In July, I wrote about the social care infrastructure we have built over the past decade to connect health care with housing, food, transportation, and the other supports that determine whether people stay well. I described that work as a four-link chain: identify the need, refer, coordinate, and deliver the service. In most models in the country, the chain stops before delivery. We have become good at finding people who need help and passing them along. We have been much less successful at paying for the help itself.

Housing is where that gap is most expensive. Washington is a useful case study because the state has invested heavily in the first three links, especially data, and is now running into the limits of the fourth.

A System That Can See the Problem

Washington tracks this problem closely. Beyond the federally required Point-in-Time Count (a one-night tally that, as the state itself cautions, can swing with the weather, volunteer turnout, and differences in county methods), the Washington State Department of Commerce (Commerce) produces a Snapshot of Homelessness that links records across three state agency data systems. The January 2025 Snapshot counted 158,791 people who were unhoused or in emergency shelters, 2.2% more than the year before and 8.9% more than in 2022. Growth has slowed, but slower growth is still growth. The 2025 Point-in-Time Count points in the same direction: outside King County, which did not count its unsheltered population that year, unsheltered homelessness rose 12.8% in a single year. A thermometer can tell you exactly how high a fever is, but it cannot bring the fever down.

Commerce’s 2025 annual report on homelessness, released in July, describes a system with sophisticated tools for finding and sorting people who need help. It also describes what happens next. By Commerce’s estimate, the homelessness system reaches only 15%–25% of the people who are homeless or unstably housed in many counties. Of the households that left emergency shelters funded by the state’s Consolidated Homeless Grant in state fiscal year 2025, only 14% exited to stable housing. Commerce’s performance target is for half of shelter exits to go to permanent housing.

These are not mainly failures of assessment or referral. Coordinated entry, prioritization tools, data dashboards, and case management support the first three links (identify, refer, and coordinate), and Washington has invested heavily in most of them. Some prioritization work is still waiting on staff, as Commerce’s progress update on its homeless housing strategic plan (discussed below) shows. What is missing is an affordable home at the end of the process, where people can move and remain.

Need Is Outrunning Every Program

The Housing and Essential Needs program shows what happens when eligibility grows faster than funding. The Legislature created it in 2011 to provide rent assistance to adults who are temporarily unable to work. In 2018, the program opened to people in the Aged, Blind, and Disabled (ABD) program, many of whom have permanent disabilities. By 2024, ABD clients made up 90% of the people receiving rent assistance through the program. An evaluation Commerce commissioned from Abt Global, summarized in Commerce’s report, found that only 3,405 of 17,784 eligible people received help in 2024. Since 2016, referrals to the program have tripled, while appropriations have only about doubled before accounting for inflation. In 2025, the Legislature extended eligibility again, so that clients approved for federal disability benefits can remain in the program, with a gap subsidy making up the part of their housing costs that the benefit does not cover. This is a clear example of the state filling a hole in the safety net with a tool that was built for a different purpose and is not large enough for the job.

The same pattern holds for housing itself. The state estimates that Washington needs 1.1 million new homes by 2044, or about 55,000 a year. Yet local governments permitted just over 35,000 homes between July 2024 and June 2025. At that pace, Washington is permitting roughly two-thirds of the homes it needs each year.

Renters with the lowest incomes bear the worst consequences. According to Commerce’s report, 71% of extremely low-income renters spend half or more of their income on housing, and eviction filings reached an all-time high in 2024, 53% above 2019 levels. Office of Civil Legal Aid data show that 2025 set another record, with 23,969 filings statewide, about 3% more than in 2024 and the highest total since at least 2013. The report cites an older finding that only about 8% of tenants in eviction cases had a lawyer. Washington created a right-to-counsel program for low-income tenants in 2021. A study of cases filed in January 2024 in six counties, which together account for about half of the state’s filings, found that tenants had a lawyer in 45% of those cases, well above the older figure but still fewer than half.

The strain does not stop at the lowest incomes. Nearly half of Washington renters (48%) paid 30% or more of their income for rent in 2024. Commerce’s report, citing the National Low Income Housing Coalition, notes that a household needs to earn about $41 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rent, roughly $85,000 a year for a full-time worker. For buyers, the gap is even wider. University of Washington researchers found that in mid-2025, the median home price in Washington was about $676,000 and that, by the researchers’ housing affordability index, a household earning the median income had not been able to afford the median-priced home since mid-2021.

What Washington’s Money Buys

In state fiscal year 2025, homeless housing projects across Washington spent about $967 million from all public and private sources, according to the expenditure table in Commerce’s report. Commerce breaks that spending down by intervention. Read alongside the state-funded program reports, the numbers tell us a great deal about what our money is buying.

• Emergency shelter accounted for about $318 million, at $116 per household per day and roughly $53,000 per successful exit, according to Commerce’s measure.
• Homelessness prevention accounted for about $115 million, at $43 per household per day and roughly $10,000 per successful exit. In the Consolidated Homeless Grant, 91% of households leaving prevention programs exited to stable housing.
• Rapid re-housing accounted for about $114 million, at roughly $25,000 per successful exit.

These programs serve different households with different needs, so the figures do not allow a direct comparison. People sleeping outside need somewhere safe tonight. But emergency shelter is the largest single spending category and, among programs funded by the Consolidated Homeless Grant, the intervention least likely to end in a home. For most people, shelter has become a waiting room: 86% of households leaving shelters funded by the Consolidated Homeless Grant did not exit to stable housing. Prevention costs far less for each household that ends up stably housed, though some of those households might have kept their homes without help.

The Plan Is Behind, and the Report Shows It

In October 2024, Commerce published the 2024–2029 State Homeless Housing Strategic Plan, organized around five objectives: an equitable, accountable, and transparent crisis response system; a stronger provider workforce; prevention; priority for people facing the greatest barriers and risk of harm; and stable housing for everyone. To its credit, the annual report provides a status update on every success measure under each objective. So how far along is the plan? By my count, of the plan’s 55 measures, 14 are implemented, 18 are in progress, 12 are in pre-planning, 10 have not started, and one is paused.

The distribution matters more than the totals. Most implemented measures fall under the first objective (an equitable, accountable, and transparent crisis response system), and many involve publishing reports and dashboards. Under the fourth objective, prioritizing people at greatest risk, nothing has been implemented. Work has not started on the Balance of State coordinated entry prioritization tool because it depends on additional staffing. The tool would help determine who is prioritized for housing in the 34 smaller counties outside the five that run their own continuums of care (King, Pierce, Snohomish, Clark, and Spokane). Staffing is holding up other parts of the plan as well. Trainings with the Health Care Authority, the Department of Social and Health Services, and the Office of Civil Legal Aid, which fall under the plan’s prevention and housing objectives, remain in pre-planning while Commerce identifies staff to coordinate them.

In fairness, the update covers only the plan’s first eight months, during a year when the state was closing a budget shortfall estimated at $12 billion–$16 billion. The pressure has not let up. Even after the September 2026 revenue forecast came in slightly higher, lawmakers still face a multibillion-dollar shortfall in the next budget. Commerce is transparent about where it is stuck, and that transparency has value. Still, a plan that measures itself well while operational work awaits staff and funding will produce excellent documentation of a worsening problem.

Next in this series: the two ways public money pays for housing, and why the standard measure of affordability falls short for households with the lowest incomes.