by Ashley Hiruko, KUOW

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with KUOW public radio. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

When Brenna Poppe moved into the Civic Hotel off the damp streets of Seattle in late 2022, she cried with joy. During her next year at the city-sponsored homeless shelter, she’d meet other guests who felt the same way — overwhelmed by the sudden realization that tonight, they would not sleep outside.

The Civic got quieter last year, however. Rooms around her, their doors still painted bright yellow from when the hotel was a boutique property, started to empty out. A “deafening silence” crept in, she recalled.

The 53-room hotel was converted to a shelter in the early days of the pandemic, and the city of Seattle kept it going. After Poppe’s first year there, the city in February 2024 signed a $2.7 million lease extension to continue using rooms at the Civic and other buildings as shelter space through the end of the year. And yet, despite committing to pay the rent, the city stopped sending people there.

Existing residents moved on to permanent housing or elsewhere and no one took their place. Dozens of rooms went unfilled.

By December, Seattle taxpayers were paying a hefty $4,200 a month per empty room — at a time when thousands of Seattleites were without a roof over their heads.

City officials described their decision to leave the rooms vacant as simply a “pause” while they evaluated what to do about an anticipated budget deficit.

One-time federal funding was going away and, if the city eventually succeeded in securing long-term funding, officials wanted to find a cheaper location than the Civic. They said the uncertainty forced them to both hold onto the Civic and stop placing people there, to avoid later sending clients back to the street.

But internal records reveal more complicated motives. At the same time as the city was halting placements, it rejected a move to a cheaper shelter location, which the main advocate of the plan said would keep the program running without interruption. A top official in the office of Mayor Bruce Harrell, explaining the decision in private, voiced animosity toward the nonprofit leader who pitched the new location and signaled an end to city support for the leader’s program.

Regardless of the rationale, the outcome of the city’s decision was that for nearly a year, Seattle paid for just as many rooms as before yet helped fewer and fewer people off the street with them.

Placements resumed this year, in a new location, after a 16-month gap.

Many West Coast cities are struggling, as Seattle has, with a rise in homelessness in recent years. Before referrals were halted, the effort that placed people at the Civic had already moved hard-to-reach homeless people from the street to a shelter space and, in many cases, then on to long-term housing and stability.

Seattle’s decision to keep dollars flowing to an effort it had suspended comes as cities such as Los Angeles are facing criticism for failing to accurately track outcomes of their massive outlays on homelessness.

Allowing vacancies to grow at city-leased shelter space also seems to be at odds with a commitment by Harrell, whose 2022 plan to address homelessness promised efforts to “better track shelter capacity and ensure beds do not go unfilled.”

(A spokesperson for Harrell responded that it’s important to note city-funded shelters had 2,850 units in all last year, 87% of which were full on any given night. The city declined a request to interview Harrell.)

Poppe, who lived at the Civic through 2024, viewed its empty rooms as a squandered opportunity, and she told the shelter staff as much.

“Multiple times,” Poppe said, “I spoke to staff about this egregious amount of open rooms.”

On any given day in a section of Third Avenue between Pike and Pine streets known as The Blade, disorder is commonplace. Some people are screaming at the air, their pants falling off their frail frames. Others are sleeping, huddled in doorways to keep warm and safe. This human suffering stands in contrast with neighboring symbols........

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