Seattle residents report encampments in record numbers

Whenever Louise Clauss sees a tent in a Lake City park near her home, she pulls out her phone, takes a picture and sends it to city officials via Seattle’s Find It, Fix It app to report an “unauthorized encampment.”

Within days, she says the city usually responds to her complaint by removing the encampment, only for her to find the same tent and person in a nearby park. So she files another complaint.

She is part of a record number of people reporting homeless camping to the city.

More than 50,000 reports were made in the first eight months of this year, a 66% increase compared to the same time period last year, despite Mayor Bruce Harrell’s claim that the number of tents has dropped 80% since he entered office. 

Harrell, who is running for reelection partially on the platform that his administration has made headway on homelessness and public safety, says reports are increasing because more people know about the app and believe the city responds. 

But people living outside and street outreach workers say Seattle’s response itself could be generating more reports by repeatedly scattering encampments.

Immediately after entering office in 2022, Harrell created the Unified Care Team to follow through on his promise to keep parks and sidewalks clear of tents and respond to residents’ and businesses’ complaints. Within a year, the team tripled Seattle’s pace of encampment removals, and has only sped up since.

With a stagnant and insufficient supply of shelter, there are more people outside than ever. And they say the city’s aggressive pace of tent removals has transformed their lives.

They stay in smaller groups. They are forced to move more frequently. They sleep without tents. And many live in different parts of the city than they used to.

Harrell began an effort last year to keep streets in downtown and the Chinatown International District clear of disorder through daily street cleanings and removals. Outreach workers say a significant chunk of the city’s homeless population has shifted from those central districts into the surrounding residential areas.

Four neighborhoods — Capitol Hill, North Beacon Hill, Belltown and Ballard — were responsible for about half of the increase in encampment reports over the last year.

Among residents, businesses, officials and people living outside, there is deep disagreement on whether the city’s new configuration of unsheltered homelessness is better than the previous one.

More encampments

Perhaps there are more reports because there are more encampments.

Gone are the days of large encampments staying in place for months. During the height of the pandemic, dozens of people camped in one location — in City Hall Park, Little Saigon in the Chinatown International District, Woodland Park, Ballard Commons — after the federal government advised cities not to scatter encampments to avoid spreading COVID-19. 

Now, Seattle’s Unified Care Team usually breaks them up before it gets to that point. Each encampment it removes nowadays has fewer than two tents on average, according to the team’s data.

“People are living in smaller groups and more scattered,” said Chloe Gale, vice president of the outreach organization REACH.

Outreach workers say it’s simple math: smaller encampments mean more encampments, which could trigger more reports.

In order to avoid the city’s removals, Chris Peek, 48, who lives in a tent in Capitol Hill, said he stays by himself most of the time to try to avoid attention. 

But he said that comes with a cost.

“It’s easier for people to prey on you and take your stuff because nobody’s watching, and you can’t just stay there,” Peek said. “I’ve had everything I own burned to the ground. I’ve come back and my tent’s wide open and everything’s gone through. It’s very violating.” 

Still, he said he’s forced to move every few weeks or so. And wherever he goes, he sees people walking by, taking a picture of his tent.

Shelter

City officials say they offer people involved in encampment removals a shelter bed “whenever possible.”

But in almost a third of removals in 2025, the Unified Care Team said it didn’t offer shelter to anybody at the encampment. In about 20%, it cleared the site when no one was there. In the remaining cases, the team reported offering shelter to at least one person but did not say how many people were there or how many didn’t receive shelter.

When the city offered, about 11% of people were recorded actually entering the shelter. City officials say that’s an underestimate due to data limitations from a quarter of shelter entrants not sharing their name.

There’s not enough shelter beds for people living outside anyway. There were more than 4,300 people living outside in Seattle or Vashon Island on any given day, according to the Regional Homelessness Authority’s 2024 snapshot count. 

Since 2021, the city has increased the shelter it pays for by 13 units — from 2,837 to 2,850. And the vast majority of those are full and seldom turn over.

In Harrell’s own words, “our Unified Care Team was not designed to end homelessness.”

“Let’s just make sure that public spaces are available and usable for the public,” Harrell said. 

But some residents say spaces in their neighborhoods have become less usable.

Residential

Emily Vega, 19, lived on the grassy hillside south of Dearborn Street in the Chinatown International District last summer until the city removed that encampment and cordoned off the area with fencing. 

So, Vega and her partner moved to Capitol Hill, where they believed city enforcement of homeless camping would be more “laid back.”

“It’s getting harder to find places,” Vega said. “A lot of people out here are getting really stressed and are like, ‘Where do you go?’ ”

A year ago, Harrell acknowledged that the city’s efforts to clear public drug use, black markets, and street disorder out of downtown were pushing people into Little Saigon.

He began applying the same tactics there. 

That’s worked to reduce homelessness and street disorder in and near the core of Seattle, groups there say. 

Drug activity downtown, as monitored by business lobbying group Downtown Seattle Association’s staff, dropped by about two-thirds last summer, and that decrease has sustained. Tents in the area have been down since summer 2022.

“The street environment is much better by just about every measure,” said Jon Scholes, CEO of Downtown Seattle Association.

While the Sodo Business Improvement Area doesn’t track tent numbers, Executive Director Erin Goodman says there’s been significant improvement there too.

At the same time, reports of encampments in neighborhoods — especially those adjacent to the city’s efforts to clear street disorder — have been skyrocketing.

“Folks are looking for places to go, they’re moving up into the residential areas,” said Nichole Alexander, outreach director at homelessness nonprofit Purpose Dignity Action.

Jonathan Schultz, assistant director for The Salvation Army’s outreach team, also said he’s seeing a migration from business districts into small neighborhood parks or in front of people’s homes.

“I don’t know if more residential, more neighborhood living means more reporting, but I also wouldn’t be surprised,” Schultz said.

Residents in those neighborhoods are making the same connection.

Don Blakeney, a Capitol Hill resident and board member of the Cal Anderson Park Alliance, said he’s seen a large influx of people living outside in the neighborhood, especially at Cal Anderson Park, where he’s seen the situation go from one or two tents to sometimes dozens of people.

“A lot of folks, we think, are coming in from downtown, being pushed out, and we’re sort of seeing them arrive on our streets and in our parks,” Blakeney said.

Action

Harrell says growing reports are a sign of confidence in the city’s encampment response.

City officials say word of the Find It, Fix It app has spread through online platforms like Nextdoor and Facebook. They have also been advertising it in neighborhood meetings as the way residents can get the city to respond to their problems, and say overall use of the app has increased, although reports made for issues other than encampments only increased by 11% in the last year.

Harrell’s office said the Unified Care Team’s efforts were partially responsible for the number of encampment fires decreasing 45% between 2022 and 2024, at the same time gunshots involving homeless people dropped 62%. Outreach workers agree that larger encampments can pose more serious safety risks because criminals can hide in them.

Goodman, at the Sodo association, also said removals clean up the trash that can build up around tents and RVs, and spreads the burden of homelessness more equitably than leaving encampments in place.

“We all know that this system just moves people around. We know that, but we’ve accepted that,” Goodman said. “Some businesses and some folks and employees were literally surrounded for two years and unable to operate while others were not.”

But Clauss, the Lake City resident, said the city’s prompt responses to her reports are not productive.

“If people are simply being relocated from one public space to another, it is not accomplishing anything for anyone’s benefit,” Clauss said.

Still, she said she plans to continue reporting them.

“I think if people simply stop reporting them, the implication could be, ‘Oh, well, people aren’t complaining. I guess it’s not a problem anymore.’ ”