We’re not sure how Suarez is deriving her total dollar amount, but based upon previous mentions of the cost of homelessness being approximately $35,000 per individual (sourced from The National Alliance to End Homelessness), we speculate that she must be multiplying the number of people she claims to have assisted into housing by that amount.

Even if it were that straightforward to calculate such a figure, 78 people times $35,000 is $2.7 million, which is $7 million shy of what Suarez’s claims.

In 2021, the city of Seattle ran a program called the Clean City Initiative. On a budget of $3 million dollars, city workers removed 3,500,000 pounds of trash and 95,000 hypodermic needles from public spaces around Seattle over a course of ten months. Using these figures to calibrate a cost per pound for trash removal, and without considering that nearly half of the trash We Heart Seattle has collected was left for the city to pick up anyway, their 450,000 pounds of garbage collected amounts to roughly $385,000.

Alas, it is definitely not simple, nor is it even accurate.

The second part of that statistic Suarez conveniently fails to mention when she cites it are the following criteria:

1. This figure is applicable only to chronically homeless people, which make up approximately 18% of the unhoused population (individuals who have chronic and complex health conditions including mental illnesses, substance use disorders, and medical conditions who experience long-term homelessness — and can be found sleeping on the street or in shelters).
2. Similarly, the housing provided must be considered supportive (permanent housing that is coupled with medical and other forms of support that the chronically homeless often need).
3. The provision of supportive housing to said individuals still has an annual cost of approximately $30,000 for the city and state.

If for the sake of this exercise, we assume 100% of the people We Heart Seattle has assisted qualify as chronically homeless, and that they were placed into permanent supportive housing, realistically we’re looking at more like a savings of $390k.

Roughly a dozen of the people assisted by We Heart Seattle received bus tickets to out of state destinations without any further contact for us to know their current status. Additionally, the vast majority of those who were assisted with shelter were placed into temporary/emergency shelters, which do not qualify as supportive housing.

We estimate that less than a dozen people assisted by We Heart Seattle received placement into long term housing.

Assuming that all twelve of them were chronically homeless, and that the long-term solution provided qualified as permanent supportive housing, $390,000 then becomes $57,600.

Per the previously cited statistic pertaining to chronic homelessness, of the estimated 580,000 people experiencing homelessness nation wide, roughly 110,000 of them meet the qualifications to be considered chronically homeless.

By this standard, it is statistically likely that only two of the twelve people We Heart Seattle placed into long-term housing were chronically homeless at the time. Even if we’re conservative with this estimate by doubling it, we’re still realistically looking at the previous estimate of $57,600 actually being more like $19,200.

There have been a myriad of disruptions to provision of services by the city and the organizations they partner with as a result of Suarez’s refusal to follow the city’s guidelines surrounding encampments on city and state property. Accompany that with a pattern of incorrectly assessing occupied campsites to be abandoned, and if you believe the reports we’ve received from volunteers in the field and unhoused people themselves, the more sinister perspective suggests that this happens out of utter disregard for whether anyone lives there or not.

In the end, park residents who were not present to defend their campsites from destruction by We Heart Seattle (which happens far more often than one might think if they also believe homeless people don’t work) later return to discover that their homes and belongings have been taken with no explanation.

This creates an immediate need for crisis response to replenish supplies that are essential for survival, which is invariably more costly by virtue of being an emergency with no slack possible in the timeline, and if the city isn’t on the scene to provide this assistance, it comes out of the pockets of mutual aid volunteers who also work tirelessly to pick up the slack. These events also often necessitate relocation for the victims.

In some cases, vital documents like legal identification and birth certificates get thrown away, which is guaranteed to interfere with obtaining employment and accessing life-sustaining support services. 

Social workers employed by REACH and similar oprganizations work tirelessly to connect the unhoused with available city resources for housing. When something like the above occurs, the relationships they’ve built with the individuals who have lost their homes are disrupted or severed until they can be found again. In some cases, these people were in the final stages of transitioning into housing.

We’re now in the red.