White House launches federal initiative to address homelessness crisis in Seattle, other cities

By Adel Toay

Published on May 18, 2024

All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness has a goal to reduce homelessness by 25% by 2025 in six communities, including Seattle.

The White House and U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH) launched Thursday a first-of-its-kind initiative to address the homelessness crisis in six parts of the country, including Seattle.

USICH’s All In: The Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness (ALL INside), first announced in December, has a goal to reduce homelessness by 25% by 2025 in six communities. The communities include Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, the Phoenix Metro area, and the state of California.

Through the initiative, USICH and 19 federal agencies will partner with state and local governments to help support their efforts to move people off the streets and into housing.

Pillars of ALLINside include embedding a federal official in each of the six communities and deploying federal teams to identify opportunities for regulatory relief and navigate federal funding.

USICH said in a statement that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will help communities leverage programs like Medicaid to cover and provide housing-related supportive services and behavioral health care.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration (SSA), and HHS will also collaborate to address barriers to government-issued identification and other critical documents.

The U.S. Department of Labor will connect the communities with local workforce boards and Job Corps sites to leverage employment opportunities for unsheltered youth.

HUD has committed to helping the communities troubleshoot barriers to connecting people to rental assistance or housing programs, as well as, help speed up the processes enabling residents to move into properties and transition into permanent housing.

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell and King County Executive Dow Constantine joined USICH in a virtual kick-off event Thursday to discuss how the federal initiative will help the city and county in its efforts to end the homelessness crisis.

“This particular initiative, which is aligned with, I think, the housing first approach that we certainly embrace, will critically bring people indoors, give them a pathway to recovery and look at the institutional challenges that we’ve had through historical practices to make sure we can prevent it in the first place,” Harrell said. 

According to 2022 Point-In-Time Count data, Seattle and King County have the third largest homeless population at 13,348, behind New York City and Los Angeles.

“This particular initiative, we think, could not have come at a better time,” Harrell said. “Recent census data was released and Seattle is the fastest-growing big city in America at about a 2.4% growth rate.”

The initiative builds on HUD’s $486 million package of grants and vouchers to help 62 communities address the homelessness crisis, including Washington state, which received $8.4 million.

This piece was republished from KING 5 News.