Earlier this summer, a coordinated effort in downtown Seattle moved 70 people from the streets of Pioneer Square into housing in about six weeks. The Downtown Seattle Association brought providers, outreach teams, and its own staff into one operation, with no new money and no extra staff to lean on.
On Episode 117 of the Seattle City Makers Podcast, Downtown Seattle Association President and CEO Jon Scholes sits down with Community Solutions President Rosanne Haggerty to talk about how that pilot came together and what it says about the road ahead for Seattle. The conversation ranges from a bankrupt Times Square hotel in the early 1990s, where Haggerty started this work, to Denver and Atlanta today, to the housing options American cities are missing entirely.
“There’s a lot of housing here. There are a lot of opportunities to get people moved indoors that seem blocked,” Haggerty says. “What are the policy levers? What are the barriers to just unlocking that?”
Listen to the full episode below, or read the transcript.
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Four takeaways from the conversation
Coordination unlocked results that new funding did not.
The Pioneer Square pilot ran from May through June with no additional resources. Providers volunteered to work in a new way, and the Downtown Seattle Association supplied the organizing infrastructure that no single agency had on its own.
Housing is the foundation, and it is not the whole job.
Cities also need an organized way to see why people are coming into homelessness and why they are getting stuck there.
Mayoral leadership shows up in the results.
It is hard to point to a city making real progress where the mayor is not out front on the issue. Where that is missing, business improvement districts and providers can start the momentum in a single zone.
A missing form of housing is stalling the national debate.
People with the most serious health and behavioral health needs are being directed to permanent supportive housing because it is the only option communities have. Haggerty and her colleagues are calling the missing piece “assisted living plus.”
Full transcript
Seattle City Makers Podcast, Episode 117, recorded in downtown Seattle. Lightly edited for length and clarity.
0:00 Introduction
Jon Scholes: Well, hello and welcome to Seattle City Makers. I’m your host, Jon Scholes.
We have a special guest on today’s episode, Rosanne Haggerty, president of Community Solutions, a national nonprofit that works across the country and has worked in more than 100 cities to help them address homelessness. We at the Downtown Seattle Association contracted with Rosanne and Community Solutions last year to develop a plan for downtown. I discussed that plan and that work with Rosanne, her perspective on the issue nationally, and her perspective on homelessness here in Seattle. Hope you enjoy my conversation with Rosanne Haggerty, president of Community Solutions.
Thanks for making time for this. We’re catching our breath after two days of diving deep into our work with you here in Seattle, and we’ll get to that, I’m sure.
1:02 The Times Square hotel
Scholes: I’m curious, because I know a little about how you got into this work many years ago, but not the full origin story. I knew it was in Times Square, and reading up a bit the last couple days, you came to redevelop what I think at the time was the largest affordable housing project in the country.
Rosanne Haggerty: Supportive housing. It was one of the early ones, but it was unusual, and actually I think still the right premise: mixed income, meaning workforce housing and permanent supportive housing.
In Times Square, a former rundown hotel, the largest single room occupancy hotel in the city. These buildings, and preserving them, are a really smart place to begin if you’re looking to create housing opportunities for folks who are coming from homelessness, and also, in our case, workforce housing for folks who are looking for an inexpensive place to live in the center of the city.
Scholes: This was the early ’90s in Times Square. What was life like then in that neighborhood?
Haggerty: Did you ever see “Taxi Driver”? It hadn’t changed much. Forty-Second Street was still the iconic urban blight story. It was a pretty grim place.
But I’ll tell you, Jon, one of the things offsetting that was a new business improvement district that had just been formed. This was the Times Square Alliance. At first it was called the Times Square BID. It was still in the formative stage, a group of property owners and business leaders who decided the cavalry isn’t coming. There had been a number of failed economic development plans over the course of a couple of decades, and they just came together saying, “We’re going to make this a safe, clean, and friendly neighborhood.” I think most folks thought, “Good luck to you.”
And yet, when I showed up with this plan to renovate a building that was known in the press in New York as “homeless hell,” it was in disastrous shape. The city had placed hundreds of homeless families there and sort of walked away without any kind of support, and it had become like a permanent crime scene. And then there were these 200 or so elderly and many mentally ill individuals who were there without support. The building was in bankruptcy. Entire floors had been burned out.
But it was an opportunity to really demonstrate that housing with support was the answer for many people coming from homelessness. I recall those first conversations with the BID board. They were looking at me kind of strangely at first, and then sort of like, “You’re one of us. You actually think there’s a future for this neighborhood, and you’re willing to take this on. How would we help?”
It was kind of extraordinary. But for the BID and these very prominent business leaders, theater owners, the publisher of The New York Times, saying, “We actually think this is a better plan than just letting this fester,” and the mayor at the time, Mayor Dinkins, and all of the powers that be in the city saying, “How do we not support this thing that looks kind of wildly ambitious when we have all of these other folks really invested in the neighborhood saying we need to take some big swings here because homelessness is getting worse, and we need some big ideas?”
Scholes: The scale of that property is what kind of got me. This wasn’t a 50-room building.
Haggerty: It was 652 units. When we finished the project it was actually over 700 units, but we enlarged the units so that there was a private bath in each one. So 652 efficiency apartments plus a very generous common space.
We learned a lot, and I think some of the core principles we learned over time still hold. The diversity of tenants mattered. Over time, about half the building was lower-income workforce units, and a lot of people worked in the theater and restaurant industry in Times Square, so it really served the local employment base and local employers. The remainder of our tenants were either those original tenants or folks who were coming from homelessness. Then we had a terrific social services partner in the building.
We had a very well-designed building for purpose. People had private bathroom facilities but lots of common space, so the size of the unit wasn’t the be-all and end-all. Having the appropriate services for tenants, having on-site management. I think this is the least sexy and maybe most important part of a well-run building. Is the management really attentive to the quality of life, the maintenance, the tone of the building, things getting fixed, people having information, it being friendly? I used to describe my job back in the day as being mayor of a small town. That management presence mattered enormously given the different personalities and issues we’d be dealing with every day.
And then also having a staff that was really mission-oriented, that just got it as far as the point being to create a community here, not simply dial it in. We learned a lot in terms of the principles that make for a good housing environment, no matter what array of people are living there.
7:45 How she got into the work
Scholes: What prompted you to propose this project, and how did you get connected to the issue of homelessness? You were working in this space prior to this building.
Haggerty: I was. It’s a funny story, Jon. My first job out of college was a full-time volunteer year that involved working at a shelter in Times Square for runaway and homeless young people. They put us up in this crazy old Baptist mission center property right next to the Times Square Hotel. So I lived next door to it, but I was very familiar with it, and with the characters who lived there, who you’d pass on your walk to work over at the child care center.
I certainly did not intend to spend my life working on housing and homelessness. I was interested in a volunteer experience and getting some immersion in what the real challenges of the world were after college. But that year was pretty profound as far as realizing the dimensions of homelessness. This was in the early ’80s, a much smaller problem, growing. And I was, in an odd way but a very helpful way, shocked that that could be happening in our country. And I’m still shocked.
So I decided to try to learn about housing development. It was in the course of my job at Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens, where we were turning all this church real estate into housing, that the Times Square Hotel began its decline. It changed hands many times and became, sadly, what had been a little down-on-its-heels place, an absolute disaster zone.
I felt very personally affected since I knew the building. And oddly, at that time in my job in Brooklyn, the project I was largely focused on was turning an old orphanage and three closed Catholic schools into single room occupancy units. And it was killing us. Finding the money was complicated, and the community politics. And I’m looking at this old building slide into oblivion knowing just how hard it was to replace those kinds of units.
So I became a little obsessive around someone needing to do something. At a certain point I realized there are probably about five people in New York City who know how to finance these things, and I was actually in the midst of doing that and learning what makes it work. So I got involved in trying to build a coalition of folks who’d be interested in turning the building into mixed-income permanent supportive housing. I never set out to start an organization, but I was very determined to try to save that building, and I ended up starting an organization because I couldn’t find anyone to do it.
Scholes: And then you continued leading Common Ground in New York.
11:31 Housing is essential, and it is not the complete story
Haggerty: Exactly. And then, apropos of the work that we are so excited to be supporting here in Seattle, I realized housing is essential, foundational, and a wider range of housing options like SROs is absolutely important, but it’s not the complete story. You actually need an organized way of taking a view of a whole city and the dynamics of it. Why are people coming into homelessness? Why are people getting stuck there? How do you take all of the worthy efforts that many organizations have begun and all the different funding programs and turn it into a system that actually has the single intention of making homelessness rare and brief?
I began realizing, after probably six or so years of completing that Times Square project, that that bigger set of questions needed to be asked. Since then, with amazing colleagues and the ability to work with great people in a number of cities, we’ve been really trying to learn our way forward into the design principles. Things as basic as, what’s the data system? How do you solve a problem that has a lot of moving parts and lots of different human dimensions that have to be factored in?
It’s almost like we discovered something obvious, Jon, which is that housing emergencies can look a lot like health emergencies. There’s an individual as the person, and you need an individual diagnosis, and you need the team to act like a team rather than a bunch of independent contractors.
13:19 Is this harder than it was in the early ’90s?
Scholes: Do you think it’s more complicated than it was in the early ’90s in Times Square? The set of issues people are facing today, fentanyl and severe behavioral health. Is it a different task and challenge than when you first got into this work?
Haggerty: It absolutely is. I was speaking recently with a terrific leader in the health care and homelessness world in Denver who was pointing out that when she first started working with people who are homeless about 20 years ago, it was not uncommon to find folks with two or three chronic health, mental health, or substance abuse problems. Now, 20 is not unusual, across different physical, mental, and behavioral health challenges.
So it absolutely has gotten tougher with street drugs, and also the longer people go unhoused, their physical and mental health challenges metastasize, frankly, and become much more complex to deal with.
Scholes: It feels like there’s a lot of tension in this issue politically. “It’s just a housing problem and we just need more housing.” A professor at the University of Washington, Gregg Colburn, has his whole book on homelessness being a housing problem, and there are some who want to define and frame it that way, which in some ways pushes others to make a case that no, it’s drugs, it’s this or that. We’re sort of talking past each other and stuck in how we’re trying to define why it exists. Is that a Seattle thing, or are you seeing that in other parts of the country?
Haggerty: That’s everywhere. That’s everywhere you debate. But what makes me hopeful is that there is just a lot of space, and a lot more movement, toward what gets outcomes, what works. We can debate about the drivers, or the degree to which, or the philosophical stance on our obligations to others. There’s a lot of room in this space of what works and how we actually join up our responses to create the most effective outcomes for the greatest number of people.
15:49 The debate over Housing First
Scholes: How do you think about the debate around Housing First? There was a column in the Seattle Times just yesterday, a local county council member saying it’s time to turn our back on Housing First.
Haggerty: In the spirit again of what works, I feel as though that’s the wrong conversation. Housing First back in the day, and it was also originated in New York around the same time that I was starting Common Ground, was housing plus very robust services, like a whole assertive community treatment team went with the subsidized apartment. It involved a high degree of accountability. That team was responsible for assisting someone in crisis, making sure they were living in a safe manner, and that their impact on the building, if they were having a crisis, was mitigated.
Somehow that got diluted over time, and the services often did not materialize to the same personalized, necessary degree. So I think the better conversation is, what is it going to take to make each individual or family successful in moving out of homelessness, or in avoiding homelessness in the first place? It’s a much more fruitful conversation.
To the extent that you’re not going to overcome homelessness without a place to live, there is no one answer to that question. It’s really about being responsive to people’s needs, but also aspirations, and factoring in people’s own sense of agency. Often some of the conversations presume that it’s only about permanent supportive housing for everyone. People have so many more options, often, if you sit and speak with people about their network, their aspirations. And more and more, I think, linking in workforce jobs and community as non-clinical but very important parts of people rebuilding their lives.
18:19 Purpose, belonging, and the pathway off the street
Scholes: I think too often in this community we do not talk enough about purpose and community as part of your pathway off the streets.
Haggerty: And that’s so important to a journey, and stability, and health. We all have that need for belonging and connection. And that also invites many more people in the community to be part of that response than simply landlords or folks who can provide clinical care.
19:36 Who is getting it right
Scholes: Who’s getting it right when you look at the different communities around the country, and those you’ve worked with directly? Now over 100 municipalities you all have worked with across the U.S., but even maybe some you haven’t worked with but you think are doing it in an effective way.
Haggerty: Among large cities, we are often highlighting the really inspirational work that’s happening in Denver and Atlanta.
Denver has reduced unsheltered homelessness by 64% in the last three years, and just the all-out commitment of the mayor and his team, and a really top-notch group of providers. They’ve done an exceptionally good job of involving their health systems too, and their private sector landlords. A lot of what they’ve done is so relevant to any large city.
They have especially shown some significant innovation around contracting and data collection, some things that sound like, how could they be so important? But if you’re talking about collaborating in a way that involves the business community, many different providers, the health care system, shared data, a really well-run coordinated backbone entity, these are all really important features. They have performance-based contracting that both raises the bar in terms of the work to be done, and has made the process of getting paid infinitely simpler for the organizations that are part of this.
In Atlanta, it’s been really interesting to see how Mayor Dickens there has really blended the very ambitious goals around reducing unsheltered homelessness, their vision is to end unsheltered homelessness in the city, with their very ambitious housing production goals around housing at many different income levels. That absolutely is the way of the future. Not thinking about, what’s our housing plan, and then what’s our response to homelessness? To the extent you’re integrating those, I think that’s where you see amazing traction.
And Atlanta, gosh, they housed 467 individuals who were living unsheltered in the downtown into housing, not temporarily into housing, in advance of the World Cup. It was impressive to see how they mobilized the business community, philanthropy, and their landlord community around a moment that was of importance to the whole city, and to do it right. Not to bust people out of town, but to see that energy as something that could be harnessed for a real gain in terms of their whole homelessness system.
The other thing that is noteworthy about Atlanta is they have produced an awful lot of housing in a short period of time by simplifying the regulatory environment and just making every little part of the system perform.
23:31 How much does a mayor matter?
Scholes: How important do you think the leadership of a mayor is to the effectiveness of a city in addressing these issues? You mentioned the mayor of Atlanta. You didn’t mention the mayor of Denver, but Mike Johnston has been very vocal and driven and really a catalyst around this. Is that an essential feature of a city having success?
Haggerty: I would say it’s hard to point to a city that’s having great success where the mayor isn’t right out front on this issue saying that this matters. So much of the energy, whether there’s momentum or not, comes from that sense of, it’s important, it matters, how do we optimize all of our resources to get this job done?
And there are certainly examples, frankly here in the downtown area around Pioneer Square, where other leaders can get things started. We certainly see places around the country where business improvement districts and Continuums of Care have just, in a zone, said, “We have got to do something differently.” So sometimes the citywide energy starts with a successful project in a subregion.
24:58 What Seattle has, and what is puzzling
Scholes: We’ve been working with you here for about a year, and you’ve been out here a few times. We just came out of a day and a half of a deep dive looking at this work in Pioneer Square that commenced in May and ran through June to get 70 people off the streets. What’s your observation of Seattle, of our strengths and shortcomings when it comes to this crisis? We’re a city going in the wrong direction when it comes to the total number of folks living unsheltered in our city and in our region, which is a different trend line than many other areas within the U.S. are seeing over these last two years. What’s your take on Seattle?
Haggerty: Well, I’ll start with what is really impressive, the assets that you’re working with here.
First of all, really strong providers. There are cities where we’ve started working with them and they’ve ended up doing great work, but it’s become evident, once we’ve met and started putting the plan together, that there is no one doing outreach, or there is some huge gap. Seattle doesn’t have enough of what it needs in certain areas, like high-need shelter capacity, but the quality of the providers and their ability to help people move off the street has been really impressive.
That had to be enabled, though, by the willingness of providers, and this has been so inspiring, to voluntarily work in a new way to get this important pilot project done. To join forces, to work in complementary ways, to identify that this provider maybe has more of what that particular individual would need in order to make a successful transition. So that cooperation was really impressive.
I think the willingness of the DSA to provide, frankly, the organizing infrastructure that none of the entities actually had. The data infrastructure, the communications infrastructure, some of the additional slack, mobilizing your ambassadors to provide some additional support for the period of time, and even documenting who was in need of assistance and putting the data set together. Usually organizations doing the work are so overextended. Having that additional capacity, and putting your own team into play as far as helping with the information flow, was hugely important.
So that partnership between the business improvement district and the providers, it reminded me of back in the day in Times Square. That was the defining relationship, and that made that project possible.
In terms of what is puzzling, I’ll say, about Seattle, to use a kind word, there’s a lot of housing here. There are a lot of opportunities to get people moved indoors that seem blocked. It’s not unique to Seattle, but it’s crazy-making, housing that’s available but empty for one reason or another.
Scholes: Exactly.
Haggerty: What are the policy levers? What are the barriers to just unlocking that?
I think Seattle, I’ve observed and learned, and this is very true of other cities that are trying to unwind this, or until they do they’re not going to make the kind of progress they could: as the problem has intensified, or political noise has, they’ve just thrown money at the problem. “We’ll do this other thing, we’ll do this special initiative,” somewhat performative. And it becomes a response that is not part of a system. It just kind of distracts, it creates all of this noise, and it makes it harder to streamline the response and get people into the right jobs, doing the right work at the right time. I think Seattle suffers from that.
But one of the things that has been really impressive, and you don’t see this everywhere, so this is also a feather in Seattle’s cap and to the group that’s been working together, is that honest assessment of, this could be done differently, this should be redesigned, it doesn’t make any sense that we’re doing it this way, how might we think about it differently? That kind of openness is too rare.
30:10 Federal policy and the exit problem
Scholes: What do you make of what HUD has attempted to do over these last many months, recalibrating their own dollars and how they’re investing in communities and for what? Is there some legitimacy to the changes they’re trying to entice or force at a local level?
Haggerty: On the very legitimate front, all of us doing this work should be doing more to connect with employment, with workforce opportunities, and better integrate the treatment community. Those are things that absolutely should be done. It’s part of helping people get back into their lives and working effectively.
What has been problematic, and detached from the reality of many cities, is: where are people supposed to go? If you’re living in permanent supportive housing and the push is to force people to move on, where are people supposed to go? It’s bumping up against the very real and known-to-everyone affordability crisis in the country. There just aren’t places in Seattle, or name that city. It’s true everywhere.
Where is the modern equivalent of the SRO or the YMCA room that matched your income if you were a day laborer or living on a fixed income? Those kinds of housing assets and opportunities just don’t exist. In the absence of an exit from supportive housing being available, then it just becomes cruel and self-defeating. It puts people back on the street.
Scholes: And that’s your concern with some of the policy shifts in D.C.
Haggerty: You kind of have to play out the context. But if that could be addressed, I think there’s a lot of room. No one wants there to be more homelessness. Everyone wants resources to be spent wisely. Everyone values, at some level, collaboration. But it really has to be the whole package for it to work in ways that are good for individuals and good for communities.
33:13 The missing form of housing
Scholes: The variable in all of this seems to be drugs. That is sort of forcing this debate, this tension in how do we deal with this significant substance use crisis in our cities across the country, and its relationship to homelessness, to permanent supportive housing, and to federal subsidies. I think the case that HUD would make, and we talked a little bit about this because I was at that session a few weeks ago when they were in Seattle, is that we’re overprescribing permanent supportive housing to the 25-year-old with a fentanyl addiction, and we shouldn’t fully subsidize their housing for the rest of their life. Do you think that’s an accurate assessment of where we’ve ended up, permanent supportive housing as a treatment and prescription for substance use, particularly among those who otherwise are employable and don’t have a physical disability?
Haggerty: The health care analogy is always one that seems instructive in this question. If your primary challenge is a substance abuse addiction, that is the thing that is going to always interfere with your ability to hold on to housing and hold on to a job, to survive.
Permanent supportive housing was never designed for that. Some of the projects I worked on were the earliest ones. This idea that folks who need intensive services, medical treatment, behavioral health services of any type, need to be in a very deeply supported environment: permanent supportive housing was never built for that. This is folks who can live independently with support. So it is not a huge percentage of individuals in any community, but it’s a meaningfully distinct group of folks with very high support and treatment needs that have been, I think, too often directed to permanent supportive housing because that’s the only thing communities have.
This is a conversation that my colleagues and I are having in several cities, which is that there are some missing forms of housing that we just need to wrestle with, and that could get us past this not very illuminating debate.
We’ve kind of started calling it “assisted living plus.” These are individuals with very significant health, behavioral health, substance abuse issues, sometimes with aging and memory issues also. Not great candidates for permanent supportive housing. They need much more than permanent supportive housing was built to offer, but skilled nursing isn’t necessarily the environment either. What could be something that’s properly supported, that is a safe and supportive environment for folks who may never get on their feet again, but that has the services in place to support those who can?
I think we’re talking about needing something new, and it would be in all of our interest to try to get together around designing and financing that, because it’s hurting people to just pretend that they actually don’t need that.
Scholes: And I actually think there’s a lot more agreement on these sets of issues than the debates would have us believe. So much talking past each other, and the words and phrases have so much political baggage.
Haggerty: I agree. I think what people want to see is generally the same.
37:38 Closing questions
Scholes: We have a couple of standard questions to conclude. Rosanne, first is, what was your very first job?
Haggerty: I worked at a nursing home in high school, as a nurse’s aide, and so I learned a lot there, and then also as a waitress. Two jobs I would recommend. Service jobs, care jobs. I think they are a very good entry point for anyone, having a sense of how you’re treated if you’re a service worker, and the care others need if you’re in the health care field.
Scholes: And to conclude, we usually ask about your perfect Saturday in Seattle, but you can answer it however you want.
Haggerty: Well, I would like to spend a Saturday in Seattle. I would try to get my friend Irene to come down from Port Townsend to maybe do something on a boat. I’m looking out your window and thinking, gosh, that would be nice to see Seattle from the water. I hope it’s a sunny day and I can just gaze at Mount Rainier. Have some good coffee.
Scholes: A ferry to Bainbridge and then on your way to Irene would get you all of that, I think. So you get the view of the city, a cup of coffee, and a view of Rainier if the sun’s out.
Well, thanks for making time for this, and for you and your team’s work with us here in Seattle to try to turn the tide and help more people off the streets. I’m optimistic about our ability to scale up the success we’ve had in Pioneer Square, and here’s to a better future for the folks on the streets and for our communities.
Haggerty: Thank you for your leadership on this. I’m really confident this is the beginning of something that’s going to be really valuable and high impact for the city.
The Seattle City Makers Podcast is produced by the Downtown Seattle Association. Episode 117 was released Sept. 2, 2026. Transcript published with permission.
