(This piece was originally published in Real Change News and is republished with permission.)
“In order for me to assist you, I will need your name, a number and the location your property was stored from,” the voicemail greeting says. For hundreds of homeless Seattleites who call into the city’s hotline, hearing that recording is a familiar experience. Data suggests that only a small fraction of them ever get their stuff back.
Since 2022, Seattle’s Unified Care Team (UCT) has carried out more than 5,000 removals of homeless encampments and vehicles — commonly referred to as sweeps — throughout the city. Residents, sometimes with notice as short as mere minutes, are forced to pack up their stuff and move. Most of the time, anything they cannot carry or salvage is thrown away by city workers. If someone is not present during the sweep, they could have all their belongings thrown away.
Occasionally, UCT staff will hold on to an item for storage if a person requests it or it is considered of significant value and is in decent condition, such as a bicycle, clothing, a tent, a sleeping bag or mobility device. Outreach workers hand out flyers with the phone number of the hotline for people to collect their stuff. After confirming their identity, UCT staff will arrange a delivery to return the property to the owners.
However, an investigation by Real Change uncovered that the system is not working for most homeless people, with only 7% receiving their property back. Individual accounts corroborate the data, painting a picture of an ineffective bureaucracy not attuned to the real-life struggles of people living unsheltered in Seattle.
A record of failure
A spreadsheet maintained by the UCT shows that city workers picked up and stored property from sweeps approximately 387 times between January 2022 and December 2024. Property stored from several people during a single sweep was recorded on a single line in the log. The grand total — 387 — represents a small fraction of all the encampment removals the city conducted during that time period, most of which don’t feature any storage at all.
In 351 instances, or 91% of the time, items were disposed of after 70 days, the log showed. Belongings were delivered to the original owners 27 times — a 7% success rate — and nine cases remained pending or had their outcomes unknown as of February 2025 when the records were requested.
When considering the relative rarity of property being stored rather than thrown away, only 1 in every 200 sweeps between 2022 and 2024 was associated with the successful retrieval of a homeless person’s belongings.
An accompanying log indicated 128 inquiries were made to the city about stored property, with only 25 successful deliveries and three marked as failed due to the owner not showing up or, in one case, inclement weather preventing the delivery driver from reaching the pickup site. This suggests the true success rate could be closer to 6%.
Worryingly, the data indicates the return rate for people’s belongings may be declining, with only 5% of items returned in 2024.
Kate Jacobs, a spokesperson for the Seattle mayor’s office — which coordinates the UCT — disputed the suggestion that a low return rate was a failure of the UCT’s property storage program.
“It would be misleading to measure the system’s effectiveness solely by the number of deliveries compared to the total number of inquiries, since not all inquiries are eligible, unique, or complete enough to result in a return,” Jacobs wrote.
Another log dating from 2018 to 2023, which was first reported on by ProPublica, showed city workers removing items from encampments at least 247 times, with property not being stored in the majority of instances. Previously reported city data also shows that between 2022 and 2024, Seattle swept 6,628 tents and 276 vehicles.
In 2023 and 2024, Seattle spent approximately $52.5 million on the UCT, which is in charge of encampment removals and outreach. The amount of money spent on sweeps in 2022 has not been made publicly available.
The documents obtained by Real Change, as well as code for the data analysis, have been uploaded to the Seattle Sweeps Open Data Repository and are available for the general public to download.
Not just things
The records obtained by Real Change documented a wide range of items taken by city workers from 2022 to 2024. They include many essentials of daily life like clothes, footwear, hygiene products, sleeping bags and tents. Property with significant monetary value, such as electronics, tools and bicycles, were also stored and subsequently thrown away. Losing these items could seriously impede someone’s ability to maintain employment.
Some belongings obtained during sweeps directly related to their owners’ health. A non-exhaustive search of the records found that in approximately 20 instances, city workers stored medication, but only three of those cases resulted in a return. Two wheelchairs and one cane were also obtained and later discarded by the UCT.
At least one social security card, as well as several IDs and other sensitive documents, were also disposed of by the UCT after the 70-day window. When IDs are taken in a sweep, this can jeopardize homeless people’s ability to access shelters or other social services, apply for housing or get a job.
Potentially sentimental items, including Pokémon and baseball cards, Bibles and diaries, were never returned.
But even when the property does end up back in the hands of its owner, it’s not guaranteed to be in the same condition. Longtime unhoused Seattle resident Martin Woodruff found that out first-hand in the winter of 2021.
When Woodruff was swept by city workers in Georgetown, he had several tools, two bags of clothes and a black bike in good condition taken and stored for him. When he arranged for his property to be delivered, Woodruff said the clothes had become moldy, and the returned bike was not his and unrideable. He estimated that he could have lost as much as $500 worth of property as a result.
“It just seemed like a sham,” Woodruff said. “They offered it to people to help you move and store your stuff, to keep it safe for you and then you can pick it up in a couple months. It sounded great. It sounded good [for] when you’re in dire straits … and so I went along with it, but it just left a bitter taste in my mouth.”
Sara Rankin, a Seattle University law professor and advocate, runs a legal clinic for homeless people. Many of the people she’s helped have described losing invaluable items during sweeps, inflicting devastating emotional tolls.
“We had a story where somebody’s grandfather’s boots … their grandfather was a veteran, and they’d been carrying those boots with them from the time that they were a teen, and it was the only thing that they still had connecting themselves to the family,” Rankin said. “Those boots were thrown away.
“Photographs of only known family members, children’s drawings, ashes of the bodies of loved ones that [people have] been carrying around with them. To call it property really minimizes its role.These are fundamental parts of people’s identity and dignity.”
Inaccessible bureaucracy
Gracey, a Seattle activist who provides mutual aid to her unhoused neighbors in Ballard, said she was not surprised about the low success rate of property retrieval from the UCT. She had never heard of anyone successfully retrieving their property after it was stored. Over the past three years, she has attended many sweeps to support homeless residents, pack up their belongings and ease the burden of displacement. She did not share her last name due to safety and privacy concerns.
In Gracey’s opinion, the city did not design the process for returning belongings to account for the inherent instability of homelessness, which makes maintaining a consistent address or phone number difficult.
“It’s not actually accessible,” she said. “To make a phone call, you have to have a drop-off location.”
Human rights activist Chanel Horner said she has had her own struggles to retrieve property taken by UCT, including a pedicab and a friend’s powerchair. Horner currently lives in a tiny house village in Interbay but was displaced several times by UCT when she was living in a bus. She said city workers made fun of her during one such sweep and can be callous toward homeless people. Apart from Woodruff, Horner hasn’t heard of anyone who has successfully gotten their stuff back after a sweep.
“They’re pretty ruthless, and they say, ‘Oh, you can always call the number,’” Horner said. “But anytime you call that number, it’s always an answer machine. You’re never going to get the call back.”
The address of UCT’s storage facility in SODO is not publicly shared due to security concerns.
Callie Craighead, a spokesperson for the Seattle mayor’s office, wrote that city workers leave flyers at each sweep with the hotline number for people to call to retrieve their belongings. She added that the UCT, which is made up of city employees and contractors from multiple departments, reserves the right to refuse storage of items that could be unsafe to handle.
“The City is not obligated to store items that are hazardous or may become hazardous in storage (e.g. wet, soiled in biohazardous waste, contaminated with drugs or paraphernalia such as needles, fuel, etc.),” Craighead wrote.
Rankin argued the UCT’s property storage program could violate several constitutional provisions, including the right to due process and privacy. This is in part because since 2022, 80% of sweeps carried out by Seattle city workers have been classified as “obstructions,” meaning they were done without any prior notice.
“Cities still have to comply with constitutional protections,” Rankin said. “Examples of those constitutional protections in the context of property include things like due process rights. It basically refers to what happens before there’s a sweep. Are people provided notice in the context of circumstances where notice would be required? Does the government follow proper procedures before they remove people or their things? And so due process rights are one level of protection that, like I said, especially applies [before] and during encampment removal processes.”
Storage for “the nicety of it”
Instead of a genuine effort to protect homeless people’s property rights, many of the advocates interviewed by Real Change asserted the UCT’s storage program is mainly intended to save face.
Last year, it took a full semester for Rankin’s law students to develop a “know your rights” guide for unhoused Seattleites to help them navigate the UCT property retrieval process, illustrating just how complex it is.
“When the average person hears that the city stores property confiscated during a sweep, they imagine in their minds a very simple system, and it seems like an act of generosity on the part of the city,” Rankin said. “Anything that involves any sort of administrative process with the city is far from easy — and it’s particularly complex for folks who are unhoused. … They’ve only got 70 days from the time that a sweep happens to recover everything. That’s really tough for people who are trying to survive on a daily basis on the streets, to be able to prioritize the significant organizational demands that are required for somebody to be able to do that when they call that number.”
Horner said she’s frustrated by the city’s lack of accountability to track down and return property to its owners.
“It gives you a glimmer of hope when there is none,” she said.
According to Gracey, the UCT’s storage program is similar to its offers of shelter and outreach, which most often do not materialize. One internal UCT report found that in a three-month period of 2023, only 11% of shelter offers during sweeps resulted in the person actually being placed in shelter. Gracey said that when she provides mutual aid to homeless people being displaced, she observes UCT workers focused on clearing encampments and vehicles as quickly as possible before moving on to the next site.
“It’s just like how they send outreach workers out. … The storage is so [the city] can show the nicety of it,” Gracey said.
