Responsibility, Structure, and Hope
A leading homeless advocate is encouraging Seattle's political leadership to abandon failed homelessness and drug policies and instead increase access to treatment-based methods. Andrea Suarez, executive director of We Heart Seattle, recently wrote in the Seattle Times that after years of working directly with people living in encampments, she's witnessed firsthand why our current approach isn't working. Homelessness has risen 68% in King County over the past decade, and this year's count will likely show another increase.
Her call for change deserves serious attention. Not because it represents one political tribe over another, but because it reveals something fundamental about how we've been thinking about this crisis.
Our Responsibility to Each Other
We are responsible for the civilization we create together. That responsibility doesn't stop at our immediate circle. It extends outward to the struggling neighbor, the addicted stranger, the person sleeping under an overpass. We're all part of the same network of human connection, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Resources are finite. Time is finite. Not every life can be fully stabilized. But the existence of limits doesn't remove responsibility. It clarifies it. The question isn't whether to help. The question is how to allocate help wisely so that forward movement becomes possible.
If all we can do is prevent someone from slipping further backward, that's not failure. That's stewardship. And we can do better than that.
Recovery Is Direction, Not Destination
Here's where current thinking has gone wrong: we've been treating recovery and stability as fixed end states rather than positions along a journey. Some people enter the system in crisis, needing intensive support. Others are partially stabilized and need reinforcement. Some will move quickly toward independence. Others will take years. Some may never fully stabilize, but can still move forward from where they are.
Think of it as a moving sidewalk. The role of our systems isn't to demand identical speed from everyone, nor to abandon people to figure it out themselves. It's to identify where someone is positioned, what resources they currently have, and what's blocking forward motion, then match the structure of support to that reality.
One-size-fits-all systems fail because they assume everyone is standing in the same place. They're not.
Why Housing First Hasn't Worked
Suarez describes visiting encampments and seeing "the devastating evidence of severe mental health crises and, far more commonly, active drug addiction. The refuse, the chaos, is not created by economic hardship. This is the visible manifestation of untreated addiction and serious psychiatric illness."
She's identifying something crucial: Housing First policies assume that stable housing will enable people to address addiction and mental health issues. But that gets the sequence backwards for many people. It's building from an imagined future position rather than from verified present capacity.
The geometric problem is this: addiction operates on cycles measured in hours or days (cravings, relapse triggers, critical intervention windows), while Housing First policy operates on cycles measured in months or years (housing placement, program evaluations, budget allocations). The decision-making frequency simply cannot match the dynamics it's trying to govern.
Even more problematic, current supportive housing often creates what Suarez calls "toxic to recovery" environments. When you place people with active addictions together with minimal therapeutic contact, "your drug dealer may live down the hall. Your using buddy is your next-door neighbor. The very people and behaviors you need to escape to heal are now your permanent roommates."
This isn't about the moral character of people seeking help. It's about the structure of the environment either supporting or undermining recovery.
The Real Problem: Resources Without Results
Current systems invest heavily in infrastructure (beds, units, buildings) but under-invest in what actually produces recovery: frequent, quality therapeutic contact and structured support that matches someone's current capacity.
Think of it this way: having a place to sleep is necessary but not sufficient for recovery. What matters is the combination of resources available and how frequently those resources engage with the person's actual situation.
High resources with minimal engagement produces minimal progress. Sometimes it produces backsliding because the environment inadvertently reinforces the very dynamics it's meant to stabilize.
This explains why we can spend more money while outcomes worsen. We're measuring success by inputs (how many beds we fill, how many units we occupy) rather than outputs (how many people achieve sustained stability).
A Framework That Matches Reality
What would work better? A three-tier approach that matches support structure to recovery phase:
Tier 1: Intensive Treatment Support For people in active addiction crisis, high-structure environments with frequent therapeutic contact. This isn't punishment. It's matching the intensity of support to the intensity of need. Recovery from active addiction requires constant engagement, rapid response to crisis moments, and removal of triggers that make sobriety impossible.
Clear behavioral requirements aren't about moral judgment. They're about creating environments where recovery is geometrically possible. If someone isn't ready to engage with treatment, they need different support, not the same support delivered ineffectively.
Tier 2: Stable Recovery Support For people in early to mid-stage recovery, ongoing housing with regular therapeutic contact and accountability measures. Not constant oversight, but sustained connection. People at this stage need space to rebuild autonomy while knowing support remains available when challenges arise.
Tier 3: Low-Barrier Basic Services For people who refuse treatment, basic shelter and minimal services that maintain connection points. This tier doesn't claim to produce recovery. It acknowledges reality: some people aren't ready to engage. But we can still prevent deterioration and keep pathways open for when circumstances change.
The key difference: each tier matches support intensity to actual recovery phase rather than pretending one structure works for everyone.
Making Truth Cheap and Falsity Expensive
Current funding structures reward inputs regardless of outcomes. A provider gets paid for filling beds, not for producing sustained recoveries. This creates perverse incentives where admitting failure means losing contracts.
We need outcome transparency: public data on recovery trajectories. What percentage of people maintain stability at six months, one year, five years? What interventions correlate with sustained recovery? What patterns predict relapse?
This information should be public and verifiable, creating competitive pressure for effective methods. Multiple treatment approaches should compete on verified results, not ideological alignment.
This isn't about punishment. It's about learning what actually works and directing resources accordingly.
Clear Pathways Forward
People need to know exactly what behaviors lead to more autonomy and what patterns trigger more intensive support. Rules must be knowable in advance and applied consistently.
Movement between support tiers should be easy as circumstances change. Someone who relapses can quickly return to higher support without bureaucratic barriers. Someone who demonstrates stability can graduate to lower-intensity support without losing their safety net.
The goal is always forward motion, however gradual.
What This Means Practically
Move funding from low-contact warehousing to high-contact treatment. This isn't less compassionate. It's matching resource intensity to recovery requirements.
Build systems that track actual recovery trajectories, not just housing placements. Make verification cheap and falsity expensive through transparent outcome measurement.
Create rapid-response capability for crisis moments. Hours matter in addiction, not weeks or months.
Let multiple treatment approaches prove effectiveness through results rather than political favor.
The Uncomfortable Reality
Some people profit from current dysfunction. Service providers with guaranteed contracts regardless of outcomes. Property owners with subsidized tenants. Political leaders claiming to "address homelessness" while numbers rise. Drug dealers with concentrated customer bases.
These aren't necessarily bad people making bad choices. They're responding rationally to incentive structures that reward persistence of the problem rather than resolution of it.
Changing those incentive structures threatens established positions. That's the actual resistance to reform, hidden beneath moral language about compassion and rights.
Why This Matters Beyond Seattle
This isn't just about homelessness. It's about whether we can build systems that match their structure to the actual dynamics they're trying to govern.
Every complex social challenge has similar patterns: temporal mismatches between decision frequency and system dynamics, verification failures that make falsity cheap, extraction disguised as help.
Learning to recognize these structural constraints and design appropriate responses is a fundamental capability we need for addressing any coordination challenge at scale.
Moving Forward Together
We will not solve homelessness completely. We will not save every person struggling with addiction. Resources are finite, time is limited, and human behavior is complex.
But we can do better than we're doing now. We can match support structures to actual recovery phases. We can measure what works and direct resources accordingly. We can create environments where forward motion becomes possible rather than impossible.
That's not idealism. It's responsible stewardship of finite resources toward meaningful goals.
Andrea Suarez has spent years working directly with people in crisis. Her experience matters. Her observations about what helps and what harms deserve serious consideration beyond political positioning.
The question facing Seattle's new leadership isn't whether to be compassionate or tough. It's whether to continue investing in approaches that demonstrably don't work, or to redesign systems around what actually produces recovery.
We are responsible for the civilization we build together. That responsibility includes everyone in the network of human connection. Within our limits, with our finite resources, we have the obligation to try.
Not perfectly. Not for everyone completely. But wisely, structurally, and with genuine hope that forward movement is possible when we create the conditions that make it geometrically feasible.
That's the path Andrea Suarez is pointing toward. It deserves our attention and our willingness to change course.
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