Thanks for covering this, Hanna. It's not too late (I hope!) for people to use WLIHA's handy dandy link to send a message to their own senator here: http://bit.ly/1fNstmI

Unfortunately, it wouldn't be illegal to effectively deny money to "special needs"-type homeless people. All they'd have to do is what they've done many times before: write the bill so that it doesn't cover services that apply to those people. And they've actually done that already: for-profit landlords, who would get almost half the money raised by these fees, wouldn't rent to those "special needs" people anyway.

It's difficult to express how mean and inhumane Tom et al. are, except to just call them shits and be done with it.

Seattle is too expensive for homeless people.

Plenty of better places all over Washington State that are cheaper or could be.

No sense in lining the pockets of people and making a sob story when it has nothing to do with helping the poor.

Huh? This article doesn't explain for what purpose the money would be given to landlords.

I had to look it up in the bill. It is for vouchers, which isn't actually a bad idea (look at the Utah model). But since it wouldn't increase the funding, it would be picking a couple of homeless people to win a voucher lottery while the rest are screwed. The real solution is a fully funded voucher program. So if the Democrats are smart, they will say "we like the voucher idea, but think it needs to be as expansive as what they do in Utah!"

Rodney Tom looks like he could be John Waters Brother.

@4, do you really think most people who have been homeless for 5+ years are going to be approved as tenants by for-profit landlords? The point is not that the landlords want to rent to them (and use those vouchers), the point is that the landlords don't want anyone else (i.e., non-profits) to get that money and mess up their sanitized neighborhoods. It's purely punitive.

@6 so instead of market rate rental vouchers, we should give half of the available funds to organizations like SHARE so they can pay 15 dollar an hour employees to lobby for the homeless instead of putting them in homes?

Rodney Tom is a unrepentant asshole, but your taking the cake on failed logic here.

Before you enact your liberal fantasy of a social oligarchy of landlord gentrification you should pull your head out of your ass and remember landlords are in the business of making money, by renting houses, voucher renters usually have all kinds of behavior restrictions and remarkably tend to be good renters.

Either way these people aren't buying high rise condos, so you can pay some dude to be their landlord with no middleman, or pay a administrative cut to SHA who will also be their landlord only they will get less money in the hands of people who need it.

@7, you're not even a good troll. Everything you said is non-factual and just plain stupid.

@5: I hadn't noticed that....I thought it was Daniel Tosh.

Bad troll. No cookie.

Oh Tim.