Solidarity Budget 2023:
Budget to Live, Budget to Thrive
The 2023 Seattle Solidarity Budget is a collective call toward a city budget that centers the needs of the most marginalized and vulnerable Seattle residents, responds with funding that is commensurate with the crises we are facing, and prioritizes collective care and liberation. Our struggles to build a more equitable Seattle are interconnected. The places in our city where inequality cuts most deeply are also the places most heavily policed. At the core of the Solidarity Budget is our refusal to allow our movements to be pitted against each other for funding. Divesting from police, courts, and prosecutors and investing in Black communities goes hand in hand with climate justice work and housing justice work and participatory budgeting.
The budget we created in 2022 remains our central background demand. But because our vision for a city where all can thrive has not been funded, conditions this year have worsened. This has been the deadliest year yet for our unhoused neighbors, with at least 87 deaths in Seattle so far this year. Our county jail has a suicide rate eight times higher than the national average, and our overfunded police department, municipal court, and city attorneys office continue to feed our people into this deadly cage. Pedestrians and bikers continue to die due to underfunding in transit infrastructure, with 27% of those who perished experiencing homelessness in the last five years. We are fighting for our lives. Our dire conditions thus lead us to call for a Budget to Live. And because survival is the bare minimum, Solidarity Budget continues to be a demand for a Budget to Thrive.
Budget to live
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BUDGET TO END JAIL AND POLICING DEATHS
King County Jail has become a death trap, with more deaths in four months this year than in all of last year, and a suicide rate eight times the national average. The misdemeanor punishment system in Seattle continues to act as designed, funneling people with serious mental health issues or other disabilities to our deadly jail. Meanwhile, SPD continues to murder people experiencing mental health crises. Our budget should not go toward putting our most vulnerable community members at risk of death for crimes of poverty and unaddressed mental health needs.
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BUDGET TO END TRAFFIC DEATHS
So far in 2022, there have been 15 deaths and 137 life-altering injuries due to traffic collisions on Seattle’s streets. Despite Seattle’s Vision Zero goal to reach zero by 2030, these numbers have been increasing.
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BUDGET TO END DEATHS OF HOUSELESS PEOPLE
The city of Seattle is on track to surpass all-time records for deaths of houseless people; alongside the rise of encampment removals this year, at least 87 homeless people have died in Seattle. Black people and Native American and Alaska Native people are disproportionately represented in homeless deaths, as they are in the homeless population as a whole. In the last year, the City of Seattle has spent over $50 million dollars on sweeps to forcibly tear down encampments. Yet sweeps and hot spot policing do not address the root causes of violence, and only push incidents out to surrounding areas. Sweeps make it harder for people to find jobs, education, and services. They make it harder to link up with culturally-appropriate case management services and existing outreach programs. Sweeps punish our community by worsening our living conditions. They are a costly, rotating door that wastes our taxpayer dollars, making everyone in the neighborhood less safe because they worsen the conditions that lead to isolation, harm, and violence. The City’s current policies are proving fatal for our homeless neighbors.
Budget to Thrive
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PUBLIC CONTROL OVER PUBLIC MONEY
The Seattle City Council committed $30M toward participatory budgeting (PB) in the 2021 budget. PB is a democratic process by which community members decide how to spend a portion of a public budget and it has been a practice in Seattle since 2015. The Black Brilliance Research Project (BBR) laid the groundwork for a PB process that centers Black lives and Black well-being in an unprecedented way, leading us to a city where all people can survive and thrive. Power comes from the people and our budgeting decisions should too. We should develop our budget solutions together, following the lead of those most impacted and those actually doing the work on the ground.
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PUBLIC MONEY FOR PUBLIC WORKERS
Solidarity Budget continues to demand a public safety strategy that divests from harmful systems and invests in basic needs like housing, support services, and crisis response. However, the City of Seattle continues to prioritize supporting police officers over all other city-funded workers. A true public safety strategy requires investing in the development of a stable, quality workforce in crisis response, homeless services and housing, and a pool to support hiring, training, and retention of a diverse, skilled workforce to sustain and increase quality care in crisis response, housing and homeless services.
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HOUSING FOR ALL
When Seattle becomes a city where all people's basic needs are met, Black and Native communities who currently bear the brunt of violent policing will experience public safety for the first time. This vision requires that one of the most basic public safety strategies - housing for all - be fully funded.
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HEALTHY CLIMATE FUTURES
To achieve true safety, we must have a comprehensive plan that addresses how we interact with our environment and how we prepare our community to be impacted by our environment. When most communities, and in particular when marginalized communities, are surveyed or asked to define safety or what makes them feel safe, police and policing do not make the list of priorities. Instead, people name education, healthcare, mental healthcare, temperature controlled and fungus/parasite-free living spaces, clean air, clean neighborhoods, meaningful employment, transportation security, food security, conflict resolution, trust, community, emergency and disaster preparedness infrastructure, and more. And yet, for every dollar Seattle spends on Green New Deal priorities, the city currently spends $40 on policing. The Green New Deal and the Environmental Justice community are forging a path not only toward sustainability, but toward the mitigation and remediation of the negative impacts of climate change and environmental destruction through meaningful, collaborative, equitable, and compensated participation. We must limit the harm that continues to happen, we must prepare for the impacts we cannot stall, and we must build collective power and ownership through a distributed model of inclusion and participation.