Something I’ve noticed: Bureaucrats love grading themselves on a curve.

Who can forget when President George W. Bush, in the horrifying aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, offered this rosy assessment: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!”

Closer to home, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels famously gave the city a “B” on the infamous 2008 snowstorm response. When he ran for re-election, voters kicked him out in the primary.

And now, professional homeless czar Barbara Poppe is in The Seattle Times, rating Seattle’s homelessness response. “They’ve done a strong job,” she says.

I think homeless folks might disagree.

If Seattle’s approach to unsheltered homelessness resembles the Vietnam War — where America destroyed villages in order to save them and assured ourselves of success by neurotically counting the wrong things — Poppe is our very own General Westmoreland.

I remember when her 2016 policy recommendations landed with a resounding thud. Longtime homeless advocates greeted her rosy projections with derision and dismay.

Her report, Homeless Investment Policy: The Path Forward for the City of Seattle, first veered into nonsense by defining homelessness and Seattle’s signature shortage of affordable housing as separate issues.

The latter, she said, was “outside of her scope” and not her concern.

Also defined as irrelevant were “jobs that pay a living wage, lack of quality public education, gaps in the social infrastructure, and ongoing structural racism.”

To quote Pet Detective Ace Ventura, “Alrighty then!”

From there, the report lunged sharply into the absurd. If only service providers were forced into greater efficiency, Poppe concluded, we’d have the capacity to get every unsheltered person indoors within one year.

Despite the City adopting 66 of the report’s 69 recommendations, that didn’t exactly happen.

So, why was this national expert on things homeless so astonishingly wrong? There’s a simple answer. In a word, the data behind her conclusion was “corrupt.”

The Homeless Management Information System, the notoriously problematic database that the City uses to track the successes and failures of its homelessness response programs, reported that shelter beds were only at around 60 percent capacity.

People on the ground, who knew from experience that the HMIS data did not reflect reality, strenuously objected that the real number was more like 95 percent.

Rather than listen to people, Poppe went with the data.

Seattle busied itself rearranging human services deckchairs while the situation on our streets went further to hell.

Seattle busied itself rearranging human services deckchairs while the situation on our streets went further to hell.

In 2016, the one night unsheltered count in King County stood at 4,505 persons. Two years later, that number rose to 6,320, an increase of nearly 33 percent. For the first time in the history of the count, the number of those outside was greater than the number of those in shelter.

The misery here is incalculable.

It gets worse. This year, 114 homeless people have died outside in King County of sickness or violence. New records are being set annually.

Seattle’s emergency response, and Poppe’s assessment is about as close to the reality of our streets as the 58th floor Department of Human Services.

Poppe has fiercely opposed stopgap solutions like tiny houses and authorized encampments, and questions whether they move people into housing. She says they’re not as effective as shelter.

If that shelter and housing actually existed, and keeping people alive didn’t matter, her case would be a lot stronger. This is where Seattle policy-makers mostly play pretend.

I wish they’d talk to David Krum, a septuagenarian former machinist who lives at Camp Second Chance.

Krum is featured in Tomasz Biernacki’s Seattle homelessness documentary “Trickle Down Town,” and talks about how his three heart surgeries last year haven’t been enough to get him into housing. When I called Biernacki, I learned that Krum is still waiting.

Once the priority populations like families and veterans get placed, there isn’t a lot of housing left over. The triage is intense, and hundreds of people like David Krum compete for the handful of slots available.

Biernacki wonders what world people like Poppe live in. “They talk like there’s all this housing around, sitting empty. I just don’t see it. The disconnect is crazy.”

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Tim Harris is the Founding Director Real Change and has been active as a poor people’s organizer for more than two decades. Prior to moving to Seattle in 1994, Harris founded street newspaper Spare Change in Boston while working as Executive Director of Boston Jobs with Peace.

Read the full Dec. 19 - Dec. 25 issue.

Real Change is a non-profit organization advocating for economic, social and racial justice. Since 1994 our award-winning weekly newspaper has provided an immediate employment opportunity for people who are homeless and low income. Learn more about Real Change.