My recent Seattle Met  story, "Can Seattle Make Homelessness Rare? Declaring an Emergency is One Thing. Doing Something About it is Another"—is part of a larger feature package on homelessness in the January issue of the magazine. 

Our coverage of the city's crisis—there's an estimated 10,000 homeless people in King County and at least 67 of those died on the streets this year—also includes an infographic that details the alarming numbers and a poignant photo essay by homelessness advocate and photographer Rex Hohlbein.

Seattle Met associate editor Matt Halverson also profiled Hohlbein last year; Hohlbein is an architect who quit his job in 2014 to work full time at his homelessness advocacy group, Facing Homelessness, and dedicate his time to photographing homeless people. He set up a Facebook gallery of photos, Homeless in Seattle, to raise public awareness of homelessness.

Hohlbein contributed 10 moving portraits to this month's Seattle Met feature package, along with accompanying mini-profiles, including stories of some people who have  died since he took their portraits.

Among all the options for end-of-the-year essays and articles, this struck me as an appropriate way to conclude 2015. With a visible 21 percent increase in the number of people living on the streets over last year, it's a default look back at this year’s most pressing story.

From the conclusion to my piece:

What’s saddest for Malone, the Downtown Emergency Services Center director, is how desensitized people are to the problem. “I have kids in high school, and certainly their entire lives, there’s just common-place visible homelessness that has been a routine feature of the landscape.” Malone argues you’d have to look back to the Great Depression to find the equivalent of the modern homelessness crisis, which he believes started during the Reagan era.

Everyone I spoke to, in fact, pegged the current crisis to Reaganomics and its massive disinvestment in social services and affordable housing coupled with tax policies that favored the wealthy. The boon to the rich was supposed to trickle down, as President Reagan’s supply-side theory had it, but what actually trickled down was economic displacement.

Joey Stanton barely survived the crisis created by those policies. The 1811 Eastlake resident who razzed the mayor for his “emergency” rhetoric had worked in sales and lived in West Seattle for 30 years before hitting the skids and ending up on Seattle’s “bleak” streets for four years. He remembers getting his head “bashed in,” and he remembers the time fellow homeless guys he thought were his friends stole his dog, Roy. He also remembers having to figure out “where you’re going to go to the bathroom in the morning…where can you go to close your eyes and just talk to God?” he says, his goatee and leather cap unable to hide the grim lines in his face.

“This is real. Three thousand people spent the night in the rain last night. In that rain, in that cold.”