Each week on The Newsfeed, host Paris Jackson and a team of veteran journalists dive deep into one topic and provide impactful reporting, interviews and community insights from sources you can trust. Each day this week, this post will be updated with a new story from the team.
King County Regional Homelessness Authority 'Resets' After 7 Years
Story published 07/27/2026
Homelessness response in King County could look a little different next year after the King County Regional Homelessness Authority undergoes what city and county officials call a “reset.”
But what is the KCRHA, and what does it do exactly? In a series of stories this week, the Newsfeed is looking at the organization’s history and explaining the next steps in the county’s homelessness response.
The regional homelessness authority was established in 2019, amid concerns that homelessness response was fragmented, and the numbers of people unhoused in King County was rising. That was four years after the county and the city of Seattle had declared homelessness a public health emergency in 2015.
King County and Seattle tasked the organization with managing the contracts for providers of services for the unhoused, like shelters and housing. Then-Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and then-King County Executive Dow Constantine called it an innovative approach.
“Over the past two years, we have totally restructured how we deliver our services with the city and the county, but we are always encumbered by some fractured-ness of the system and today we take a step to change that,” Mayor Jenny Durkan said at a media event to sign the interlocal agreement in 2019.
“We begin a new era of accountability, of bringing data driven solutions to the crisis and making sure that we have the right people at the table,” Constantine said in 2019.
Despite the calls for regional buy-in, the bulk of the Authority’s $200 million annual budget was funded by King County and Seattle’s contracts to service providers.
And seven years after that press conference, new administrations in Seattle and King County announced a change.
Later this week, we’ll hear some key voices about what’s next for the KCRHA and what the future might look like for a regional response to homelessness.
KCRHA: A mixed legacy
Story published 07/28/2026
When the KCRHA launched in 2019, city and county leaders called it an innovative approach, streamlining services to address homelessness across the county and its 39 cities.
Karen Lee, the CEO of Plymouth Housing, says the region had been missing a system to prevent people from falling through the cracks.
“Potential residents, when they were looking for housing, would have to go provider to provider to provider. And so that was really inefficient and really difficult for residents. And they were being screened out for reasons that would be seen as arbitrary and capricious today,” she said.
The agreement was signed in December 2019, and just months later, the COVID-19 pandemic slowed progress. After more than a year, the homelessness authority finally got its first CEO in 2021. In the five years since, it’s had five CEOs, three of which were interim leaders.
Throughout KCRHA’s history, it’s been criticized for how it has handled its money, most recently a forensic audit that found about $13 million not accounted for, and $45 million in overspending.
Independent journalist Guy Oron, who has covered the agency for Real Change News and The Stranger, said the results were stark but not surprising.
“There were a lot of basic things that were kind of missing in terms of cost controls, in terms of reconciliation,” Oron said. “I'd heard many times that KCRHA was quite late to pay providers, sometimes months to fulfill invoices.”
Despite its problems, the agency was successful in several key areas, including managing the biennial point-in-time count, providing an ombuds office for people having issues with their services, and maintaining a regional system to help match services to people’s individual needs.
“So one of the good things that KCRHA has helped us do is approach housing the most difficult to serve residents as a system,” Lee said.
King County homelessness agency reset called ‘bridge’ to new path
Story published 07/29/2026
Ever since it officially started operations in 2021, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority faced scrutiny and skepticism.
Journalist Guy Oron has covered the agency and homelessness issues for Real Change News and The Stranger.
“The lack of transparency and just the lack of organization, which has allowed it to be hard to track how much money is actually being spent looking at the budgets, looking at some of these key documents that you would expect any public agency to do,” Oron said.
Oron said the timing of the agreement – December of 2019 – didn’t help matters.
“In part you could say it's like growing pains of such a young organization which was tasked to take on a massive responsibility, formed right on the eve of the COVID19 pandemic,” Oron said.
But a forensic evaluation of the organization released in April revealed it couldn’t account for $13 million and had overspent by $45 million. The report also flagged poor bookkeeping and reconciliation practices, including a lack of receipts for thousands of dollars in purchases.
After giving the homelessness authority leadership a chance to come up with a plan, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced a few months after the audit that the city and county were taking back the management of service contracts — about 160 million dollars worth.
Zahilay said the county is gearing up to take back its share of the contracts, including hiring between 10 to 12 new staff.
“It is both taking accountability and responsibility for what is the most important issue in our region, and that is addressing the crisis of homelessness. And at the same time, it is improving the way we do things, making sure that King County Regional Homelessness Authority has a narrowed scope where it can focus on regional duties,” Zahilay said.
Among those duties that will remain with the homelessness authority includes local leadership on a $67 million grant application to the federal department of Housing and Urban Development that currently funds the housing for about 4,500 people in the region.
Zahilay said he couldn’t put a timeline on the process, but he said both Seattle and King County will convene with stakeholders, including the county’s other suburban cities.
“You can consider the step that we are taking right now as a bridge between where we are and where we want to go, which is a truly regional approach,” Zahilay said.
KCRHA reset sparks concerns over new HUD policy
Story published 07/30/2026
While local leaders and advocates applauded the KCRHA’s reset, they are concerned that the focus on what went wrong could lead to the loss of support, as the national picture also shifts under the Trump administration.
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development announced in June new guidelines for the Continuum of Care program, criticizing “Housing First” programs, and emphasizing addiction recovery programs, shelters and short-term housing, and other services.
In HUD’s June announcement, the department said, “The status quo perpetuates addiction in taxpayer-funded homelessness assistance programs in violation of Federal law.”
Alison Eisinger, executive director of local advocacy group Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, was critical of the move.
“The Trump regime and the current leadership of HUD -- the Office of Housing and Urban Development – are extraordinarily obsessed with undermining the strongest evidence-based housing program that exists, namely Housing First.”
She said that shift could put about 4500 people in King County at risk of losing funding for their permanent supportive housing.
“And that includes veterans, that includes families, that includes people you know from every walk of life, really, who are stably housed.”
Karen Lee, CEO of Plymouth Housing says transitional short-term housing and shelters are needed, but that programs with few or no restrictions have been the most effective.
“The focus on transitional housing would be great if it was an ‘and.’”
The organization provides permanent supportive housing for about 1,500 people in 18 buildings throughout King County.
Lee said that prioritizing housing is what leads to treatment – and that requiring treatment, no pets or other conditions can exclude people from getting help.
“The lower the barrier, the more people are going to move into housing. And then once they're into housing, then we can begin the work on their healing,” Lee said.
What comes next for King County’s regional homelessness response
Story published 07/31/2026
As the King County Regional Homelessness Authority starts the process of being downsized and reset, we spoke to local leaders about what a new regional response to homelessness could mean.
King County Executive Girmay Zahilay said the process of creating a new regional partnership is in its early stages.
“I didn't want it to be that just because we inherited these issues and just because change is hard, that we wouldn't do change, right?,” he said. “This is an intermediary step to stabilize the entity. But in the long run, our goal is to have a completely new approach that has the buy in of all of the different important individuals around the region who have a role in our homelessness response system.”
The homelessness authority will retain some regional duties including federal grants, a regional database for individuals and providers, and an ombuds office, to name a few.
“Now we have to show people where their tax dollars are going, and we have to make every change possible to make sure that the people living outside have a roof over their heads. That's really what's at stake here,” Zahilay said.
Alison Eisinger, executive director of local advocacy group Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, worries that with one agency’s troubles making all the headlines, the effectiveness of the solutions is being lost in the debate.
“In some cases, there were poor decisions made about who was going to be the leadership. In some cases, the appropriate protections weren't in place,” she said. “Another agency is on the front page of the newspapers. Those are real concerns that undermine the public will and the political will.”
She said the focus has taken the talk away from the work that the service organizations have been doing to alleviate homelessness.
“But in fact, they're not about the quality of care that's being provided. They're not about the fact that we are helping 10,000 or more people leave homelessness every year.”
The coalition has advocated for people experiencing homelessness for 40 years and has seen different government attempts to respond to homelessness, she added.
“We have a shared responsibility to not let the next generation of people who live in this city and county think that it's normal, that 12 to 15,000 people every day and night are struggling to survive outside.
Karen Lee, CEO of Plymouth Housing, agrees and says the reset is an opportunity to do better.
“For the providers, there's always room to improve operations. And I think it's really key for us on the provider side. The risks are more, I would say existential,” she said.
“There's possibility that that there will be cuts to our basic safety net. Many of our residents rely on Medicaid for health care. They rely on behavioral health services from local providers. So any cuts to the safety net infrastructure... would be extremely, extremely damaging.
Independent journalist Guy Oron said local leaders have many questions to address as they form the next regional response to homelessness.
“You're going to have the same issues that you had before KCRHA was formed where you have different agencies working on the same problem. And how do you make sure you're not doing duplicative work and creating inefficiencies?,” they said.
“And I think at the end of the day, no matter how the bureaucracy is structured, our main problem is we don't have enough resources for enough people.”
