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We tend to think we're smarter in Washington, but we've got the third highest number of homeless people in the United States on the West Coast.

Only California has us beat.

More than 16,000 people are homeless in King County alone, making Seattle ground zero for the problem, as it has been since the homeless crisis was officially declared more than a decade ago.

And into all of this enters we heart Seattle.

A group of volunteers founded in 2020 by Andrea Suarez, who works to clean up the environmental catastrophe caused by illegal encampments while trying to influence the city's approach to the problem.

We're talking to We Heart Seattle next on northwest now?

Music Billions of dollars have been spent on homelessness, but all the numbers are going in the wrong direction.

The Housing First and harm reduction models tried for a while in Seattle have failed.

And now, after the last election, the city has decided to move back toward a more permissive treatment of drug offenders and the continued hope that the chronic criminals embedded in the homeless community could somehow be persuaded to change their ways.

Working in the midst of all of this is Andrea Suarez and the organization she founded, We Heart Seattle.

We Heart Seattle claims to have removed 2 million pounds of trash from public spaces and help 300 people get off the streets, all with private fundraising.

Suarez works at the intersection of trying to clean up the city physically on the one hand, and at the same time trying to influence homeless policy.

Andrea, thanks so much for coming to northwest.

Now to talk a little more about we heard Seattle.

You know, I was thinking we should get her back on the show.

And and then I looked back and it was like, I think it was two years ago, that we talked last time.

You are now five years into this going on six.

And one of the things and in the interest of transparency, we talked a little bit before this interview that you're okay with this line of questioning, but I think it's important for people to know that this isn't some hobby you're doing, something you're doing for clicks and something for likes, and there's some kind of an ego trip.

Doing this work that you do in downtown Seattle has come at a pretty significant personal price.

And I'd like you to talk a little bit about that and tell folks what you've been through, attempting to do this work.

Well, thanks for having me back.

It's good to be here.

Yeah.

Five years in, you know, 2 million pounds of trash, 50,000 hours of volunteers came out and cleaned up Seattle's shared spaces.

And we found grimly, bodies, bones, human waste needles, thousands of pieces of drug paraphernalia, watching human despair and human suffering, drug addiction, untreated mental illness and the same people over and over again who are service resistant that you want to set out to help, and sort of being in that first responder role like police and fire, you absorb that trauma, depression, PTSD, self-medication.

I'm on a lot of medication right now.

I'm not going to lie, I've lost, I lost my corporate job after 25 years.

I mean, it was kind of time, but going from a nice, fat six figure job with benefits and paid vacation to a poor social worker, wage was absolutely a sacrifice.

Running for office.

I don't know if you knew that or you shoot you, but I ran against Sean Scott as a state representative.

Then I became very political.

You know, my friendship started to become a little bit estranged.

Yeah.

People were like, where are you at on the political spectrum?

You sound conservative because you want people to be accountable and mandate treatment.

And that sounds like a conservative talking point.

I was a card carrying Democrat.

I got crushed by a, democratic socialist, Sean Scott, in my race.

So I've just really been lost.

Abandoned, estranged by relationships and put on some weight.

I have aged.

I mean, let's face it, I was in my 40, lower 40s when I started, and I'm 51 this month.

And, yeah, sometimes I wake up and say, what the heck am I doing?

Except that I have 100% doubled down that this ministry, if you will, is is a calling.

And being a civic servant has been the most rewarding thing I've done in my life.

And I'm glad you shared that, because I wanted people to understand that this hasn't been free.

And, you know, and I appreciate your transparency there.

And, you know, wish you the best.

Obviously, I'll say that early, in overcoming some of those things and hanging in there because I know that it has been difficult work.

You mentioned your loss to Sean Scott.

You know, Seattle dipped its toe briefly into moderation for a couple of years here recently.

And then of this past election boom.

Right back we go.

What are what are your thoughts about that?

Do you lose hope a little bit there when it looks like more of the same?

What are your thoughts about where the city is politically and the impact that has on the issues you're dealing with?

It feels there's a, you know, popularity contest there with democratic socialists.

And what happened in New York, our mayor here, Katie Wilson, candidates like Sean Scott and Alexis Mercedes rank crushing moderates.

Yeah.

I mean, not just winning by a small margin, but really taking those races and leading all the way through, really, whether it's, you know, Trump backlash, going on opposite of anything that's moderate kind of to reset maybe the national trend.

But unfortunately I think that Trump lives rent free in 99% of people's heads, but yet has 99.8%.

Nothing to do with our backyard.

And I wish that voters would turn out.

Frankly, it is a voter turnout crisis.

People turned off what to believe and why.

We're so proud of our direct action to go out and learn by doing.

Look at the trash.

Look at the human suffering.

Look at the empty buildings.

Look at the destruction of low barrier shelters and housing first projects that aren't producing the outcomes.

And see, why are these electeds, getting to where they're at, raking in billions of dollars without producing outcomes?

It's very mind boggling to be honest.

My cynical view on this is that the reason things have continued and carried on the way they have, is that it's simply too profitable to change.

Set me straight on that.

Am I wrong?

Well, I mean, in any other private sector, the homeless would be out of business, people would be laid off.

There's not enough outcomes.

Billions going in.

Homelessness is up 700%.

30,000 people have lost their lives to death by overdose.

Since we've implemented these policies, you know, things like housing first, harm reduction, keep people comfortable until they're ready to address their untreated mental illness or drug addiction.

And it's just not working.

You hear a couple examples here and there that maybe housing first helped a person, but certainly not when they were on fentanyl.

The only people that I know that are getting help are the ones that are court ordered through drug court to either go to jail or go to treatment because they've committed enough crimes that that that's where they're at.

I want to break both of those out separately.

Let's start with harm reduction.

I've had guests on this program for a long time talking about harm reduction, and I get the logic of it.

There's a piece of me that says, well, listen, the house is on fire.

Let's not put more fire on it.

Let's have some safe tools.

If you're going to be drug addicted, let's not get, you know, another disease as a result of it.

It makes some sense to me.

But if you look at the results, the results have failed miserably.

What is wrong with harm reduction?

Well, you know, again, we go back to the needle.

Dispensaries really made sense during the HIV crisis.

Here we are, 20, 26 decades later, and we're handing out foil and methamphetamine pipes to smoke narcotics that aren't spreading disease.

And addiction is a disease.

So when we enable that, isn't that spreading the disease of addiction and enabling people to stay trapped longer?

And if you ask the men and women in recovery of which this is a pivot, you know, we're really working with the recovery community more and more to come out and pick trash with us when surveying them.

They're like, no, do not hand me the tools to slowly kill myself, even if just for no other reason but morally wrong, you know?

Just stop.

Full stop.

And why would taxpayers have to pay for it to boot?

That makes no sense.

And then you have the contradiction of, behavioral health and public safety.

So those needles and foils end up in our parks, picked up by children, by dogs.

They litter our parks.

I've picked up hundreds of thousands of pieces of this drug paraphernalia, and it's just psychologically a burden for the rest of society.

It's not reducing harm, it's enabling addiction.

Another piece I wanted to break out separately, Housing First.

It was the hot new thing.

And again, I will also admit to you, Andrea, at first, you know, I'm thinking through this and I like the idea.

Let's solve the housing problem so they're not worrying about where the roof is going to be over the head.

Get them out of the cold.

Boom.

We got that covered.

Now we can start working on the rest of you.

That has failed miserably to why you cannot help a person treat their addiction when the foxes in the henhouse, you're putting a bunch of people with a bunch of different disabilities in an apartment in perpetuity for free, for life with no requirement to enroll in mental health care or substance abuse treatment.

None.

Zero.

So what happens is they will be trapped there for years, furthering their addiction, getting sicker, losing their teeth, getting thinner.

It's terrible.

I see it every day.

Talk about some of the conditions you've seen in places like, yeah, you go inside.

They are unable to care for just basic janitorial.

Their bathrooms are overtaken by cockroaches.

Appliances don't work.

Indoor fires.

I've met multiple people who have housing or shelter or tiny homes that still remain out on the street because they simply just can't adapt.

I don't understand why our folks at the University of Washington and beyond are not pivoting and saying treatment first, go to a treatment facility.

That's the model we hurt.

Seattle uses, and we have hundreds of people that have gotten off the streets into treatment, into recovery homes, back to parents, back to their children, serving their warrants.

Accountability is love.

Accountability is empowerment.

And when we canceled that, we really started seeing that decline in in the system working.

And like you said, there's no rock bottom in Seattle now.

You really can't hit rock bottom.

And you're you've called housing first to glorified hospice care is yeah, I see it as just call it end of life care.

And let's stop arguing.

Call it hospice care.

We'll stop arguing.

Call it, safe injection sites, a safe place to use.

It was supposed to be kind.

That's supposed to be kind, right?

Right.

Now, the low barrier, you know, and I'm going to name them Plymouth housing.

The DC old guard.

Well intended housing for people with the worst of the worst disabilities are harboring the drug addicts in Seattle.

Everybody knows to find their dealer in these homes.

We are funding dealers in these homes in low barrier, free for life housing that we pay for so that these dealers can prey on the residents, whether they're schizophrenic, mentally ill, whether they're addicted.

Fentanyl changed the game.

Housing first was studying on, studied on, inebriated alcoholics two decades ago.

Right in in a DSC house.

Right.

They the gate the drugs have changed.

And any drug addict will tell you it does make sense to get treatment before housing does put me through a 28 day program.

How do first, how do addicts fund their habits?

Oh my gosh, they are boosting so steel retail theft, flipping their gift cards, flipping their food stamp card, siphoning gas porch pirating, smash and grab on your windows.

I saw two guys with stolen luggage going down First Avenue yesterday.

Sadly, a lot of men and women are trading, trading, you know, sex and different tricks to support their daily habit.

A daily habit is really anywhere from $50 to $200 a day, depending on where your tolerances are.

One gentleman I know who's been on the streets for 12 years and he's like, Andrea, I'm the best thief there is.

And he he has to buy about $100,000 of drugs a year to keep him.

Well, which the retail on that was probably you have to assume double.

So 2 to 300,000 times ten years.

You're talking like $1 million in retail theft for one guy to support his habit for ten years, times thousands of drug addicts doing the same thing.

And you wonder why we have a $3 billion a year state of Washington retail theft number and a quiet downtown Seattle.

It's a it's rooted in drug addiction, drug addiction, drug addiction, drugs, drugs, drugs.

And when I say quiet I meant it from a retail perspective.

It's why people why stores and storefronts.

It's it's small businesses are being impacted.

Your target, your Walmart, your quarter.

Pharmacies.

But yeah, the the ability to come to Seattle, a sanctuary city where there's a no rules playground.

We just elected a prosecuting attorney who said she will not prosecute for consumption.

That was my next question, this suicidal, empathy piece.

Here.

Talk a little bit about that.

And SPD, not arresting going back to that model again.

Yeah, I mean, maybe they'll arrest on certain occasions if they're a repeat, maybe somebody that the police have identified as a role, you know.

Hi utilizar but at the end of the day, the message is sent to the criminal mind.

It's sent to the addict, the addict.

The addiction is in charge.

And so all these bordering cities and all these bordering counties are are we have an inflow.

Droves of people are going to come to a sanctuary city where they can now pitch their tent.

They won't get prosecuted, they might get arrested or stopped, but they will go into a diversion program, which in past has been the lead where they get to go to a hotel, the Civic Hotel, with the view of the Space Needle to score more drugs in an air conditioned room while they have a gazebo to smoke fentanyl again on our dime, instead of going to jail and being accountable for their behavior that's associated with their addiction.

Danny West Nate recently wrote a piece in the Seattle Times about the experience down in Portland.

The mayor down there, Keith Wilson, he stood up shelters and forced a camping ban.

The news sounds pretty good, but of course, the stop, the sweeps crowd and the other, advocates on the extreme left there say, that's not enough.

Now, of course, that'll never be enough, right?

I mean, is there an enough can this problem be solved?

It is.

I've read those articles, and I know Mayor Wilson in Seattle has said the same thing.

You know, 4000 more shelters, more affordable housing.

But we have an affordable housing surplus.

We have shelters for people to go.

There are options.

They don't want to go.

They are service resistant, codependent groups and clusters of people that work in a system where once the deal or one's the person that trades her body, the other person scores the dope, the other one's the dealer, the other one cooks I it's over and over and over again.

The crisis population.

Mayor Harold couldn't figure it out prior.

Mayors don't know what to do with the crisis population that are wreaking havoc on the communities.

It's a very small number, actually, that we're talking about.

And it's just we don't want to jail them.

We don't want to mandate treatment.

And there's something there in between.

And I think that's why models like we hurt Seattle that go out there and clean the parks and build trust and a really a humanitarian crisis way without government might just be the way out for hundreds of people, because we've certainly already proved that model possible.

You've talked about taking a clinical approach to homeless camps, having some, mandated or not mandated but approved camp, type of setup.

Talk a little bit about what your vision is for that.

And what some of the other policy pieces that you're advocating.

How how do those fit together and possibly help the problem?

I do believe in transitional camps.

There's three in Seattle.

There's like a tent city, two, three, four and a camp.

United we stand.

If well run, that's always the caveat.

If well run, you have security, you have bathrooms, you have tricity of a safe place for a certain demographic of people to camp.

Again, not usually the drug addicts who have to commit crime.

All day to support their habit.

Those encampments really aren't still even suited for that population.

However, I do think there could be a reimagined triage like sort of FEMA for this population tent that says, you're going to go in here with an exit plan.

You cannot be here more than 30 days.

You're coming in there with the expectation that you will do something with your life.

Then just continue to squat, loiter, steal, use in our public spaces.

Again, without a mayor willing to mandate, you have to go here or you will be arrested and go to jail.

You do not end the crisis.

Population wreaking havoc on our community.

Same thing with Portland.

He opened up the shelters.

Wow, that was really good weather as mats on churches, community centers.

He got that count done.

And I think Wilson can get that count done.

But people might just go in for a night, get a warm bed, take a shower, get a meal.

But they're right back out there.

And while that disrupts their cycle, it really isn't sustainable.

Is saying no narcotics in our parks.

There's a bill in all in the state right now.

I think it's being argued today that should we pass a you know, basically you cannot resolve move camps unless you have this like 100 list of things you can accommodate dogs, groups of people, all the things, so no sweep, no sweeps.

And I'm like, okay, fine for argument purposes, fine.

I support it, except that there's one thing if there's narcotics anywhere near those camps, full stop.

Remove.

Now, no one wants to talk about the narcotics.

Yeah.

It's wild.

What do you think?

What's your number one policy prescription right now?

As you talk to lawmakers and you get involved in policy, what you indicated earlier was kind of where you think the key to this might lie in your work.

If you have one thing, what would it be?

Well, one of our proudest moments, being now five years old, is that legislators from both sides of the aisle are calling upon.

We heard Seattle for information, whether it's whether or not we should take little children that are in tents next to a mother who's using and also a prostitute or, things like, should we have, broader nuisance property legislation around the low barrier shelters that are having the most 911 calls or, you know, narcotic, narcotic use when and where?

My number one thing and I just said it is if fentanyl is anywhere in the midst of a public space close to a daycare, a park, a playground, a community center, a library, full stop arrest, now that it's poison, it's taking our loved ones.

It's now a national weapon of mass destruction.

It's fentanyl.

Last 30s naked self-promotion.

If people want to get involved and learn more, what do they do?

How to where do they go?

We heart seattle.org time.

Talent.

Treasure.

We are A501 C3.

We're five years old.

We have a strong back of the house.

Volunteering is how you vote for the backyard.

You want to live.

So get out, volunteer, pick up some trash, connect to the homeless.

My mantra is everybody is an outreach worker.

Everybody can lend a helping hand up.

Think about are you helping or enabling somebody when you leave them a sandwich or give them a dollar?

Try to connect them to a service or donate to a nonprofit that's out there.

Boots on the ground.

And if I had $1 million, I would put more outreach on the ground.

We need intervention at the ground level.

So, it's not a it's not a top down.

It's a bottom up outcome here.

So thanks for your time, Andrea.

Thanks so much for coming to northwest now.

Billions of dollars later, homelessness and drug addiction are as bad as ever, and there's desperate need for a new approach.

Although with the results of the 2025 elections, that's probably not going to happen because good luck getting affordable housing investments going when the very notion of private property is an anathema to the city's new leadership.

And let's not forget, while housing is a secondary effect of the problem, it's not the primary one, and there's not enough political will to aggressively discourage drug vagrancy and mandate treatment.

The bottom line the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

And yet, here we are.

I wish we had Seattle the best of luck, as I do the people of Seattle who have suffered through this for so many years.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

You can find this program on the web at kbtc.org.

Stream it through the PBS app or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

That's going to do it for this edition of northwest.

Now until next time, I'm Tom Layson.

Thanks for watching.

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