovery housing, let’s discuss that. If the Council wants more behavioral health facilities, let’s identify additive funding and build them. If the Council wants clearer outcome measures, provider accountability, or better coordination between housing and treatment systems, many of us are ready to help. Those are worthy conversations.
But policy should be built from the actual conditions in Snohomish County, not from a national political debate or a caricature of what local providers are doing.
We urge the County Council to slow down, direct the County’s Executive’s office to engage providers and people with lived experience, define terms carefully, evaluate the current funding structure before changing it, and pursue a both/and strategy. We need housing and treatment. We need compassion and accountability. We need recovery pathways and deeply affordable homes. We need public safety and human dignity.
Snohomish County will not solve homelessness by forcing these priorities to compete. We will make progress when we build a system strong enough to hold them together.
Respectfully,
The members of the Snohomish County Partnership to End Homelessness Executive Committee
Mary Cline-Stively, Co-Chair, ChildStrive
Jane Pak, Co-Chair, Snohomish County Legal Services
Joe Alonzo, Cocoon House
Mary Anne Dillon, YWCA Seattle, King, Snohomish
Rachel Downes, Housing Hope
Jodie Halsne, Housing Authority of Snohomish County
John Hull, Everett Gospel Mission
Desmond Pullen, PEH Racial Equity Advisory Board
Mindy Woods, City of Edmonds Human Services