Seattle City Council Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development & Arts Committee 6/11/2019

Good morning, and welcome to the June 11th meeting of the Civil Rights, Utilities, Economic Development, and Arts Committee.

I am Lisa Herbold, the chair of the committee and council member representing West Seattle and South Park, District 1. It is 9.37 a.m., and I'm calling the meeting to order.

We will have on our agenda following public comment the following items of business.

We're first going to hear a geographic and demographic analysis of hate crimes in Seattle from Dr. Tim Thomas.

And this is a part of the city auditor's report that we heard in a previous committee meeting.

But this is specifically focused not just on the enforcement piece of bias and hate crimes and how SPD and the courts handled them, Instead, this is a look at a mapping exercise showing where the crimes have occurred and sort of an analysis of what that might mean for us as a city for how to address those crimes.

That will be followed by a presentation from Seattle Public Utilities on a joint effort between SPU and Seattle Department of Constructions and Inspections to implement some changes to the construction code to require So, we have access, equal access, to recycling, composting, and garbage facilities on every floor of new construction residential buildings.

My interest in working on this has come out of previous years' Seattle Public Utilities recycling programs that clearly shows that there is better participation in recycling residents of multifamily buildings when they have equal access to all three types of solid waste facilities.

Again, that being recycling, composting, and garbage, and have access to each of those facilities on every floor of the building.

And then finally, we will end the meeting with a presentation from the Arts Office on the fantastic Creative Advantage program, a really wonderful program in many of our public schools and soon to be in all of our Seattle public schools.

With that, we're going to go right into public comment.

We have one speaker signed up, David Haynes.

And we'll be keeping time.

You have two minutes.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt you unless you live in Seattle.

It's obvious re-election season is upon us and the aloof City Council further undermines local community.

In fact, Seattle City Council protects perverts, drug pushers, and non-citizens treading on local innocence.

If you're a drug pusher destroying lives, you're exempted from jail.

Yet if you're being bothered by a pusher or a pervert and they won't take a polite no and leave you alone, the only way to defend yourself is to go defensively hostile to let them know no means no.

Yet if a third party hears you tell a creep to leave you alone, you can get in trouble for calling evil a name.

This is more proof of the aloof, cowardice, cupcake-eating, fake-nice, mistreating, two-faced flakes in Seattle responsible for the oppressive societal implosion caused by passive-aggressive hypocrites who like to tread on locals.

God bless the overthrow of the treasonous and unconstitutional policies of city government.

It's so pathetic we go from a racially motivated UW College Pew compilation of data to blame white people to solid waste storage.

Perhaps this bill should be dumped in with the solid waste.

In addition, our recycling program has gone way out of control.

We got trash trucks coming into Upper Queen Anne like six days a week, banging and clanging.

People are coming out and hitting the door on the side of the trash truck, asking them why they're showing up at 5.30 in the morning.

All right, so before we move into the first item on the agenda, I want to also recognize the other members of my committee who have joined me today, Council Member Sawant and Council Member Bryan.

Thanks for being here.

And start with item one on the agenda.

Agenda item one is a geographic and demographic analysis of hate crimes in Seattle.

Thank you, Newell.

Join us at the table.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Start with introductions, please.

Thanks for having me.

My name is Dr. Thomas, Tim Thomas, from the University of Washington.

I study Neighborhood change, segregation, and all things that involve migration and also how crime impacts those are related to consequences of urban change.

And so I was asked to do a report on hate crimes in the city of Seattle from 2012 to 2016, and these are kind of some preliminary findings that I've had.

I'm kind of going over the major.

I'm happy to take questions at any point.

And just as an introductory report comment, I just wanted to note that I asked the auditor to include this kind of work.

I'm really glad that you were able to accomplish it and that we had your expertise here locally.

But we really wanted to sort of test a theory of whether or not our patterns of development had any relationship to hate crimes.

And so just putting that out there as sort of my thinking in asking for this work and look forward to digging in some more.

Yeah, there's probably a relationship with that, and towards the end of the presentation, we can definitely talk about those couple maps that show that.

So, just to kind of situate what hate crimes are and where they kind of occur, for the most part, hate crimes are situated within the context of neighborhoods and social dynamics, so they're not randomly distributed.

There are different kind of issues that happen that kind of produce more hate crimes than not.

And so based on a lot of the theories on hate crimes, the overall general kind of understanding of it is hate crimes are situated with the context of exploitation, marginalization, and cultural imperialism.

In other words, it's this form of dominance that one group has over another.

In particular, they're trying to inflict that, especially if they feel like their hegemony or their dominance is being threatened.

In terms of where hate crimes occur, they happen most in where there are high concentrations of targeted groups, so LGBTQ groups or racial ethnic groups or other types of groups that might be marginalized.

They also occur a lot in areas with high pedestrian traffic and residential turnover, so that's kind of a friction hypothesis when you have strangers meeting with each other with potentially differing beliefs.

And that kind of, they also happen in areas with liberal views and support for LGBTQ and racial civil rights.

So that's kind of one of the dominant issues with Seattle is we have a lot of liberal views, so we may see a high rise of hate crimes in general.

But in particular, what I found, one of the first things I found was that hate crimes are most frequently directed towards a victim's race or ethnicity and sexual orientation.

So race and ethnicity was the most dominant at 54%, sexual orientation was at 32%.

This bar graph shows the frequency of subcategories that I took and kind of concatenated into primary categories, just so it's understandable.

And as you can see at the very top, we see the African Americans.

So these are all the listings at the bottom are organized into five different categories.

They're organized into gender identity, hate crimes, other types of hate crimes.

They're very various.

Race and ethnicity in green, religion.

related hate crimes in blue, and sexual orientation in kind of pink.

And those are all listed at the bottom, but as you can see, there's a high frequency of them amongst a very few types of categories.

In particular, the number one category is against African Americans.

Number two is what SPD labeled as LBG, lesbian, bisexual, and gay.

Number three came in as what were considered white hate crimes.

So in other words, against white individuals.

Number four was Jewish.

And then there's just kind of a whole myriad of different kind of categories that take those areas.

So for example, the highest in gender identity was those that found transgender hate crimes against them.

Homeless individuals had a high rate of hate crimes within the other category.

And then all the other groups, racial groups, had pretty high rates of hate crimes, in particular Native American, Latinx, ethnic hate crime listings, Asian, and Arab.

And then again with religion, Islamic came in second as one of the primary hate crimes, and homosexual was in the sexual orientation category.

If we could just take a quick pause, I think there are some questions lining up.

On the LGBT coding, can you explain the different distinctions and whether or not the large LGBT category that does not have an additional distinction, demographic distinction, whether or not that just means that that information wasn't collected.

It's not, doesn't look like it's white because there is a white category.

What can you tell me about that, that plain LGBT category as compared to the other LGBT

And just to make sure we're seeing it right, the tall, the spike there is just the LGB, not LGB black, right?

Yes.

Yeah, it's hard from that angle, I can tell.

Yeah, so that's, this is just an issue with data in general.

It depends on who's collecting the data and what kind of access they have.

So from my viewing of a lot of the data, there's a lot of categories that just are dominant.

So they would just throw LGB, for example, they may not have had an opportunity to ask some sort of demographics, or some individuals were very insistent on saying, you know, there was a demographic component to this hate crime.

Okay, thank you.

Counselor?

Can I ask on that one?

Just follow up.

Yeah, of course.

So how is homosexual distinguished from LGP?

Is it just, these are being just reported differently, and so you don't know how to aggregate the data, so you just put them all out there?

Yeah, so they were actually, so this is directly from the SPD data, and so that was a decision made at that ground level.

And these were vetted through investigators as well and already pre-aggregated.

This is, I can't recall, about 30 different categories, and I looked at 200-something categories, and so I tried to concatenate them as best possible to present it in the most...

I took an academic lens and tried to categorize these into a space that would be, make most sense and also be most respectful to each of the groups as well.

But there was just, yeah, those distinctions are, yeah, it's unclear why they were that distinct.

Great.

Thanks.

Thank you.

So, one, just one point is the, when you say 808 total hate crimes, these were reported hate crimes from the police department.

Yeah.

Presumably, there is underreporting.

I don't know if you've, I would assume that there is.

And then, I was just curious, so this is, these are Seattle numbers.

Do they also generally mirror national?

And let me go ahead and ask another question.

What did the SPD find in terms of the hate crimes directed against white people?

What does that constitute?

How did that get reported and that sort of thing?

Yeah, unfortunately I didn't have the records related to each of these crimes, and because there were 808, I was mostly interested in trying to identify the types and locations of them.

So I'm unclear of like why, what would constitute a white hate crime over another.

What I could imagine, And that, you know, would be a question for the SPD, and they could definitely clear that up.

But they, what I would imagine is it would be something along the lines of someone feeling like, you know, their race was being, you know, they were being persecuted because of their race, and so the individual was white, and so the SPD had to kind of clarify it as a hate crime.

What goes into those details, I'm unclear, and that would be a great question for the SPD to kind of follow up on.

So are there any questions that you could answer to that about the

Let's talk a little bit about how SPD reports the data.

Right, yes.

As Tim mentioned, there are a lot of different categories.

And I think the goal, SPD's goal is to be as granular as possible so that we can see some of the, you know, the trends over time.

But, and I know that with the implementation of their new system, they are cleaning up some of these categories as well.

So I think over time, in the future, we'll see that be a little clearer.

Some of the categories might be combined in the future.

The number two thing that I found was that hate crimes occur more often in neighborhoods that are either racially diverse, that we're slightly below the Seattle median income, but very close to the median household income, or had a high proportion of renters.

So basically, I'm gonna be showing a lot of maps, and so I'm gonna be going through several geographic details, but in particular, what I wanted to highlight in this point is that the racial diversity in which hate crimes occur happen often.

So this graph kind of shows kind of a scale of racial diversity.

On the far left, you have mostly white neighborhoods.

And on the far right, we have neighborhoods with mostly folks of color.

And what I found was that race and ethnicity hate crimes definitely dominated about all of the categories, and they particularly were high within areas that had three groups of, in other words, over 10% or more of the group was represented.

So if there was 12% African American, 12% Asian, and 12% white, or over, the rest of them are white, and everybody else was under 10%.

That's how I categorize each of these.

And this kind of draws from some literature on segregation.

So this is a way to get at micro-segregation scale.

So the three groups are actually, a lot of those groups are located in North Seattle.

White Asian neighborhoods are kind of sprinkled all around Seattle.

And those came in second with race and ethnicity and sexual orientation, hate crimes.

And then mostly white neighborhoods had a high number of other crimes, as well as mostly race and ethnicity and some sexual orientation crimes there, too.

And just to respond to your earlier question, Councilmember Sawant, nationally, for the last period of time that we, that FBI has reported data, the rise in hate crimes has been 17%, whereas in Seattle, it's twice that, 34%.

No, no, I just meant the distribution is that mirroring, not the increase, I knew about that, but like the Seattle data, for example, from the SPD indicates that the majority are on black and the GPA.

I believe that it's similar nationally.

It is kind of shocking how high the black hate crimes are in Seattle, given that it's only 7% of the population.

So that's just under about 0.4% of the population as may have experienced a hate crime.

But like you said and pointed out, the rate at which how much higher black hate crimes are may suggest, I mean, with We know that there's a lot of under-reporting as well.

And there's a lot of people that face a lot of discrimination, tend to not have faith in the system.

So those are the people most likely to not report.

Whereas folks who are in dominant culture, such as whites and males, tend to have more faith in the system and will continue to report.

So I find it interesting.

That's why whites kind of showed up third in that category.

But that's based on academic theory, of course.

Number three, the largest clusters of hate crimes occur in downtown and Capitol Hill.

Smaller clusters occur in the U districts and in the Ballard neighborhoods.

All these spaces are known for high commuter and visitor traffic.

So basically what this shows is a map of the racial diversity that I mentioned previously.

As you can see, Seattle has kind of been the, On the north you have a lot of wider neighborhoods and you also have it's kind of difficult to tell the distinction with the colors but What I try to do is cover as much diversity as possible.

What's difficult too, and I just always had to point this out, it's hard to distinguish Native American populations because the census data is just very poor at kind of identifying those groups.

So I just wanted to point that out real quick.

But the four areas that I had pointed out, if you point here, so the downtown area and the Capitol Hill area are located right here.

And Ballard is located right here where we have, there's a lot of bars and street locations.

And then there's the university district here.

This is 45th Highway 99, I think, If I'm thinking correctly, it's coming up and down around here.

This is about where 23rd or MLK and 23rd kind of Rainier Valley area is located.

And of course, this is West Seattle there too.

And as you can see that, you know, those are where the highest concentrations are located at.

Is it also correlated with rate of pedestrian activity, meaning all the neighborhoods you pointed out, especially Capitol Hill, the U District, these are all very high pedestrian areas.

Yeah, in fact, in about three or four slides, I have some zoning maps, which, where I found the highest correlation of where hate crimes are occurring.

So yeah, you're correct that hate crimes tend to occur mostly in the high pedestrian, high traffic areas.

So that's why there's so many downtown.

There's a population density component to it, but there's also a transportation component to it as well.

The one thing I wanted to point out before I get into the zoning maps is that in less dense neighborhoods and particularly in the North Seattle area, this is probably one of the more interesting things that I found is that where hate crimes tend to occur along the borders of mostly white and racially diverse neighborhoods.

And this is up in North Seattle where there's a larger white population.

So what I mean by that is if you look along here, if we were just to kind of like do a regular, statistical regression, we wouldn't find this kind of relationship, but by kind of just spot checking this stuff, we see that there, you know, in these really dark red areas, these are all white dominant neighborhoods, there's not a lot of hate crime activity except for in Ballard, but that's largely because, going back to Council Member Sawant's comment about it's a high pedestrian area and also the U District, what we do find is if you just kind of pay attention, there's a lot of, there are a lot of major thoroughfares along here and along here and down this way.

But what's interesting is that they're kind of falling along the residential racial divide within those spaces as well as the high traffic areas.

So we can't just blame it on high traffic.

There's something kind of going on.

So here, you know, there's kind of a border going on.

There's a bit of border action.

a little bit of clustering going on here, and there's a little bit of clustering going on here.

So this isn't, like, extremely conclusive.

However, knowing what we know about, there's this theory called racial threat theory, which basically talks about if a dominant group feels like that their hegemony is threatened, that there may be an increase in hate crimes, and so it's potential that That's something that's going on socially within these spaces, but it's very difficult to get at that without qualitative data.

So there's, what I'm doing is drawing in a lot of theories with what I'm visualizing and trying to explain what's going on there.

A couple slides ago, you talked about, it showed that the highest level of hate crimes were where there are three or more groups that had at least 10% of the population.

So I take that as a population where there's a fair amount of diversity.

Yeah.

When you look at the, like, absolute numbers of, say, like, hate crimes on black populations, at least, from a proportionality perspective, if you go into a predominantly white neighborhood where maybe there's only a handful of black people, the rate would be lower.

But I'm wondering, is the risk for a black person to be a victim of a hate crime lower there?

or higher, I mean, it may be if there's only one person, but there's a small risk, it's like, well, if it happens, it's gonna happen to me.

I'm curious, are folks better off living in a more diverse community, or if you're isolated in a community, you see like, no, there's actually a lower instance of hate crime because you're not, is it like lack of representation why it shows up that way, or is it, you're not seen as a threat when there's just a few of you, and so hate crimes don't happen at the same frequency?

Yeah, something to kind of highlight is that What's difficult about using residential information as maps to.

to signify diversity, you're not talking about the ambient population during the day.

So downtown Seattle may be incredibly diverse, but during the day on the bus, it may be, you know, one group heading to City Hall, heading to Amazon.

There are dominant groups that kind of shift, you know, within those spaces at different times.

On a Friday night, there's a different dominant group from Bellevue maybe moving towards, you know, Belltown or Ballard or something like that.

So I think that if I was to posit a theory, it would be more related to the ambient population at the time rather than the residential space.

you can't ignore things like this where there's a very low rate of race and ethnic crimes in white neighborhoods.

White neighborhoods have benefited a lot from economic and social context.

They get policed less, they have a lot more value with their homes, there's a lot more white-centric spaces there that kind of allow them to thrive in whatever ways, whereas, you know, in, there's a lot of, in high traffic areas, you're gonna draw more attention for policing and there's economic diversity and things like that.

And so that friction can cause what, you know, kind of leads to hate crime.

So living in a white neighborhood will protect you, you know, from hate crimes for sure.

Regardless of your race?

Yeah, it depends on the neighborhood, too.

I mean, I grew up in Georgia, and I know some white neighborhoods that...

I mean, a lot of these neighborhoods still had housing covenants, too, up until about 2005, 2010, I believe.

They weren't enforced, of course, but that kind of social norm of white dominance was, you know, propagating.

Yeah, it's embedded in there.

you know, do people feel comfortable going to these spaces?

You know, we haven't been able to test whether or not hate crimes are thriving or not in those spaces or not, if that makes sense.

Does that answer your question?

I probably said that in the most academic, blurry way possible.

It's complicated.

Yeah, no, that's what I get.

I mean, I look at, you know, Ballard as being very white, but obviously, you know, in the evening, especially on the weekends, it draws a lot of, it imports a lot of people.

Right.

And there's a variety of, you know, institutions from, you know, country music to, you know, and you bring a lot of these folks together.

Capitol Hill, obviously, same way.

Belltown, same way.

And then you throw alcohol into the mix.

Absolutely, and one thing that's unique about spaces like Ballard and Capitol Hill, which we'll get into Capitol Hill a little bit more here in a minute, but since the recovery from the housing crisis, and especially since 2012, there's been a massive shift in the demographics, in the economics, in the homelessness population, in the housing dynamics, in rent.

All these things, like there's an economic atom bomb kind of dropped in 2012. And with that kind of introduction of, and if, you know, one of our primary theories is that if we have friction between strangers occurring, New residents that may not be totally tied to the city may be coming in with bringing with them values on what they believe is important, and that may conflict with what Seattle's traditionally been known for.

And in fact, if housing has become so unaffordable, you start to push out people that love the city and care for the city and nurture the city, the gardeners, if you will, of Seattle.

And so that's when you start seeing shifts going on.

And in fact, one of the items in the report that I found is that LGBTQ crimes are highest in Capitol Hill, and that's a traditionally, you know, protected space.

They used to have, you know, it's kind of ebbed in flow where it was a safe space.

It was an unsafe space, became a safe space, and now it's unsafe again, by and large.

But I don't think it's as unsafe as it was back in the, 80s and 90s, but it's definitely changed.

And that's why I'm really interested in this idea of neighborhoods that are experiencing demographic change and how we can target our efforts to address hate and bias crimes to those neighborhoods of change so that we can reinforce what the values are of those neighborhoods to people who are coming into those neighborhoods and don't have those values.

Absolutely.

And some people do have those values.

I think that part of it, the people are coming in, you know, there just needs to be a fostering of that space and those values to kind of be reinvigorated and empowering other people to step up.

So this gets into what you were asking about.

Over half of all hate crimes, 53% occur in mixed general use.

These are commercial and residentially zoned areas.

and also multifamily zoned areas.

So I'm about to show three maps that kind of describe this circumstance.

So hopefully you can kind of distinguish this, but basically the pink are general mixed used areas.

So these are kind of a mixture of storefronts and apartments and then surrounded by them in these kind of darker yellow.

These are multi-family zoned like apartment areas.

And then the light yellow is, which is about 75% of the city of Seattle is single family zoned housing.

So there's a large amount of housing.

So getting back at your question, Council Member O'Brien about white spaces being protected, I think single family zone spaces are also very protective of that too.

So that's because you don't have a lot of those intersections.

As you can see, Highway 99, a lot of thoroughfare, but these are kind of like, you'll just see very quickly that it's literally like even in small mixed use or multifamily zone spaces, you'll start to see this is where hate crimes are clustering.

And in fact, these like solo hate crimes out here, this is for example, this red one is a sexual orientation hate crime.

in the middle of a neighborhood is very rare and uncommon.

this racial diverse, this one on race and ethnicity seems uncommon and likewise around in these spaces.

But as we see, this is the Ballard area down here, down south, and this is the university district down in the southern portion right here too.

If we look at in the central Seattle location, this blue area is the downtown corridor.

This is the central business district.

And as you can see, the most kind of dominant hate crime that occurs, it's a mixture of of sexual orientation and race and ethnicity, but it seems to be largely dominated by race and ethnicity, whereas if you move just east to Capitol Hill, you start to see basically a massive splattering of sexual orientation hate crimes pushing through the Pike and Pine Corridor, there's a lot of bars in those areas, and also up towards Broadway and up north.

Right.

Obviously, you know, we have to be careful and precise in what we are inferring from the data.

And also, it's a question of the scope of your study as well.

So, I don't want to Obviously, I think we should respect that kind of academic precision.

But clearly, there is something, there's a story being told here from what you've uncovered here in the sense that it seems to me that if we need to look at, I mean, the clash that's happening, I don't mean like actual clashes, like incidents, I mean the clash in the- The friction.

Yeah, the frictions.

Yeah, that's a better word.

Obviously, income and economic questions are going to be important because it seems to me that in the neighborhoods where, for example, on Capitol Hill, LGBTQ people are more likely to be working class or low income.

And so there, and there's a higher population of LGBTQ people among the working class.

And so you might tend to see that.

And in neighborhoods where the working class is more highly composed of people of color or immigrant communities or Muslim communities, then they end up becoming targeted to, you know, for hate crimes.

And that it really sort of, in some sense, it depends on which, group it is that is seen as the...

Who's being targeted.

Who's being targeted, yes.

Yeah, for sure.

And I think one of the important things that, you know, from a social perspective, in terms of social good, these are the residents that have to put up with this type of activity on a constant manner or more frequently.

So, you know, if you would just take out the population itself, Capitol Hill faces sexual orientation crime, height crimes more.

So whoever is there, that will kind of, From a theoretical perspective, there's a lot of research that talks about how that creates what's called social disorganization, and that dismantles any kind of thriving structure.

Now, if we go back to the example of a white single-family zone neighborhood, there's a lot of social organization there.

In fact, there are, you know, a lot of stability, there's a lot of resources and availability to kind of do what you want and kind of create a common space.

Whereas with this friction, this adds to a lot of the stress, this adds to a lot of other kind of issues that could really lead to a very, how do I say it, like kind of an unhealthy social order in terms of, or social health is a better term to put it, on multiple levels.

And so any kind of crime that happens in those spaces, I mean, crime's gonna happen in dense, high traffic areas altogether, we know that.

And it's very similar here, but it's the groups that are being targeted and have to put up with this type of behavior that it just kind of adds on top to what they're dealing with already.

marginalization, in other words.

There's a couple of theories that I'm hearing coming forward, looking at the data.

And I want to try to understand how we as policymakers address that.

So one of them is this idea of these mixed-use zones, where there's more pedestrian traffic, there's more interaction.

I mean, that's obviously, by design from a city, we're trying to create more of those spaces.

It's, you know, decades ago when everyone fled the urban areas to suburbs, there was a life where you just got in your car, in your garage, and pushed the button and left, and you didn't have to interact with anybody.

And, you know, you go to work and you're secure, you know, there's, and we're like, no, we're breaking that down because there's a sense that it's so isolating to so many people, it was unhealthy.

And so now we have a place where there's a lot of interaction.

I would argue that a neighborhood like Ballard or Capitol Hill is creating a lot of really good things because of those interactions.

And, but there's also a downside to that.

I don't think you're asking, nor do I think we would want to say, well, let's eliminate these pedestrian zones and secure everyone back in their suburbs.

I don't know.

Actually, I brought up the income inequality question, because I think a lot of the sociological studies point towards the friction being caused by there's more inequality.

There's generally more.

Yeah.

You see more incidents of crime in general.

I mean, I don't know about hate crimes particularly.

Sorry.

And so then, you know, look at a neighborhood like Capitol Hill, where there's a very vibrant, active place.

And while these numbers are going up significantly, and it's appalling and unacceptable, it's still, you know, well, I don't know, as a white male walking into that neighborhood who's heterosexual, I don't feel that, and I feel like all the benefits of all this great interaction, so it's great.

So maybe the folks with different identities than me have a different experience.

I mean, certainly they have a different experience.

I don't know if it's overwhelmingly terrifying to be in there or if it's still a relatively small number.

It's just going up a lot.

But I'm trying to figure out how do we create this vibrant neighborhood that we want and have these really strong interactions and avoid the downsides and how do we manage for that?

There's a couple things, one of the things I hear anecdotally when I read the news is this sense that there are people that, whose identities are threatened, who often, who come, maybe they live in Seattle, maybe they come from outside of Seattle, that it will say like, almost for sport, we're going to Capitol Hill this weekend to cause some trouble.

And occasionally you'll read incidences of a group that was bullying or picking on someone or physically beating them up.

And it's just appalling that these folks feel like this is sport.

We're going to come into this liberal place of Seattle.

And that feels like if that's what's happening, that would require, you know, some sort of awareness and policing strategy.

If what's happening is there are people that have lived together for a long time but they're okay with the previous balance, but now are just really uncomfortable with the balance, or there's economic disruption in their life, so they're feeling insecure, and they lash out in ways that, you know, that doesn't require necessarily more police.

It's like, oh, we got a social system that we gotta fix.

And, you know, they're obviously both related, I think.

You know, when people are coming from far out of the city to climb, there's some social problems there, too, but it's harder for us to deal with.

Does the data, like, or anecdotally, can we tease that apart or is it really hard because that's not what we're measuring?

You know, I'm gonna draw in from other studies that I've done to kind of hopefully answer your question.

I used to live in Capitol Hill and I live in Ballard now and I know these areas pretty well and I actually went to Seattle Central Community College before I actually went to University of Washington.

And I'll never forget that experience because the one thing I remember the most was there's a lot of iconography or icons of social justice and LGBTQ communities, and there were a lot of people talking about this concept, this space being safe, and there were a lot of businesses that were owned and diverse, and there was a lot of opportunity to thrive in these spaces.

If you look at Capitol Hill now, what is its iconography?

All the businesses have shut down.

I've talked to recently one of the, I won't name the name, but one of the business owners who works on Broadway and says like, you know, people are just struggling to stay alive and, or stay in business.

And they've been, you know, serving there since the 80s, you know, in different capacities.

And, you know, if you think about it now, you see, you know, brand new restaurants, you see.

Upscale restaurants, upscale buildings, upscale, you know, so that iconography has been replaced by a new iconography that invites a different population.

And so that different population is then being invited into a different space that used to be dominated by a different group.

And so when that happens, you know, that's basically competition.

If you think about plant life, you know, one seed is trying to, you know, take over the field of another, there's going to be some friction at those borders.

And Capitol Hill right now is one of those borders.

And it's really uprooting happening.

I mean, I would say that's the large phenomenon that's happening, and that's exemplified by the quote you had from the business.

Because it's true, it's not just working people, it's also small businesses that are being uprooted.

And now, I mean, something that you would never have thought would happen on Capitol Hill, like a whole block of a big Starbucks.

I mean, that's...

I mean, I drink Starbucks.

I don't have the whole sort of, you know.

Sure, yeah.

They employ a lot of people.

Yeah.

But it does signify that a neighborhood that used to be known for vibrant, sort of diverse small businesses, it was, yes, it was dangerous for LGBTQ people many decades ago, but it was also the place where LGBTQ activism became, you know, it became a thing in Seattle through Capitol Hill was the genesis of that.

And I hear stories from, like just to give you an example, Sean Bagsby, who you might know, is a longtime member of IBEW 46, you know, journeyman electrician.

He's black and he actually used to work at the Safeway that, you know, the QFC that used to be a, whatever, Kroger or Safeway at one point.

I wasn't there at that time.

He was talking about how there was a whole thing of uniting black people and LGBTQ people because everybody was facing And they said, you know, let's get together.

And this was happening on Capitol Hill.

And now it's completely changed.

And so, but who gets to enjoy that change?

I think that's a concrete question.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a lot of this.

I mean, you use the plant analogy.

You referenced uprooting.

It's about an ecosystem of identity.

for a community that is being lost, and that identity is part of what protects a community, is when it's clear that the identity of a community is supportive of LGBTQ people, or the identity of the neighborhood is supportive of African American residents and businesses.

When you lose that, then you're losing a very public message about, I think, about safety.

Absolutely.

And it's, you know, unfortunately, it falls within the shadow of development.

change in rent and affordability.

I have a PhD, and if my rent goes up $200, I have to find a place outside of Seattle.

I have one of the last cheap places in Ballard, and I have a roommate because I have to.

There's a lot of people that face that.

Don't you have a roommate?

Because the last time you came to the committee, the Select Committee on Homelessness, you said you have a roommate.

You were talking about economic eviction at that time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was talking about evictions, and so maybe I study what I'm afraid of.

But I have a few more slides and I'm sure I've gone over time.

But yes, let's move on.

But thank you.

Okay, sorry.

No, don't be.

We're obviously, we have questions.

Yeah, and I want to talk about social organization all day personally because I, you know, if I was to say one thing that the city could do, it's difficult.

You can't change rents unless you inhibit, you know, certain zoning or some, you know, some other kind of laws.

And you can't change that, but what you can do is try to defend icons or spaces.

You know, if you wanted to impact hate crimes, it's a social issue, it's an economic issue for sure, but directly you could bolster, you know, small business and icons that say this is a safe space.

So this other map, real quickly, kind of shows South Seattle.

So in West Seattle, again, we see the same kind of thing around the corridors.

We're starting to see a few more race and ethnicity crimes down in the Rainier Valley, but we definitely see a few sexual orientation crimes as well.

And in kind of the heart of West Seattle in these spaces, we see a few down there, but they're a lot less frequent.

I did a quick analysis on hate graffiti under the request of the auditor, and basically, real quickly, what I found, like hate crimes, hate graffiti is reported along busy thoroughfares and in highly racially diverse block groups.

But unlike hate crimes, in other words, this is what's unique to graffiti, It is also reported in block groups that were mostly white and white Asian, which was kind of interesting to me.

It's kind of the opposite.

Maybe it's a bunch of people afraid to act on hate crimes, but aren't afraid to tag spaces.

So most of them happened in mostly white neighborhoods and white Asian neighborhoods.

This is kind of the opposite of where the actual hate crimes occurred.

And then they also, of course, are happening in general mixed use areas.

But what was interesting is the second highest count of graffiti was found in single family residential.

Now we know that there's a plethora of, and then the map that shows hate crimes basically shows a lot more dispersed kind of identification where this is, where these are located.

But hate crimes, you know, crime in general is related to age as well.

You know, the younger you are, the more likely you are to commit a crime around, adolescent to about 25 is kind of the threshold, kind of the peak threshold of crime activity.

And so graffiti is, you know, it tends to be related to that, to more youth related incidents.

And so it may make sense that single family zoned areas are affected, but it, you know, it's, but it's definitely still a, you know, kind of getting back at that concept of iconography.

It's replacing icons and putting them in spaces that might be more harmful for certain folks.

And that's about it.

Can you speak to whether or not you've looked at other cities and whether or not they have similar studies to this one in other cities?

And if so, if there are similar conclusions?

On hate crimes, no.

Unfortunately, I have not.

Might be something worth us taking a look at the literature out there.

But again, I appreciate the work that you've done.

And I want to continue working with the city auditor, as well as SPD, who's in the audience.

Detective Elizabeth Waring of the Hate and Bias Crimes Unit is here.

And I want for the city to work together having some place-based strategies to deal with these types of frictions that I think are an outgrowth of sort of redevelopment of traditional communities where places were, again, traditionally, historically safe places.

And now, or safer places, and now less so.

And that doesn't mean exclusively enforcement strategies.

I think there are a lot of different things that we can do.

You know, SPD has led on creating the Safe Spaces Initiative with having business owners be I think it's clear to passers-by and people entering the businesses that it is a safe space.

But I think we can do more to, I think, broadcast what our expectations are as a city for our values.

And I think some of that does, may involve some specific place-based enforcement strategies.

I think, again, I'm looking forward to continued work with the Office of Civil Rights on my hate crimes legislation, and specifically using that as a tool not to have additional layers of disproportionality against marginalized people in the criminal justice system, but again, as a way to enforce our values as a city and also to address the harm that is done to the perpetrators of hate crimes from acting on bias and hatred.

So that's where I'm hoping we can go, hopefully with the help of my fellow committee members.

Council Member Swan.

Yes, thank you, Chair Herbold.

And just to add to what you were saying, I just also wanted to say that part of what afforded the increased safety, let's not say everything was perfect in any way, but as you said, made them safer in the past, I mean, a big component of that was also affordability.

You know, neighborhoods being welcome, not in name.

I mean, you know, we have lots of proclamations that Seattle is welcome, but what does it mean to be welcome when you can't pay your rent and you're getting pushed out?

All the families and neighbors that you knew.

who, you know, who grew up with you being pushed out.

And I'm not talking about NIMBYs.

I'm talking about working class people having the right to the city.

And so I think, you know, I think we all should draw that message out and not like density is bad or having pedestrians is bad.

So I appreciate my colleagues, you know, emphasizing that that's not what, that's not the message of this.

Really, I think safety and public safety overall can be improved when, We don't have such economic divisions.

And in fact, the whole data being so indicative that it was after the economic boom began here that a lot of these are being observed also has a lot to do with the post-recession recovery has been only for a few and many, many have been left out of it.

Thank you.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Agenda item two is solid waste storage and access requirements.

Thank you for joining us.

We'll just do a quick round of introductions first, please.

Hi, I'm Susan Fife-Ferris, and I'm the Division Director for Planning and Program Management for the Solid Waste Line of Business, SPU.

Hans Van Duzen, Seattle Public Utilities.

Angela Wallace, Seattle Public Utilities Solid Waste.

Eric Engman, Department of Construction Inspection Land Use Co-Development Team.

Great, thank you.

Before we kick it off, just a few words.

I became really interested in this issue after a couple years of SPU recycling reports.

And one of the clear messages that I've seen is that we need to do more to assist residents in multifamily properties to do better in recycling, and I think the approach that the city should be pursuing is not a punitive approach, not to punish people for not recycling, but to look at the reasons why they may not be recycling.

SPU's been really good at helping to demonstrate that recycling rates are higher in multifamily buildings when there is equal access to each garbage recycling and composting facilities and on multiple floors.

And so from that, I've become really interested in how we can make sure that new buildings, as they're being built, new residential buildings, meet those standards.

So with that, I'll kick it off to whoever wants to get us started.

And you can tell us a little bit about the work that SPU and SDC have been working to promote this.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for having us here today too.

And I really appreciate your interest in, you know, up until now we've given you some background.

And so today we're here to talk a little bit about the engagement that we've been doing to try to figure out what will work in the multifamily area.

We've done extensive work with multifamily residents and just developing data about what will and won't work.

And so Hans, Angela, and Eric are here to talk a little bit about the engagement we're doing with the development community.

So I'll hand it off to Hans.

Sure, and Angela and Eric can cover a lot of the great input they've gotten from the business community as they've worked on this.

Likewise, appreciate the interest and the opportunity to come here and update you on what we've done related to land use code guidance and just on a big picture level, We work with DCI to make sure the land use code has requirements in it to ensure successful recycling and composting.

And that covers all building types, in this case, including certainly commercial, multifamily, single family, covers recycling, composting, and garbage.

So adequate space, safe access, successful access are all part of it.

And then, as you mentioned, it applies to all new buildings and then to major remodels as well, that code.

And we haven't had any significant changes to it for the last 10 years or so.

And so we're dealing with this day in, day out to make sure that, as you identify, that we have successful recycling.

And so over the last four to six months, we've had great interactions, as you know, with the business community and the development community to kind of understand what opportunities there are to move forward on that.

And so Angela can speak to some of what we found out.

Yeah, so I'll have the next few slides here.

And of course, please interrupt me anytime.

So while Hans mentioned that we do have land use code that does a lot to provide for resident storage for solid waste and access to that solid waste, there's places where we can improve.

And I wanted to talk about basically four areas today.

Two of them are related to multifamily and two are not, but I want to just bring them up because they're part of an overall improvement plan that we might be able to implement.

So the first is that most new buildings in Seattle that are built do not provide the on-floor access.

that we know is critical and I'll talk about our data around that.

So we would like to think about ways that we can bring that on floor access to new multifamily buildings.

The second is that the land use code has provisions for allowing modifications to storage areas and other modifications are allowed as well to the five pages of land use code that apply to solid waste storage and access.

And that modification language is really broad and also really vague.

And we'd like to look at ways to make that more clear for developers, make it more clear for architects as well as staff so that when new building plans are proposed that nobody's wasting their time on a design that isn't safe or isn't feasible, especially in these multifamily buildings where we have thousands of residents and the impact to what people can divert really matters.

So those are the two things, the variance requests and what those might look like in tightening up that language.

And then bringing that on floor co-located access to residents that really apply to multifamily.

And then a couple of things that are peripheral, but I'll just add here today.

Our code lacks clarity around when a commercial building expands.

And commercial buildings, it's really important that they have solid waste too, and especially commercial portions of multifamily buildings.

This is where this might.

come into play.

So say if they're adding 10,000 square feet of commercial office space, right now there's a little loophole in the land use code that doesn't require them to come up to code the commercial storage code that we do have to come into compliance with that to account for that extra solid waste storage that they might need when they add, say, 10,000 square feet.

So that's sort of just an oversight.

You know, the code was done 10 years ago.

So that's something that we'd like to look at.

I just want to clarify, when we're talking about storage requirements, are we talking about the standard that I described at the beginning of equal access to all three stream, storage for all three streams on every floor?

Yes.

So the third bullet suggests that that requirement already exists for multifamily remodels?

No, so the third bullet gets to the point that when a multifamily building is remodeled and two or more units are added to that building, then they need to comply with the storage square footage requirement that's in the land use table.

So it's by numbers of units and how much square footage storage you need for the dumpsters.

That's not related to on-floor access at all.

None of these bullets relate to the the issue that I teed up?

No, the very first bullet does, most certainly.

Yes, it does.

We just want to do our best to look at the various areas that could use improvement, not just the most important of on-floor access.

And so when we talk about the existing requirements, It is merely to have storage facilities on site and sufficient to handle the waste streams according to the square footage of the building or of the number of units.

And we don't prescribe where in the building that has to happen.

We don't prescribe on floor.

Thank you.

Great.

Okay.

And then the final smaller item here is that we, our code lacks any storage requirement for industrial buildings.

So it's just sort of an oversight.

Again, we have very few industrial buildings being built in the city, but while we're looking to improve things, we should add this and improve that as well.

To date, it has not been an issue.

I've reviewed one industrial building and they had the, they followed the commercial table for square footage and that's great, but we should just close that loophole in my mind.

Okay, so moving on to a little bit more background.

So my colleague Socorro Medina has done wonderful research in actual buildings in Seattle, the 300 largest buildings in our city that are multifamily or mixed use.

And we assessed those buildings for how successful they are at food waste diversion.

And in buildings that have that on-floor access, sort of that top image that we're looking at, whether it's a combination of carts and chutes or all carts or all chutes, when they have that on-floor access, 60% of those multifamily buildings have very strong food waste diversion programs.

So that means that they are diverting a lot of material.

They're doing it cleanly, so there's not a lot of plastic or other contamination.

Building management and maintenance are on board supporting that program.

60% of those buildings with on floor access are doing a really good job.

And in stark contrast, when those buildings, residents have to go all the way down, do a dark.

or really far away solid waste storage room, only 10% of them have a strong food waste program.

So we are not surprised, of course, it's common sense, but we have the data in 300 buildings to show that.

My colleague, Socorro Medina, gets the credit for that work.

And then so one other bullet point of data here that's more related to the work that I do day to day, the buildings that are coming in, new multifamily proposed buildings over the past two years, about one third of those are coming in with on-floor access.

The developers, the architects are saying, yes, we're doing this.

Some of that's because SPU has been guiding them that direction very closely for a couple of years now, but some of it's just that they've done that.

But that means that two-thirds of them are not.

So we know that developers and architects are interested enough to do it, a third of them, roughly, over the past two years, and we know that two-thirds are not doing it for various reasons.

So that's an opportunity for us to be here today and talk about improving that.

Okay.

So I think this is my couple final slides here about stakeholder work that we've been doing.

So SPU and SDCI over the past nine months or so have done quite a lot of outreach with the various stakeholders, including meeting with the Master Builder Association, Seattle Council, several times, starting back in November, going through April and June, including more meetings tomorrow.

Tomorrow?

Today.

Today.

We've also met with the Seattle chapter of the American Institute of Architects, so the AIIA.

We held a charrette.

Again, that was an SPU-SDCI joint effort, and that was in November.

And we met three weeks ago with a group of the larger developers in Seattle, including important groups like Seattle Housing Authority, Plymouth Housing, Accel Pacific, just larger developers that are doing a lot to help build out our city and provide housing.

And we're actually meeting on July 11th as well with the Downtown Seattle Association about solid waste and other land use considerations that are important to that group.

Back on the question or the data point related to new buildings, do you see any difference between the nonprofit providers, their buildings, and the for-profit providers?

and the voluntary equal access facilities in those new buildings?

I do.

It's been communicated routinely that it's unaffordable for the low-income buildings to provide chutes or to provide on-floor access.

And so has that resulted in fewer of those buildings that you've identified as voluntary compliance?

And I would say that I haven't seen any of those through to completion yet.

They're buildings that are under review.

They're in the DCI permitting process.

So I can't say for certain the outcome of all of those because they're just being permitted, but yeah.

Thank you.

And I also want to recognize Council Member Pacheco has joined us.

He was at one of our, you were at one of our stakeholder meetings with us last week.

Yeah.

Talking with the MBA.

Okay, so just to wrap up some of the feedback we received from all that stakeholder outreach that we've done, as correlates with the data I just mentioned, many of the medium and large multifamily developers are choosing to provide this on-floor access, and many are not.

They did not communicate so far that they're against providing that on-floor access.

You know, their reaction was, yeah, we already do this.

And it might be even easier to do if the solid waste storage rooms on every floor, which would be small, 25, 30, 40 square feet, did not count toward their floor area ratio, their FAR calculation.

And so SDCI and SPU are in conversations about what that might look like.

So those are the two big takeaways.

We also mentioned clarifying that ambiguous part of the code where modifications can be requested and kind of laying out when it's appropriate for those modifications to be considered and they're in support of any time that the code can be clarified but not be too restrictive.

So that was some important feedback we received from them.

And that's all I have to say.

Anybody?

Yeah, I would just really love to get a sense of what your next steps are.

In the memo that is linked to our agenda from last November, we had talked about a timeline that included a delivery of legislation sometime in March.

So how can you sort of give us an update on what we can expect from SPU and SDCI on that timeline and when we might be able to expect to see a bill?

Yeah, appreciate the follow-up question.

I mean, what we're looking at right now is finishing up the stakeholder input, which, exactly right, it is extended longer than we initially anticipated, but we're getting great feedback from the developers.

So we're anticipating wrapping that up this summer.

And then August, September is what we're looking to recommend next steps going forward for the rest of the year.

So recommend next steps, does that mean a piece of legislation is proposed?

We can't tell at this point.

We're trying to figure out, you know, get the finish our stakeholder input and get the outreach from that and identify what would be the best steps for finishing that and working with the input we get there.

So on these potential next steps, I am concerned because I would like to see a piece of legislation proposed to address this and the issue of equal access as well as the other sort of cleanup pieces that SDCI identifies as being useful as it relates to variances and industrial properties.

But I don't see any time in here identified for a SEPA process, which I understand would be necessary.

That's right.

Yeah.

If the land use code is changed and Eric can speak to it a little better, then there probably would be a SEPA process if that step came forward.

So should I take from this that there isn't agreement that we're going to be proposing a land use code change as a result of the work that y'all have been doing since last November?

I think we don't know that at this point, correct?

Yeah.

This area we're definitely focused on improving.

I appreciate your interest there, but I don't think we clearly know whether it'll be a change to the code or not.

Well, if there were to be a change, how would SIPA fit into this timeline?

I can kind of take care of that.

So basically what Angela and I would be doing after this is the August, September kind of drafting up potential language, see how it fits.

Once that happens, it goes to the executive office.

They take a look at it.

SIPA takes about a month.

And then from there it goes through council deliberation and that takes about a month or two after that.

But that's the potential down the line a couple months afterwards, three to four months.

So we're not looking at a potential SEPA process until after September?

Right.

All right.

Well, we'll have to continue discussing this.

And I'd like to know how I can help, whether or not it is as it relates to your engagement with stakeholders or having discussions with the mayor's office about, you know, addressing what my objective and hope is for this policy.

I think it's really important considering some of the challenges that SPUs identified as it relates to recycling.

I think it's really important as it relates to our climate change goals and also some of the things that you've come and talked to us as recently as our last committee meeting about our recycling waste stream.

Sounds great.

Thank you.

We appreciate the support.

Jenna, item three is a creative advantage update.

My happy face on now.

Turn that frown upside down.

Now that it's just us.

Welcome.

Thanks for having us back.

Thanks so much, you guys.

This is one of my favorite topics.

Let's do a quick round of introductions, please.

Mandy Engstrom, Director of the Office of Arts and Culture.

Tina Lapadula, the Creative Youth Project Manager for the Office of Arts and Culture.

Good morning.

I'm Lara Davis.

Good morning, I'm Larry Davis, and I'm the Arts Education Manager with the Office of Arts and Culture.

Fantastic.

Who'd like to kick us off?

Are you starting or do you want me to do the?

Sure.

And then I can volley it over to you.

So thanks for having us here this morning.

We're here to talk about the office's creative youth programs and share some of our work and some of the progress.

I think our hope is to provide some information for you, answer your questions, and hear any of your thoughts and perspectives on how this work might align with your interests and priorities.

And so, oh, I can control this, great.

Yeah, you're driving.

Great, oh, I'm driving us, thank you.

So just a super short history of how our office came into this work.

Seattle Public Schools had one of the best arts education curriculums in the country up through the 1970s, and then due to a double levy failure at the end of the 70s, as well as the rise of Reaganomics, a steady disinvestment in primary and secondary education in America and in Washington and in Seattle.

Arts education was disproportionately eliminated from public school curriculum, particularly in schools that didn't have strong PTAs that could raise the money to replace the teachers.

So, in 2007, we discovered that the school district did not even have a staff person in the Visual and Performing Arts Department at the district.

And so at the time, the Arts Commission and the Mayor's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs reached out to the district and said, if we invest $100,000 in the district, will you reconstitute that department of the district?

And they did, and we did.

And a woman named Carrie Campbell was hired, who is amazing.

And in the years that followed, we saw a pretty dramatic increase in the number of arts education programs, but it was still happening pretty episodically, and it wasn't a systemic approach.

We were then, this unique partnership between the district and the office, so a state partner and a city partner, attracted the interest of the Wallace Foundation out of New York, who gave us a $1 million planning grant that allowed us to set the goal of restoring arts education to every student in Seattle Public Schools, 52,000 kids in 100 schools by 2021. That was an incredible two years.

That was in about 2010 we got that grant.

It survived four superintendents and four mayors.

And eventually we were able to engage about 2,000 community partners, parents, students, teachers, teaching artists, cultural institutions, labor unions, and we developed a plan that is now the Creative Advantage.

We launched in 2013 in 13 schools in the Central Arts Pathway.

I can let Lara explain what the pathways are.

And just to underscore, it's really important that you noted the survival of this initiative and the importance of it through four executives on the school district side, and two- I think we're at six now.

Raj Monhas was the superintendent of schools at the time, and Greg Nichols was the mayor at the time.

Right, I mean, we all know how much, you know, new executives like to change priorities, and that didn't happen in this case on either side, so it's amazing, because it shows how important this is.

Agreed, and thank you.

And a ton of that credit goes to Lara and the team that she's built, because I do think that what has allowed this partnership to whether the political sea changes that come and go has been the fact that it really is a collaboration between the city and the district and that we are centering the needs of the kids.

It's a collective impact model and we really believe in its capacity to change lives.

and you've built a lot of other believers along the way.

Yes.

Thanks for that context, Randy.

I'm going to step back for just a second to give a little bit more context for the creative youth programs overall in our office.

The creative advantage has certainly been the lion's share of the work over the last handful of years when it comes to K-12 partnerships and investments to realize equity in arts education.

But when we talk about the creative youth programs in the office, we're also talking about our work to connect arts to careers.

And given the future of work and some other national priorities around tending to career-connected learning and workforce development, we're going to spend some time digging into that as well.

And then also share a little bit about a social impact project, the Arts in Alternative High Schools project.

that is supporting students who are experiencing homelessness and is also connected to the Connecting Arts to Careers kind of framework.

So just to give you an overview of the elements that we will be discussing.

So the creative advantage, which again is our investment in K-12 opportunities.

Really, just very quickly, want to talk about why this work is so necessary.

We, meaning the city and the district, are committed to the creative advantage because we know that young people who are engaged in the arts are motivated, they do better academically, they are more likely to stay in school and less likely to actually be pushed out of school.

and have higher college enrollment.

And I think this is a really critical element at this time, the piece around civic engagement.

Young people who have had access to an arts education are more likely to be civically and community involved.

And we know this both from longstanding national research and the impact of the arts on students experiencing poverty or how it's framed low socioeconomic students, but also from our data locally that was funded through the Wallace Foundation that showed us that the greatest depictors of who has access to the arts are by race, family income, and home language, so that we know that this is undoubtedly a race and social justice effort.

So these are our goals that we're working to realize with Seattle Public Schools and our community arts partners.

We are making sure that young people have access, comprehensive and sequential access to arts education that teaches skills and techniques, that fosters 21st century skills and is culturally responsive.

That there are arts teachers certified during the school day.

That we work to help diversify the pool of artists and teaching artists and arts teachers that are part of this work.

That we're connecting the arts to other content and subject areas like math and language arts and science.

that we have arts partnerships that are funded through the city, through the Office of Arts and Culture specifically, and that we're working to connect arts to careers.

I want to pause on that one for a second because during the research phase that Randy mentioned, what young people specifically asked for in regards to their arts education experience is that, A, they had opportunities to perform and share the creative work that they were doing, but they also wanted to understand, what is my career opportunity when it comes to an arts education?

Like, how can I parlay this into a meaningful experience as an adult?

And also, what can the arts do for me whether or not I go into a specific arts-related career?

So just a little bit of what this looks like in implementation, because, you know, when we talk about these collective impact initiatives and partnerships, it can be sometimes hard to imagine what does it look like, what it looks like in real time.

So these are the components of the work.

Creative Advantage is a district-wide initiative, meaning every school in the district will participate and benefit from the Creative Advantage.

And I think I mentioned this at our last presentation, the RSJA presentation, but we are everywhere except for the north end.

So this next school year, we're rolling into the north regions of the district.

And the way that we do this is through middle school feeder patterns called arts pathways.

So when we go into a region, we convene all of the schools that are connected by a middle school feeder pattern.

We work with those principals to cultivate a vision for arts education that meets the goals of their region.

We have them look at access data.

So they're thinking through a critical racial equity lens about how they want to prioritize the things that they do.

And again, we're connecting them so that principals who are running high schools are thinking about what the elementary and middle school students need before they come in, and that there's a more ecosystem-based approach to how they support each other.

They then go back to their schools, they form arts teams, they drive the work forward in their own school communities, and we invest in principal coaches, we train principals to support them in developing their own plans so that they can really drive this work forward.

And then we do a lot of rigorous professional development in partnership with Seattle Art Museum and other folks that we can continue to invest in the quality and the leadership of our teachers and teaching artists here, so many of whom have been pushed out of the center of the city because of a lack of affordability.

So we have artists and teachers coming from South, you know, King County, north of the county, all the way into Seattle to participate because they work here, but they're just not living here.

So this is our way to continue to invest in them.

Laura?

I just want to go back to a point you made on a previous slide.

It takes my brain a little bit of time sometimes to catch up.

On the connecting arts to careers in high school bullet and your reference to the fact that It was the students themselves who expressed an interest in this.

I remember when we started implementing Creative Advantage, there was a lot of talk among policymakers that even though there were academic studies that showed that people, young people who had an arts education were more successful in their professions and in their adult life, that it was really important to policymakers to broadcast that this was not about making better little workers, but that it was about the innate good of providing arts education for young people for a whole other variety of really important aspects of their life and their development.

So I'm really interested to know a little bit more about how the youth themselves identified this as important to them.

Yeah, I mean, we have to do a little bit of digging into the K-12 arts plan that has some information from those focus groups, but I really think that young people were expressing their connection and interest, their intrinsic desire to be engaged and have access to creative spaces and artistic opportunities ongoingly.

And so trying to understand, how can I continue to do this as an adult?

Is it something that I have to just do on the side that's outside of my profession?

Or can I live a fully creative, artistic life and have it integrated into how I make money and how I spend my time?

And for other students, I think it's just also If I want to become a teacher or a lawyer or a doctor, how can I also do that in a way that's really creative and expansive, right?

So I think that's a really good point, because what's really awesome about the arts, and Randy says this a lot, is like, the arts are the how.

So they're both...

a specific thing that you can learn about, but they are a vehicle to drive learning as well.

So when we talk about arts integration and connecting arts to other content areas, it's really about supporting young people to be innovative and creative and think expansively.

So I think that's a question that we have to continue to come back to.

because a lot of times we can say the arts at the end of the day are for X, Y, and Z to really drive these other things forward, but they have power in and of themselves, and they are expansive, so yeah.

I think it's the hope that we don't have to make our students choose between making a living and making a life.

These kids want to be realized.

They want to be actualized.

They want to participate in their community.

That's why the slide about civic engagement is so important.

And so to not have to commit to a life of wage slavery in order to be able to practice your creativity, that's the ideal, that they're able to find a way to do both.

Absolutely.

I think I also talked about this a little bit last time, but I just want to make a note that critical to our efforts is that we're evaluating the work that we do.

So we're doing a longitudinal study of the impact of the creative advantage.

Are we broadening access?

Are we closing racialized gaps in the arts?

Are we increasing teacher efficacy around teaching creatively and cultivating 21st skills and teaching in culturally responsive ways?

And we are making gains in all of these areas, but I do want to underscore and name that while we have increased access at the elementary level, we are still seeing racialized gaps at the middle and high school level, an underrepresentation and overrepresentation of students of color.

in course taking and in certain art forms.

And we know that this intersects with all of the institutional and structural racism that occurs in education, so it's also raising awareness about how the arts are a part of that, and we need to have the arts engaged in any of our educational justice strategies that are being prioritized.

And so this brings me back to the question I think I asked when you all were here on the RSJI presentation.

And we just sort of lightly touched on creative advantage.

But I was interested then, and I'm interested now, on how you're tying your experiences and the evaluation findings of creative advantage as it relates specifically to racial inequities in secondary course taking as well as the recent creative economy report.

that shows racial disparity in the creative jobs that people are accessing and how we can tie those lessons to result in different outcomes for both educating young people in school on those types of creative outlets.

or creative disciplines that will then lead to the higher wage creative jobs on the outside.

Yes, that is absolutely the question of the day and the work that we are investigating.

If the Creative Advantage in and of itself has been a monumental initiative around arts education and a game changer, I would say, for the way the Office of Arts and Culture thinks about how we support young people, the next phase of this is really around creative workforce development and the creative economy.

I'm going to Zoom past this unless you have questions about sort of how the financials work and go into this conversation about career connected learning and how we're engaging in that work and what that means in terms of our equity efforts as to your question.

So we've been bumping up our partnership with Seattle Public Schools, especially around gaps.

And some of the gaps were identified by the young people themselves in focus groups and interviews and in a research project that our office spearheaded, really asking them about what they wanted, about the kind of careers and community support they were seeking.

And what they talked about was high schoolers themselves are seeing the gaps between schools, right?

They're like, oh, I go to this school, and we have this.

And here's this other school, and they have that.

And how can I get that?

Or why don't we have that?

And why are there these barriers?

So one of the steps we were taking was to address a gap in media arts.

And we've been investing in media arts skill centers.

It started as a summer program.

We've expanded it into a school year program.

And it's housed at Seattle World School, but open to any student.

We were realizing there were all these access barriers to how young people could get these kinds of skills, which are really about fostering, first of all, a well-rounded education.

If it's inequitably funded and young people are not getting access to the same kinds of courses, that's a problem, right?

So we're trying to address that.

But it's also specifically around sort of 21st century skill development and critical thinking around media arts and audio and video production.

It's been super successful and it's going again this summer and will go again next year.

That's been awesome.

And I'll just add that the media art school centers are part of career tech education for secondary students.

So they are credit bearing.

They are getting mentorship from industry professionals to support sort of that pathway into opportunities post-secondary.

Right.

And this is a way the city has invested in supporting a gap that young people identified themselves and that we were seeing, but that they were like, yes.

And the Paul Allen Foundation also stepped up to support that work.

And can you tell me, is the Media Arts Skill Center the only one that allows draws from other schools?

No, the way that the skill center programs within CareerTech education are set up in Seattle Public Schools, and it looks very different across many different districts in the state, is that any interested high school student can enroll in a course and will be supported to travel there.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

Another thing we're doing is our continued work, which is cross-departmental around connecting arts to careers.

Career Days, especially Music Career Day, has been around for a long time.

We've expanded that to include Film Career Day, Literary, you know, Career Day, Visual Arts Career Day.

This is a way for young people and young adults to really learn from experts in the field.

and to come together between One Rail, our office, and other community arts organizations to support young people to learn workshops, from workshops, but also learn what's possible from each other.

Another project that we've been bumping up support for is our partnership between Seattle Public Schools, Seattle Colleges, and the city to support Try a Trade, which is a way that community college and community partners are supporting, exposing young people and young adults to sort of post-secondary pathways.

So it's like, okay, well, you're in high school now.

These are ways you can continue to extend that learning here.

And here are some of the places locally where you can do that.

Here are some of the teachers and teaching artists who are doing that.

And in many ways, these days are really exciting because the students are also helping, you know, so the college level students are helping high school students learn about what's possible.

They're talking about their pathways.

And so the Tri-Trade, are they day-long workshops?

How are they structured?

Yeah, they're day-long workshops.

And we work together with the district to identify different schools that have been mentioning they wanted that, doing transportation to get them there.

Yeah, they're really engaging.

I just want to underscore from the vantage point of like the Future of Work subcabinet, which I'm pretty involved in, through upstairs, this ceiling between skill centers, career tech ed, the Seattle Promise, and the colleges around really creating accredited, high-level training.

That's a transformational opportunity for young people, and that's how you change the game around who gets those high-paying creative tech jobs that are right now over-represented by white men, but how do we level that playing field and provide more access to more tools for more people?

You're creating an intentional pathway.

Yeah, an intentional conversation around not just the language but the skills, right?

I'm just super interested in the Tri-Trade, I think that's brilliant.

Typical year, how many workshops, how many different trades?

Yeah, first I do want to acknowledge that the Tri-Trade partnership has really been realize through the work of our office and Office for Economic Development and OFM.

So it's an example of ways in which we're working cross-departmentally to drive this work forward.

We, this past year, there were, I believe there were, there's been two so far.

The first one was in 2018. And the second one was this past year in media arts, graphic design, and apparel design.

And total, I think we have supported upwards of about 200 to 250 students.

And the students that are coming to this particular event are students who are enrolled in CTE and skill center programs.

So this is an opportunity for those students who are engaged in this learning during the school day to then come to the community college, meet fellow students, hear from professors, and explore these different disciplines.

And we can also follow up with exact figures on all of these things.

Yeah.

And then a couple more slides.

Right.

So this year, excitedly, we did a sort of deep dive in exploring what career-connected learning looked like in out-of-school time and in creative youth development.

So we had the idea to pull together some very amazing arts education organizations that are already on the Creative Advantage roster, who we knew are doing high-quality work.

We had them apply to be part of the creative careers cohort.

Our idea was to convene them over a series of about six months, learn from them about how they're talking about creative, career-connected learning in the creative arts in out-of-school time.

So we're trying now to connect how we talk about this work in the school day to the out-of-school time programs that also a lot of young people are accessing.

These organizations are phenomenal.

They're talking about career-connected work in a variety of ways.

We wanted to inventory some of their best ideas and have them learn from each other so that there is some parity.

A lot of what they're talking about are the higher level thinking skills that they're trying to get young people to access around communication, collaboration, and critical thinking, as well as perseverance and growth mindset, which are things the school day is also concerned about, of course.

They also want these young people to have access to skills that they're not getting in school, so this is an out-of-school-time way that they are being able to access that.

We learned a lot from this group of six, and we'll continue to sort of tap them for some of their best thinking.

Some of what they're hoping to do is you know, and they are doing is training young people to be journalists, is training young people to be music executives, to be making podcasts, to doing, you know, learning immersive technology as they're all around AR work.

Yeah, some of them are training young people to be teachers in the arts, specifically around these learnings.

This has been an exciting group to learn from and inventory and work pulling together the information we got from them now.

And then we did, we were asked, our office was asked to support homeless and unsustainably housed young people.

We decided that, we did some research around where unsustainably housed and homeless youth are really going to school, and we focused our efforts on interagency schools.

So we've been doing this amazing program, which we're calling the Arts and Alternative High Schools, and we're really focusing it at Southeast Interagency School with a program called Print for Life.

Young people are learning already from an amazing teaching artist named Greg Thornton about printmaking, but they're also learning about how to market their work, and they're selling their work at markets, like at the Columbia City Farmers Market to support their ideas and their learning.

So it's a way that we're exploring, again, using arts education to support career-connected work.

especially with our most marginalized young people.

I would say, just sort of to wrap it up and then we can talk further if there are additional questions, that our work is really rooted in partnerships and relationships.

I think we like to brag sometimes that we have a really great relationship with Seattle Public Schools and the Visual Performing Arts Department, the Community Partnerships Department that has weathered all of these changes.

And I think having a collective impact model where you have resources from your respective institutions as well as committed community arts organizations towards this shared goal means that it lives beyond some of the leadership transitions that take place.

Also, with the career connected learning as part of creative economy effort that we're working on with OED and OFM, it's an opportunity for us to think critically about what are the ways in which we can support young people during the school day, out of school time, during the summer.

support young people who are still enrolled in high school as well as young adults.

When we think about the future of work and the priorities that the city has between young people ages 14 to 24, that has become an area that we're focused on.

And how can we pilot some programs and do some research and collaborate with other departments like DEEL and OED and OFM and getting some of these things off the ground and then find ways to move that forward into the long term.

And I think that's where we're at right now with a lot the creative workforce development effort.

Randy, you'd mentioned in the, sorry, Director Engstrom, you had mentioned in the beginning that the original grant set as a goal to have the creative advantage in all public schools by 2022.

It was 2020. We've been saying 2021. It's probably more like 2022. We're on track.

We're on track for 2022.

The part of it is that something that we learned along the way was that there wasn't a one-size-fits-all solution for different school communities within the district.

So what the central area schools needed was different than what the southeast or southwest.

We're developing curriculums based on what you define as the needs in each school.

Yeah, and we're meeting each school community where they're at and allowing them to determine the plan that's going to work for them.

And you're focusing first on where the need is greatest.

Yes.

And where the disparity is greatest.

Yeah, all principles that I wholeheartedly support.

And it's interesting to look at need in different ways, neighborhood to neighborhood, what North End schools, and helping them walk through a conversation around equity and access looks and sounds really different.

Yeah, I can imagine.

Yeah.

Great.

Well, thank you again for joining us and thanks for all of your fantastic work.

Thank you for having us back.

Thanks for having us.

It's 11.12 a.m.

and the meeting is adjourned.