Seattles new mayor, Katie Wilson, has pledged to move every homeless person in the city into shelter before World Cup matches kick off at Lumen Field in June, setting up a high-stakes test of progressive governance under an international spotlight.
According to The Post Millennial, Wilson, a self-described socialist who took office at the start of the year, framed the tournament as a forcing mechanism for long-delayed action on a crisis that has only worsened despite massive public spending. The World Cup gives us a pretty aggressive timeline for trying to bring people inside with the support that they need, as opposed to sweeping people to other neighborhoods, she told Politico, adding, Folks who are experiencing homelessness downtown often also have complex challenges related to drug use and mental illness.
Her administration is moving ahead even as more than $1 billion poured into homelessness programs over the past decade has produced scant measurable improvement, raising questions about whether more money and more bureaucracy can solve what is increasingly a public order and addiction crisis. President Donald Trump previously threatened to strip Seattle of its World Cup matches after Wilsons election, a warning she publicly brushed aside, yet the looming tournament now appears to be driving a sudden urgency that was absent for years.
Wilsons plan calls for the creation of 500 new shelter units before the first match on June 15, a dramatic escalation in capacity that would include tiny home villages, RV placements, and apartment-style housing. That target stands in stark contrast to the citys recent record, as Seattle managed to add only 13 new shelter units over the past four years despite its self-declared state of emergency.
City leaders are also grappling with public safety concerns, as Lumen Field sits within walking distance of downtown streets long dominated by open-air drug use and sprawling encampments. Even so, Democrats in Washington state are pressing Wilson to avoid encampment sweeps, prioritizing ideological opposition to enforcement over the expectations of residents and visiting fans.
We do not have sustainable resources to scale up all the places for people to come inside, be it permanent or temporary locations, warned state Representative Nicole Macri, who also serves as deputy director of a homeless nonprofit, underscoring the gap between political promises and fiscal reality. With Seattles homeless population nearing 17,000after being labeled a crisis as far back as 2015and Washington now leading the nation in chronic homelessness, the citys experiment in left-wing policy will be judged not by rhetoric but by whether streets are safer, cleaner, and genuinely cleared before the world arrives.
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