(Bloomberg) -- The blocks at the center of Seattle’s drug crisis are surrounded by everything that should be driving the city’s economic recovery.
Just west of the fishmongers of Pike Place Market and the tourists lined up at the original Starbucks, the streets for years were marked by squalor. Boarded-up doorways. Littered sidewalks. Open drug use.
But in recent weeks, there’s been a palpable shift.
The stoops where people crouched behind peeled-back chain link fences are mostly empty, guarded by police on bikes. Rows of Lime scooters have replaced the piles of stolen toilet paper and packaged snacks that were sold or bartered for fentanyl. The alleys where contracted companies cleaned up drug detritus and human feces every morning have been blocked off with “No Trespassing” signs.
Seattle is joining liberal strongholds such as San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, in cracking down on drug-riddled areas to stem a spiraling crisis tied to fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid. Police are detaining more users, with a special booking rules for the downtown area. And under a new loitering rule adopted by the City Council last week, judges will have the option to ban people arrested for drug use and related crimes from even entering certain areas, including the five square blocks surrounding Third Avenue and Pike Street in the heart of downtown.
The word most repeated by Seattle officials over the summer was “disruption,” hoping that the series of new steps would break up the entrenched drug market to save lives — and save the city from the toll of crime, blight and shuttered businesses.
“I have made a philosophical shift in telling officers, ‘don’t leave people on the street,’” said Sue Rahr, Seattle’s interim police chief. “Our failure to remove people from those locations has contributed to the problem growing. I might prove to be wrong, but we’re going to find out over these next couple of weeks.”
Up and down the West Coast, officials are trying to balance compassion for people suffering from fentanyl addiction with very real public safety concerns — leading to more hardline tactics to fight the epidemic. San Francisco has stepped up deportations of people involved in the drug trade. Oregon lawmakers this year voted to recriminalize public drug use after Portland’s county saw one of the country's sharpest increases in synthetic opioid overdose deaths from 2022 to 2023. Vancouver’s home of British Columbia made a similar move.
For Seattle, the adoption of “Stay Out of Drug Area” zones is the city's latest attempt to reverse the stubborn perception of unruly streets. It comes four years after racial-justice protesters declared a police-free autonomous zone in the Capitol Hill neighborhood during the upheaval after George Floyd's murder. More than 700 Seattle police officers retired or quit in the aftermath, and the force still has a more than 300-officer deficit.
The new loitering measure is one more tool for overworked officers, Rahr said, allowing them to remove some repeat offenders from a notorious drug market without a warrant. Its opponents say that it infringes on civil liberties of users who have been merely charged, not convicted, for drugs and makes it harder for them to access services.
Wrangling the crisis is key to economic revival in the city, where the flow of workers returning to downtown is still less than 60% of what it was before the pandemic, according to data from the Downtown Seattle Association. Business leaders caution that filling vacant storefronts and offices depends on people feeling safe on city streets.
Just last week, Amazon.com Inc., whose Seattle campus is clustered north of the downtown SODA zone, said employees will be required to be in the office five days a week starting next year. At least one location has been affected by safety issues: The tech giant pulled staff from 300 Pine St., a building near the drug-afflicted area, after a series of shootings and stabbings in 2022. That left more than 650,000 square feet of space virtually empty.
Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesman, said the company is weighing how to use the space and is hopeful that the city’s stepped-up enforcement will improve public safety in the area.
Pat Callahan, chief executive officer of Urban Renaissance Group, which owns 300 Pine, said reviving the downtown core is critical since tenants have many other options. His company also owns a building on Pike Place, beside what was one of the city’s most infamous alleys. It’s been a struggle to find street-level occupants where the security situation is so tenuous, he said.
“The market is there in Seattle, especially where all the tourists are walking through and everything, but not if it feels unsafe,” said Callahan. “There was a real belief in downtown Seattle and that we were creating a great city collectively, and we may lose that opportunity permanently if we do not solve this crisis.”
‘Huge Problem’
Fentanyl came late to Seattle – years after the cheap synthetic opioid washed over the east coast. By 2015 San Francisco was already blaming the drug for a spike in overdoses, but it wasn’t until 2019 that Vince Lombardi, the assistant US attorney for the Western District of Washington, first started noticing fentanyl this far north.
“I remember not that many years ago when I first started hearing about fentanyl being a problem, we would kind of be like, ‘oh, we’re not really seeing that,’” Lombardi said. “It came here a little bit later than maybe on the East Coast or some other parts of the country. But it’s definitely here now — and it is a huge problem.”
US fatalities from fentanyl have eased in the past year, largely because of declines on the East Coast and Midwest, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the crisis remains particularly dire in the West. In Washington state, estimated deaths from synthetic opioids rose 20% in the 12 months through April, compared with a 12% decline for the country.
Last year, Seattle’s King County had a 52% increase in overdose deaths from synthetic opioids, CDC data show. The county attributed more than 1,085 deaths last year to fentanyl. So far this year, 566 people have died.
Fentanyl is cheaper and more deadly than the substances that drove previous drug crises, requiring a different policy response to save lives, said Amy Barden, the head of Seattle’s new public safety department. She is among those advocating for more rigorous enforcement, including the possibility of involuntary treatment for people arrested for drug use.
“It shouldn’t be controversial to say we have to act with urgency, because you can see how many people we’re losing,” Barden said.
The challenge is convincing people – many of whom are also struggling with homelessness and mental health conditions – to stick with treatment, particularly for a drug that can have wretched withdrawal effects.
Devin Moore, now 32, was homeless downtown for seven years, addicted first to heroin until everything was laced with fentanyl. He was arrested close to 20 times for offenses mostly related to stealing. He recalled being booked into jail, bracing for the withdrawal symptoms he knew were coming – writhing on a mat on the floor of the medical unit, vomiting, days of sleeplessness.
Moore, who now works with an addiction recovery program, said that every time he got out of jail he could go back to Third and Pike, “where you can go to get dope and to sell your merchandise” stolen from nearby stores and cars. It was sheer exhaustion that finally pushed him to stick with the treatment he had started and stopped so many time before.
“I just felt like really broken,” Moore said. “I couldn't accept it, you know? So I just started saying yes to the solutions presented.”
Public Safety
Even before the new loitering law, Seattle was exploring other options to revive downtown. A program for small business pop-up shops aims to temporarily fill empty storefronts. The city last year rezoned the most blighted three blocks of Third Avenue to encourage taller mixed-use residential towers and potentially even a public school.
There are signs that the city is on the upswing. Hotel bookings hit a record in June and foot traffic has nearly returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to the Downtown Seattle Association. The return-to-office move by Amazon, the largest downtown employer, will likely provide a boost to local businesses. But for many companies, the top issue for coaxing workers back is still safety, said Sara Nelson, president of the Seattle City Council.
“We have got to create a downtown where businesses want to locate and where workers want to come back to the office,” she said in an interview. “And the city’s responsibility is to create the conditions where people feel safe.”
Seattle has tried SODA-like measures before. A loitering law last amended in the early 1990s was repealed by City Council in 2020 after Floyd’s killing drew attention to racial disparities in the enforcement of such laws around the country.
Those who spoke against the new SODA proposal in public comments to City Council warned that it would block off chunks of the city for some of its most vulnerable citizens.
“The policies expand police powers to harass individuals based on their perceived status, disrupting essential services for those in need rather than addressing the root causes of their issues,” said Caedmon Magboo Cahill, director of policy advocacy with the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.
Police were already arresting more people simply for using drugs. So far this year, there were 224 arrests for public drug use in the precinct that includes downtown, compared with 94 over the same time period last year. Tim Burgess, Seattle’s deputy mayor, said more of those arrests are proactively initiated by officers.
A pilot program for jail bookings also designates most of downtown as a “special emphasis area.” Public drug use is a gross misdemeanor under city and state law, but jail staff shortages meant that it wasn’t a bookable offense. Officers now have the option to either book people arrested downtown to King County jail or divert them to treatment programs. Mayor Bruce Harrell also proposed nearly tripling the amount of money spent treating substance use disorders in the city budget he presented this week.
The question for a city that's arresting more people for drug use is how to better integrate medically assisted addiction treatment — and how optional those services should be.
Compared to other opioids, fentanyl sticks around in body fat longer, making it harder to get people on the medical synthetic opioids used to ease withdrawal symptoms once the drug is out of the body’s system. Treatment thus requires cooperation and courage from the patient, said Callan Fockele, a Seattle physician and University of Washington assistant professor focused on addiction services.
“The risk is that we’re gonna take people’s autonomy away and we’re going to harm them,” Fockele said.
Rahr, the police chief, said she would ideally make addiction treatment part of the booking process so that people can be helped at the same time. Without that structure in place, clearing out five square blocks of Seattle might make downtown feel safer, she said, but it risks just pushing people suffering into a less visible part of town.
“It’s not compassion to leave somebody in the street to die,” Rahr said. But with the current options of hospital or jail, “it’s not a clear line either, what’s the right thing to do.”
--With assistance from Tanaz Meghjani and Jason Kao.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
