From Seattle Weekly’s Pioneer Square office, you can see where 46-year-old college English professor Troy Wolff and his partner Kristin Ito were repeatedly stabbed Friday night. Wolff succumbed to his serious injuries Saturday, while as of this writing Ito was still hospitalized.

After being read his Miranda rights, 44-year-old suspected attacker Donnell Jackson told detectives that he suffers from schizophrenia and that “the victim was a member of a group that was trying to kill him.” The police report classifies the suspected attacker as a “total stranger” to the two victims, who were heading to the light-rail station after Friday’s Sounders game when the assault occurred.

The fatal stabbing came just one month after a mentally ill Martin Duckworth—who shared an address with Jackson at Pioneer Square’s Compass Housing Alliance—opened fire on an Metro bus, wounding the driver before he was killed by police. Is this the new normal? Stats showing a swelling rank of homeless and mentally ill people in downtown as millions of dollars are cut for mental-health care suggest a troubling answer.

Figures from the King County Mental Health Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services Division show funding for mental-health services throughout the state have taken a beating from Olympia in the aftermath of the Great Recession. As a briefing paper from the agency begging for more money explains it, “Since 2009, there have been significant reductions in funding for community mental-health services, while involuntary commitments have increased substantially.”

How bad has it been? Starting four years ago, budget cuts in the state legislature have led to the elimination of 90 beds from Western State Hospital. Another 31 beds were lost when the Program for Adaptive Living Skills facility on the WSH campus was forced to close because of the cuts. It housed people with histories of violence, sex offenses, and noncompliance with treatment plans—in other words, the last people you want roaming the streets at night.

Here’s a breakdown of the statewide cuts:

• The 2009 state biennial budget slashed Medicaid funding for mental-health services by 3.4 percent—or $12.2 million per year.

• The same budget took a 9 percent swipe at non-Medicaid funding, to the tune of $11.6 million per year.

• The 2011 budget cut another $13 million per year in Medicaid and non-Medicaid funding.

• A 2011 supplemental budget enacted a one-time mental-health funding cut of $12.6 million.

According to Amnon Shoenfeld of King County Mental Health Chemical Abuse and Dependency Services, all these cuts result in a loss for King County of $11 million in Medicaid funding and $18.6 million in non-Medicaid funding over the past four years.

As Shoenfeld tells it, the non-Medicaid funding cuts may be the most problematic. In King County, this funding has been used almost entirely to pay for King County’s evaluation and treatment facility, involuntary commitment services, residential services, and crisis services. Since cuts started in 2009, Shoenfeld says the King County Regional Support Network has been forced to make significant cuts to services. It has fewer respite and hospital diversion beds for people suffering mental crises, and fewer resources to go out on the streets to find homeless people who need mental-health care. Long-term treatment, specialized treatment for severe cases, and Medicaid personal care have also been slashed.

“You can see we’re hurting,” says Shoenfeld. “The cuts get felt.”

The results of this struggle play out acutely in the state’s most populous county, and especially on Seattle’s streets. As Seattle Police West Precinct Captain Jim Dermody told Seattle Weekly for a story on homelessness and street disorder earlier this year (“Everybody’s Business,” July 3), the bulk of King County’s social services are located within four square miles of downtown. “Seattle is a service-rich city,” Dermody said at the time, noting that this concentration of social services leads to the inevitable: A disproportionate number of people who need help call Seattle’s streets home. In Pioneer Square, this is particularly apparent. According to numbers provided by the Alliance for Pioneer Square, roughly 1,200 of the neighborhood’s 2,100 residents are in a shelter bed or some form of transitional housing.

“When they cut mental health and housing, there’s not a neighborhood in the state that feels it more than downtown Seattle,” Jon Scholes, vice president of the Downtown Seattle Association, told The

Seattle Times this week.

On Monday, reacting to the deadly stabbing and in full-campaign mode, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn didn’t mince words, saying “We aren’t going to wait on Olympia ” while calling on local businesses to identify a new funding source for mental-health treatment beds. (McGinn’s mayoral challenger, state Sen. Ed Murray, has spent a lot of time in Olympia, as you may have heard.)

It’s a nice thought; local businesses coming together for mental health would be an admirable start. Unfortunately, the problem is likely bigger than that.

How big is Seattle’s housing crisis? And what are we going to do about it?

Those questions have been provoking debate over the past week in the wake of a report submitted to the City Council by Cornell University law school professor Robert Hockett.

So far the first question has generated the most attention. The report Hockett turned in last Wednesday painted a surprisingly bleak picture. “Seattle has about 42,000 underwater mortgaged homes,” Hockett wrote. “That is over one-third—about 33.3 percent of Seattle’s mortgage total, a remarkable statistic.” It’s even more troubling, Hockett noted, because underwater homes—homes whose mortgages are larger than what they would fetch on the market—are particularly susceptible to falling into foreclosure.

KUOW and other media outlets reported that these numbers seemed fishy—particularly the 42,000 figure, which is far higher than other estimates.

In an interview with Seattle Weekly this week, Hockett explains that he had used a number about half as big—24,000—in a draft report submitted to the council. But a working group providing input to the council urged him to go with 42,000, a figure from a previous report commissioned by the Washington Community Action Network, an activist group, and the United Black Clergy. The higher number would convey more urgency, Hockett says he was told.

It’s a familiar tale. Individuals and organizations working on an issue frequently try to make the situation seem as bad as possible to dramatize the importance of their work and get as much funding as possible.

Yet even more conservative estimates, which Hockett put back into a revised report he’s finalizing this week, suggest that Seattle’s has a sizable problem on its hands. “There are thousands and thousands of people out there” with underwater homes, reiterates council member Nick Licata, chair of the committee dealing with housing.

The more interesting question is whether Seattle is prepared to take dramatic action. Hockett is certainly advocating as much.

According to the law professor, various city, state, and federal programs aimed at stemming the tide of foreclosure have had only modest success. Programs may cut monthly payments or draw out loans, but they don’t reduce the mortgage principal, so homeowners remain underwater.

Hockett outlines three strategies that would tackle that problem. Perhaps the most radical is the use of eminent domain, which allows governments to seize properties for the public good. The essential idea, batted about for some time among academics and officials, is that the government would take properties at risk of foreclosure and thus reduce the amount owed by the homeowner.

One of the biggest weaknesses of an eminent-domain strategy—aside from the backlash it would likely generate from financial institutions—is that it would take lots of money. The government has to pay a fair price for the properties it takes.

But Hockett advocates an interesting twist. The notes on many properties are owned by bondholders such as pension funds. Hockett contends they might be induced to supply the money needed for the transactions if it were explained to them that homeowners might consequently be less likely to default on their loans. The government would then give the notes, with amended loan terms, back to bondholders.

Hockett also recommends a complex house-swapping arrangement, which would get around bankruptcy rules that don’t allow people to write off their primary residences, and the creation of a “land bank” that might have the government “foreclosing on the foreclosures.”

“I need to learn a lot more about all three” strategies, Licata says. He adds that his first step is simply to figure out whether writing down loans would stave off foreclosures.

At the same time, he signaled his willingness to try something radical. He says, “I come from an era where things that once seemed radical now seem normal.” Nina Shapiro

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