Lately, I have done most of my blog post writing at Forbes. Along with my series about the future of rental housing in the United States, I wrote about something called Compassion Seattle, a campaign to amend the charter of the City of Seattle, called Charter Amendment 29 (CA 29). Many of you will be approached to contribute to this effort and to support it. Don’t.

There is, in my view, a difference between chronic homelessness and illegal encampments. There is certainly overlap, but the encampment problem isn’t economic, but about mental health and chemical dependency. In short, what Compassion Seattle is trying to do is amend the operating system of the City to force the people at City Hall to act to remove the irregular and illegal use of public and other spaces for encampments. As I point out, this is existing policy and it has been a failure.

The current barriers to clearing encampments are not legal, but political.  CA 29 will create new legal barriers that will make the political barriers more difficult to overcome.  Rather than “making City Hall clear encampments” as some supporters argue, CA 29’s “balancing test” can be used as a shield to explain why an encampment is not cleared.  And even if City Hall were more willing to clear encampments, CA 29’s legal barriers will stand in the way.

Former Seattle City Attorney, Mark Sidran on Compassion Seattle’s proposed Charter Amendment 29

Not long after I distributed my post, someone sent me a damning memo from former City Attorney Mark Sidran. I had a very enlightening, yet discouraging call with him about the Compassion Seattle effort and what it would do to the already complicated effort to deal with encampments. Sidran’s memo points out that along with enshrining existing sweep policy, the measure would essentially make even that process worse by introducing a higher legal threshold to enforce existing law.

Furthermore, the changes to the charter would give more leverage to defenders of allowing encampments to remain in place, creating a “balancing test” that would expose almost any removal to extensive litigation, litigation that might well end with rulings that protect encampments.

And almost as important, Sidran implies throughout that the whole effort to stick this amendment into the code is because some business interests downtown haven’t had the will or found a way to elect rational actors to serve at City Hall. I agree. However, this proposal simply hands the implementation of a hard-to-change amendment to the same regime that has failed to deal with the encampment issue to anyone’s satisfaction.

You can read the full memo below.

Charter amendment 29 analysis from Roger Valdez