As locals and tourists alike ventured to downtown Seattle for the upcoming MLB All-Star game on July 7th, the city was noticeably different. 

Local Jackson Barr, who had family from North Carolina come up to see the game, had prepared them about Seattle’s large homeless population around the area. But when he got there, “they had vanished.”

But the homeless population of downtown Seattle had not vanished. Formerly covered in a scene of tarps and tents, the neighborhoods leading up to T-Mobile Park, where the All-Star game was held, had been swept clean. But the newfound cleanliness of south downtown Seattle (SODO) came at a cost that homeless people have been paying for decades. Encampment sweeps, the clearing of a homeless encampment by outreach workers and legal enforcement, are often thrust upon already struggling communities in an effort to ready a city for tourists, like those coming to Seattle for the All-Star Game. Forced relocation is one more thing for homeless people to worry about—people who often face harassment by housed people and cops, alongside the challenge of struggling to meet daily needs of shelter, food and water. 

“The city comes through with this big coordinated effort with dozens of dozens of workers who are not there to help them, but to throw all their stuff away…From the perspective of homeless people, it’s one more “fuck you” from the world,” Jay Jones, founder and member of Seattle’s Stop the Sweeps chapter, said. 

Jones’ specific chapter of Stop the Sweeps has only been around since 2021, but the problem of encampment sweeps has existed since the early ’90s. In 2020, CDC mandated a break in the sweeps in order to limit the spread of Covid-19, but that suddenly stopped in the spring of 2021, when Seattle decided they were going to start sweeping again with a sweep on Miller Park in Capitol Hill. 

The city of Seattle has maintained that the increase of encampment sweeps surrounding SODO in the days leading up to the All-Star Game was simply a correlation. Mayor Bruce Harallel did not respond to this reporter’s request to comment, but spokesperson Lori Baxter had previously told the press that “The City’s homelessness response has had a steady and consistent focus on SODO over the last year and a half due to a high concentration of RVs and tents.” But for Jones, the encampment sweeps had nothing to do with a “consistent focus on SODO,” and “had everything to do with reputation.”

“Seattle doesn’t want to be seen as this place with rampant economic inequality. Seattle doesn’t want to be seen as this place with this huge housing issue,” Jones said. 

It’s important to note that Jones believes this to be especially true for events that draw in tourists like the past MLB All Star-Game and the upcoming Taylor Swift concert. Bringing up the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China, Jones compared China’s controversies to our own. “We loved to criticize them back in 2008 for covering up homelessness and other inequities. But it’s not like [Seattle’s] any different,” Jones expressed. 

Seattle has claimed in the past that these sweeps, which cost the city tens of millions of dollars each year, hold beneficiary value, by “sweeping” more people off the streets and into transitional housing or tiny home living. 

But the services offered, according to Jones who talks to homeless individuals during the encampment sweeps, are few and far between. Those that are offered are less than adequate, Jones mentioned, as they described knowing people who “had died in tiny house villages, and not be discovered for over a week.”  “The sad thing is,” Jones pointed out, “was that for some people, being swept is your best way of getting into housing,” because for that individual there lies a small chance. Unfortunately, this is often not the case, and heartbreak and frustration at what could’ve been an opportunity for housing follows alongside the trauma of experiencing an encampment sweep. Jones noted that one man he met was particularly desperate for housing—for the past few years he had talked to case workers, and city officials, who assured him that he was “for sure” going to be moved into housing before summer. 

“How can I get inside?” he asked Jones. “They told me I’d be in before the summer, but we’re already halfway through the summer.”

Not only does Seattle lack the amount and quality of resources necessary to make these encampment sweeps legal,  but they’re making it harder to access the ones already established. 

Because homeless people often don’t have access to regular cell phones, case workers trying to move homeless people into housing can’t call their clients. Instead, they have to find them. Encampment sweeps, forcing homeless people to constantly be on the move, makes their job even harder. 

“I have a friend who’s a case worker, trying to find housing. After an encampment sweep, half of her job was just finding all of her clients again,” Jones said. 

Alongside Real Change and Action Network, Stop the Sweeps Seattle has created a new coalition called “Services, not Sweeps,” where they hope to advocate for the banning of encampment during extreme weather— particularly during winter. Stop the Sweeps works alongside these organizations to shift the public’s opinion of encampment sweeps and to those who believe that sweeps are a possible solution to homelessness, Jones would like to make one thing clear. 

“It’s a farce that [the sweeps] serve the people living outside because you don’t need to sweep people to offer them shelter services,” they said. 

Real Change estimates that in 2022, the city of Seattle conducted 943 encampment sweeps.