Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell shared a new homelessness dashboard on Tuesday that gives a “snapshot” of people experiencing homelessness by neighborhood, and identifies roughly 1,300 new or upcoming shelter and housing units.

Harrell and Deputy Mayor of Housing and Homelessness Tiffany Washington shared the new interactive website at a news conference outside the Dockside Apartments, a $18.9 million affordable housing project in Green Lake.

The building, acquired by the Low Income Housing Institute, will provide 70 new permanent housing units for homeless people and an additional 22 for residents earning up to 50% of the area median income, or $45,300 annually.

The dashboard itself, Washington says, is designed to track the city’s unhoused population and connect people with shelter, transitional housing or permanent units like those at Dockside.

“When you take the time to build a database of what things are under construction, that then allows you to connect those [projects] pending and under construction with the locations that people are living unsheltered,” Washington said.

The mayor’s dashboard tracks new housing and shelter units that are in the preconstruction phase, under construction, or completed and available. Currently, the city shows 241 units in preconstruction, 540 in construction and 553 available.

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Though the units were primarily planned and funded before Harrell took office, he is the first mayor to connect the units with people experiencing homelessness in this fashion.

One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan

The dashboard also includes a “reactive” count of tents and RVs in the city, or those that residents have flagged, but is not a “proactive” or complete count, and does not reflect the number of people who may be staying in tents and vehicles. It also does not include other types of structures.

The current partial count shows 763 tents and 225 RVs across the city as of May.

Tents are most common downtown, where the city reports 183; areas around Sodo, where the city reports 129; and the North Beacon Hill area, where the city counts 69 active tents.

Active RVs counted by the city are most dense in Duwamish/Sodo with 45, Georgetown with 33, Fremont with 29 and South Park, also with 29.

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According to Harrell, creating the system and identifying the need and the housing stock has to happen in order for new housing to be effective.

“I’m building systems here,” Harrell said at a news conference Tuesday. “It doesn’t matter how many years they were in progress, in fact, I can’t even concern myself with that. Because unless it’s part of a plan, we’re going to be having this conversation 10 years from now.”

The dashboard also contains data on public safety issues at encampments, noting 3,707 emergency calls from unhoused individuals, or about 31 per day, from January-April; 608 fires at tent or RV encampments; and 53 shots fired incidents involving someone who is homeless in the same time frame, which will be considered in scheduling encampment clearings.

“There’s not a neighborhood in Seattle that’s not being impacted by the crisis that we face,” Washington said. “So we are trying to be less reactive.”

While Washington said that the city will respond to everyone who complains about an encampment or shelter, she said that the volume of complaints in an area will not determine the speed at which an encampment is cleared.

“What happened last year is someone with power or someone who has time on their hands would just send all these horrendous emails and pictures of things going really, really bad,” she said, noting that the city provides the King County Regional Homelessness Authority a calendar booked two months in advance so it can schedule outreach at encampments scheduled for clearing.

“And it’s fluid, so sometimes the calendar moves,” Washington said. “If we had something scheduled for June 15 and then tomorrow there’s a huge fire or somebody gets shot, we might move some of [the other scheduled clearings] down the line.”

At the news conference, Harrell also committed to issuing permits for approved affordable housing projects within 12 months of application and releasing a public safety plan in “coming weeks, not months,” to similarly quantify public safety issues and progress in the city.

The dashboard can be found at homelessness.seattle.gov.