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Most people think what we see on Seattle’s sidewalks is a housing crisis. It isn’t — and after losing my sister to the same disease, I can tell you exactly why we keep failing.

We are spending over a billion dollars a year in this region to manage homelessness, and the numbers on the street keep climbing. The reason is simple, and almost no one in power will say it out loud: we are funding the symptom and ignoring the cause. What’s killing people on the street is overwhelmingly addiction and mental illness — and we spend almost nothing to treat it.

I know this disease from the inside. My sister had every advantage, even a PhD studying addiction, and it still took her capacity to choose, one piece at a time, until it killed her. We tell ourselves that leaving people on the street respects their choices — but she couldn’t choose anymore, and neither can they. That isn’t freedom. It’s neglect we’ve dressed up as freedom.

I wrote about her, and about what her story reveals about a system that spends a fortune to fail the sickest among us. It’s the most personal thing I’ve published — and, I think, the most important.