Good afternoon.
This is the regularly scheduled meeting of the Human Services, Equitable Development, and Ventures Rights Committee of the Seattle City Council.
It's 2.02 p.m.
on June 25th, 2019. I am Shama Sawant, Council Member for District 3. I am, unfortunately, as far as I know, not going to be joined by Council Members Juarez and Harrell, who are committee members, who have informed my office that they are not able to attend today's meeting.
For our first agenda item, and this is something that we just had a press conference on, we will be discussing the lack of just cause protections outside Seattle in King County.
In Seattle, we have a just cause eviction provision, which means that a landlord can evict a tenant only if they have a real reason, and a real reason meaning a legally justifiable reason, a reason that has been documented in the law.
So it could be if the tenant did something wrong, if the rent was not being paid, or if something else happened that's been legally recorded as a problem.
Or if the property owner wants to do something different with the rental home, which is demolish it or redevelop it.
None of those situations are ideal for tenants, but it is important to fight for every law that closes existing loopholes.
So here in Seattle, we have just cost protection.
We don't have this, as far as I know, in any other part of the state.
But we have people here to talk more about that, who are more knowledgeable about it, and hopefully will have more insight.
The case that we are talking about today has affected tenants in unincorporated King County.
And we are asking King County to pass Just Cause eviction protections to cover all people living in unincorporated regions of the county.
And I believe there are, Nick Jones who's staffing my office, can you tell me if we have copies of the letter we sent to King County?
For those who are here, please make sure you look at the letter that I sent to the King County Executive and King County Council, urging them to pass just-cause protections for all tenants throughout King County, which would impact all tenants who live, renters who live in unincorporated regions of the county.
We also have sent a letter to the landlords, and we'll be talking more about this in a second, and I will share some of the content of the letter.
In any case, we are going to be discussing more about that in a second.
And for our second agenda item, we have a presentation from All Home about the results of this year's Point in Time Homeless Count.
I really appreciate you all being there.
Our presenters for the first item are already at the table.
But before that, we will have public comment.
Is anybody signed up for public comment?
There are currently no one signed up for public comment.
No one signed up for public comment.
Would anybody like to speak?
Please.
Go ahead.
Each person has two minutes.
And make sure you sign up so we have your name for the record.
Yes, yes.
This is directed at the people who are watching this.
I want to salute people that are bravely coming forward when they're being evicted for other people and not themselves and putting themselves on the line and that's what we need to do in this country right now.
You know we're living under a fascist regime and the most The most marginalized people we know are being demonized, like the kids in the concentration camps that are being abused.
And so we all have to be in solidarity with all the people who stand up for people that are being evicted.
It's just an uncruel thing that's happening.
And I salute the people that are brave.
Thank you very much.
Can you please state your name for the record?
Cynthia.
Cynthia Wetzel.
I'm an activist.
Thank you.
Please sign up so we have your name.
Hello, my name is Flora Ibarra, and I'm here to support my good friend, great leader in our community, Mariquito Argo, and the tenants who are facing this 20-day notice.
I'm here also because I want to say thank you to Tenants Union for helping and supporting our families and our communities when they are in need.
Right now, not only Maniguetu and people in that building are facing the 20-day notice, but the city is necessary to start doing something immediately, because the families and the tenants in the Mount Lake Terrace is also facing and doing that 20-day notice.
Thanks to the great mayor of the city of Mount Lake Terrace, she's supporting and on board, on wagon, to work in affordable housing also.
So I think like my sister Sissy was saying, we need to be united in this because it's affecting not only one group or one community, it's affecting every single person, especially people with low income housing.
So I'm here to support everyone because we're gonna be in this situation one day.
So thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Sister Flora.
I'll sign my name later.
My name is Sarah Stallman, and I'm only here to speak from the heart about in case people aren't aware of what it feels like not to have housing, I almost didn't.
And luckily, I was able to get in subsidized senior housing here in Seattle.
And what I want to say is the moment that you feel that you're safe in housing, it is huge.
I don't think people who have that have any idea what it's like to not have that sense that there is a space where you are safe to be yourself.
And that's all I wanted to say.
Thank you for your time and thank you for what you're doing.
Thank you, Sarah.
Assuming nobody else wants to speak, I will close public comment.
Will all our presenters please state very brief just introductions for the record and then we'll start the discussion.
Hi, I'm Renee Holmes and I'm here to support Megitu and all the residents of Seattle who are facing displacement.
I'm also here because I currently reside at the Chateau and my aunts lived there for 30 years and a developer has decided to tear the building down and they want to build a small efficiency unit.
Sean's team came and helped us organize and now we're organizing.
And the developer said that they're going to give us more time and they're offering us money to move out, but we're still waiting for them to put that in writing.
So I'm here in solidarity because we have to do what's right sometime.
Hi, I'm Violet Labatang from the Tenants' Union of Washington.
I'm a housing advocate.
I'm also a director for Advocates for Tenants' Rights.
I'm here to support not only our friend, and she's a social justice sister, but also what is happening right now in our whole state, not only in just King County.
And we want to bring light to some of the things that tenants are facing these 20 day notices.
Hi, my name is Mergi Tu.
I am one of the people who got the 20 days notice in South King County.
And I'm here today, not only to advocate for myself, I want this eviction to stop.
I don't want anyone to face this anymore in King County and Washington State.
Hi, my name is Devin Silvernail.
I'm with B-Seattle.
I'm also a member of the Renters Commission, but here in personal capacity, here to support Margeto and everyone in her building who are facing the same issue.
And then also to reiterate what Violet had said, that 20-day notices are a scourge on Washington State.
And they are, we'll talk about soon, they are used to discriminate and to retaliate, and they need to end, not just in King County, but all over Washington.
Thank you.
Thank you all, and we'll get into the discussion in a bit.
I just wanted to frame the discussion by, we also are joined by Ted Fordone.
frame the discussion by echoing some of the points that were made by Flora and Violet and others that Mergitu Argo herself has been a longstanding and highly respected community organizer.
She is currently employed by the city of Seattle and she's doing outreach for Seattle's Democracy Voucher Program.
Before that, she worked for years, both for One America and SEIU 775, defending the rights of people facing abuse and discrimination and for working people.
And the fact that she is now facing the same unfair treatment from her landlord that she has spent years defending other people against is the irony that illustrates that the only justice we can get as regular people in this world is what we organize and fight for.
And so on that note, I wanted to give Margie to some time to talk about how this whole thing came about and how you ended up reaching out to my office.
First of all, I want to thank Councilmember Kshama Swan and her staff for helping me even though I work along with this office for a while.
I didn't even think this will happen to me because I've been advocating and organizing in South King County not only residential business owners to stop the displacement.
On June 10, I pay my rent on time.
I have never got any notice, that warning, or verbally, or on paper for close to 14 years.
That's how long I lived there.
And Monday morning, June 10, if I'm not mistaken, if it's Monday, I got, after 5 o'clock when I went home, received a letter on my door hanging.
And I open it, it says 20 days I have to leave this tenancy.
If I don't, they will evict me.
I was nervous as a mother, single mother.
My daughter is coming back Friday from college, Western Washington College.
And I didn't know how to tell her we're becoming homeless.
But anyways, I tried to call the landlord, the manager, who came on board May 1st this year.
She doesn't even know me to give me a notice, 20 days notice.
So she didn't answer the phone.
Sometimes she pick up.
I can tell because I lived there for a long time.
It's supposed to go to the voice message, but it doesn't.
So I walked into her office.
This person never see me.
I don't know how she figured it out, because she mapped out the three people who got noticed.
We're all immigrants.
Mergitu, Mohamed, Lynn.
You can tell those are different names.
So anyways, as soon as I walked in, she said, oh, you were on my list to call you.
I said, how do you know who I am?
She said, you left me a voice message.
Can you tell by listening to your voice message who that person looked like?
No, right?
So this is just, it's very sad.
As I said, I'm an organizer.
I know when people map out things and try to play game, they think because my name is Margitu, I don't speak English, I'm a migrant, I can't fight for my right.
I do.
She's messing with the wrong one.
But thanks to other people who knows my work, they did send a letter, include Kshama Swang's office, NAACP, One America, And the tenant union, of course.
And then the tenant union advocate, Amy, tried to call.
Never answer.
She pick up one day, she say, oh, I'm busy, can I call you back?
And she never call her back.
So this is what has happened to me and my other people who couldn't be here today.
Lynn is also from Southeast Asia, single mother.
At least I'm better than her because my daughter's grown up.
Hers is only eight years old.
She has to take him to school instead of looking for an apartment for 20 days.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you, Murgidu.
This is really difficult.
Can you tell us, according to the landlord's notice,
When is your date to vacate?
Today's the 25th in five days, the 30th, which is this weekend.
And as I said, I work every day, nine to five.
Right, and here I have the notice that you got from your landlord and I don't think it is, I think, or rather to put it this way, I think it's completely unconscionable that you and your fellow tenants are being asked to vacate.
We don't think you should have to vacate without any real reason that the landlord is giving you.
That is why I was wondering if, Violet, could you, in terms of your experience as leading the Tenants Union's work, can you confirm that Seattle is the only city that has just cause?
And what happens when you don't have such a law on the books?
So yes, Seattle is the only city that has just cause.
When you are on a month-to-month, Unfortunately in other cities if a landlord gives you at the beginning from the 1st to the 10th a notice It is legal to vacate at the end of the month.
They have to put the notice in between the 1st and the 10th Seattle is the only one that has the just cause laws Some tenants don't even know that and so when they call the tenant union We refer them to SDCI here in the city, and then it gets the ball rolling to help them.
Which is the city department, SDCI is the city department?
SDCI is the city department.
The Just Cause laws is really good.
I mean, it's not the greatest, but I can say it's really good because they're the only ones that got it in Seattle.
The tenant, the landlord has to, if they want the tenant out, they will be given 90 days.
They also have to have a good cause to be asked to leave.
Also, if their income qualified, everybody's income qualified when it comes to Seattle because It's outrageous, you know, some of the rent stuff, so they're qualified.
They can get moving cost fees.
We always get calls on the 20-day notice.
We're not just getting it.
I can honestly tell you, this is not a unique case.
This happens every day.
This just happened last week on Mountain Lake Terrace tenants.
They're in another city.
What we're doing is making sure that we're bringing light to these notices because it increases homelessness.
Thank you.
Thank you, Violet.
Devin, do you want to add something?
I was just going to add that in the last legislative session statewide, there was a lot of activists and organizers were asking the state to reform the eviction laws.
And they won some good things, like they won for people that are facing an eviction for not paying their rent.
It used to be a three-day notice, and now it's a 14-day notice, and that's really good.
But for people outside of Seattle, one of the things that they did not win, one of the things that the state legislature completely, they considered it and they failed to do it, was passing Just Cause statewide.
So landlords outside of Seattle can still say, 20 days notice, you're out for no reason at all.
Thank you, Ted.
I'm glad, really quick, 5600 is the 14th day.
Now it will go into effect on July 28th.
Because of that law ordinances that passed, we're seeing more and more frequent 20 day notice because now it's turned into 14 days for the tenant to find help.
So thank you for bringing that up.
Thank you.
And Devin, I know you're here, you're on the Renters' Commission, but you're here in personal capacity.
But nonetheless, can you tell us about some of the principal things that the Renters' Commission is advocating for and that you took a unanimous vote on?
And I believe some of those issues touch on what's happening to Murgitu and her fellow tenants.
Yeah.
Well, definitely in relation to what's happening here and what's happening almost everywhere in Washington, Violet's absolutely right.
You know, I've actually talked to people who've gotten 20 day notices for things as little as leaving their windows open, you know, and they can get, they don't even need any kind of excuse to kick somebody out.
But here in Seattle at the Renner's Commission, recently we've been working on, you know, we passed A recommendation off to this committee for rent control, which coupled with Just Cause is needed in all of Washington State.
It could save millions of renters in Washington State.
We also sent a recommendation to this committee for 180 days notice for rent increases.
Obviously, it's not necessarily the same thing, I think it falls into line with the idea that more notice is needed for anything when it comes to our housing.
20 days is not enough, 30 days is not enough, 60 days is not enough, especially when you have a family, when you work.
And so those are the things that we're working on at the moment.
And then obviously, I think as renters on the Renters Commission, we all live in the city of Seattle and have benefited.
I know personally, myself, I've benefited from the Just Cause laws and things like that.
So I can't speak for everybody else, but I bet you if you talk to any renter in this city, they've benefited from that.
Absolutely.
And Margit, how long have you lived there in your apartment?
And also, can you tell us a little bit more about your fellow tenants, how long they've lived there?
And also, haven't they spent their own money to fix some of the things in their apartments and all that?
Yes, I first moved in in 2003 and then lived there until 2012 for nine years or so.
And then they won't change my carpet.
I've been doing a lot of different things to change in the house, but I was not able to change the whole carpet.
I asked them, they didn't want to, I moved out.
So, and then my daughter grew up there, she always say, mom, let's go move back there.
Two years later, in 2015 earlier, I moved back.
So all together close to 14 years.
Every time, we have better than this new manager, but the owner is the one who tells the managers.
If the managers are trying to change the carpet or make good living for the tenants, they will get fired.
So someone who's doing all these bad things is the owner of the property.
And my other two tenants that got the eviction, they live there for three years.
And they also, one of them, she live in single family home, not like me, an apartment.
So every time she have to change things broken down, they don't go change it because the owner won't let them.
Not only the manager have been bad or the maintenance.
And recently, the person who told us who got the notice is the long-term maintenance guy who live in the property also.
First time they cut his hour, this new property manager.
The second thing, once he was talking to me and talking to other who got notice to connect us because he works in the office, he knows who got it, he got fired.
So the maintenance person who had his arms cut short and then was fired?
He was fired.
So clearly in retaliation?
Yes, and also they wanted to evict him from the mobile home that he's living next to the owner.
And they've been doing this for a while.
You can all search Steve Harrell.
That's the owner name, owner of the land.
But the management, they try their best, except this new manager who came on board.
The couple moved down here from eastern Washington.
So they're very racist.
That's all I can say.
Thank you.
Did you want to add something?
Yeah, sorry.
That is so true.
You know, people don't like to use the word racist in housing, but housing is racist.
It's not equality in housing.
This kind of notice is the norm that we see almost every other day at the tenant union.
If you're a month to month.
you can be asked to leave for absolutely no reason.
And that's why it's vital that we plead and we ask the King County Council members to take action right now to set in motion to help more people stay in their homes.
I hate to say this, but this is the norm.
I see this all the time.
And I write letters every day to landlords.
Some of them, they get mad at me.
I actually don't care.
But I'm asking them, is this immoral for them to do this?
Because people say, the landlords always say to me, well, it's our property.
How about fairness?
Would you like to be served with a 20-day notice if you've lived there 20 years?
That's the importance of the Just Cause Laws in Seattle.
You know, when tenants call us, we just share with them the Just Cause Law, and we tell them to contact the city.
Yeah, I'd like to even echo what Violet is saying.
So the eviction lab, which studies eviction across the country, You know, they found the common narrative is with eviction that it's the last resort.
You know, it's the last thing that happens.
The landlords try.
That's the common narrative.
But the eviction lab found that normally with evictions, it's the first resort for landlords these days.
And Violet's absolutely right, and Marky too is absolutely right, that our housing policies are rooted in racism, and they always have been.
And landlords will use that to retaliate against folks.
But what's even more despicable about the 20-day notice is that you don't even have to go through the eviction process.
You don't go to court.
You put a thing up on someone's door and then you expect them to leave.
So the landlord isn't even going through with the process because they know that they would have nothing that would hold up.
Absolutely.
I think that was a very important point to add, Devin, and the eviction lab has done some incredible research to show us that evictions are not the last resort for a landlord to deal with a troubled tenant.
It's the first resort.
It's part of a completely exploding housing crisis.
Rene, You, Margeto and her fellow tenants are facing, you know, they have this notice to vacate and they have a few days left.
What do you think they should do based on your own experience of having to fight a corporate developer?
Well, they're doing some of it, calling press conferences, shedding the light on the owner, because you have to shame them and make them, you know, they can do what they want, but morally, is it right?
And make them think, would you like it if it happened to you or your daughter?
You know, you have to, because these days, a lot of developers, I think, are really just thinking about money.
But we really do have a soul, and I hope they haven't lost their soul yet.
Because what is it a profit if a man should gain the whole world but lose his own soul?
So everyone, they need to do some soul searching, continue to fight, organize with the other tenants, shed the light so that everyone knows what's happening.
And it has helped us at the Chateau.
The cadence real estate is slowing down now.
I just wanted to, when we talked in the office yesterday to some of the other, some of Murgitu's neighbors, some of the other tenants who are facing this, and one of them, the landlords gave him a rent increase, and then less than a month later, gave him the 20 day eviction notice.
And for people that don't have the piece of paper in front of them, I think that it's worth people knowing just how little information is on it.
It says, you and each of you are hereby notified that your tenancy of the premise is located at blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is terminated on the 30th day of June 2019. And on that day, you will be required to surrender possession of the premise to the owner.
If you do not surrender possession of the premise, of these premises, on or before the date set forth above, judicial proceedings will be instituted for your eviction.
And that's it.
It says nothing else.
It doesn't give a reason.
It doesn't give anything.
And then the one other thing is, McGee-Tu, you were mentioning somebody from this building that this happened to previously.
I was wondering if you could share that also.
Yeah, a person that I know for a while because I lived there and she is also from Africa like me.
I lived there and she was evicted last year.
I didn't know but I was working last Juneteenth weekend.
She came by my table Since I received this letter, I asked her, I received a letter, and what happened?
Why did you move out?
She said, yeah, I received 20 days later also, and I become homeless.
The mother become homeless, the daughter found a place with her husband somewhere else, and they've been through a lot.
It's not only that she mentioned to me they have to pay the apartment some money, and they still making a payment.
Right.
Unless the presenters here have more points to add, I was thinking that we close out this agenda item, but with a call to action.
Clearly, we have several fronts to fight on.
One of them, as Mergitu and Mohamed and Len have joined us, Tenants Union and other organizations who are alongside our office, council office, urging the county council to pass just cause and we will keep at it.
And I hope everybody in the audience will support us in this.
Everybody who's watching this will support us in demanding that King County do this immediately.
Just a couple of things on that.
As far as we know, it will, when they do pass this law, and we will make sure that they do, it will impact, it will, it will enable just cause protection in all unincorporated regions of King County.
So that means that the city, incorporated cities under King County, also need to pass their own laws because the state does not, if the state passed its law, then it would be The easiest thing, but as Ted was mentioning, unfortunately, the state legislature failed to do its political duty this past session.
They didn't lift the ban on rent control either.
And it's really an abdication of responsibility at a time when millions of people in our state are facing a deep housing crisis.
But we will need to keep fighting ourselves, so we need to keep doing this.
So I just wanted to let everybody know that we will make sure that King County does this, but at the same time, my office will also be sending letters to the city councils and the mayors of other cities in King County as well, urging them to do just cause as well, so that it protects hundreds of thousands of renters in King County.
In addition to that, we also have to make sure that Mergitu and Mohamed and Len and others are not evicted.
They don't have to vacate.
And as Mergitu said, we have a very, very short timeline.
So does everybody agree with me that we have to do something this week?
We have to fight this week to make sure that the landlord renews their leases and rescinds the notice to vacate.
We want to make sure that happens.
But we should all understand from the example of the Chateau apartment building in the central district, the way we are winning victories against the corporate developer is not by trying to get the city council to pass some esoteric ordinance.
What we did was actually fight on the ground.
So we will need to engage in some sort of action outside the building.
in the coming days, so I really hope everybody supports us.
And in the meanwhile, in the next several days, I hope you will all join my office in a call-in campaign and a write-in campaign for the landlord.
We have the address and the phone number for the landlord.
We will be sharing that.
We want to make sure that the landlord hears from hundreds, if not thousands of people, that you stand with Mergitu and Mohamed and Len, and you do not want them to be evicted from the premises.
Should we do that?
Because otherwise, they're going to have to move, and we will not have attained justice.
So we have to urgently move forward doing that.
We also have to fight on the front of the just cause.
Just one last question.
Murgi, to you and your fellow tenants, and a representative from the Tenants Union visited a King County Council member yesterday.
Can you report from that meeting quickly?
Yeah, we had a meeting with David Upgrove, council member from King County.
Even though he's not a council in my district, Larry Gusset is our district.
We had a good meeting and we're going to follow up.
He's going to do some checkup and then get back to us.
They didn't have any information about the 20 days notice, how it affect people.
So they're going to do some research and get back to us.
Okay, so thank you all for being here.
Please make sure you look out for an email from my office where we will share all the information so that you all can join in the call-in campaign.
I really also would appeal to the Tenants Union and Be Seattle to also share that with your own mailing list so that, you know, the message goes out far and wide.
And we want to make sure that all the tenants have their home in the coming years.
We will keep following up with King County.
And I also just wanted to end on this note.
As Devin correctly said, as the Renters Commission has made it very clear, and this issue has come to our committee, Renters Rights Committee, is Seattle has just caused, like you said, Violet, it is important, but it is clearly not enough.
That is not enough.
There is an eviction epidemic in our city and region.
And that's why we need a comprehensive set of policies to address this housing injustice.
As the Renters Commission has said, we need a 120-day notice.
We need also rent control.
And that's why I'm really happy that representatives from Tenants Union and B-Seattle are here, because you have stood strong on the question of rent control.
And Renee and Murgitu are shining examples of tenants, women of color, working-class women of color, who are fighting back.
And as Mergitu said, and I'll close on this, they messed with the wrong person.
So let's fight.
Thank you.
Thank you, Shama.
Our next item is a report from all homes.
So if our presenters could please join us at the table.
Hello.
Running the PowerPoint.
We'll sit here.
I don't know who that is.
I will have.
So Ted, you're going to sit there?
Actually, no.
I'm going to have Jennifer sit here, because she will navigate a website.
All I'm doing is the PowerPoint.
Good afternoon.
How are you?
Good.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thank you.
Of course.
Thank you for being here.
Sure.
Great.
I'll just navigate to that.
It's pretty easy.
Thanks.
Thank you all for being here.
If you can start with brief introductions, and then you can take it away.
Jeff Sims, Council of Central Staff.
Hi, I'm Kira Zylstra, Acting Director for All Home, the Continuum of Care Lead in Seattle King County.
And Jennifer Koldyron, the Chief of Performance Measurement and Evaluation for the Department of Community and Human Services.
Yeah, please.
Yeah, please.
Go ahead.
Did you want to introduce, Jeff?
Sure.
Today, we're...
Is that working?
Okay.
Yes, please go ahead.
Our presenters are from All Home, and they'll be presenting on the annual point-in-time count.
In this case, we label ours Count Us In.
It's a requirement that Continuums of Care regularly do a point-in-time count to take an estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness in their region.
And this is the latest report from our region, then, and allow them to go into further detail on the data.
Thank you so much.
And I really thank you for the time, and thank you for allowing us to expand the topic even further than Count Us In.
This year, I come alongside Jennifer Coldiron from our Performance Measurement and Evaluation Team at King County.
because we want to talk about multiple sources of data about what we know, the scope and scale of homelessness in the county.
So we'll present a little bit about Count Us In, but first we'll actually go into the revised homeless system dashboards that we want to walk through in more detail.
The important thing I want to start off in saying is that we know we have a crisis in this community.
We've been in a crisis of homelessness since 2015 formally, but we have thousands of people outdoors without a place to be at night.
I know you know this well, and so we want to know as much as we can about that crisis.
We do see some signs of progress that we want to build on in this year's point in time count.
But the reason that we're sharing both the point in time count report as well as the dashboards is so that we look at all sources of data, quantitative data that is.
We also need to be talking with our community, understanding the needs of people experiencing homelessness.
by speaking with community and understanding those needs.
So the qualitative information is just as important as what we will be sharing today.
But just as context, I'm going to have Jennifer kick us off in talking more about the homeless system dashboards that we've launched at the same time as the point in time count.
Thank you.
So as Kira said, thank you very much for allowing us to expand the topic and present on our dashboards.
I want to really give credit where credit is due to my staff, to Sarah Argerdale and Christina McHugh, who've spent many months working to prepare Lots of other people have also been involved in getting the dashboard where it is.
So I'm really excited to have a chance to showcase it here.
There were really multiple reasons why we undertook a redesign of the all home website portion that talks about system performance and homelessness data.
And that was really in response to feedback from stakeholders that wanted data that was more intuitive, fully encapsulating the situation on the ground.
And as we developed our data systems, we realized we had lots of disparate dashboards that weren't really telling a cohesive story.
So we went through a process of redesigning this dashboard to pull together all the data that we could bring to bear to better understand not only who is experiencing homelessness, but also how is the system responding to the homelessness crisis.
So I think you'll see something that is a little bit more cohesive.
And we think that it's really important to release this now.
We worked really hard to release it alongside the point in time, the Count Us In numbers, especially as our community is having conversations about how best to organize governance around homelessness.
We think that this is another very good data set and way of informing the conversation.
So I am here just to show you the dashboards.
So I'm just gonna navigate there now.
The dashboards are exactly where hopefully people are used to going to look for homelessness data.
So it is at allhomekc.org.
Nope, that's not going where I want it to go.
Allhomekc.org.
So this is the All Home King County website.
And in the same place where the system performance dashboards and other dashboards used to be found under our progress, you will now find our landing page for our updated dashboard.
So I wanted to kind of show you that Where the data that people normally would have navigated to for the system performance is still here under program performance, but most of what I'm going to show you today are actually new visuals and new compilations of our data.
All of the data comes from the Homeless Management Information System, so from HMIS.
And so that only speaks to households that have touched the homelessness system, so the homeless crisis response system.
So as Kira will share, the point in time count is another piece of the puzzle but also helps us understand who is experiencing homelessness but might not yet be accessing services.
So they're different data sets.
The landing page here, you'll find it has four main tabs.
Overview, Currently Served, the Crisis Response, and Program Performance, which I'll go into in a little bit.
But the landing page is really designed for somebody who's coming to this website and just wants to better understand homelessness.
maybe hear something on the news, wants to better understand.
It's really designed to pull a viewer through a series of questions.
So the first step is just, what am I looking at?
It orients people towards the data.
We then pulled out several dashboards, which I'll get back to, the key questions that people often have, that the public or media have.
Then we talk about how are we addressing the crisis?
What are the key parts of the homeless crisis response system?
So prevention, crisis response, and housing.
That often leads to questions about what's causing this crisis.
And so we wanted to make sure that we had something about root cause.
These are the five areas that OneTable explored as root causes of homelessness.
And then below, people might ask, what are you doing about this?
How are we doing as a system?
And right now, we have a rapid rehousing dashboard highlighted, but we plan to have this be a slider of different dashboards as we develop them out.
Can I ask you a question?
Yeah.
Do you on your, you know, in terms of the traffic you get on the website, do you track what the origins are like, what kind of people are accessing the website?
Is it service providers?
Is it people who are facing homelessness or people whose family members or friends are facing homelessness?
Do you have any insight into who seeks this data?
Because I would find that insightful to know.
We do track some analytics of our website.
This is, again, hosted on the All Home website, though it is our entire region's data.
I couldn't answer those specifics about exactly who.
That's not tracked in the analytics of just the tracking of how long people spend on our page and what pages they are going to.
Though we do have analytic information about who is part of our listserv, who's engaging in all homes, media and newsletter on a regular basis, generally touching really all aspects of our community.
The general public, public and private funders, service providers, people experiencing homelessness, I couldn't say to what degree, but we definitely are engaged with all of those communities and others.
So I'm going to show you a couple of the key pages, some of the newer visuals.
The first one that I wanted to highlight is, how is homelessness changing over time?
This relates specifically to the data that Kira is going to talk about with the point in time.
We wanted to have a space that was able to, sorry I'm a little, there we go, was able to help people understand the difference between the HMIS data that most of the dashboards are built off of as well as the point in time count data.
So here are four years worth of data.
The top line are the households accessing services in the homeless response system at the last day of January each year.
And we chose the last day of January because that most closely approximates the day that the point-in-time count is conducted.
So you can see that the top line is, it varies from the bottom line, which is the point-in-time count.
Both of them have increased in the past four years.
The major differences between the lines is the top line with the HMIS data is about households, so units of people coming You know, it could be a single adult, it could be a youth and young adult, or it could be a family with minor children.
On the bottom line, the point-in-time count are individuals.
So that's a difference between the two.
In addition, as I highlighted before, the households accessing services is based on HMIS data, which means that the household has to have been served by the Homeless Crisis Response System, whereas in the point-in-time count, we know that some of the people who are counted, are not accessing or engaging services yet.
So there are some major differences between the two, but as they relate to one another and sort of look at trends over time, it can be useful to understand.
One of the other things when looking at this that we wanted to highlight is that over the past four years, we are seeing more people or more households accessing services within the homeless crisis response system compared to how many are being counted in the point in time count.
To us, that means that the homeless crisis response system is scaling up to meet the demand.
We are obviously, you know, both are going up.
There are more and more people that are experiencing homelessness, but the system is also responding and serving their needs.
So that is one of the main new visuals that I wanted to highlight.
The second one is on the, it's currently served.
And this is where we look at homelessness over time and how many households are being served by the Homeless Response System.
So again, this is a snapshot of the last day of every month of the year.
I wanted to highlight again that just like what the visual that you just saw, the trend is increasing, but obviously there is some seasonality and some changes over time.
We have one major change here in September of 2018, and this is due to a change in how we are managing the coordinated entry for all queue.
On September 7th, 2018, households that were on the queue but had not been active in the homeless crisis response system for more than 90 days were removed from the queue to better align with best practices nationally.
And so that resulted in a drop of people or households that were on the queue by about 3,800 households.
So in other words, that should not be interpreted as...
Exactly.
It's an administrative change.
Yeah.
It's not a reduction in homelessness.
Exactly.
Yeah.
You'll see that ripple through the other dashboards that I'm about to show you.
So I really wanted to highlight that that's one major change that we can point to.
A specific thing happened on this day, and that's a lot of why we're seeing that particular dip.
Can just, could I ask, I know that with, so if this is based on HMIS data and individuals experiencing homelessness have some privacy rights and can make some decisions about whether or not they want to provide that information, do you have any sense of kind of the margin of error, you know, how accurate these numbers, how accurately these numbers reflect the real kind of on the ground situation?
So this speaks to the number of households being served, speaks to the number of households being served, whether or not they are identified or not.
About 30% of households coming into the Homeless Crisis Response System opt out of providing identifiable information.
you'll see that that actually impacts one of the other visuals that I'm about to show you where we are looking at episodes of homelessness where we need to be able to track one household through maybe being served by multiple programs, but from the time that they first enter to the time where they have left all services.
So with that, we're not able to match across those households if they have opted out.
But this is a count of everybody in the system.
Yeah, it's a good question.
The next one I want to highlight, well, the currently served we do break down by multiple demographics and other.
other factors like veteran status.
I wanted to show you some of that here, though, because it's a little bit more condensed.
This is the same information but shown in a more easily digestible form.
So of the 12,705 households experiencing homelessness, on April 30, 2019. And again, these are experiencing homelessness and receiving services in the Homeless Crisis Response System.
About 51% of those households were sheltered.
79% of those households were single adults.
About 11% families with children, 10% youth and young adults.
9% of the heads of households were veterans and 40% of the heads of households were white compared with 28% of heads of households being black or African American.
And on this bottom graph we have included the King County, population estimate, so it is estimated that about 61% of King County residents identify as white, and 40% of the households experiencing homelessness and receiving services from the Homeless Crisis Response System are white.
Can I ask you a question just in terms of how you classify the data?
If it's a family unit that does not have children, you just count them as single adults?
The reason I'm asking is we have actually, obviously families with children are counted as families, but we've seen a lot of community members who face homelessness who don't have children but are either a married couple or are a couple, you know, who live together.
And often the crisis they face is that they don't have shelter space that takes both the husband and wife.
Often this is a bigger crisis for people of opposite sex, obviously, because often it is gender-based shelter space.
And so it's a specific thing that I think tiny home villages are addressing where you can stay as a family unit.
So I just was curious in the data, is there any space to record a family as a family but without children, you know?
In terms of, I don't know how to answer that.
In terms of the data, we do have that information.
So, where you're seeing individuals, this is truly representing individuals.
And where you're seeing data that is reflecting households, it's households of all kinds.
It's just if it's an adult-only household, they will show up in the adult category.
I'm just not seeing it there because I think you said individuals.
They would be in here counted as adults.
But it's an interesting question that I could work with my team around how to tease that out.
But this particular data is an individual's data household or page, right?
Yes.
So this is based on the status of the head of household.
So because we're talking about households, that could be a single adult.
So they're their own head of household.
But when it's a family with children, then the racial breakdown veteran status and whatnot is based on the head of household status.
Okay.
Yeah, it would actually be useful if we are able to separate that out as well because it seems like this is a real issue that people face.
So having the data according to that would be good.
Yeah.
Okay.
I will follow that.
We have that for the point in time count as well.
Okay.
Good to know.
And in terms of veterans and non-veterans, that is, if any person is a veteran, I mean, that is sort of orthogonal to family status and all that.
It is the head of household status, which when you think about it, the adults, the single adults and the head of household for the families would be likely maybe a few of the youth and young adults, but given the age, it's probably one to one.
And if somebody doesn't answer that question, do you count them as a non-veteran or do you just not count them at all in that breakdown?
We don't count them.
It's a fairly complete data though.
Yeah.
The other piece that is of a lot of importance and highlights a brand new methodology is what we're calling our inflow-outflow dashboard.
And this is the crisis response.
Let me bring that up.
There we go.
Sorry.
No, that's okay.
So this is really one of the key features of the updated dashboard is a way of talking about how is the system responding.
So a lot of the dashboard that I just showed you is specific to households and the individuals within those households.
This section of the dashboard is about how is the system responding?
How is essentially the demand for services being met?
So we have created logic around what is an episode of homelessness, and that includes If from the time that a household enters the system for the first time, either we haven't, either they have exited everything previously, they've never been in the system before or they've been completely inactive for at least 90 days, that would be, if they come back, that would be the start of an episode.
They could be served by many programs during that episode and not until, again, they have a complete exit out of all of those systems or services or, They have been inactive for over 90 days.
Would it be considered an end to their episode?
So this is looking at households, entries, and exits.
And in 2016, you can see here that there were 20 or about a little bit less than 21,000 new entries into the homeless crisis response system, coupled with about 18,000 exits.
It's about the same, but increasing, but same proportion in 2017. In 2018, you see that the outflow bends towards the inflow.
Some of this is due to the CEA change that I highlighted before.
So about 3,800 households were taken, basically were exited out of the system.
But we did do an analysis without that change to see what would happen.
And we are pretty confident that the outflow would still bend toward the inflow, but wouldn't cross it.
So we are still, again, encouraged that we are seeing some progress in terms of the rate at which we're resolving a homelessness episode and that even though we are seeing more and more entries into the system, we are still able to respond at scale.
I just want to emphasize that this look at entries and exits is a new methodology for looking at this impact of the system.
And it is truly our most effective way of understanding true system-wide regional impact, knowing that it's not based just on a funding source or just on a particular intervention, but truly system-wide.
What is the household's experience and what is our system's ability to meet the demand of the community?
I also want to highlight it's one of the main ways that we're able to really deduplicate the data.
So by looking at an episode and figuring out how to determine what an episode is, we're able to not duplicate them and count them multiple times, even if they were served by multiple programs.
So it might have taken multiple programs to help them stabilize and exit the system.
Yes, yeah.
I'm sorry if you already specified this and I missed this, but this sort of lends into the data through entries and exits.
It is, as you said, it's counting episodes and you're trying to avoid duplication, which is very useful, what you just said.
But over time, is it accurate to say that there might be the same individual who had an episode got it resolved, but then again fell into crisis and then had another episode.
And presumably, I mean, just speaking just from, I mean, I don't have statistical numbers with me, but I would imagine that's not an uncommon occurrence either, just because people who are sort of on the brink facing an episode, then maybe something resolving it, but essentially the situation not being resolved in such a way that you're totally out of the woods, you know.
Right, and that is why we say entries and exits and not households as the baseline for this, but I think you might have some stats.
Yeah, it is definitely true that there are some households that experience multiple episodes of homelessness even within one year.
We're currently doing some analysis about like over time how much that is, but within one year the average episode per household is 1.07.
So it is actually fairly rare for the same household to experience homelessness, like have a completely new episode within that year.
But obviously those are bounded by sort of artificial calendars.
So it is something that we're looking at, is that flow.
So this methodology is really helping us look at more of the dynamics of the system.
In the interest of time, I'll just highlight that we do break down the exits by episode, so where people or households are coming from and where they're exiting.
I'm sorry, this is very difficult to read up here.
The highlight here is that 79% of the new entries are newly homeless in the past 24 months, which means that that household has not been served by the Homeless Response System in the past 24 months.
And that doesn't tell us whether they were never homeless before.
So they were either never homeless before or at least weren't homeless for the last two years.
for the past two years.
We really have no way of knowing if they were ever homeless.
People could have experienced it many years ago in other places.
So that's why we chose the 24 months.
29% of exits are exits to permanent housing.
6% are to temporary housing.
A very, very small amount are deceased.
And 46% are exit destinations not reported.
That is for many, many different reasons.
It could be that we have lost touch with that household.
It could be that they've self-resolved and didn't choose to walk back in and say, hey, I'm fine now.
You know, they've moved on.
There are many reasons why this is the case, and we've done a lot of work to improve our data quality in that respect.
Last but not least, do we have any more time or should I stop?
No?
No, we're good?
I mean, how much time do we have?
I don't remember.
I don't want to see.
We have, we have until 3.20 or something.
Oh, okay.
Then I will show you just the, yeah, the last one.
Sorry, can I?
Yeah, go ahead.
If you can go back to that bar graph.
Sure.
Keep going.
There we go.
Oh, skipped right over it.
There you go.
The bi-episode?
Yeah.
In this, we're counting 29% exited to permanent housing.
The 6% is?
Temporarily housed.
So that includes all kinds of temporary situations, all types of shelters.
Does that also include informally organized options, like if somebody found a family member or a friend to take them in?
I believe there's two categories, temporarily housed with friends or family.
either of those circumstances, you can record it as temporary or a permanent solution.
And if somebody found a space at a tiny home village, that would also go there or?
There are tiny homes.
I think that might still be a program, a service, but I don't.
And yes, and I think it depends because there are different categories of tiny home villages as well.
Right, okay.
And the permanent housing is not.
Sorry.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, go ahead.
I just want to say the permanent housing isn't permanent supportive housing.
It's just any permanent housed arrangement.
So it could be that they are with, you know, their mother and they feel like that's a permanent solution for them.
Right.
Yeah.
Okay.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Okay.
Last but not least, to go back to the landing page and again highlight that we're trying to answer a series of questions here.
The final one is, how are we doing?
This will likely change over time in terms of what we choose to highlight.
And I don't know why it's not resolving.
Sorry, it's slow here.
It's a lot of data it's pulling.
I'll just speak to what's supposed to be here.
That's true, it is.
Oh, it's been there, okay.
So we wanted to highlight here how many exits or how many household exits to permanent housing there are each year.
So we just talked about the proportion of exits that are to permanent housing.
And that's one way of looking at it in terms of proportion.
There's another way of looking at it in terms of just the raw numbers.
And again, speaking to the system scale and what the system is having to do year in year out scaling up and being able to meet the need.
So, you know, in 2016, 4.9 thousand households were permanently housed.
In 2018, 6.8 thousand.
And that's what I have.
This was just recently updated in terms of the quarter data.
We will be updating the monthly data every quarter in the same way that we did for the system performance.
But obviously, some of this will only be updated once a year.
And we will be adding new dashboards over time.
I'm going to go back to the slide deck, and we can do questions on anything at the end.
But I'll quickly go over the point in time count.
I want to tie the two a bit together to note that, for one, the point in time count is an estimate.
It is just a snapshot of one given night.
Jennifer did a great job of outlining the key differences.
Really, HMIS is only able to track information on individuals and households that are touching the system in some way, shape, or form.
And with the point-in-time count, it's just one given night, so it's just that point in time.
And it also is able to capture and count people that are potentially not connected to services at all, but not all of those individuals.
So we know that it is still a baseline.
An absolute undercount.
There's no question to that.
We're not saying likely.
An undercount is an undercount.
And so while we see progress in the point in time count this year that I'll talk about, and we also see just through the HMIS system that we are scaling up as a system.
We are doing more and more to connect people to services.
More households are connected to services every year.
And we see more permanent housing placements through our system every year.
But that is not scaling to the degree that we need.
We also learned from that data that we know more and more households are falling into homelessness in our community than we still have the capacity to support.
We continue to see that gap and need to address the crisis.
Just a bit of background, technical background on the point-in-time count.
This is a federal and state requirement, federally mandated every other year.
This 2019 count was a mandated reporting year for HUD.
And we will be doing the count in 2020, and I can talk a little bit about that as well.
2020 is a census year.
Most communities across the country, I believe, are carrying out their point-in-time counts because of that.
And can you, given that it's a hard requirement as you said, can you tell me how in recent years, especially since the crisis exploded in the Seattle region, how the point in time numbers here compare to the Bay Area or other hotspots for all of us?
Generally speaking, we've seen a trend of increasing homelessness, particularly on the West Coast and particularly in unsheltered homelessness.
So we are not alone in many of the trends that we're seeing, both in unsheltered homelessness increases, also with increases in vehicle residency and just the challenges that we see in just the changing unsheltered populations and needs of people who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness.
There are a wide variety of reasons for ranges of results in the point-in-time count.
For one, there is broad requirements from HUD about how communities carry out the point-in-time count, but not a chosen methodology.
So every community does have slightly different implementation methods for chosen methodology and implementation of that methodology.
depending on the scale of homelessness in their community, their region.
And I believe you changed your methodology recently, right?
So this will be the third.
The results that we're sharing here is the third year of carrying out the same methodology for three years in a row.
Prior to that, we were doing what's known as a hotspot counting.
really honing in on areas where people were known to be experiencing homelessness, but again, throughout the entire King County region.
Starting three years ago in 2017, we began a full enumeration of King County.
So an enumeration of all 398 census tracts in King County.
And the previous to three years ago, that was when Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness did the count, right?
Correct.
Yep.
And there's multiple components to the count as well.
Again, to adhere to HUD, this is a subset of people experiencing homelessness, so it's not capturing people who are couch surfing or doubled up temporarily or permanently staying with friends or family.
It is really covering unsheltered and sheltered homelessness.
And on the sheltered side, it is only estimating people who are in emergency shelters, safe havens, and transitional housing.
So, the sheltered side of the count that you see in the HMIS data really is even a broader subset knowing that we're capturing folks who are engaged with any type of service in the system and in the sheltered or unsheltered.
And in the new methodology, you are counting people who are vehicular, what, how do you call it?
Vehicle residents.
Vehicle residents.
Yes, and I'll get into details about that.
So the count components include the observational street count, which is what many of our community members get involved in as volunteers or as guides with lived experience to help their expertise inform how we carry out the count.
But that's the 2 a.m.
to 6 a.m.
hours on one given night this year, January 25th, and really going out into those regions of the county to do an observational count only.
Additionally, there is a youth and young adult count within 24 hours of the general street count, and then there is an effort to deduplicate those numbers.
That count is really heavily reliant on our youth service providers and system partners to really go to places where young people are accessing services and conduct a survey with young people during daylight hours.
Following the count, there is a survey conducted.
This is a sample representative survey.
So we surveyed this year approximately 1,170 individuals where we get more information on demographics and characteristics of people experiencing homelessness.
But the full enumeration is only an observational count.
So this is intended to supplement that information.
And then the sheltered count is captured through HMIS as well as a survey with programs that are not currently participating in HMIS.
Thanks, Jennifer.
I mentioned the methodology changes.
The methodology has not changed within those three years.
We have continuous improvement efforts, getting feedback each year from volunteers, from guides, from those who have helped conduct the count.
to try to make improvements over time, but those improvements did not change the actual methodology.
In 2019, we had more than 600 volunteers and approximately 130 paid guide positions.
These are, again, people with lived experience offering their expertise into the count itself, and a virtual 100% canvassing of all regions in King County.
And that was true in the past also?
The past three years.
Before that, it was just the hotspot counting.
So hotspots within the area, not all census tracts.
Can I ask, there are places that I think are not part of the census tracts, like some of the green belts and that sort of thing that sometimes people.
But that would get to the specialized count strategies that I did not mention, so thank you for calling that out.
So we do work with some partners in the community to have some specialized efforts around particular regions of the county that might be difficult to count by volunteers or maybe less safe for just general volunteer members to go out and count.
Encampment locations, sanctioned and unsanctioned, fall into that category.
So over the past couple of years, we've been able to track the sanctioned encampment sites through HMIS.
But with the unsanctioned locations or self-managed locations, we've worked with either the leadership of those locations, of those sites, or with outreach teams and or with outreach teams to make sure that folks that have relationship, folks that are part of those communities are helping estimate those particular areas.
That's where there's, you know, particularly a large number of structures or tents in an encampment.
because it would be difficult for a volunteer team to simply walk by and count the number of structures in that area.
There's additionally specialized counts for the late night bus zones or bus routes and for unsheltered families.
We have a particular centralized process for how unsheltered families are connecting to shelter and we use that as a proxy for this.
The overall results, I'm sure you're familiar by now.
I've been speaking about this a lot in the community, but the overall estimation in 2019 was that 11,199 individuals were without a permanent place to be.
Again, that is both unsheltered and unsheltered individuals on that one given night.
This reflected an overall 8% decrease, a 3% increase in those that are sheltered.
Again, in emergency shelter, transitional housing, or safe havens.
and a 17% decrease in unsheltered homelessness.
And this is the first decrease that we have seen in seven years.
We look to the point in time count, again, for trends over time.
We want to understand the direction of our system.
The estimation is not perfect.
And what we look for is sustained trends.
And so we are, of course, hopeful about the directionality of this unsheltered count going down, but also want to see that sustained over time and know that we have a lot of work ahead to make sure that that is the case and that we have the services to address that need.
In your estimation, is it accurate to say that now that you've shifted to covering virtually all of the census tracts, that you're not missing any hotspots either?
Like, so it's like a superset of what you used to do and we're not excluding any?
I think there's a better likelihood that we are capturing all hotspots.
Again, it is known that this is an undercount.
There are individuals that we are not able to observe in just a street count.
There's also people that don't want to be counted and make their best effort to be out of line of sight.
So I do think that we have, and I think before this three years, we did a good job, our coalition partners and partners throughout the community did a good job of the hotspot approach.
And yet this is still an imperfect tool.
The thing I want to point out here in particular is looking at specific populations.
So we report both to HUD and within our local community specific results for families, for youth and young adults, for veterans.
And what we see is an overall decrease across all populations.
We've now seen decreases for families with children for four years in a row.
I will say the point-in-time count is a very difficult tool specifically to measure unsheltered homelessness for families, so I say that with some caution.
But it is also a continuing trend, and so we do, again, find hope in that.
We've also seen veteran homelessness decline now two years in a row.
Unaccompanied minor homelessness has declined two years in a row now, 63% since 2017. And youth and young adults in total decreased by 28% over the last year.
That's the first overall decline for youth and young adult homelessness.
But we also have a lot of effort underway right now to truly collaborate and strengthen our efforts on the youth and young adult homeless system.
I know that our partners at All Home and the City of Seattle, our Youth Action Board and Youth Care came and spoke to the Select Committee on Homelessness about that yesterday.
So again, these are successes that we want to learn from, but also continue to measure against what we see in the homeless management information system and continue to track over time.
Some specific information, as you had asked about, we do not just track sheltered versus unsheltered locations, but where people are staying outdoors.
And so we generally saw the unsheltered population living outside or in tents and unsanctioned encampments increase in this last year, while vehicle residency decreased in the 2019 count.
This is a change from the results that we saw in 2018. It was pretty much a flip from that.
There was a decrease in tent and unsanctioned locations.
and an increase, a sharp increase in vehicle residency.
And so this is something, again, we need to learn more about.
We need to track all sources of data.
We have been tracking information about who in HMIS is reporting as staying within a vehicle when engaging in services.
But that's just started, I think, mid-year 2018. And so it's something that we want to look to as we get more data captured in multiple systems to better understand this trend.
We have sub-regional information that we learn.
We always want to emphasize that this is a regional crisis and that it's important to look across all areas, but understanding a little bit more about what's happening region by region.
Most regions of the King County area saw decreases in unsheltered homelessness.
The exception to that was Southwest King County.
Our partners in Southwest King County have shared that they felt that they had a more comprehensive volunteer pool and approach to their count this year than they did in 2018 and felt that this number really represents what they're seeing in their community.
But again...
So, sort of better counting than 2018?
In the Southwest region in particular, mm-hmm.
So in terms of disproportionality, I was here for at least part of the earlier presentation.
I used to work in tenant rights and really care about that topic as well.
What they mentioned about racism and discrimination is of course true in our homeless system and in the experience of homelessness.
What we see here is continued disparities and even increased disparities and the point in time count results.
particularly for black or African American communities, Native American Alaska Native, and Hispanic Latino.
We did see a sharp change in the results for American Indian Alaska Native.
We worked really closely with our partners and Native organizations, Native serving organizations over the past year.
to improve our efforts in how we conduct the count within the Native community to make sure that we had surveyors and Native serving organizations, surveyors that are Native people.
And we need that same equity lens truly across the entire count.
So I would say that this year's count of 10% representing American Indian and Alaska Native is more reflective of our community.
It does not necessarily indicate a sharp increase of Native homelessness.
It's more reflective.
And again, we need to take that approach in all of our data efforts as a community.
But that is compared to 1% of the overall population experiencing homelessness.
For the homeless system and what we see in terms of intersection of race and homelessness, this is the impact of hundreds of years of institutional racism.
And we know that because it is consistent not just in this community, but across the entire country.
for the same populations.
Thank you.
Additional disparities, approximately 64% of people surveyed are living with one or more health condition, behavioral health conditions being the most frequently reported.
This is in comparison to 6.4% of people in the general King County population reporting living with a disability.
I do want to note, because we've had some questions about this, that we saw some decreases in the number of people that reported having a mental illness or substance use disorder in the count this year.
And those are very difficult data.
It's difficult data to estimate.
It's dependent only on the sample survey.
And so there's limitations and fluctuations in that type of reporting.
And it is dependent on multiple questions within the survey.
So not just whether people are, experiencing a health condition, but if that is a disabling condition.
And so it just becomes a more complex data set.
Right.
So it's not, you can't just directly compare for whether a condition is categorized as a disability.
And also the above, the one above is talking about behavioral health conditions.
And this is all the population that under 65 that has any disability.
So it could be physical disability as well.
Yes.
What do we see among the homeless community, as we see through our measures anyway, in terms of what kind of disabilities are most often seen?
You know, I would not be the best person to speak to that.
I don't have that data offhand, but we can certainly provide you with more.
There's more detailed information in the full Count Us In report.
And then, of course, the data that we collect in HMIS will offer an additional set of information to share on that.
That would be great if we can have, because, and I really appreciate you including this slide specifically because we know We know that people with disabilities are, again, disproportionately impacted by homelessness, but I don't think it is recognized widely enough that this is a particular population that experiences it.
Yes.
And if you don't mind going back a slide, just because the chart draw me to race, I didn't want to miss the other piece here that we also know that people who identify as LGBTQ experience homelessness at much higher rates, particularly young people who, young people experiencing homelessness report identifying as LGBTQ at about 34% compared to 20% of the general homeless population and just 5% of the overall population, which is probably all an undercount as well.
But that needs our attention and both, on all of these disparities, we need to be explicit about our solutions to truly address the crisis.
I want to lift up just an advocacy moment here that HUD has recently released a proposed rule around the equal, changes to the equal access rule, which would actually challenge protections that have been in place for people who are transgendered and their access to housing and homelessness.
So we have been speaking with our federal partners, and we at All Home, at King County, City of Seattle, and our housing authority partners, we're all really lifting our voice to that issue and hope others do as well.
And I think that's it.
So any other questions?
I think that was the end of the presentation.
I feel like I interjected a lot of questions throughout the presentation.
Ted and Jeff, did you have anything to add?
Great.
Any final thoughts?
I feel the question of the Trump administration that I think that is really important context.
So I appreciate you adding that.
Yeah.
And obviously, we are continuing to update these dashboards.
Those are live.
The point in time count happens annually.
But the dashboards are live data, updated quarterly.
And so as questions arise, we wanted to navigate through so you get a sense of what you can find.
So please do explore and let us know what other questions come up.
We will do that.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
I, that is reminding me I need to officially adjourn the meeting.
Is that what you're reminding me of?
Meeting adjourned.