KUOW: Seattle Mayor Wilson wants to expand World Cup homeless plan to entire city

This story was originally published by KUOW on Oct. 21, 2026.

By Scott Greenstone

A program that moved homeless people in Pioneer Square into housing before the World Cup will be expanded to the rest of Seattle, Mayor Katie Wilson announced Wednesday.

The shift in strategy won’t cost additional money, Wilson said, but is a course-correction along the lines of what cities like Houston and Denver have done in recent years.

“ We are going to scale up what we know works,” Wilson said in a press conference. “Specifically, we are launching a coordinated effort to use our shelter beds with the most intensive services to the greatest effect by focusing on the unsheltered individuals who are having the greatest impact on our neighborhoods and our public space.”

Denver saw its unsheltered homelessness cut nearly in half between 2023 and 2025, according to point-in-time counts. Sam Batko, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who’s evaluated the approach, told KUOW that social workers, police, and public health staff had daily calls, kept real-time data on people and encampments for outreach, and moved them into hotel rooms and tiny houses while caseworkers figured out long-term housing.

Intensive outreach programs like the Denver model rely on something called “by-name lists,” that has social service providers, business groups, and city officials focus on a group of people who are hard to house. This strategy has been tried before in Seattle with some short-term success: A downtown effort by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority reportedly housed 230 people in the one year it ran, before winding down in October 2023.

Jon Scholes, head of the Downtown Seattle Association, said the new strategy is different. It doesn’t have dedicated new staff like the homelessness authority had for their effort. Instead, it will focus on sheltering people before housing them more permanently, and it doesn’t come with new funding that needs to be sustained, Scholes said.

“The unification here, the unity of many different individuals, and groups, I think is significant and new, and I credit Mayor Wilson for her leadership in aligning us,” Scholes said. “Seattle, we have a problem. We’re going in the wrong direction. Just about every other metro is reducing unsheltered homelessness in their community.”

Noah Fay used to work street outreach. He’s now director of housing programs for the Downtown Emergency Services Center, which operates nearly 2,000 units for people with mental-health and substance-use disorders.

He sees a bureaucratic disconnect between the streets and the housing he and other providers run.

“ The pathway for those very people out on the streets into that housing is really muddled and not very clear and coherent. This is an effort to try to align all of that,” Fay said. “ Whereas right now, we don’t work nearly that nimbly, and as a result, a lot of high-needs people get left out and lost in the wash.”

But Marc Dones, former CEO of King County Regional Homelessness Authority, said this effort sounds extremely similar to past efforts, like the one that ended in 2023, which included daily meetings in the city’s Emergency Operations Center, a by-name list, and tailored offers of shelter.

“ To some degree, that’s not a bad thing, right? Like, it worked,” Dones said. “[But] the math stays the same. The number of people outside continues to climb, and the number of spaces that we have for them to go, whether that’s congregate shelter, non-congregate shelter, supportive housing, transitional housing — that number continues to not grow.”

Past successful efforts had more funding from the state, federal government, or philanthropy behind them. But the city and state are facing massive budget shortfalls and President Donald Trump has tried to cut homelessness funding from cities like Seattle in his second term — not give them more.

Wilson did find some money in the corners of the budget, or from some philanthropy groups, to open new tiny house villages. But she fell short of her June goal to create 500 new shelter beds and moved her first-year goalpost of 1,000 beds to next year.

It’s also not clear if Seattle’s new approach will come hand-in-hand with more enforcement. One report showed Denver’s approach included a 50% increase in “enforcement actions,” including a few instances where police ticketed people for camping outside.

“ Denver is absolutely keeping already-cleared areas clear, and they’re doing that through these coordination meetings in the morning. Police are involved with that,” said Batko, the researcher.

“ But that enforcement didn’t come in the absence of services and real tangible shelter and housing… It wasn’t ‘arrest or cite people and then move them a block away, and then do the same thing again a week later,’” Batko said. “It was, ‘We’re the police, yes, this encampment is going to be closed. We have a shelter and housing option for you… you’re gonna be able to take your pet with you. You will be able to stay with your partner, and we’re gonna work on getting you a housing solution.’”