The World Cup’s Biggest Policy Bet

The self-described socialist mayor of Seattle has responded to President Donald Trump’s threat to remove World Cup matches from her city with an audacious gesture of her own: a mission to find housing for her city’s homeless before the first tournament match kicks off there in June.

Mayor Katie Wilson’s goal represents the boldest commitment by an American leader to remake the local policy landscape in preparation for the summer soccer extravaganza distributed across 16 cities in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

“The World Cup gives us a pretty aggressive timeline for trying to bring people inside with the support that they need, as opposed to sweeping people to other neighborhoods,” Wilson told POLITICO in her first interview on the topic after entering office. “Folks who are experiencing homelessness downtown often also have complex challenges related to drug use and mental illness.”

The population of Seattle is expected to swell by up to 750,000 people this summer, according to the Seattle FIFA World Cup organizing committee. The city will host six matches at Lumen Field, a short walk from a downtown where Seattle grapples with one of the country’s largest populations of unsheltered homeless people.

Just a few weeks into her new administration, Wilson is still in the early stages of rolling out her plan to clear people living on those streets — a situation that vexed predecessors who spent $1 billion over a decade with little to show for it.

To make progress on the seemingly intractable issue, Wilson will have to navigate a dismal fiscal environment, including cuts to federal funding used by Seattle’s existing homeless programs. Wilson also faces political pressure from her left flank to not resort to the encampment sweeps derided by most homeless advocates. 

“We do not have sustainable resources to scale up all the places for people to come inside, be it permanent or temporary locations,” said state Rep. Nicole Macri, a Democrat who works as the deputy director for strategy at homeless nonprofit Downtown Emergency Service Center in her Seattle district when the legislature is not in session. “But it’s not the only thing that would hold it up.”

Seattle designated the situation as a crisis in 2015, but its homeless population has only risen since, growing from around 10,000 to almost 17,000 between 2015 and 2024.

A moderate Democrat, Bruce Harrell, was elected mayor in 2021 as part of a backlash to previous Mayor Jenny Durkan, under whom the city saw high rates of crime and homelessness. Harrell focused on long-term housing and relied on pandemic-era renter programs to support a controversial policy of sweeps that forcibly removed homeless people and their property from public spaces.

The policy did little to slow the growth of Seattle’s homeless population, just as the expiration of Covid-era funding provided by the American Rescue Act led to the closure of hundreds of shelter beds in the region in 2025. In her successful campaign that unseated Harrell last November, Wilson said she would stop sweeps while focusing on housing options like rent vouchers and tiny homes.

The World Cup “will lay bare Seattle and King County’s long inadequacies on dealing with our homeless problem that no other event to this point will have been able to do,” said King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn.

Washington and its largest city, Seattle, regularly rank in the nation’s top five for both their per-capita homelessness rate and overall growth of its homeless population. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, nearly half of the state’s homeless in 2024 were classified as chronically homeless, defined as lacking more than 12 months or having lost housing four times over the most recent three year period — the country’s highest rate. (As of 2024, the county’s biennial count estimated that nearly 10,000 of the almost 17,000 homeless in King County are completely without shelter.)

Washington state has the highest rate of chronic homelessness (where someone is unhoused for more than 12 months or four times over three years) in the nation, and the highest percentage of unhoused people who don’t have shelter like a congregate facility.

The location of Lumen Field — one of the few American stadiums being used for a World Cup located within walking distance of the host city’s downtown — has raised fears about heightened interactions between visiting spectators and unhoused Seattleites. Homeless advocates told POLITICO they are nervous that people living on Seattle’s streets could themselves be victims of a crime at the hands of intoxicated sports fans. (Neither the Seattle Police Department nor World Cup organizing committee responded to requests for comment.)

Shortly after Wilson’s election, Trump said he might move World Cup matches out of Seattle if officials couldn’t guarantee that the city — which has a high rate of non-violent crime — would be safe. Wilson told POLITICO in January she wasn’t concerned about the president’s threats, saying: “We’re going to have the World Cup here, it’s going to be great.”

But the World Cup does seem to have spurred her toward taking on the homelessness problem with new urgency. Wilson plans to create 500 new shelter units — including tiny home villages, RVs and apartments — by the time of the first match at Lumen Field on June 15, her team told POLITICO this week.

That is exponentially more than the 13 new units Seattle added over the last four years, but — even when occupied by some couples or families — not enough to hold even a tenth of the city’s unsheltered homeless population. A recent executive order also directs an interdepartmental team to find other methods for expediting new shelter spaces, from identifying new sites to creating financial incentives; its report is due in March.

Her rhetoric since the campaign already shows a subtle shift on the goal line. In July, Wilson told alternative newspaper The Stranger: “Let’s get people inside in time for the World Cup.” When she spoke with POLITICO on Jan. 5, she again did not place any limit on the number of unhoused she intended to shelter. But earlier this week, a spokesperson clarified that the goal was “as many as possible,” not all.

Wilson’s first policy moves on homelessness have indicated she is still figuring out her approach to the issue. The mayor recently delayed the planned closure of an encampment in the city’s Ballard neighborhood, about seven miles from Lumen Field. But later in the month she moved forward with the removal of a second encampment near the University of Washington, which will be used as a practice facility for World Cup teams.

Much of the city’s conflict comes over the use of temporary group shelters. Moderates in the Democratic-led city, who were more likely to back Harrell’s encampment sweeps, often champion such facilities as a quick fix to get people off the street. Dunn, a rare Republican in county government, suggested in an interview that Seattle look to large tents the county acquired for use as field hospital, quarantine and vaccination sites and during the Covid pandemic. He suggested they could be repurposed as temporary group shelters and to support emergency feeding services during the World Cup, which will be held when the Pacific Northwest’s weather is at its finest.

But local progressives are quick to criticize breaking up encampments or forcibly moving people from the streets into group shelters. City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who previously worked for an organization that provided homeless services, argued that it would be hard to convince unhoused residents to trade the city block they know for a temporary shelter with strangers. Many progressives and homeless advocates point to research that shows giving a person or a family their own private space has better long term outcomes than group shelters, which lack privacy, stability and can be dangerous especially for women.

But local progressives are quick to criticize breaking up encampments or forcibly moving people from the streets into group shelters. City Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, who previously worked for an organization that provided homeless services, argued that it would be hard to convince unhoused residents to trade the city block they know for a temporary shelter with strangers. Many progressives and homeless advocates point to research that shows giving a person or a family their own private space has better long term outcomes than group shelters, which lack privacy, stability and can be dangerous especially for women.

Local policymakers have to contend with the Trump administration’s recent cuts to key federal grant programs for housing and mental health treatment that Seattle has relied on to support a transition off the street. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Continuum of Care grants, for example, help fund nonprofit organizations that offer transitional housing and support services that help get people in the Seattle area from a tent to a permanent home. But the fate of those grants is uncertain.

After the White House issued policy changes in November that would significantly cut funding, Washington state helped to lead a 21-state lawsuit that argued the White House cannot impose new conditions or cuts on money already appropriated by Congress. In December, a judge issued an injunction pausing the cuts, with a hearing scheduled on the case in February.

The funds could face additional delays due to an ongoing congressional appropriations snarl holding up the funding package that includes the HUD budget. If the planned cuts are allowed to take effect, Macri says an estimated 4,500 additional people will lose their housing in Seattle.

In addition, the Trump administration cut and then abruptly reinstated nearly $2 billion in federal grants for mental health programs used by city programs serving unhoused people. These pivots have created uncertainty over what federal funding local governments can count on when making plans for the next few months.

“When money is cut for core social services, it really hurts,” said Dunn. “It would be helpful if the federal government stayed the course on those funding streams. That would certainly help me do my job better.”

The one thing already uniting officials, though, is the role of the federal government: Trump may have elevated the World Cup as a focus for Seattle’s policymakers to address seemingly intractable problems, but they don’t want him to get involved any further.

“Nobody here, Republican or Democrat, wants the Trump administration coming in here with any federal presence to try and solve this problem,” said Dunn. “We all want to solve it locally.”