Select Committee on Homelessness & Housing Affordability - Special Meeting 91318

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us.

This is the first Select Committee on Homelessness and Affordable Housing.

I'm Sally Bagshaw.

I'm one of the three co-chairs.

Council Member Mosqueda and Council Member Sawant are likewise the chairs.

Thank you so much for coming, all of you.

Council Member Gonzalez, I know you're feeling a little set aside all by yourself down there, but we're very glad to have you.

And thank you to the executive's office.

I know we'll be going through and having introductions in a moment, but I'm very grateful that all of you are here.

So I wanna talk a little bit about why we're doing this and how it all got started.

Could I please ask you not to wave the sign around?

Thank you, just, I'm glad you're here, Mr. Zimmerman, but let's just have a little decorum from the top.

So the purpose of this select committee, this is something that Council President Harrell decided, we are not gonna be spending our time reviewing the causes of homelessness.

Goodness knows we have been doing that for a lot of time, for many years, and we're going to start just at the point where we're saying, all right, what are we going to do now to really solve this in a city, county-wide, region-wide way?

For the last several years, many of you at this table and I have been working probably more hours than you would ever want to together to identify what is going on.

I do believe that homelessness and the crisis of not having enough affordable housing, these are the twin moral crises of our time.

We've been doing a lot over the last number of years, whether it started with Barb Poppe's report in Pathways Home or the focus strategies, the bridging the gap to Pathways Home, All Home, One Table, the Regional Affordable Housing Task Force.

What I'm looking at today is a beginning to say, all right, where are we and where are we going from this point forward?

Many of the discussions of homelessness have really largely been focused on our homeless intervention strategies.

Many of these strategies have been administered primarily by Jason Johnson's crowd in their human services department.

But also, those of you who are at the table, whether it's parks, whether it's Seattle Public Utilities, Seattle City Light, in some degree our department, of transportation, many of the departments have joined forces to help us with this homelessness response effort.

And the purview extends way beyond our human services department, as all of you who are sitting at this table and many of you in the audience knows.

But as I mentioned at the top, at President Harrell's request, we're pulling the team members together today to move towards a better coordinated action plan internally.

And we're starting today about what is actually going on, how much money are we spending.

But I am expecting that we're going to coordinate also with beyond the executive's team the next meetings going forward with what the county's doing, the work that All Home is doing, and all arranged, even things like what the public library is doing.

You know, we don't really think about the amount of work that many of our agencies do that nobody's really pointed to and said, you're going to be helping us solve homelessness, but this is happening.

So as we are examining the issues of this select committee over the next few meetings, we are going to determine what the investments are, if there are deficiencies, if there are policies that we as a council want to provide during the budget.

But as I started to say earlier, we know what is causing homelessness, and it came out again during one table.

The primary thing is the lack of affordable housing.

We are short an estimated somewhere between 100,000 units of low and moderate and extremely low housing units across Seattle and King County.

And King County itself has come up with a number of nearly 250,000 of additional affordable homes that need to be created in and across King County.

So, hand in glove, whether it's the lack of affordable housing, the lack of behavioral health and mental health resources, whether it's a lack of resources for youth and those that are aging out of our foster system, we've got a very complicated and often inequitable criminal justice system.

Many of you at the table are working with me, but also with the prosecuting attorney, with our city attorney to identify some of those.

And just the value of wages and the cost of housing here in our community, we know, continues to digress.

And hand in glove, as we're dealing with these homelessness issues, we need to recognize, and I think of them as parallel paths, what are we doing to help people stabilize, the prevention that we're doing right now, all the good work that our public health colleagues are doing.

Thank you, Patty Hayes, for joining us here.

today, we know that I believe it is a two-track.

We've got to focus on how do we increase our housing supply, what resources are we going to need across the city and the county to make that happen, and at the same time be working on the solutions around prevention that many of us have already identified.

We do know that progress is being made, and I want to acknowledge and thank all of you who've been working on this.

People have been housed annually in King County has doubled since 2013. It's a big number, I think, that we've seen from a few thousand to 7,000 annually.

But between 2014 and 2017, the number of households that are accessing the homelessness services has likewise increased by an average of 11% a year, whereas our funding has only increased about 2.4% per year.

So the gap continues.

And I have heard from thousands and literally thousands of constituents that we in the city aren't doing enough.

And just as recently as last night, I'm getting the fingers shaken at me that You know, we're doing a crummy job.

And I stood up to that and said, no, we need to do more.

We all know we need to do more.

The work that is being done by this group at the table and your team is impressive.

And part of what we're doing today is to give you that opportunity to tell us what you're doing and how much you're spending.

I also want to acknowledge that at the end of this meeting that we're going, or a series of meetings, that we'll be working closely with our regional affordable housing task force colleagues at King County.

Council President Harrell, thank you for coming.

I've already sung your praises twice.

I appreciate you leading us through this.

But, you know, recently the Seattle Times said something about how we've got to be much more creative.

And I switched what they said, that creativity isn't the only tool that's needed here to address this complex and seemingly intractable problem.

I think simply put that we've got to do more of what we've been doing, but the supply of housing, resources for mental health, for the location, additional locations for public health, for treatment on demand.

These are things that we're going to have to fund and not just fund by city taxpayers alone, but across the region.

To address these needs, this is where we're coming together to get renewed community support.

I was with Marilyn Strickland last night, and I want to thank her for participating in a panel with me.

She brought up the idea of, is it time for us to be looking at a tri-county effort?

That it's not just the city, it's not just the county, but it's really a tri-county effort.

And we go to the legislature hand in hand saying, just like we did with Sound Transit several decades ago, that we have a focus city, county, tri-county wide, and get the state support that we need.

We cannot go this alone.

So I think this is an opportunity where we can say no more of the same.

We want to hear about the creativity and the work that you're doing and lead us into an action plan that does have the buy-in from our full community.

With that, I think Council Member Swann had a few things to say and Council Member Muscata, if you would like to lead it and then we'll turn it over to our inestimable colleagues down here.

Thank you, Chair Bakhshal.

I asked to speak right away because, unfortunately, by the time this meeting was scheduled, I had another commitment, so I'm going to have to leave right after I speak.

But I just wanted to convey a message to those of you who are all here and also those who are watching and who will be keeping track of this committee.

So as Council Member Bakhshal said, she is going to be chairing this committee meeting.

She has set the agenda for this meeting, but it's going to be co-chaired by the three of us, and as I understand the structure for the committee that Council President Harrell has created, there will be a rotation, and so I will be chairing a subsequent meeting of the committee, and then I'll be sharing the agenda with members of the public and activists, and in fact, having a discussion with you all in terms of what we should be doing with the committee.

Today's presentation is good in that it puts all in one place a lot of information city departments have collected throughout the year.

In reality, all the information in this presentation has already been presented in my Human Services Equitable Development and Renters' Rights Committee earlier this year, at different points, not all in one, so it's good to have it all in one place.

So even though I won't be able to stay for the meeting today, I will be following any new information that's discussed.

I fully agree with Council Member Baxhaw that this is not a problem that can be solved just by the city.

This is a regional issue.

So whether it's city, county, tri-county, state, we have to be fighting at every level.

But one thing is true, regardless of which level we're fighting on, The question of where revenues will come from to build social housing, which is publicly owned, permanently affordable housing, the question of how that housing is going to be funded cannot be ducked.

And in a state with the most regressive tax system and stagnating or lowered real value of wages for most working people, working families who are homeowners already being taxed to the hill through property taxes, the question of taxing big business and wealthy and the wealthy cannot be ducked.

And so ultimately I think, I hope that the goal of this committee will be to discuss concrete options along those lines.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for your opening remarks and thank you as well to Councilmember Sawant.

I look forward to working with both of you on this select committee.

I'm really interested though in making sure that we don't spin our wheels, that we stop pointing fingers, that we stop asking the question over and over again about how individuals fall into homelessness.

You so articulately said, we know the reasons.

We don't have enough housing.

We don't have enough shelter.

We don't have enough investments in mental health and substance abuse and public health overall.

We know what the causes are.

So what I'm really excited about, and I think the opportunity that this committee presents, is an opportunity to evaluate what is working and what's not working right here in Seattle.

Identify what's working and what's not working across the county.

Identify what we can do in partnership with county and state partners as we look at trying to make sure that we have enough housing, case management, and service providers to make sure that those who are most vulnerable in the community who are already homeless and those who are at risk of falling into homelessness have the support that they need and have the housing that they need to prevent homelessness.

I also am interested in making sure that we no longer think of this as an isolated issue.

This is the most pressing issue that we are seeing across the West Coast and, frankly, in every large city across the country.

This is the crisis of the moment, and I think that this committee, in partnership with our county and state officials, will hopefully find the solution and find the solutions soon.

And I say solutions plural because I had the opportunity to talk to a few of our partners who are struggling with similar issues in Houston, in Denver, in Oakland, and in L.A.

and ask what they have done.

And what they've done is outlined a very progressive strategy that in many ways mirrors the same conversation that Councilmember Gonzalez and Councilmember Herbold outlined for us earlier this year.

And that is that we need housing, we need shelter, and we need investments in health services.

And when we collectively work with the county, I hope that we as the city can find the recommendations necessary to get the funding so that we can adequately resource our community.

We know from the reports that have been generated that we're about $200 million short here in terms of the necessary funding needed to create affordable housing, shelter, and health services.

What we saw in the city of LA and in the county of LA is on the very same day, After a robust community engagement process, collectively the county and the city passed resolutions that put forward 50 to 60 recommendations for each body to make sure that housing, shelter, and health services were invested in.

I know that we've been a leader in this effort in the past.

In fact, when I reached out to Houston, Oakland, Denver, Los Angeles, their experts in the community told me that they had come to Seattle two, three years ago to learn from us.

So we started at a place that was advanced.

I think we can come back and actually figure out how to house folks if we do it with urgency.

We've talked a lot this year about how people are living outside.

It's workers, people who have jobs.

It's families that are living outside.

It's individuals that need to be housed in order for them to get stable and hopefully the treatment that they need.

It's individuals who are our working families, who are our neighbors, and in many situations, it's many of our friends and families who are on the cusp of becoming homeless if we also don't figure out additional prevention strategies.

I'm heartened by what I learned from the other cities, which is that they have looked at us for examples in the past, so I know that there are some things that we are doing well.

But what I want to hear about is where we can step up, make the investments necessary now, so that we can prevent people from becoming homeless and house those who are homeless currently.

I'm excited to hear that we have opened up additional beds, so we're not as at capacity as we were in the past, but we're still over 90% capacity at our shelters.

So, the time is now to stop pointing fingers, stop creating silos, and look for opportunities to find those solutions across sectors.

across industries.

This is the most important thing I think we can do as public servants to serve the public.

It's good for our local economy.

It's good for the public's health when we make sure that everyone has a place to call home.

And I hope that this committee, with urgency, can help take the necessary next steps to create affordable housing, health services, and shelter so that we can have a place to call home for everyone in Seattle.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Council Member Mosqueda.

All right, down here, if there's questions, let me know.

But I'd like to turn this over, start with Alan Lee and Steve Walker.

If you'll do your introductions, and then I assume, Alan, you're going to do a moment's intro, and I think then we have a slide presentation.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair.

In the interest of time to get through the presentation, I'm going to defer my remarks, but I am Alan Lee with City Council Central Staff.

Steve Walker, Office of Housing.

Patty Hayes with Public Health.

David Mosley, Mayor's Office.

Julie Dingley with the City Budget Office.

I'm the lead for the homelessness response.

Leslie Brinson, Mayor's Office.

Christopher Williams, Seattle Parks.

Jason Johnson, Human Services Department.

Mami Hara, Seattle Public Utilities.

Great.

Thank you all for coming.

So is it, are we turning this over to Leslie?

To Deputy Mayor Mosley.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Council Members, and thank you for having us here today.

Mayor Durkin seeks to address the crisis of homelessness through more focused spending and accountability, enhanced regional coordination, better coordination of emergency service response, and sustained emphasis on increasing affordable housing in the city.

When Mayor Durkan took office last year, she found that she was unable to get a comprehensive answer to the question of how much the City was spending on homelessness.

We have often talked about the great work of the Human Services Department to respond to the crisis of homelessness, but there are more than 15 other departments engaged in this issue in some way or another.

Over half of the departments in the city are engaged in this in one way or another, whether through providing direct services to people experiencing homelessness or core city services that are impacted by the crisis of homelessness.

With a goal of greater accountability and transparency for spending across all City departments, Mayor Durkan directed the City Budget Office to dive into spending on the homelessness.

The City Budget Office has developed a reputable methodology to look at direct spending on homelessness response by category instead of by department.

taking a holistic approach to the issue instead of siloed, department-by-department approach.

We believe that will give us a better notion of what we are actually spending on this issue.

The work that Julie Dingley will walk you through in a moment will be the method that we are used to track and report direct homelessness spending moving forward, including the 2019 budget.

For ease of presentation, I have asked Julie and Leslie Brinson to lead the walkthrough of this presentation.

Jason, Steve, Mami, Christopher, and Patty are here to answer questions you might have and to talk about a few specific programs in their area.

We understand this discussion will prompt a number of questions, including how our homelessness investments are performing.

We are analyzing right now our first half of the year Q1 and Q2 results is currently underway, and we'll be coming back to you as a part of the budget configurations to present those results so that you'll know what the impact of these investments would be.

So with that introduction, I would like to turn this over to Leslie Brinson.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Councilmember Mosqueda, I'm appreciating the fact that you situated us within the national context.

Because last year for the first time in many, many years, we actually saw an increase in homelessness across the country.

And all of our cities nationwide, or our 50 largest cities nationwide, are also struggling in this.

I think it's important for us to recognize that Seattle is not alone in this crisis.

Over the past 10 years, you know, cities big and large, primarily those with...

That over there.

Sorry, I'm just trying to...

I apologize.

You can't see the PowerPoint.

Yeah, I want to see the PowerPoint.

I can turn my computer on, of course, but I like looking at you and looking at it.

So, is it possible to do that over there?

Thank you.

Sorry, Leslie.

No worries.

You are on a roll.

Here I go again.

So especially cities up and down the West Coast with strong economies and increasing housing prices are definitely seeing increases in their homelessness, in their homeless population.

City of Seattle, I'm going to start this one with a caveat that over the last decade, we have indeed seen a 55% increase in our point-in-time count results.

That said, the methodology by which we count has changed over time, so this should be used as an illustrative example and not as a very finite, concrete data point.

There is also an error on this slide.

It is 12,112 people.

I increased our population by 10 accidentally.

And of those 12,112 people, more than half of them are living unsheltered in King County.

And 71% of those folks, 4,500 people, are living unsheltered in the city of Seattle.

And so I think when we talk about our spending and we talk about the scale of our response, it is important to situate it into the number of people who are living outside, who are struggling with their housing costs, who are struggling by living on the streets.

So if I can just ask a quick question on that 71% that's 71% of the total so 71% of the 6,320 are living unsheltered in King County and 71% of those 6,320 are in the city of Seattle.

Correct.

Got it.

That's a question, Chair.

And I didn't say any introduction remarks, but maybe I'll take the opportunity now to say I want to thank all of you for In addition to your core responsibilities as department heads and contributors to the city, homelessness and affordability is not your only thing.

You've got full factories to run.

And so part of our job, I think, when we had sort of envisioned this committee was to sort of force your hand a little bit, force the executive's hand, not in a confrontational way, but to say, okay, we all have to, that's not the only issue we contend with as well as legislators.

So it might have been a little, there might have been some push points on trying to do this effort as we get through the budget.

do the work next year.

But it's very intentional to try to force us as city employees to really think about all the cross-sections of the work we're doing.

So I just wanted to share with you that.

I appreciated the spirit with which you embraced this.

I'm going to push on some of the data just so I could better understand.

And that's one of the challenges is sometimes I still don't understand what's happening to our country.

So when we look at the rising numbers of homelessness in all these cities.

And you demonstrated New York City, Sacramento, Washington, DC, and San Diego as examples.

I get the impression that Seattle's problem, however, is still, compared to other cities, exponentially worse.

I'm actually surprised San Francisco's not on there as well, because I get the impression that they have some pretty alarming numbers down there as well.

And what I'm trying to understand is we're a high growth city.

We know we have 60, 70 people here moving here almost every day.

We're a high-tech city as well, and we have these real cool companies that have decided to be here.

We all know the Amazon story, et cetera.

And I'm trying to better understand is some of our problems, just the organic growth that has occurred here, or in the alternative is just this happening to our country that we're seeing vast amounts of wealth and vast amounts of poverty.

What is the data sort of telling you?

I don't like to think of us as the same thing as New York, Sacramento, Washington, D.C., and San Diego.

No offense to those cities.

There might be people from those cities.

But Seattle is unique in a lot of ways.

And I'm trying to understand also what's our uniqueness and how does that relate to what we're dealing with versus the other cities.

Is the data telling us anything?

So a couple of thoughts there.

I think your first point of it seems like our issue is exponential.

On a per capita basis, indeed.

Our homeless population is very large compared to our population.

How are we unique?

I would say that we are uniquely situated in that we are a land-constrained city.

And so when we talk about supply and demand, when we talk about supply of housing, that is very much related to our housing crisis and to our affordability crisis.

Third point where we're not alone, we have housing costs rising across the country, not across the country, sorry, up and down the West Coast in New York.

And we know that homelessness and housing costs are directly related.

And so that is happening.

And while our housing costs are going up because our economy is booming and we have a lot of demand for the housing that we have, that's also part of the issue.

And then I think, At the fundamental core of all of this, why have we seen homelessness increase over time?

We have a significant income inequality issue.

This is not just, you can't just solve this problem with housing, you also have to raise the wages of our folks who are living in our city.

So I think those are the two pieces that go hand in hand, and that is a nationwide issue, even though our housing costs are a little bit different.

Thank you.

Thank you, Leslie.

So before Julie dives into the budget, I'd like to review this slide really quickly.

This is a slide that you all have seen before that the Human Services Department has presented.

We have augmented this slide in order to demonstrate the more holistic way in which we're going to talk about our investments today.

Option number three, which is on the bottom in red, living unsheltered, previously that wasn't on this slide.

That allows us to represent things like the navigation team, the operational activities related to encampment response, as well as just the reality that people become homeless and they have three paths.

They can live outside, they can enter our emergency services system, or they can be diverted out of the system altogether.

In addition, the conversation forthcoming will broaden the way in which we talk about housing programs.

We have added our affordable housing inventory to this as one of the ways in which we are funding homeless outcomes.

The Office of Housing has specific housing that's dedicated to people exiting homelessness besides just permanent supportive housing.

So this allows us to talk about that as well.

Julie.

Good afternoon.

My name is Julie again.

Nice to meet you all in person.

Nice to see you, Julie.

So as Deputy Mayor Mosley laid out in his opening remarks, we recognize the need for greater accountability and transparency on spending across all city departments.

And we also heard loud and clear from the mayor that she wanted a more comprehensive view on what it is that we spend money on in the city.

So this summer the city budget office led an effort to define the city's 2018 budget for direct spending on homelessness and what we lovingly referred to as homelessness adjacent activities for lack of a better comprehensive term.

So this built on previous estimates that we had derived largely on an ad hoc basis.

We were trying to be more intentional this time.

We had two functional goals driving this.

One was obviously establish a baseline so that we can go back and compare actuals to have that accountability going forward.

And the second was that it needed to be replicable.

And you heard this from Deputy Mayor Mosley as well.

So that did constrain some of what we were able to include and not include.

What's different in this number than what you've seen before?

As was mentioned previously, we have spending organized in categories.

So those categories being emergency, housing, prevention, access to services, and then operations.

And we will walk through each of those and the subsequent pieces that make up those categories a bit later in the presentation.

And then the biggest difference that you heard from Leslie was that we're including housing costs in here for the first time.

And we want to make sure that we call that out.

And I will be intentional about where things are different throughout to the best of my ability.

Does whoever misguided has a question?

Sure.

Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

I don't know if you're done with this slide.

My biggest question is, what do you mean by homelessness-adjacent programs or funding?

So this is things that are not in HSD or HSI, in the Homelessness Strategies and Investments Division, where we wanted to be able to capture.

So that's more of operations, that's more cleanup, and then also housing, because it's not the direct response to the crisis itself.

So these were just ways that we internally organized.

I don't introduce that term by way of It's probably a term of art inside the budget office that should probably have stayed there.

So I apologize if that's causing any confusion.

Did you get your question answered?

I believe so.

I think as we go forward, it would be helpful though to, I'm looking at your next slide so I can hold it for the next slide, but as we get the full picture of where the funding's going, if housing is considered a homelessness adjacent funding in addition to operations and cleanup, et cetera, I would like to see that housing element pulled out separately so that we can have a better sense of funding over time to have a better sense of baseline.

Sure.

I'll show you throughout.

What we count in the operations is the operations and maintenance, for example, for permanent supportive housing.

What we don't count is capital costs for OH.

But I have that distinction later on.

So one final note on this slide that budget cross cuts can be somewhat subjective in how we determine what's in and what's out sort of to the council members point.

And I just want to be take one moment to be really explicit about what's not in here before we dive into what is.

So this is not an attempt to do a full cost benefit analysis as that is not something that is replicable over time.

It would be an interesting intellectual exercise, and I would love to geek out on something like that in the future, but that is not, that's not what's here.

We don't have indirect costs for things such as police and fire response.

We would consider those essential city services that would exist with or without a homelessness crisis.

And we don't include regional or philanthropic spending, because again, this is meant to be just the city's view.

And finally, we did not attempt to catalog every program for which our neighbors are eligible participants throughout.

Madam Chair.

Sure.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you.

You used a couple of additional terms of ART, and I want to make sure that I understand what you're referring to.

Sure.

The first one was you made a distinction that this is not a full cost-benefit analysis or even a full true cost analysis.

Sure.

I don't think I know what that means.

Sure.

So in a full, I'll just take the latter piece.

In a full true cost analysis, we would consider secondary and even third order impacts to the city.

So we would look at emergency room visits and we would look at fire response and health outcomes down the road.

We can't, we are not attempting to capture those full costs to society in this presentation.

So that's a much broader look that would have to be done as a one-off special project, but not with me and one team member in the city budget office.

Okay, and then what's the difference between that and a cost-benefit analysis?

So in a traditional cost-benefit analysis, you would then also weigh the benefits to society of the varying interventions, and then you would weigh them and figure out how you net, whether you net at a net cost or a net benefit to the city.

Typical public sector programs have a negative cost, because otherwise they would be handled by the private sector.

It's a general rule of thumb.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I would just like to put a bookmark in this.

The notion of having a true cost analysis is something, and poor Leslie, I can see her grimacing there.

This is something that I have frankly been asking for for a really, really long time.

And I know that we can't do it alone, that it takes the region.

But looking at the cost to our first responders as an example.

when we have first responders that have to send out two ladder trucks and they're sending out two ladder trucks because some of our first responders have been um attacked by people on the street so that they don't feel safe so they bring six people rather than the two or three that would normally be the responders that has a cost and that has a cost to the fire department it has a cost to the police who have to come And it frankly has a cost to the neighbors that if the firefighters are somewhere else, first responders, that it takes more time for them to get back in and where they need to go.

So I know other cities are working on this too.

It's not like we are the only ones who haven't.

But the notion of the number of times we send somebody up to Harborview, as an example.

If we send somebody up in an ambulance and they stay in Harborview overnight, as my understanding round number is, that's a $2,000 night.

We can do and learn from others on what options might be available.

An example that I have brought up with Chief Scoggins is Colorado Springs is an example.

They have done a different kind of medical response unit in a van with two or three people that are trained for mental illness or prevention or response of whether it's naloxone or whether it's a, you know, moving the next step, which is a mobile medical van where people can get treatment on demand.

Those are the kinds of big picture costs that ultimately I would love for you to geek out on.

And help me understand, because I do think that this is a place where, as we're spending money, that creativity that everybody's demanding, we've got to start with, okay, how much is it really costing us?

What are the true costs of sending somebody up in an ambulance?

And especially when Chief Scoggins will tell you that the two blocks down there, they respond to more than all of the other blocks.

our district put together.

So there's opportunities here for us to be thinking in a much different strategic way.

Not today, but I just want to put that out there that it's something I care deeply about.

I just wanted to echo your sentiments, Chair Bagshaw, on this particular point.

It strikes me that as we continue to address this issue and to grapple with the realities of the exponential nature of the problem, I continue to think that it is difficult to talk about the amount of money we're spending on the issue without a clear picture of what the cost actually is.

And we are, of course, dealing with the issue of human suffering in a very public way.

And the reality is, is that we are engaging in a conversation that is really designed about fixing a social issue.

And that requires a very broad systemic reform approach and change.

And I don't know how we can ever begin to do that systemic reform work without actually understanding what the various components of the system are and what the cost is. in both hard dollars, but also in the societal cost of not addressing those issues or continuing to maintain a status quo approach to those particular issues related to mental health, behavioral health, drug addiction, and the fundamental lack of affordable housing in our city, paired up with, of course, the increasing wealth gap that is plaguing the city of Seattle, just like it is other major cities.

Thank you.

Well said.

All right.

Back to you, Leslie.

Julie.

All right.

So this is the 2018 I'm sorry, the 2018 homelessness direct services budget that we want to put in front of you.

This has 86.7 million as the total.

This is slightly higher than an amount you saw earlier this year, largely due to those housing costs that I mentioned earlier that are now included, that were not previously included.

So as I mentioned, this is an attempt to define the city's direct spending on homelessness through these five primary categories that you can see on the slide.

This is, again, compared to about 84 million that you saw in June.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn't call out to all of your points, I think in your opening remarks, that this does not include the capital cost from OH of their capital investments, which is noted in a footnote there at the bottom of 25.8 million.

And that's the commitments from OH in 2018, estimated commitments.

So we're going to walk through each of those categories.

So first up is emergency services at 41.2 million.

We've further subdivided this in the following slides between shelter, villages, outreach, the navigation team, transitional housing, and outreach and permitting.

And so, again, we'll walk through all of those.

And you can give me a hand signal if you want me to move forward if things are not, if you've already heard them.

Can I go back?

Yeah, sure.

Council Member Muscata wants you to go the other way, so how about my hand signal being the reverse button?

Perfect.

I do want to go back to the pie chart very briefly.

I understand that the $25.8 million in Office of Housing Capital Investments is not captured in this 28% reflected, but I think it's important to note that that is separated out intentionally because you have included transitional housing in the emergency section.

So I want to make sure that people understand why you've done that, right?

It is not an I think it would be inaccurate to lump in that funding because the housing that the Office of Housing is building is not directly allocated just for those who are exiting homelessness.

And so what we know is that we need more housing overall.

But the reason, and tell me if I'm wrong, what I'm understanding is the reason that you've included transitional housing in the emergency services section specifically is because that is where we see individuals exiting homelessness.

And you've included $24.2 million in permanent supportive housing.

rapid rehousing and diversion because those are the specific programs that help people either avoid falling into homelessness or help them exit homelessness.

So these are the direct investments that help us make sure that folks are getting out of homelessness and preventing them from falling into homelessness.

And it would be inaccurate to include the 25.8 because I think that that's actually for additional housing opportunities.

I just don't want anybody to inaccurately add those two numbers together.

Sure.

So, Steve, did you have something you wanted to add?

You were grabbing.

Hi, Steve.

I was looking right here.

Didn't see you down there.

You were grabbing the microphone.

Yeah, I think on that point, and I'll mention it again, I think, later, that even that $25.8 million doesn't capture all of our investments in affordable housing, which, as I think we would all agree, that providing an affordable home in and of itself is a prevention tool.

So the city invests more than even that 25.8 in capital investments in producing affordable housing in our city.

So is that number from the levy or where do we get that 25.8 number?

If we might pause on this, we have a number of slides that walk through exactly these questions that you all are asking in the housing section.

So if we can return to them.

Good.

We will address them as we go.

Is that okay?

It's okay by me and okay by you.

Thank you.

So if we dive into emergency services, the first step is emergency shelter at 20.6 million.

In recognition, and everyone has spoken to this today, but that the continued crisis of people living outside, and as many of you, as you all already know, in fact, that by the end of this year, we will have increased our shelter capacity by 25% over 2017 with the proceeds from the communication shop sale earlier this year.

This includes sustaining basic shelter beds at $2.8 million as we work to increase the performance of our broader system.

We've also significantly increased our investment in enhanced shelter beds through the Pathways Home RFP and the Path to 500, investing $17.2 million.

With housing at the center of this effort, our enhanced shelter investments are already showing that they are more effective.

There is an additional 600,000 noted here that we anticipate needing for expanded services and encampments in 2018 or 2019, just so that you know that this all adds up.

Great.

So if I can just ask you a question about that.

With basic shelter beds, we have 668 in your first bulleted and bold line there.

So that, quick math, it's a little over 4,000, close to 4,200.

per bed, and then the enhanced shelter beds, 1,289, dividing that into our 17.2 million, a little over 13,000.

And I agree and am probably the strongest advocate for having 24-7 shelter.

enhanced shelter and getting places where people can get stabilized and have a locker and care for themselves.

Can you talk a little bit about why we think that this $13,000 per bed is a good investment?

Do you mind if I kick that question over to Jason?

No, he's looking forward to answering the question.

Great.

There we go.

Am I on?

Yes, you are.

Thanks.

Thanks for the question.

Appreciate it.

We are seeing a, so there's, let me back up.

There's sort of two different functions between the basic shelter and the enhanced shelter.

Basic shelter, as noted on this slide, is really a survival resource.

It is an opportunity to get someone out of the rain, out of the cold overnight, and allow them indoors, typically to sleep just overnight.

So it is a function that serves an important role and is definitely a life-saving function.

That said, what we look at when we dive into performance data is that without services and when you bring someone in, late at night and then ask them to leave first thing in the morning without making any kind of connection, then really all you're offering them is sometimes a meal and a place to sleep.

You're not helping to put them on the path to permanent housing.

We're seeing that the enhanced shelter, the services that are offered, the time that people are allowed to be in those programs, the engagement that they have with qualified case management staff, housing navigators, the access to a variety of other services that they may also be able to access while they're in that site for a 24-hour period of time, all help stabilize and move an individual into permanent housing, permanently ending their experience of homelessness.

And that is an investment that pays for itself over and over and over again.

If we can get someone into permanent housing and eliminate their experience of homelessness, their experience of living unsheltered, it saves the city money time and time again.

You were talking about emergency services, you know, there's all sorts of costs that can be identified to support people who are living unsheltered, who have nowhere to go during the day.

And so I think with that sort of more detailed cost analysis and with some you know, data that shows impact, I think we would see that that $13,000 is quite a good deal if it results in moving people toward permanent housing, which our data is showing.

Great.

Thank you.

I just want to underscore not only the data and the numbers are showing that this is better, but just from a moral standpoint, like we've discussed, getting people out of the cold and into a place where they can get stabilized.

We know, and I think when Patty talks, that we know from a public health standpoint that the first thing that we need to do in order to get people moving on and dealing with whatever issues that they have, whether it's mental health or behavioral health, They've got to have a stable place to live.

And if we are putting them right back out on the sidewalk at 630 or 7 a.m.

in the morning, nothing good happens from that.

Yeah, please.

Go ahead, Council Member Esqueda, and then Council Member Gonzales.

I was in the queue, sorry.

You next.

Just want to reiterate something that I think got lost in the conversation earlier this year, and that is specific to the last bullet point that Council Member Chair Baxhaw just mentioned.

Can you please again reiterate for the viewing public, for the press, the data that's behind this?

My understanding is that when we place people into enhanced shelters, you are four or five times more likely to see somebody exit homelessness than they would be in overnight shelters.

And I just saw a signal from the audience.

They are five times more likely to remain in housing if they are exiting from enhanced shelter.

And that is something that the city has invested in last year and we're seeing results already in quarter one reports back.

So, again, please emphasize for us the data that supports that last bullet there because I do think it's an element that got lost in the conversation earlier this year.

That is correct.

So enhanced shelter, what we're seeing is that they are able to help clients connect to housing at a rate that's six times higher than that of basic shelter.

So it is, again, this ability to, when you have people in the program for a 24-hour period of time, often have a right to return.

They don't have to worry about where they're going to sleep that night.

they have some of their basic needs met, and they have case managers who can help them on a path toward permanent housing, then these programs, these enhanced shelter programs, are much more successful.

Can I just be clear on what I just handed, Jason, were the Q1 metrics.

So Q1 of 18 compared to Q1 of 2017, we saw a six times rate.

And also important to acknowledge that that 13,000 per bed roughly is per bed and not per person.

So the faster we are moving people through those beds, the more people we are serving with that $13,000 per year.

Good clarification, Council Member Gonzalez.

Thank you.

First of all, I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the hard work of our Human Services Department.

I know there's some employees, some staff from HSD in the audience, and I'm sure that there are more listening.

at least I hope there are.

And I just really want to express my gratitude to HSD and, of course, the rest of you, but in particular, HSD, for the hard work that I know that you all do every day on a topic that is incredibly controversial, that is, I think, fairly considered and characterized as a hot-button issue within our community.

And I know that it is hard work and that you oftentimes, like us, receive a lot of the rhetoric and which sometimes is not very helpful.

And I just really want to take a moment to appreciate your staff for all the work that they do every day to help us solve for this issue in a positive, collaborative way.

Secondly, I wanted to make sure that we don't lose a little bit of a nuance when we're talking about emergency shelters as part of the investments in the emergency services area.

And I think that it's fair to say that I am incredibly supportive of the enhanced shelter bed model.

I think we are seeing great results with it.

But I think that anybody listening to this conversation or some folks listening to this conversation might then ask the question, well, if enhanced shelter beds are six times more likely to lead to an exit to permanent housing, Why would we continue as a city to invest in basic shelter beds?

So I want to provide you an opportunity to tell us why the city, as part of its strategy in the emergency shelter area, continues to invest in basic shelter beds when we don't see the same level of success in terms of exits into permanent housing that ultimately end a individual's experience with homelessness.

Thank you.

For your first comment especially, we do have, you know, 360 hardworking individuals in the Human Services Department that I have the honor of calling my colleagues.

And they are extremely bright, creative, innovative, hardworking individuals that I get the pleasure to work with every day.

And to your second point, I think we know that overnight shelter saves lives.

There are hundreds of people on our streets who don't have anywhere to go overnight.

This very building that we're in offers overnight shelter.

to nearly 100 people every evening.

Basic shelter is an essential need, especially given the thousands of people that are living unsheltered in our county.

Ideally, we would have a, you know, robust shelter service system that was all 24-7, that could move people through quickly, that could get people into permanent housing at a different rate than what we have now.

But right now, we still have thousands of people outdoors and basic shelter offers them a place to come inside, a place to have a night's sleep.

40% of individuals living unsheltered are employed, are working.

And so it's critical that people have a place to go, an emergency overnight place to lay their head.

So again, I would argue that basic shelters save lives and it's still a critical element of our emergency service system.

Thank you.

Well stated.

Thank you.

And thank you for the question.

And thank you for acknowledging our HSD colleagues in the back.

Tiffany, Dusty, Meg.

Thanks.

OK, please proceed.

Okay, next up in the emergency category is day and hygiene services at 5.2 million.

This, the lion's share, is with HSD for the day and hygiene centers, and then about 100,000 with parks hygiene services, which includes certain community centers and community pools that offer showers and restrooms for folks.

And I think to tie it back to the enhanced shelter conversation is we have enhanced more of our shelters.

We've also increased the access of our neighbors experiencing homelessness to hygiene centers.

So the majority of our shelters have access to showers.

all of our tiny house villages either have or it's in the planning process to have shower trailers available to them.

So we are investing more in services for our shelter system and our encampment system so that hygiene services are being accessed there.

And can I just say to thank you to Christopher and the parks for opening up the community centers and a number of the centers where there are swimming pools that that has made such a big difference because those locations are spread across the city So and I would add that we've served roughly about 4,000 people since January through I believe it was August 31st in those And those are our individuals individual people or those are 4,000 people

Well, kind of repeat visits, but it's working the way I think we planned or intended.

Do we happen to have the comparative numbers on how many people are using our parks facilities at zero or no additional cost and how much we're paying for three urban rest stops as an example?

We don't have that on hand, but we can follow up with that information.

Good.

Thank you.

Okay.

And I would also, since you brought up Parks and Christopher, I also express my thanks because I was the one that made that call a year or so ago, and it was like, we need to stand up showers, and it was done within, it was one of the easiest things that I have had happen, so I'm so glad that it's working.

That's what it's like working with Christopher, the guy that can help get to yes.

Okay, I know I keep interrupting you.

It's okay.

In addition to the, the direct hygiene investments that are made in the budget that Julia is walking through.

I also wanted to highlight that the city, as part of its core basic services, funds 117 restrooms around the city.

And there was also a question that Alan flagged that council members were interested in the interactive map that is available online.

It's on the Human Services website and it's up in front of you right now.

Great.

And special thanks to Meg and Lily.

I think that I must have bugged them about this for many, many months.

Thank you for making this available.

Okay, next up in the emergency category is tiny house villages.

You are all very familiar with these.

These are going to all come online by the end of the year.

Any specific questions on the villages?

No, but I would like to acknowledge and say thank you again for moving in this direction.

People have said to me, you know, well, this isn't solving the problem of homelessness.

I'm like, no, of course, it's not addressing the direct need to get people into permanent housing.

But it's so much better than leaving people under a bridge or in a cardboard box.

And I've heard from many, many people who have moved into these tiny homes that they have a place where they can have their partners, their pets, their possessions locked up.

They're insulated, they've got built-in community.

And I want to just contrast this, that we've got nine of our tiny home villages Compared to when I first got on the council and raised this issue, it was like, no, we're not going to do that.

No, it's a bad idea.

No, this is terrible.

And the fact that we've moved this far, I'm really grateful for.

Yeah.

I have a specific question.

As you know, Licton Springs is the largest of the tiny home villages, probably 54 units.

So the last I checked, we worked with the neighborhood, but we have a million complaints all the time that we work with SPD.

We work with Department of Neighborhoods, OPCD, in fact, just about everybody at the table.

So I'm just going to be blunt.

Our main concern is we know it's low barrier.

My understanding is that there's not a shower there yet.

Is there, there's not a shower, is that correct?

That's right.

Okay.

And also when they had to have the wash basins and all that, that the city did not pay for that, that they had to get money from the private sector to pay for the sinks?

That's probably true.

We can follow up.

I can follow up.

I don't know the exact detail of who paid for the sinks.

Well, I think the answer is that the city did not pay for it.

That's my understanding from Sharon Lee and from going out there two or three times.

And so, yeah, I understand tiny villages and what we're doing, and I appreciate what you're doing here today.

But to be quite frank, I'm really concerned where we're going with tiny house villages.

I'm very concerned that, okay, it's great that we have nine.

They're all at different levels, 54 units.

And I know that you gave us some good statistics before, how many people came in and how many people you got out.

I would like a more, and you don't have to do that today, but if you can get back to us, where we're at in occupancy and how many, what the throughput is.

How many people come out, come in, how many people have gone out?

I hear success stories, and then I hear the complete opposite.

In fact, sometimes I wonder if I talk to one person in the business of trying to make Licton Springs work, and then the neighborhood, that they're talking about two different areas.

And I have driven up there and I have been there at least a half a dozen times.

So I think it all looks great on paper, but I would like to see some more specifics because I think that our constituents and the city of Seattle and the neighborhoods deserve to know and should be online, quite frankly, what kind of services are there.

In D5 and the North End, what I find troubling is we do not have around the year in-house care for men.

We have it for women.

We have it for children.

We do not have it for men.

It's seasonal, I believe.

Basically, we have a lot of veterans and older folks.

And as you know, we have some incidents going on in Thornton Creek and in front of grocery outlet.

And I'm not just trying to, I mean, these are serious issues that have been going on.

where we, and I want to first of all thank the mayor's office, you came out there, Department of Neighborhoods, SPU, City Light, everyone's parks, thank you Christopher, but it's not going away.

And so I again want to just do my basic, we online, us as electeds to our constituents want to be able to say across the city, not just if you're a district representative, any one of these tiny house villages, what amenities are there and what is needed?

How many people are in, how many people are going out?

And still look at particular districts that are lacking some of the services that we're seeing in the south and we just don't have them in the north end and our unsheltered population has exploded.

And so I'll be very frank again.

I'm not real pleased with the response that I'm getting in real time, particularly with the outbreak, the recent outbreak, Patty, you know.

of HIV and some other issues that are going on, particularly in the north and particularly on Aurora.

So you can understand why we are fielding up to 200 calls a day, D5 alone.

I'm sure the other offices are hearing these issues as well.

So I would like to leave you with that.

Thank you.

And Council Member, as we come back with the performance metrics as part of the budget process, we will definitely address your questions around how these are performing.

Yeah, because, you know, I know there's nine here.

I don't know, I know for sure that lictin is low barrier, but I don't know about the other eight.

I mean, those are the kind of things I need to know.

I mean, what services you provide?

Are there showers there?

Are there wash basins?

We've been, we raised money privately to buy wash machines and dryers and help Aurora Commons.

I mean, At some point it would just be nice to know what each of these tiny house villages what amenities are being provided and That's just where I'm at on that.

So, thank you.

Thank you.

Go ahead Julie Thank you, it's always so hard to see down this way

So I just, you know, I have had an opportunity to spend some time in District 5. I spent several hours up there with folks in community and had an opportunity to see this particular tiny village and, well, As a concept, I'm supportive of tiny villages as a short-term solution to addressing the realities of people experiencing homelessness.

I do think that there are particular villages that we need to be realistic about in terms of our budgeting, because we're talking about money here, in addressing attendant public safety concerns and livability concerns as a result of the City of Seattle making a policy decision to place this model of a shelter in a particular community.

And, you know, when we were looking at siting the navigation center, and that was done in little Saigon in a manner that I did not agree with in terms of the process and approach in terms of community outreach for that community.

And I think we have to be in that, that was another example of where we didn't appropriately budget in a realistic fashion about some of the reasonable livability and quality of life and public safety concerns that were being raised by housed neighbors in that particular part.

of town.

And I feel like it's happening again in this particular instance.

And from what I recall seeing in terms of the performance metrics as it relates to the tiny villages, I do believe that for whatever reason in Seattle, it is a successful model for us to transition people into permanent housing, certainly off the street into something better and into permanent housing.

So I think that we have to be realistic about some of the impacts that neighbors have reasonable concerns about if we want to continue to support this type of a model.

Otherwise, we will lose the support of the general public.

in the future if we don't get it right.

And so I just want to echo Council Member Juarez's comments as it relates to this.

When I was up there and you know my best friend owns a townhome on Nesbitt which is right on the other side of the tiny village.

It is always chronically been a public safety concern area.

And I think that we missed the mark on being realistic about how the folks living in the tiny village would be impacted by public safety and how public safety would be impacted in return.

And the one time that I went out there during the day, I saw a lot of activity that was not productive.

occurring behind and outside of the tiny village.

So I hope that we have an opportunity as we continue this conversation to really dig into the numbers around this $4.3 million to really be able to identify how much of that money needs to be going to services and to infrastructure versus addressing public safety concerns, both for the residents of the tiny villages, but also for the attendant behavior occurring outside of the tiny villages that may have nothing to do with those individuals living in the tiny villages.

It's a good point whether we need additional security, more involvement from the police.

And I'm not suggesting that that needs to be done, that that heavy hand needs to occur for every single tiny village because that's incredibly expensive and we have limited resources.

But I think we need to be realistic about our citing decisions.

and some of these reasonable livability, quality of life, public safety concerns, both, again, for those living in the tiny villages and for the house neighbors around the tiny villages.

And I think we have to get it right or we will lose an opportunity to continue to utilize a model that is performing.

Please continue.

Thank you.

All right.

With outreach and engagement, we have two categories, or subcategories, rather, in here.

We have outreach and housing case management at $4.6 million, and then also navigation team staffing and logistics at $2.5 million.

We just want to take a moment to recognize that, as Leslie noted earlier, our crisis of unsheltered homelessness has increased significantly over time, and we've commensurately increased our amount of outreach here.

Another note on here is that for the navigation team specifically, this is obviously not the full cost of the navigation team.

We have split the costs into the appropriate categories of spending.

So you'll see below the bolded line, There is a portion of cost captured in the outreach category and also in the operations category with cleanup.

Any questions here?

I'm sure we'll get into more of the navigation teams, but in my opinion, They're one of the greatest additions to this effort, and there's a coordinated bringing together people who are both experienced in working with people who are on the streets now, those who know what the options are.

But again, what I hear from people all over is that we need more places to be able to direct them, places where they can be secure 24-7.

So I'm sure we'll get into more of that, but thank you for bringing it up.

Transitional housing is $3.5 million.

This number includes both HSD and OH's operations and maintenance for transitional housing.

So this is one area where we have a new piece of budget reflected that we didn't previously have, and that's the OH portion of that.

And this is where I'll sort of lean in and clarify a little bit, Council Member Mosqueda, on what we were talking about earlier.

So there are two different categories of housing spend that we're tracking.

One is OH money that goes towards operations and maintenance, plus HSD's money that goes towards operations, maintenance, and services in transitional housing, and later in permanent supportive housing.

And then there's the capital investments that we're making in those.

So when we reported previously, we have only talked about the HSD investments in the services and operations of transitional housing.

OH spends some of its money on exactly the same thing, but because we were only looking department by department, we didn't combine that together.

So previously we said we spent roughly $3 million on the operations and services of transitional housing.

Now we are saying we are spending $3.5 million because that includes the efforts of both departments.

So that's, and that's all included in the $86.7 million total.

Separate from that is the capital investment, which we're gonna talk about a little bit more.

So I'm gonna continue to punt that down the road a little bit.

And that is not added into that 86 million because it's capital and isn't in the same sort of ongoing bucket as far as money goes.

So I hear oftentimes that transitional housing has detractors and has supporters.

And I think that those who say they don't like transitional housing, and I'm putting that in quotes, is that it's the time limit that is disturbing, yet we do all kinds of housing that we would call temporary and moving people out into other things.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Why is, and rather than getting into a debate about transitional housing, is there a way that we can restructure that?

Or maybe you can just explain.

Sure.

So transitional housing is housing that can be used for a household for a period up to two years.

That is a HUD definition.

It's a 24-month period.

that an individual or a family can use that housing resource.

Typically, I would say transitional housing is really successful, especially for specialized populations.

Think about young people.

Young people are transitioning.

I know sometimes there were years in my life that I moved every semester.

And so transitional housing can really offer both a temporary but stable place that they can call home.

Transitional housing has services connected to it, so there can be specialized services offered and tailored to that individual or household.

I would say that transitional housing is also can be a really useful model for some families.

So we use transitional housing for families that are fleeing domestic violence.

We use transitional housing for families who have special needs and need those services for a short period of time.

But the model was stood up recognizing that someone should be able to in a relatively short period of time move through transitional housing into some level of self-sufficiency, or that they may, you know, in that two-year period of time, their public housing unit may come up, their Section 8 voucher may come up, which will allow them to move into something more permanent.

So we see transitional housing as something that's successful, that can be really useful for certain populations, but it is, again, by sort of HUD definition, it is intended to be temporary.

Good.

Well, maybe another time we can talk about what the downsides of that is, because it's amazing to me how much energy and heat is created when we talk about investing money in transitional housing.

So we'll continue.

But continue on with your slides, because we're all the way up to about halfway through your slide pack.

We are in the last category of the emergency category, so this is exciting.

Lastly, within this emergency category is community outreach and permitting.

This is Department of Neighborhoods efforts to develop and implement outreach plans in communities where managed villages and new shelter programs are being cited, and then SDCI helping with citing and permitting and code compliance issues.

Okay.

Doesn't sound like that was a problem.

Next one is housing.

All right.

So as Leslie mentioned previously, the 24.2 million is captured in the pie chart that you saw at the beginning of the presentation.

What's not captured is that 25.8 capital investment.

So we're, we've, you've seen most of these, these first, these next couple rather.

And so I'm going to try to move through these a little bit more quickly and then spend a little bit more time on the capital piece.

So as you know, diversion is considered a best practice for quickly addressing the needs of people experiencing homelessness, and the city is investing $2 million in these programs.

Again, rapid rehousing, similarly, is considered a best practice for quickly moving people into housing, and the city has increased its investment in these programs over the years, and this year is $7.2 million.

We also have $400,000 for the Housing Resource Center in OH.

Okay, so we, there's stunned silence here.

So we have diversion.

That is after people who are out, they've lost their homes, they're out, and this helps them, we're diverting them from the emergency shelter system, correct?

That's how the definition comes about and finding something else for them.

Rapid rehousing is, again, people are out already and this gets them out of emergency system into, Something more permanent.

Can you describe then how how that works?

Is it by definition the diversion?

It's keeping them out of the emergency system rapid rehousing there.

They're in the emergency system.

Yeah, so we used that visual earlier that showed sort of how folks move through the system.

Diversion is, in an ideal system, every individual who was falling into homelessness would be able to be diverted from using our emergency homeless service system.

Diversion can come up in a lot of ways.

So, diversion can be some cash assistance to help pay for first last month's rent.

It can be a train ticket back to a home community where they have natural supports.

It can be a payment for a license so that they can get a job.

It can be a variety of things.

But even more importantly than The cash that we typically talk about, it is an individual who can sit down and brainstorm with a household and explore all of the options that that individual or family may have.

that could keep them out of this emergency system.

So can you stay with your Aunt Sally?

If I paid a light bill and bought some groceries, would she let you stay there for an indefinite amount of time?

So it's just exploring all of the options that people have maybe in their natural supports to keep them out of the shelter.

For rapid rehousing, most of the time those individuals are already experiencing homelessness.

They are already in a program in our emergency system.

And rapid rehousing can quickly get them into market rate, private market housing, provide them with a cash, a subsidy, a voucher for a short period of time.

Likewise, offers them a variety of services that can help them gain the stability they need once they're in housing.

But as a model, it's intended to get them rapidly into permanent housing, housing that is theirs, that they have their name on the lease, helps them pay rent for some period of time, typically about a year or less, and also offers them with some support services during that period of time.

So that's $7.2 million that we spent in 2017, or is that just up through June of this year?

June of this year, so the first six months.

Do you have a recommendation going forward?

Would you increase this?

Would you?

Has one proven to be more effective than the other?

You know, I wouldn't compare them.

I think they are different strategies.

So again, diversion is supposed to be the first conversation that a case manager is having with an individual who is going to be experiencing homelessness.

and it is a one-time sort of quick conversation and maybe some cash assistance that can get that person housed, but there's not sort of an ongoing level of support connected to it.

With rapid rehousing, it's an acknowledgment that someone's going to need a period of time, sort of an ongoing voucher, and some services to support the individual being successful in housing.

So I wouldn't compare the two.

I will say that they're both, you know, based on first quarter of 2018 results, they both are, they're both working.

For rapid rehousing, for example, I believe that it is having a 80% success rate and really only 5% of individuals who have used a rapid rehousing voucher are falling back into the homeless system.

So I would say, you know, both are successful.

Both can be helpful but in different scenarios for different individuals based on their need.

So I wouldn't compare the two.

Right.

Thank you very much for that.

And if I could clarify, you had one other question which was 7.2 is not year to date.

That's the 2018 budget amount.

Okay.

So at the top of each slide, those numbers are the budgeted amount for all of 18.

Got it.

Thank you.

And so the 835 households served between January and June, that's the number that you have counted.

But we may not have already spent the 7.2 million.

Hopefully not.

We have not.

I'm going to go with that.

Please.

I shouldn't answer that question.

Really quickly, if I may.

Yeah.

On both diversion and rapid rehousing, that is a space where I think we currently take a regional approach on those two programs.

Is that accurate?

So we work with King County, All Homes Through, to do our diversion and our rapid rehousing work?

That is correct.

Okay.

And there was the report that came out earlier this year from the King County Auditor's Office that had some, expressed some concerns about the rapid rehousing program in particular.

Can you talk a little bit about whether, sort of what HSD's perspective is on the concerns that were expressed by the King County Auditor's Office in terms of the issues related to rapid rehousing?

Yeah, I think I'll have to follow up with you.

Yeah, I'll have to follow up.

We're seeing rapid rehousing as, the data that we're seeing based on first quarter is showing that rapid rehousing is successful, it's flexible, it's especially good for families to get them quickly into housing.

So we've seen our rapid rehousing investments showing good results, but I can get back to your office with,

I was trying to lead you down this path, so I'll just be more direct, because what I really want to know is if the rapid rehousing issues that were highlighted in that King County Auditor's report are applicable to the rapid rehousing specific to the City of Seattle's investment.

And it sounds like it may not be.

And I think one of the biggest criticisms that the King County Otters ever concerns was that rapid rehousing in theory and in principle is a great program if you have housing to put people in.

And so I guess I'm just trying to figure out sort of how to thread that needle.

So maybe we can just connect offline and get that information from you.

Yeah, that'd be great.

I think, you know, I assume that some of the audit findings are the length of time people are taking to find housing, the length of time that they have to be on the subsidy.

associated with the housing shortage.

Okay.

And then on, you know, I think it's important to highlight the areas in which the city is already partnering with our regional partners on some of these issues.

And so in the future, on future presentations, I'd appreciate it if that was called out a little bit more.

Clearly, we hear a lot about this, you can't go it alone, we need a regional approach.

And the reality is, is we have been engaging in regional approaches and we haven't been going at this alone.

And so I think when we have these presentations to establish baseline information about what the city is doing in those instances in which we are already engaging with regional partners, I would appreciate it.

And I think the public has a right to know who those regional partners are and how long we've been partnering with them on these efforts.

And the diversion area is one of the specific areas that I think we have done a really good job with our regional partners on.

King County has Best Start for Kids that has really showed a lot of promise in terms of I think their early numbers showed that there was about 4,000 families that were diverted from experiencing homelessness.

Again, we are part of those diversion efforts and I want to make sure that the public understands how we are leveraging our dollars with King County dollars to produce positive results.

And I want to be able to do that as often as we can.

Good.

I think that's a good point.

Thank you.

All right.

Shall we move to permanent supportive housing?

Slide 23.

Great.

So as you know, permanent supportive housing pairs affordable housing with comprehensive supportive services.

And this is $14.7 million.

and includes both HSD and OH operations and maintenance costs for Permanent Supportive Housing.

The 2018, as you all know, the 2018 budget increased HSD's investment in PSH by 2.5 million per council add.

And this is one of those places where we've also for the first time included the OH numbers as well.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate the distinction that you were trying to describe earlier.

I think in addition to the request that Councilmember Gonzalez just made in future presentations, I would also love to see if it's possible to do an apples to apples comparison with some of the other cities that we mentioned.

You had four at the beginning of the presentation.

I think there's a few more I would like to suggest, including Los Angeles City.

While we know that clearly a city like Los Angeles has a much larger population, around 50,000 individuals who are homeless per capita, as you mentioned, we do have more homeless folks.

So what I'd like to see is if we could do an analysis of how we as the City of Seattle are compared to other cities that have comparable size homeless population per capita and how our investments are paralleling.

What I think it would be very interesting is to see the permanent supportive housing element compared to a city like Los Angeles who has just passed some major funding initiatives both at the county and the city with measures H and HHH, they do have significantly more revenue to invest in permanent supportive housing, shelters, and the capital investments needed for affordable housing.

In addition to public health, which often gets thought of last, and I just want to acknowledge Director Hayes' good work, we think of public health last because public health is often very effective.

And so when we don't see outbreaks and we don't see disease, and we don't see crisis in our water, we often don't think about the investments necessary.

But I would love to see how we as the City of Seattle compare to some of these other cities, specifically corresponding to that pie chart that you created at the beginning, most interested in housing and the capital costs that has been left out of these slides.

I understand why, but to see that comparison in the future would be very helpful.

Thank you.

Are you grabbing a microphone down there?

Yeah, I can't resist.

Just on that point, just one contextual response is that because the city of Seattle was such an early adopter in recognizing the importance of providing permanent supportive housing, housing with all of those wraparound services, I think we have one of the largest portfolios of our counterparts across the country.

But we absolutely will get you those numbers, but that's something that we're very proud of and fortunate to have, obviously something we need to continue to grow.

Just a question on these different buckets of housing, whether it's permanent, supportive, or rapid rehousing.

We're describing the money that the city of Seattle is investing in these different buckets.

I'm not asking Patty for the specific answers, but on the county side of things, I don't know if they divvy up their housing in the same kinds of descriptions as we are, whether it's rapid rehousing or diversion, but I think at the end of the day, it's sort of...

Maybe the same thing is called something differently, but is it possible as we go through the data to also describe what the county's investing in this so we can see our investments relative to the county's investments?

Very soon.

That will be a thing.

So I will highlight this later on, but one of the efforts that's currently underway is the city and the county are working in partnership with the suburban cities to talk about this regional governance conversation, the MOU that was signed between Executive Constantine and Mayor Durkan.

Part of that is doing a full funding landscape.

So for the first time soon, around the end of the year or so, we will have city, county, local jurisdictions, philanthropic and corporate sponsorship, all of the money that goes into the homeless system.

And so we'll be looking at how all of those investments relate and how we align all of those investments moving forward.

But I might have stole your thunder by the question.

I apologize there because that's exactly the challenge I have is trying to determine whether we are doubling down in the right areas, whether our ratios are correct, and sort of feel like we're working in a vacuum sometime.

But because of my discussions with the county folks, I know they're making similar investments.

In fact, I've visited facilities that are funded by the county and sometimes matching funds.

So that's going to be very helpful looking at where we fit into the big puzzle.

Thank you.

I mean, I think right now the most comprehensive we have was put together by the Seattle Times.

So I think the government partners are all taking it on as we need to, we the government need to understand where all of the funding is coming from and how it's all aligning.

So it won't be ready in time for budget, but as soon as it is ready, we will be presenting it back to you all.

Thank you.

Council Member Mosqueda.

Will that report be accompanied with recommendations for how to further streamline or reduce the silos of funding?

Again, L.A. County and L.A.

City went through a similar effort, and I think what was interesting is they really did divide up the roles and responsibilities for the county versus the city.

Just a very brief explanation from my understanding and from conversations with them.

The county really has a responsibility for direct services for homeless prevention programs and homeless assistance programs, while the city has maintained responsibility for the capital projects, capital investments in terms of housing.

And it would be helpful, I think, to President Harreld's question, not only to have that map, but also to have some sense of whether or not there's going to be recommendations accompanying that report to see if there's better ways for us to not just align funding, but maybe to break down silos and couple the programs and services more clearly or cleanly between county and city.

Is that part of the work that you're doing?

I'm just going to dive into what I was going to say later on because it's more appropriate now.

So as part of the MOU that was signed between the county executive and the mayor, there are a group of folks who are working on a number of things.

Those include a critical assessment of how we're using our existing funding so that we can maximize the impact and efficiency of our current resources.

So that is this sort of what is the funding out there, how is it restricted, what is the impact, and how do we best invest that to make the biggest impact.

Second, they're working on an actionable agenda, sort of looking at how do we make meaningful progress towards the reduction of homelessness through both crisis response and prevention efforts.

So moving forward, not only looking backward at the impacts of how we're spending money now, but looking forward, How do we actually make an impact?

How do we hold everyone accountable?

How do we align our funding and coordinate it so that we don't have duplicative efforts or so that we don't have efforts that are actually counteracting each other?

And then thirdly, which was sort of the direct spirit of the MOU, is really looking at the appropriate governance structure.

How do we, Seattle King County, work in the most effective governmental way so that our investments are aligned so that we don't have different government entities doing the exact same work so that we're efficient in moving that work forward.

So that is work that's playing out right now.

It is, the recommendations are due to the mayor by the end of the year, mayor and executive Constantine by the end of the year.

So I would imagine that in future select committees, we will be having future discussions once it's done.

I am so glad to hear you say that.

Of course, all of us have talked about this for a long time and I'm I appreciate the direction that you're going on this.

And as Councilmember Gonzalez was saying, the public really is looking at us.

And one of the problems that we ran into when we were trying to deal with the head tax was the employee hours taxes.

There was a sense of, well, it's all uncoordinated.

You're spending all this money.

You're not getting results.

We don't know what it looks like.

So I think this is what is really needed.

And I also appreciate the fact that we are getting all of the moving parts because I know the city's been doing a lot, the county's been doing a lot, all home has been, some of the suburban cities are individually and now we have this new regional affordable housing task force that I believe council member Claudia Balducci has been leading and I don't know whether You've been part of that, Council Member Gonzalez, but it is something that has come up with a number of recommendations.

And when you look at it, you go, yes, that, that's what we want.

And then also, I haven't heard anybody talk about what the King County Housing Authority or the Seattle Housing Authority is doing, because I appreciate Steve Norman.

He's been around for two or more decades.

working in this arena.

And I just talked with him recently, and he was talking to me, you know, they have bought 10,000 units, the King County Housing Authority, over the two decades.

They've bought 10,000 units that they control.

So when somebody is looking to get out of, or we need housing, whether it's the LEED program or whatever, to be able to say, hey, we have housing here.

We control it.

We control how much we charge.

So it's not a rent control imposed on the outside.

It is self-imposed from the inside.

So I hope that as we're going forward on this, we can also bring Steve Norman in with our Steve Walker to be able to say, how is this coordinating so we actually have the units?

So when a judge, for example, says, We're not going to be putting somebody in jail, but we have a place for them to go when they've got supportive services.

It's part of the criminal justice reform that I know we're working on as well.

So somebody said we're breaking down silos.

I don't think we ever do that, but maybe we can cross them.

We can build bridges.

We can, you know, make sure we know where the doors are.

Chair Baxter, if I may.

I'm not ignoring you.

I'm sorry.

I know you're not.

I never think that you are intentionally ignoring me.

You know, I think as we have this conversation around I just want to throw out a note of caution to my colleagues around this, and that is that I think I, you know, I do believe in efficiencies and transparency and accountability and making sure that we are holding ourselves as policymakers and administrators to I think it's important for us to look at the best standards and practices around what does an efficient system look like.

That's not just for the sole purpose of being able to say that we have found efficiencies.

It is presumably for the purpose of saying we found efficiencies that ultimately yield a you know, the experience of homelessness for individuals at a massive rate, right?

And I think that we lose, sometimes I feel like we lose sight of that nuance that we're talking about efficiencies not for purposes of, you know, solely for purposes of good governance.

but that really ultimately the reason we're motivated to find efficiencies is for the purpose of being able to deliver these critical human services to people who are in dire need of those services.

And so I just wanna be really cautious about how we talk about efficiencies and ultimately how we implement the concepts around efficiencies in the system and what it means to work regionally and across lines with other folks because I don't wanna get into a space where we are doing that for the sole purpose of criticizing the functioning of government in this space because I don't think that that's what we're actually talking about.

I don't think anyone of us would disagree with that and I think that's exactly within the spirit of what I'm talking about.

continuing to be frustrated with the lack of urgency around figuring out some of these governance issues.

And so again, if we truly believe in the concept that efficiencies that we are identifying in this space are for the purpose of being able to have success in ending homelessness experiences for individuals, then we have to continue to act with a sense of urgency around this.

And I just get really nervous that we are getting mired down in this who owns the issue, when are they gonna own it, how are they gonna own it, and then, you know, winter comes and goes.

And so I just, that's, I just feel compelled to express a note of caution to my colleagues and to all of you at the table I again absolutely agree with efficiencies but I also think that we need to be able to find those for the right purpose and certainly with a high degree of urgency to make sure that we get this right.

Please continue.

Great.

Capital investment.

So this is a bit below the line as it were is our term of art.

So not in that pie chart that we first discussed.

This is that 25.8.

million dollars specifically, sorry, in commitments for capital funds to create about 500 housing units specifically designed to serve families and individuals experiencing homelessness.

I apologize that that first sentence is missing that experiencing homelessness piece.

Any questions on this?

Okay, great.

We also have, digging into the next slide has specific details that Leslie's going to get into.

Sorry, Steve.

Mr. Walker.

Sure, I'll jump in here.

You know, I think this slide is familiar to most of you, but this is capturing the affordable housing portfolio in Seattle, not just through city investments, but including our important partner, the Seattle Housing Authority.

not just subsidy programs but our incentive program calling out the multifamily tax exemption program and its presence in producing affordable units for that period of that tax exemption, the 12 years.

And then the last thing that's captured there is what's under development right now, a significant number of 4,400 units are coming online over the next three years.

And then, you know, there's no dollars here, but I do want to emphasize that, by and large, the city's investment is representing roughly a third to a quarter of the total cost of constructing a unit, which translates into the importance of our ability and our success over the last several decades now of stretching our resources by bringing other, attracting other capital when we put down that first dollar.

And so that is a critically important storyline to how we've been successful thus far in creating this number of units.

Great, thank you.

Any questions on this?

Okay, Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you very much.

Can you show me if included in this map here or this summary of the

Investments that we put forward how much of this funding may have come from the mandatory housing affordability dollars that we've received so far very Very little because we haven't received so much yet as we're still standing up the citywide program, but a significant Investment includes the existing incentive zoning program, but I can certainly break it down for you.

I think what would be more important is for us to have a sense of what the projections would be assuming that we can move forward.

I think this is an important opportunity for us to realize that there is even more ample opportunity to create affordable housing once and if the city is allowed to move forward with the selective rezoning that we have proposed citywide.

And the amount of housing that could potentially be built that could be affordable for individuals to help prevent individuals from falling into homelessness or to provide an outlet from getting out of homelessness and into affordable housing is critical.

So you've been able to accomplish this amount, but we can do even more when we soon will potentially have the dollars necessary from MHA.

And I think if you can give us a rough estimate, that would be very helpful.

So my brilliant helper here, Allison McClain, just sent me a question, which is a really good one, which is from the time we have an idea about a project that we've got the land, we've got we've issued the NOFA, we've done the RFP, we've selected our nonprofit development partner.

What's the timeline on that?

Because if we're looking at trying to address up to 200,000 units King County wide, and it's taken us much of a couple of decades to get 3,300 units, how are we gonna speed this up?

I wanna answer that question by dispelling a myth that affordable housing takes dramatically longer than market rate housing.

As soon as we make a funding award, We're talking about getting into the entitlement process, which is the same for all developers.

And that's about an 18 to 24-month period.

And I want to acknowledge SDCI's commitment to fast-tracking affordable housing.

There's, as well as my team and a number of the departments that are represented here, part of what we've committed to doing is, as soon as we hear about a proposal and we're hearing an application is coming in, we convene an initial meeting with that applicant and with a number of the departments that touch that entitlement process to surface early any issues.

And so that is starting to really take shape and starting to create efficiencies within our own bureaucracies of permitting and entitlement.

But we have a long pipeline.

Sometimes it's to our advantage to see projects coming our way.

a couple of years out, but I always just default to we never have a shortage of good proposals, we just run out of capital.

So then if you would just put that in a parking lot as well, how we look at the alternatives for capital is, I mean, I know that we've been talking about this for years, if not for decades, but I'm looking at all possible tools and not just cash out of the general fund, but what is there?

What is there in the market?

I heard of something today that I'd not heard of before called a mezzanine loan.

and the idea of maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not, but if you've got lots of extra projects, Council Member Mosqueda is helping us create more land through her disposition legislation that we just reviewed again yesterday.

The idea that we can get thousands of more units up and available for people is very appealing.

I love it that you're using the term mezzanine loan now.

If I knew how it worked, I would feel better about it, but it just impresses me that people from the private sector are coming and saying, hey, have you thought about this?

Well, no, I haven't actually, but tell me more.

And that's where I am with this.

Good.

Thank you.

And also, one of the other things we teed up yesterday is around modulars.

I'm, you know, and nobody is saying that we want to get away from brick and mortar in the traditional sense, but looking at some of the things that we've seen, as you all know, my, whether it's blockables or the block project or what Vancouver BC did, with their modulars up there.

The modulars are able to be built in the middle of the winter in a warehouse.

And as soon as we get the property ready to go with electricity and water and get it permitted, it was in Vancouver, BC, 90 days when they were able to get those units up and operational.

So I'm hopeful that we're looking at every option.

I want to express to you that you should be confident that we are looking at every one of those.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Okay, please proceed.

Great.

Next is prevention.

So if you'll remember back to the first, what Leslie walked through at the beginning that had the chart of the whole system, prevention is that entire first chunk where we're trying to assist people who are currently housed but face imminent risk of becoming homeless.

There is no change in this amount to previous amounts that we have put before you.

So if it's all the same, we'll keep moving.

Okay.

Great.

Next is access to services.

This is $6.4 million and has a couple of things lumped in here.

One is health care for the homeless, which I'm going to let Patty speak to.

Additionally, we have a bit in here for community resource specialists at the Seattle Public Library.

And then homeless child care assistance program in DEEL.

And then there is a bucket of funds that through this process within HSD, it's about 3 million, that through this process we identified are in the Homelessness Strategies and Investments Division that may be more appropriately housed in a different division within HSD.

So we're going to continue looking at that.

So for now it's captured here because it's within HSI, but we might come back to you on this particular point.

Good.

Well, I will tell you this access to services is one of my strongest focuses.

And we met yesterday with Brooke Buettner from King County.

I'm very impressed with the work that she's doing with our public health once again.

And there are so many folks that are with all the best efforts trying to identify people by name.

You know, it's the by name list we've been talking about, the person-centered approach.

But I don't think our software systems are talking to each other yet.

What I loved, the description, the way they looked at this was like an H with One part of the vertical line of the H being the people who are out on the street, the Jackie St. Louis's, the folks that are doing the direct contact, and they can have information about who is talking to this individual.

Does he have a case manager?

How many times has he been up in the hospital?

So they actually know who it is and what is what's going on and helping that individual.

Then you have the other vertical post on the H being perhaps what the police are looking at.

We know we don't want to have information about individuals being used against them in a criminal context, but having that bridge across, that's the bridge in the middle of the H, so I'm a huge fan of what work that Allie Franklin is doing.

She's doing the 211 crisis communication.

She was telling me about going down to San Diego and looking at what they've done with their community program.

And it is for around emergencies, and it's been highly effective.

San Diego is willing to come up and talk to us for, you know, the cost of a plane ticket and a few hotel nights.

We could get them up here talking about their strategy.

They have said that they are willing.

to offer us their software, offer us what they have learned by this.

And I just, this goes back to what I'm talking about with the first responders.

We want to have our first responders responding to the work that they've been trained to do, not necessarily doing the same thing for a few individuals over and over and over again.

It's frustrating for them.

It's not helping us.

It's not resolving the problems that each individual has.

So more on this, more access to services, but you can count on the fact that There's a lot of work going on.

I'm going to want to hear a lot more about that.

Great.

Thank you.

Questions?

Patty, would you like to get in?

Sure.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me and talking a bit about public health on the technology.

And let me just add that it is really a movement forward to have folks at the table looking at how do we make access to information real, visible, and real time for folks.

And the Familiar Faces Project in Brooke, in her work, is just fantastic in terms of visioning what we need to do.

It's a public health approach.

One of the things I'll add that I can help make the link and explore is the accountable community of healthier here as part of the waiver project under the state's transformation work is actually exploring, I think, this system that you're talking about.

And so we can pull those pieces together.

There's a lot of ways to connect data platforms, and we need to really connect and work and leverage where that's coming.

So happy to do that.

On the slide here for you are the list of some of the key programs under this.

And I will say that at the bottom, just the bottom bullet, this is part of public health.

work in totality.

This reflects those pieces under the rubric that you're seeing today in terms of funding.

But I do want to say that there's a rich network in public health all around this that we've talked about in the past.

But our mobile program, which I'm so proud of, I've talked to you about it over time, it's one that, really gets helping people real time where they need.

We need it up on Aurora at some point in time, for sure.

It's a clinic on wheels, as you know, and for those of you that's seen it, it's a customized RV that's a full clinic, rotates locations, and the city investment's been an incredible expansion of this vision to areas in the city that are so critical for folks that often don't make it to a community health center or can't get the follow-up.

So we're obviously offering treatment on the van.

The van serves about 750 unduplicated people a year, which is really great.

These are folks that would end up in emergency rooms and other places that we're trying to make sure we can help.

We deliver nearly as much behavioral health service on these vans as medical treatment.

And the beauty of the design that we've done in King County for the mobile medical van is it has the health care services matched with outreach and behavioral health services.

And in the best of all worlds, we have the mobile dental van with it so that we can really bring it forward for folks.

Do you understand we're expanding one?

We're adding another one?

So we are looking at under the Vets and Human Services levy at actually expanding to a senior type van that was funded under the senior portion of that.

I would like to see that both looking at kind of how we traditionally look at the definition of seniors as well in the homeless population because they're so vulnerable.

They're actually aging so much more quickly.

I would like to see how we can be flexible with that.

So I've been working with Adrian Quinn on how we're going to be doing that.

Happy to report back on that.

That'll be coming online in the next year or so.

So that'll be the next step forward with the mobile band.

Thank you for being here, Patty.

We were at the regional council policy meeting yesterday and understood and voted on, or not voted, we are going to on the next one, on the oversight committee for the vets and levy.

And I understand for the very first time in this levy's history that there'll be three seats available for the city of Seattle.

So maybe you didn't know that.

I just learned that too.

But I'm wondering how that.

Well, the reason why I'm interested is because some of us sit on the Board of Health over at King County.

I sit on the regional policy for King County.

And what struck me is that whether we will, the City of Seattle will have a voice in how those monies are spent and whether we can be a resource to you and certainly to our colleagues in City Council to advocate for more money for Seattle to fund these kind of programs.

So I didn't know if you had any more information about that.

I don't, I'm sorry.

We can certainly get it for you.

That's all being developed under the Department of Community and Human Services who oversees the levy and just sounds like great.

But is the department of, is the King County side working with our city side on this issue, the homelessness?

I know we're trying to like not have the silo thing and we have all this.

We've had all these attempts and runs at one table and all these other things.

Is it actually going to happen?

So this is where when I talked about that regional governance conversation, Jason, Steve, my colleague Kylie in the mayor's office are in weekly regular contact with the county, the suburban jurisdictions, all home to work on coordinating all of this.

So we are in regular communication as well as the fact that there is a very strong partnership between King County and Seattle as far as our homeless services go anyway because we work with them on the HMIS system and the coordinated entry system.

So those conversations are happening all the time.

I don't know that there are specific conversations about the Vets and Human Services levy, but we can certainly talk to them about it.

Thank you.

Any further questions on that?

Council Member Gonzalez, it seems like that's right up your alley.

Okay.

Two other areas quickly.

The housing health outreach teams that are funded under this are really those teams that are serving as nurses and mental health counselors that are stationed at supportive housing.

These are folks that prevent 911 calls.

They're present, and they deal with medical conditions.

Even folks that are terminally ill, they help with the hospice issues with folks.

They coordinate with the housing case manager, especially focusing on chronic illnesses such as diabetes, dementia, and schizophrenia.

They do education and care coordination.

And the nurses and counselors in this program serve about 1,300 folks a year.

90% of these clients are able to retain their housing in 2017. We call them the hot team.

They receive about 68% of their funding through the city.

The REACH program, this team serves people who have chronic substance abuse and are homeless.

It's a harm reduction model.

I had the privilege of writing with this team, and they are amazing, amazing folks if you have the opportunity.

The team does outreach on the streets, under bridges, soup kitchens, in jail, as jail transitions, folks transition out of jail, and at hospitals.

They build the relationships that are crucial to getting folks stabilized, really meeting people at their basic needs, with the whole premise that if you build that trust, then you can get into things like motivational interviewing and eventually get towards recovery.

Our funding helps the REACH team serve over 1,000 clients a year.

174 REACH clients improved or maintained their housing in 2017. That sounds like a small number, but these can be some of the most traumatized and really difficult multi system problems that these folks are dealing with every day.

And this is a team that helps do that linkage into all the other things that you're hearing about.

So it's a very powerful venue.

One of the things Chief Scoggins and I have talked about is between the HOT team and the REACH team, we have some of the staff stationed at places like DESC, and there's a direct relationship between when some of that staff is no longer there and when the calls to the chief occur through 9-1-1.

And so we're always looking at ways to do that more cost-effective model of expanding that team there and have done that.

through a partnership with Neighbor Care a bit at DSC.

We've got more work to do, but we know that that helps on the EMS runs to those places.

Thank you.

And just put a footnote on that, that we've heard this many times from Chief Scoggins and from the actual first responders.

And I think the women that we all affectionately called Nurse Mary.

When Nurse Mary was there, that the number of calls that to the first responders was quite low.

And as soon as she went off at 5 o'clock at night, it went up dramatically.

So, you know, this is part of the true cost, Julie, that we were talking about.

If it costs us $100,000 to have another nurse there in evening hours and weekends, it strikes me that if it protects the number of times that people pull the 911 and gets them the help they need.

And it goes back to what Councilmember Gonzalez was saying.

We're not trying to be cheap here.

We're trying to take care of the people on site rather than making six first responders hop in their gear and go.

to DESC as an example.

So I hope that we'll look at this in that system way.

That is, what can we invest in that's getting the best outcome at the best cost, least cost to the city and the county?

I'm going to turn it over to the chair.

I think it's really important that we have the best practices and models in other cities that get to this issue of really effectively what is happening is that people experiencing primary care providers.

And so, obviously, we have a broken healthcare system in this country that is the fundamental problem, and once we fix that and ensure that there's universal access to free and affordable healthcare for those who need it, we're gonna continue to need to innovate and find models that deliver critical healthcare services to populations that can't otherwise access them.

And one of the things that Chief Scoggins mentioned is that you know, for first responders in particular, they have to start thinking about what their role is as first responders in this space in a radically transformational way.

And so some of the models that he shared with us are very interesting ones that I'm happy to share with the folks on the committee later.

Perhaps we can have some opportunity through the select committee to explore some of these different models, but one of the models is out of, I think, Dallas, Texas, or maybe Fort Worth, I can't remember, somewhere in Texas, where what they have done is they have embedded social workers at their 911 call center to be able to better, you know, I think what the fundamental problem is, is that a lot of folks, and Chief Scoggins confirmed this in our presentation yesterday, that a lot of folks call 911 because they don't know where else to call.

to report seeing somebody who might be in the midst or the throes of a crisis, whether that's a mental health crisis or a physical health crisis, they don't know where to call.

So they end up calling 911. And the problem is, is 911 is structured very clearly to then send out, you know, a fire engine or a fire truck, full response to whatever the thing is.

If we transform how 911 calls are handled, then we're gonna, I think, be able to better meet the needs, the actual needs of the person who is sort of the subject of the call.

And we'll also, I think, find a significant amount of cost savings in the system that we could utilize in more strategic and better ways to deliver the services.

So I hope that the chairs will create some space and opportunity to be able to explore some of those different kind of models that are being used in other parts of the country that I think could be really helpful to our ongoing conversations.

Great, and thank you for bringing that up.

You mentioned it briefly to me yesterday, and I also have been working with Chief Scoggins as well as Director Hayes on just exactly this point, and we've looked at some other models, I think Tempe, Arizona, and Colorado Springs I mentioned earlier.

Similar kinds of things where we're bringing mobile vans together, but you've got people well-trained to address the immediate needs of the person on the street and, like you were saying, having somebody at the 911 center know who to call and what they can do as contrasted to getting routed around.

So thank you for that.

I mean, I think as we're having this conversation, ultimately also we have to have places to send people.

And that is very geographically based according to Chief Scoggins and Deputy Chief Greth Green both mentioned that there are often times when they are interacting with folks who are experiencing a mental health or physical health crisis.

And the most fundamental issue is that there isn't a place to refer those folks to that has capacity, for example.

And they pointed out the North Precinct area as a particular gap in terms of services available on the north end of Seattle that that system could be in place.

But if we don't have the capacity and the depth of services to refer people to, it becomes a problem.

Yeah, and they end up in Harborview again.

Right.

Okay, thank you.

Let's continue.

It's now 4.06.

Yeah, Council Member Mosqueda.

Thank you so much.

So, as you know, public health is a huge priority of mine.

It's in our committee.

I understand that there's really one slide in this deck that focuses on health, but the reality of what Director Hayes just shared with us is that public health touches on every element of making sure that people have services to prevent them from falling into homelessness and then to help them remain stable, whether that's in shelters or once in housing.

So just kind of forecasting ahead a little bit to the conversation we keep prompting you to provide more information about, Leslie, is public health part of this discussion this crew that's meeting to talk about realignment and governance structure currently.

Jason, do you?

No, not public health specifically.

Seattle and King County are both there, but Patty, your public health is not currently part of that core working group.

Okay.

Obviously, I look forward to learning more about what the core working group is working on, but my preference and strong recommendation is that Public Health Seattle-King County be an early participant in this conversation given the critical role that public health has both at the county and at the city.

and in every element of the presentation we've received so far.

It's, you know, the life stories that we hear in addition to the data that's been presented.

We know public health is critical, so that's the one big ask I have.

I obviously look forward to hearing more about the core group.

I see that there's a larger group that you'll talk about at the end related to subcabinet, but strong recommendation that they be included at this stage.

Well done.

Agreed.

Thank you.

Okay.

I promise this is the last category.

This is operations.

It's hardly your fault.

We seem to have lots of questions and comments.

I appreciate them very much.

Thank you.

So within operations, we have obviously human services department staff and admin that have to administer all of these investments.

So those are captured here at about 4.8 million.

And then additionally in operations is cleanup activities.

And we've divided this into encampment response, which is part of the navigation team.

As I mentioned previously in talking about the navigation team staffing and outreach, that these were captured in other categories as well.

This is one of those places.

And then also Seattle Public Utilities Clean Cities pilot programs, which I believe Mami is going to get into for you.

Very good.

Thank you.

You've been very patient.

Please.

SPU conducts several.

SPU conducts several Clean City Pilot Programs and we adapt and design those programs based on a few essential perspectives that include understanding that what may look like trash to some may be all that's between life and death for a homeless person.

Also, that crews have to be kept safe.

Mr. Zimmerman, I'm just going to ask you to please not interrupt.

If there's something funny, please take it outside.

Go ahead, Ms. Hara.

Thank you.

The second perspective is that we have to keep crews safe.

in their work and operations that we must achieve the most impact and responsiveness for any investments made and that data is key to informing an effective and adaptive approach.

So I'll briefly outline the four of our many Clean City programs that most closely support addressing the impacts of homelessness.

The first is our pilot encampment trash service, which provides purple bags and regular pickup at unauthorized homeless encampments.

The program also includes on-call collection of trash, loose debris, bulky items, and on-site needles.

And since 2017, we've served 28 unauthorized homeless encampments and collected over 300 tons of trash.

Because those sites move constantly and because folks have to be willing to be served, we are currently serving nine unauthorized homeless encampments and providing requested on-call services for others.

We also conduct a litter abatement pilot that addresses the increased trash and right-of-way for neighborhoods that are disproportionately impacted by unauthorized homeless encampments.

And through that program, we've collected over 220 tons of litter since July 2017, and we're currently regularly serving 13 neighborhoods.

Seattle has also developed the first comprehensive pilot program on sharps, which is also needles, collection in the country, providing 24-7 on-call sharps pickup in the right-of-way and collections from city-managed sharps collection boxes across the city.

And since August of 2016, we've collected over 10,500 needles from over 3,000 complaints.

And since February 2017, we've collected over 110,000 needles from collection boxes.

We've also begun a new pilot on remediating the impacts of recreational vehicles that is in the main about parking enforcement and right-of-way cleaning.

In collaboration with Seattle Police Department, Parks, SDOT, and the mayor's office, we clear up after RVs which have moved voluntarily.

We also tow RVs as directed and scrap structurally unsafe recreational vehicles.

In just a few months, we've removed 76 tons of debris that are related to RVs with the vast majority of them moving voluntarily.

So that's just a very brief overview of the many pilot programs.

I want to commend your staff.

Ken has been in front of us many times and I appreciate how hard you've worked on this.

I know that it's above and beyond the work that you were assigned to do, but it is making a big difference.

And I also frankly hear from people that they're concerned about tents on the sidewalks or in schools or in parks, but they're more concerned about the trash.

And so if you can help us get that picked up and to thank your staff for doing it, it is one of the things that we can do in response to neighbors that are concerned about just what the look of the neighborhood is.

Yes, thank you.

Thanks very much.

Please.

Okay, so you just heard about 86.7 million in the city's 2018 budget.

Thank you very much for getting through that with us.

Wanted to put a point in, you know, we understand that the city has significant indirect costs.

We've discussed those throughout today's hearing.

And one of the programs that we did want to highlight was one of those programs that we're not counting and we've asked Christopher to join us to talk about it.

And that's the Parks Conservation Corps program.

Great, thank you.

I'd like to highlight the Seattle Conservation Corps program.

This is one of those boutique-ish programs that when people learn we do, are actually shocked that the Park Department is engaged in this kind of work.

It's a program that has significant positive human impacts on people.

It's a program that fosters work training opportunities for adult people who are typically either from the ex-offender population, they need to be homeless to enter the program, or be in a halfway house situation.

Let's see, the annual budget for the program is about $4.7 million.

It's a fee-for-services program.

It's primarily focused, again, on serving ex-offenders and people in homeless and halfway house situations.

The program provides workforce training.

So people come to this program, they get skilled up and tooled up and transition into a permanent job.

Let's see, we provide wraparound services in the program.

We recognize that people who are exiting a homeless situation or a halfway house situation typically need a whole array of wraparound services from addiction services to counseling services on how to be a more responsible parent.

We help people get their driver's license or Washington State ID if they don't have that.

But it's a complete array of services that help people get on their feet.

We serve about 75 people per year at a cost of about $62,000 per person.

However, when a participant leaves this program at the end of the year, nearly 100 percent of the program participants who enter the program complete the program.

They leave with a full-time job, and they leave with a living situation that is a permanent living situation.

One of the things the program does is help people save money they earn in the program so that they can transfer into a permanent, stable living situation with a job.

So again, I mentioned this program was boutique-ish, but as you can hear, the impacts are mighty in the lives of an individual.

Thank you very much for bringing this up.

I know that you and I have talked about this many times before, and I keep asking, can it be expanded?

Can you triple it?

bring it up to scale across all of our parks.

And I know that it takes a lot of resources.

And that's something we're looking at for the next tranche of park district funding to see how we can scale this program up.

The wraparound services and There's not a one-to-one relationship or ratio for a supervisor and a participant.

There are a lot of added costs that go into that.

Good.

Thank you very much for bringing that up.

So what else is underway?

Well, one of the things that Mayor Durkin has done to ensure that there's better coordination and interdepartmental dovetailing of experiences has set up seven to date subcabinets that bring together departments that are involved in specific kinds of activities.

One of those is the homelessness subcabinet, which has just been set up.

It has been established to support the mayor's efforts on homelessness and housing and to ensure that that is done in a way that departments that are directly involved in that sit down on a regular basis.

Right now, as we start this, it's every other week, so that we are talking about all of the issues that we talked about here, as well as others.

The slide shows the kind of what we're trying to do to strategically align the city departments and resources, resolving cross-cutting planning and policy issues, and providing a more uniform, consistent approach to planning, design, and delivery of investments in the future.

But what we're really doing is bringing those departments that are most impacted and involved in the homelessness issue around the same table, about this large, and making sure that we are coordinated and are together.

and are marching together on issues that affect this very difficult issue.

We want to make sure we are coordinated as a department so that we aren't at cross purposes with ourselves and that we are marching in the same way.

You see the members' departments that are there.

It's the first time some of them have really sat around the same table to talk about this issue, although all of them have a role to play in working on and helping us resolve the homelessness program.

So that's one of the operational or management systems that we have in place to help us address this problem in a more focused and intentional way.

Deputy Mayor Mosley, thank you for that.

And I guess a question that I have is who's in charge?

So when we had the emergency management ready to go and people were meeting daily and they were really focused on some particular person-centered responses, what was great is that people knew who to call.

I am a huge fan of these interdepartmental teams, and what I know is that if you, for example, are sitting at the table and are able to turn to one of your colleagues and say, we need to get this done, and we need to get it done within the next few days, it gets done.

But if we have a table of equals, they don't feel like they can tell each other what to do, and so there's a lot of, you know, goodwill, but not necessarily the action that we're seeking.

So, can you address that?

I am sitting at the table.

Love that.

Okay, very good.

Go ahead.

Deputy Mayor Mosley, thank you for sharing that.

I think that the list of a dozen or so organizations or departments that you have listed up there is the right folks to be sitting in the room.

Yesterday in Council Member Gonzalez's committee, we had the chance to hear from fire and police, as she mentioned earlier, and the cross-departmental approaches that they've taken on to address not just safety, but make sure that people get access to the health services that are needed, was one small indication that a table like this is necessary.

Again, I'll continue to harp on the lessons learned from other cities and ask if you and the mayor's office, if this cabinet is looking at what other cities have done to create similar cabinets.

When I had the opportunity to visit with folks in Los Angeles City, they invited me into a room that had these exact same individual organizations, sorry, departments represented around that table.

And it was very heartening to see them breaking down silos brainstorming together and tactically identifying what needed to happen region by region throughout the city.

I understand that the mayor is going soon to visit, I believe, with Mayor Garcetti as well and would love to hear more about other cities that you're looking at and encourage us to learn from those other cities on what types of cabinet approaches they've taken so that we can, to the points made earlier, not waste additional time.

Thank you.

Yes, ma'am.

Anything else down there?

Council Member Gonzalez.

Thank you.

I just, now that we have gone through the slide deck and I've had an opportunity to just sort of sit here and think about it.

a little bit longer.

I have some observations that I just wanted to quickly run through.

The first one is that I really do appreciate a transition from, you know, looking at the City of Seattle's investments in the area of homelessness, you know, switching that from these are what the departments are spending to this is what we are spending it on.

I think that is a positive step in the right direction.

I do, however, have some concern about not being able to, it just doesn't seem very people-centered to me still in terms of how we depict our investments.

And I'm struggling with figuring out how we would even accomplish that.

But I think we have to challenge ourselves to make sure that when we are looking at these different lines of business that we are investing in, that we don't lose sight of the fact that this is not a monolithic population with monolithic sets of needs.

And so I think for me, I'm still missing that nuance around when we're talking about emergency services and we look at the line item of basic shelter beds, who is it that we are actually serving in that space, and is it working for that population, or is it not working for that population, or is it a mixed bag, right?

And I think that's what I was trying to pull out when I was asking you, Director Johnson, to give me a little bit more information about what is the purpose of basic shelter beds if they are not as successful as enhanced shelter to move people out of homelessness and into permanent housing.

I think for me, that's one of the observations that I have here that I hope that the Select Committee can continue to dig into is sort of challenging ourselves to figure out how do we continue to have a people-centered approach even in the context of talking about how we invest our dollars and really sort of challenging ourselves to evaluate when we invest those dollars in emergency services, housing prevention, access to services, operations.

you know, what, who is, who is benefiting from those investments and who is not benefiting from those investments within that category, because I think that'll show us some hopefully additional, you know, strategies or modifications or, or whatever the case might be, to be able to better serve this particular population.

So that's just my first observation.

The second one is around the housing section.

One of the things that I think continues to be missing as part of our strategies in terms of what type of housing we're investing in is that type of housing that doesn't come with a lot of services.

There might just be a social worker available, for example, so sort of services light type of housing that is really designed for people who may need some assistance to be able to navigate and to transition into housing.

they don't need the full-blown permanent supportive housing model.

It's too much for them, and it's too expensive.

And so I feel like we're still very heavy on some of that most expensive type of transitional and permanent supportive housing, but what we're missing is housing that would be available and appropriate for that portion of the homeless population that may need some assistance, but doesn't need the full Cadillac version of affordable housing.

And, you know, the clearest example I can think of there is when we talked about who lives in basic shelters, who is utilizing basic shelter beds, Director Johnson mentioned that 40% of those living in basic shelters have jobs.

And to me, that means that this is a population that is high functioning, but still can't access affordable housing.

So what can we do at the city moving forward to provide that type of housing stock to that particular population?

And I guess this is driving my first point on my observation that I think that's why it's important for us to continue to be focused on who it is these investments is benefiting and then being able to evaluate whether that's working or not.

The third observation that I have is around this concept of this narrative that we continue to talk about how this is a regional issue.

I think today's presentation to me didn't send that message and didn't convey information to me that gives me any sort of confidence that we are working on this issue through a regional lens.

I saw a lot of, this is what the city of Seattle is doing, but not a lot of, this is what the city of Seattle is doing.

And in doing so, we are leveraging King County dollars or Snohomish County dollars or Pierce County dollars to be able to do this type of work.

And maybe that's something that's going to come later on.

And if so, I look forward to it.

But I do think that.

If we're going to keep talking about this particular solutions for this particular issue in that regional context, then I think we have to be much more deliberate about presenting information in these committee hearings that has that context embedded into the presentation.

So, those are just some early observations from from our presentation and our conversation today, and I look forward to continuing to dig into this and to really, hopefully, making some greater strides and progress here.

Great.

Thank you for those four issues, Council Member Gonzalez.

I would put them strongly up front as well that I know that we are working with our colleagues in King County.

So if you can, at our next meeting, and I think it's October 3rd, but come back and show us what investments are happening, and then the person-centered approach that Council Member Gonzalez just mentioned specifically, that was something that I know that we talked about in Barb Poppe.

It's embedded in our policies.

I know it's something, Jason, that you and I have talked about.

a lot, but we know that if we can find the individual and know what it is that that person needs, we're able to move them through the system.

And if we're constantly running around and can't find them, and then we find them again, and somebody may have talked with them five times, but they don't have a case manager identified, that's where the HMIS data and the software program we've been talking about comes in.

And again, I want to bring Allie Franklin into this conversation and the 211 crisis.

They've got so much that they're doing and working on.

I want to make sure that they're part of this because they'll help us with the solutions.

I just want to highlight that when we do come back to you on October 3rd or whatever day that will be, that we will be coming back with the performance of our investments for the first half of this year.

And that while it won't be sort of down to the individual level, as Councilmember Gonzalez was highlighting, it will start to talk about what's working and what isn't and where should we be directing money.

So that is coming.

It's just analysis that's underway that we couldn't bring to you today.

And then the regional investments will be coming on later in this year.

I do not know that we'll be able to come back with that in October.

Well, I think it's important as we're going into budget that we're thinking about priorities and obviously what's working and what we're spending our money on.

That's going to be important because you all know, and we have seen this every single year, that the human services monies, the investments, what the decisions are, those are the hot buttons.

And we will have these chambers filled with people who are telling us we're not investing in the right thing or we're not investing enough.

And, candidly, I want to be really focused to invest on what's working, know how much money we've got, and how much we're leveraging, as contrasted to be shouted at for two months about what we're not doing right.

So, if it's based upon good, responsible information and best practices, that's going to be very helpful to us.

Great.

Thank you.

Just a few initial reactions.

Outstanding start for at least, this is the first meeting of a new committee.

So thank you very, very much.

And I think, I hope that you're receiving all of this as simply that feedback on what our expectations are going to be through the budget, after the budget.

And in that lane my feedback not so much about today about moving forward is one of the ideas that I I think I disagree with something I heard earlier from the Dyson that is Everything that we need to address the issue of homelessness is not on one committee It's not on HSD's agenda.

It's not on Parks agenda.

I could just go down the litany of departments.

It is not It's just too all-encompassing.

And one of the areas that I continue to think about are what are the predictors of homelessness?

If we're looking at a 10-year plan or a five-year plan from now, one could argue that we are in a situation now because perhaps our lack of foresight 10 or 15 years ago.

And it is what it is.

I mean, I don't think a lot of people predicted this level of growth that we're experiencing.

So what are the predictors of someone in high school or someone that dropped out?

What are the predictors of a young adult?

What are the predictors of a person that's on a fixed income that's retiring?

What are the predictors of a person with a mental or health illness situation?

How do we determine what those early factors are in Seattle and in other cities?

And how are other people determining that?

What kinds of ups?

Enforcement.

I mean, quite candidly, we need to openly and transparently talk about enforcement strategies, and that's the other end of this equation.

We focused primarily today on housing, and that was appropriate.

We can't build ourselves just completely out of the problem.

Some may argue we can't.

I don't think we can.

I don't think we can.

It's just build, build, build, build.

We only have 88 square miles in this city.

Again, this is a regional solution.

Hopefully it's not just building in the core city of Seattle.

So this issue of homelessness is all encompassing.

So as we continue our work as a committee, I think almost every committee council member should be deeply engaged in this because we say, and I think we've repeatedly said that during our budget process, this is going to be one of our city's key priorities.

How are we addressing this issue?

So the issue of enforcement, the issue of predictors, all of that comes into play as we look at housing options, and there's some really rich, good ideas that we're working on now.

A lot of the stuff is working.

People may not believe it, but a lot of what we're doing is we are finding some successes, and we have to celebrate those as well.

But we know the challenges in front of us are huge, and last, Even when I read the article today on Bezos' $2 billion pledge to homelessness, I'm glad to see that that has become a priority.

And that's right in our backyard here.

I know that's a nationwide pledge, of course, but then the question becomes, How do we get all over that, quite frankly?

I mean, if you're piloting new strategies and we're looking at all, no better place to start than right here in our backyard, since we are directly affected by their trillion dollar growth.

And so I'm assuming that working together, we can all collaboratively figure out how do we How do we make sure we are aligned and make sure that our residents are recipients of some of that generosity that's coming in the tune of $2 billion.

So thank you for this presentation.

Council Member Mosqueda, I think he's going to take his home and then we're going to open it up for public comment.

Well, first, thank you, Council President.

Thanks for pulling together this committee.

I know that there's a number of departments that all of our committees touch on, Council Member Bagshaw, finance, I have housing, guns, all this, public safety.

Obviously, we heard about HSD earlier.

I think that the critical role that this team has is helping to identify how we can better communicate to the public, to partners, to providers, and to the media what we're doing and what's working and the desperate need that we have to fill the gaps.

Yes, we are doing some things, and much of what you presented today showed that we're doing a better job than we have in the past of getting folks into shelter, getting them into housing, making sure that they have the health services that they need, and we should be proud of those data points.

To Councilmember Gonzalez's point, we still have people, individuals, families, workers who are outside, and those individuals do not have a place to go right now because we don't have the systems, the investments that we need.

in order to scale up rapidly shelters, housing, and health services.

So I appreciate the analysis that's been presented so far.

I'm heartened to hear about the core group that's being pulled together, the potential to add the health element to that.

I look forward to hearing more from the subcabinet that is coming up with recommendations.

And today I really feel was an internal look.

What I'm hoping to do for our next conversation and look forward to working with the co-chairs on this is having an external analysis of what we're doing in the city.

Much of that I think will help us get the regional analysis that we need to complement what you've provided today.

But in addition to hearing from folks at King County, I want to hear from folks like Professor Sarah Rankin at Seattle University who's been a tremendous amount of work comparing our area to other areas of the country.

I'd like to hear from individuals like Christine Margiota who is out of Los Angeles who helped to actually convene a similar style conversation across county and city in Los Angeles.

I'd love to hear from individuals like Mandy Chapman-Simple who has come out here before but who I think has given us a lot of information and we can now learn a tremendous amount from her work in the Texas area and California area and other areas of the country.

So what I'd like to add to this for our next conversation, just giving a public heads up to our colleagues here and to the community, is an external evaluation of what we think is working well, what we've heard today, and where we continue to see gaps in the future.

And that will only be rounded out by, I think, a presentation and information provided by local community experts.

The individuals that work on the LEAD program, for example, and public defenders, I know, are in the audience with us today, are critical community partners who have, I think, on the ground experience helping to continue to inform us about what we're doing well and where the gaps are.

So I'm heartened by this conversation.

I'm glad that we didn't spend a lot of time spinning our wheels and trying to reevaluate what we already know.

And what we know is that we need more housing, we need more shelter, we need more health services, and we need the revenue to scale up.

So let's continue this conversation.

And thanks for bringing forward the information you're working on at the cabinet level.

Thank you very much.

I do want to seriously extend my thanks.

It's been two and a half hours for all of you here.

Post all the prep time in advance.

This matters so much that we are together, that we know where we're going.

We want to be as creative as possible.

I love the notion of inviting philanthropy and business back to the table, back in to help us solve the problem so that we move beyond that us versus them.

It is all of us, and I want to say thank you for coming.

Okay, with that, we have some public commenters.

We've got one, one, two, three, four, five, six.

We have seven people who have signed up for public comment, and since we have only seven, I'm going to Invite two minutes.

We've got William Jennings, Betsy Pito, and some, oh, it's the Honorable Michael Fuller.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, all right, William Jenkins, Michael Fuller, and Matthew Lang.

Mr. Jennings, please.

Okay, yeah, my name is William Jennings, and my issue is what was on the slide, prevention, keeping people in their homes, and that's where I think I fall at with this right here, with what I've been listening to today.

Now, I was homeless in 2014, but I made it on my feet with employment and got my own apartment.

For five years, I've been maintaining rent and my place.

My employment cut back considerably drastically on my hours within the last couple of months.

So it's been hard for me to pay my rent for the last couple of months.

So I'm on the cusp as Miss Teresa Mosqueda, I'm sorry if I'm, okay.

I'm on the cusp of becoming back homeless because of that.

So I'm looking at this thing like, that's all I'm asking for for my city is just a little rental assistance so I can maintain, that's it.

And all the services that y'all say y'all asking for funding for has turned me away.

I don't know whether it's because I've been working or what, but I'm, you know, that's my issue is preventing me, keeping me in my home.

And is that all the time I had?

Right there.

Well, I mean, I see the rapid rehousing rental assistance right here that you talked about and I feel that, you know, if I can get just some assistance in that way, then I can maintain.

I won't become homeless again and add to the statistic again.

So that's what I'm asking from my city council is what direction should I go in when all the agency has pushed me away for the funding?

I'm sorry, what'd you say?

Okay.

Do you give us your email?

Yes.

Yes, ma'am.

I see a phone number.

Do you have an email?

Yes, I do.

Great.

Well, we will get back to you.

Okay, the Honorable Michael Fuller.

You're up next, please, sir.

And then after Mr. Fuller, we'll have Matthew Lange and then Alex.

What?

Please.

What?

I said you've got two minutes, sir.

All right.

Yes, I'm Honorable Michael Fuller.

I'm addressing this to Mayor Jeannie Durkin and Sally Bradshaw.

Now, I'm devastating you up there, giving misleading information.

I'll take you back to 2006, Sally Bragg, y'all.

144 deaths, the highest in the nation, Sally Bragg, y'all.

The same, what has happened since 2006, Sally Bragg, y'all?

When I was educating you over our homeless veterans sleeping on the streets in 2006. And Jenny Durkin was the Attorney General.

What's the problem, Sally Bragg, y'all?

You're supposed to work for We the People.

This is extraordinary pimping We the People and the violation of the Federal Funding Act of 2000 and that Federal Funding Act of 2000 and that Federal Immigration and Nationality Act, Title 8 USC 1324A, Inferences 1, Inferences A, Inferences IV, Inferences B, Inferences III, Inferences INA 274A, Inferences 1, Inferences A, Inferences Title 8 USC 1325. Improper entry, H.R.

303. No sanctuary.

for criminal acts, H.R.

304. Case laws, H.R.

309. Enforcement of sanctuary city laws.

So it's a conflict, Bruce Howard.

Yes, sir.

Note that for the record and let the record reflect, our veterans should not be sleeping on the streets.

that fought to make this country safe, free, and secure.

And you spend a billion taxpayer dollars on your legal immigration?

You're betraying my daddy that served this country two and a half decades before.

Thank you, Matthew.

Is that a price, y'all?

Thank you very much, Honorable.

What's wrong with y'all?

You act like y'all ain't wrapped, too.

The next person will be Matthew Ling, followed by Alex Zimmerman.

Thanks, Matthew.

Hi there.

Hi there.

My name is Matthew Lang, and I'm the lead organizer at the Transit Riders Union, as well as I do work with the Ballard Community Task Force on Homelessness and Hunger.

I really hope this committee will be a productive space to iron out the issues surrounding homelessness and affordability.

There has been a call for evidence-based solutions.

We have ample evidence that points to a housing-first model is the best way to address all the intersections surrounding homelessness, from public health to public safety, mental health, unemployment, addiction.

Housing is the foundation of stability upon truly addressing this crisis must hinge.

I appreciate that this committee plans to focus on those issues, and I really look forward to having some concrete conversations around progressive funding sources to get that.

I also want to talk about the way that we handle in-camera removals as a, it's not really a personalized solution right now.

Last week there was an in-camera removal in Fremont that was about 37 tents, over 50 people were there.

The only thing that was offered to them was mats on the floor at City Hall.

Now during this removal there were two women that were having mental health crises.

that being put into a situation that is actually a very high barrier shelter situation, like the City Hall shelter, and putting them in that cramped space with a mat on the floor is not actually productive for them or for the other people in the space.

One other thing that I want to address is that the healthcare costs, we did not talk anything about emergency room visits, and I would love for the council to dig deeper into that, because I know a lot of people that are living on the street that check themselves into the ER regularly, and that's $1,000 a visit right there.

$2.9 million is not realistic for healthcare.

Yeah.

Thank you very much, Matthew.

Thank you.

Alex Zimmerman, followed by Marguerite Richard.

Hello, my gables.

Open channel, please.

Say hi, my lovely console.

The best people friend.

A little bit antisemite, a little bit.

Who's next?

Oh, Tuck Sucker, and little bit, oh, Killer.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

My name Alex Zimmerman.

Honestly, I love you.

I love you so much.

I come to this place for many years.

It's nice, circus, nice, clown.

It make us happy because it's entertainment.

Entertainment very important.

When you have entertainment, you're happy.

You can be dead, but you're supposed to be die happy.

It's exactly what is you're doing here.

And I very appreciate you for this beautiful circus for three hours.

You promised only 70 minutes.

Yeah.

So right now I have very interesting couple statistic.

50 percentage people in Seattle, this mean 350,000 need support with housing.

Hundred thousand family.

If you have right now 25 percentage apartment empty, so I think Seattle Times absolutely right.

We have 10,000 apartment empty now.

25 percentage, 10,000 apartment empty now.

Now, you don't do nothing about this.

And exactly I'm confused about this four brown council who represent minority, who represent poor people, you don't do nothing.

Why are you doing here?

Oh, I forgot, I'm very happy about Seattle too.

And I'm very happy about the 700,000 emerald degenerate idiot who elect you for this circus, for this entertainment.

Hello, happy Seattle!

Say hi, my lovely Fuhrer.

Next we have Marguerite Rochard.

Followed by Karen, Glenn Gillen.

Thank you, Karen.

Yes, I would just like to go on the record to say this is the most rudest city council I've ever been in front of.

There's a lot of disabled people.

They can't sit for no two hours to hear from other people when you should be giving us the two hours to hear from us.

And there's other little things that I could talk about, too, about this tragedy and the stuff that is going on with housing.

And they say housing is a human right, but I know folk, including myself, once you get in their purview, they try to destroy the very essence of your being.

I don't have to lie about nothing.

All you gotta do is click me on and look up it in the Justice Department in terms of what I have done.

And then turn around and have to go, I say, oh, I get to meet with the chief.

I didn't, but I went to his office.

I'm talking about the fire department, because you talked about him too, okay?

And I'm talking about stuff.

that I wouldn't have ever thought I would have to meet with a fire chief, but it was around some janky housing situation.

And I'm saying, will y'all, this is a disaster.

Being, I mean, homeless, no, just look at the folk that's taking the slumlord on.

Slumlord don't want to do nothing but make you, you know, turn into what, kibbles and bits and bits and bits.

And then it's just a disaster.

I don't know, I keep repeating myself because it's like the worst atrocity that a person can even fathom.

And then half of them people that sat on the committee, I have dealt with them.

One way or the other, I've dealt with them.

And they don't do nothing either.

They're a part of this criminality that's going on in black America right now, and it needs to stop.

Somebody needs to put some real pressure on these people to make them stop.

And straight to prison they go.

Thank you.

Last presentation signed up is Karen.

Thank you for waiting, Karen.

Yes, my name is Karen Gillen and I live downtown Seattle and I like to walk a lot and I'm getting seriously concerned about the number of unsheltered people on our streets and in tent encampments.

The slideshow said that there are 22,432 individuals between the tent and unsanctioned encampments.

I'm terrified that as soon as the weather turns that these people are going to become victims once again of exposure, etc.

What I want to bring to you, I will leave this with you, is a proposal that I've been working on for some time, which I think addresses some of the needs of the people-centric issue that Council Member Gonzalez mentioned.

A lot of the people who are down in these camps are not going to go into an office building for a mat on the floor because it does not meet what they need.

They can't bring their pets, they can't be with their partners, they're afraid of their own personal safety, they may have emotional or mental health issues.

My proposal is basically like a small tiny house camp or the enhanced beds but taking existing already built sheds, putting them into a warehouse where they already have the support and infrastructure of warmth and such, so you don't have to go off and build them for $10,000 each and have portable services in there, maybe a social worker so that they can get what they need, but they have a lockable place where they can go, nobody else can go, and I think it could be very inexpensive and it could be made available almost immediately.

Plus it would be portable, could go to another place if that property was no longer available.

And a lot of our stuff takes a long time to get a neighborhood to support it, takes a long time to buy the property, to build whatever it is you're going to put there.

And we can't wait because we've got people out there right now that are at huge risk.

So anyway, I will leave you that proposal and I would love to help put it together.

Good.

I would hope we've got your name and number and I want to say thank you for coming.

And that is something we are very specifically working on.

So if you know of some spaces, some empty buildings, we're looking at some actual warehouses right now that do have fire suppression systems and are warm and have toilets close.

It's a matter of getting them, you know, opened up.

But if you've got if you know of some in your neighborhood, please let me know.

I don't, I don't, but my idea actually says how you would populate it to make it attractive to people who are on the street that need something more than what they're being offered.

Thank you.

Madam Chair, that is everyone we had signed up to testify.

I don't know if there's additional folks in the audience who would like to say something and didn't have a chance to sign up yet, but I'll hand the microphone back over to you.

Great, thank you so much for handling that.

Just a presentation.

Okay, well thank you very much all for coming.

Again, thank you for those of you who sat through this with us.

I want to say thank you especially to some of our members in the back that keep an eye on us.

I appreciate very much your coming and this meeting is adjourned.