Seattle City Council Community Economic Development Committee 6/15/21

Good afternoon, everyone.

The June 15, 2021 meeting of the Community Economic Development Committee will come to order.

It is 2.02 p.m.

Tamay Morales, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council Member Juarez.

Council Member Lewis.

Present.

Council Member Peterson.

Present.

Council Member Sawant.

Chair Morales.

I do want to note that Council Member Sawant is excused.

I believe that's three present.

Great, thank you.

If there's no objection, today's agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

At this point, we will open the remote public comment period.

Sun, can you confirm, I don't think there's anybody signed up, is that correct?

There are no public comment registrants.

In that case, at this time, we will close the public comment period and just move on.

So, Lakeisha, will you please read item one into the record?

Agenda item one, building an equitable economy discussion and strategies.

Briefing and discussion.

Very good.

Thank you.

And I do want to note that Council Member Juarez has joined the meeting.

So thank you.

Greetings, Council Member Juarez.

Thank you.

I'm sorry for I was late.

That's quite all right.

Okay, so colleagues, as Lakeisha mentioned, we did not have a vote today, but I did want to really take this opportunity to have a community discussion and to hear from some of our stakeholders who have been doing some really important work in Seattle, thinking about what it means to build an equitable an equitable economic recovery.

So I've been meeting regularly with community organizations and small businesses to have the conversation that we started last year about building community wealth in Seattle.

I think it's even more important now that we're planning an economic recovery from the pandemic and really vital that as a city, we think strategically about how to rebuild our communities in a way that ensures resilience for our neighbors, ensures worker protections and small business sustainability.

And that really protects the rights of our low income neighbors and our black and brown community members to stay rooted in their neighborhoods.

if that's what they choose to do.

We know that our economic system doesn't serve all of us equitably.

And my hope is that as we really think about what the next system looks like, that our decisions are rooted in how we take care of people as our neighbors and as our community members.

We have the opportunity to put in place the kinds of systems that can prevent disaster gentrification, that can prevent the continuing displacement of community members.

It can really ensure that everyone gets to benefit from the city's recovery strategies and programs.

And that means really facilitating public investment in a way that expands economic opportunity and ensures community ownership and really helps build wealth for all of our neighbors.

So I'm excited about this panel that we've put together today.

This afternoon, we will be hearing from community members who will share their vision and some of their strategies for how we build that equitable recovery.

First, we will hear from Ryan Donohue, whose work I just want to note, I learned about as my capacity as the Central Puget Sound Economic Development District board member, where Ryan was presenting some of the work he's doing for PSRC.

And I do want to clarify that Council has not hired Ryan as a consultant on the presentation.

His background is listed there, but he's actually been doing work with the Office of Economic Development.

And so I really appreciate him being here to share with us some of what he learned in that capacity.

We'll also hear from Jaguna Gishudu from the People's Economy Lab.

And the final presentation includes Gregory Davis from Rainier Beach Action Coalition and Yordanos Teferi from Multicultural Community Coalition.

who will share their priorities around how we prevent disaster gentrification.

So we'll hear from all of the panelists and definitely have time for discussion once every group has gone, but please do feel free to ask questions along the way, colleagues, and then we can also have a deeper discussion afterward.

So with that, I do want to pass it to Ryan to get us started.

Thank you so much, Council Member, and to all of you for having me here.

I will pull up my slides quickly here, and I will assume that everyone can see them unless I hear otherwise.

So again, thank you.

I really appreciate the opportunity.

Obviously, this is a kind of momentous time period when it comes to equitable economic development, and I'm really impressed with the effort that you're all putting into figuring out how to do it right under a lot of time pressure.

To open, I just wanted to give a sense of who I am and where I've worked.

As was mentioned, I've done some work on economic development here in the city of Seattle, in the broader Seattle region.

I've done work in Portland and a number of other smaller and less fast-growing cities and regions.

In addition to my consulting work, I'm a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.

get to do research and work with cities and regions around the country on all sorts of issues related to economic development.

So I'll be speaking somewhat based on my experience here in the city and the region, but also just know that I'm sort of drawing on lessons from other communities as well.

What I wanted to do today and I'll try to be brief so that we have plenty of time for discussion is I just wanted to quickly define the economic problem that we're facing right now in some senses it's very obvious what the problem is but in other ways it can be pretty complicated to tease apart.

what's an immediate effect of COVID versus longer term challenges that predated it.

So I hope to shed some light on what the broader economic problem or challenges.

Secondly, I hope to trace out just a very basic, simple model of the components of an equitable economic development strategy.

And then I'll just highlight a few interesting practices or maybe best practices that might be worth a closer look as you think about what might be worth funding with the incoming ARPA funds.

So I said that I wanted to start by defining the problem, but I actually want to start maybe on a slightly more positive note, which is just making note of what's going well.

in the Seattle region.

And so this chart is obviously rather busy and perhaps difficult to absorb on first glance.

But the basic message of it is that Brookings looked at the 53 largest metro areas in the country and plotted the median wage in each of those regions against what it would take to provide a family sustaining wage.

And Seattle, this is the metro area, not the city, but the Seattle metro area is one of only five in the entire country where the median wage is a family sustaining wage.

I can talk more about the sort of methodology of that.

But the basic point here is that I think it's important to start by recognizing what's going well in this region and what could be accelerated and what we could try to connect more people and communities and businesses to.

Because I think there's often this narrative in this region that we are a hair's breadth away from becoming the next San Francisco.

And that maybe creates more skepticism than is warranted about what Innovation and tech and all these other things that define our economy can do.

So I just like to point out here that As you can see, Seattle is a long ways from the San Francisco Bay Area in terms of lack of affordability and it's doing better again than 90% or more of large metro areas so There are other places where inequality might be lower and housing pressures might be less, and there might be less of those frictions.

But the vast majority of those places just simply aren't producing as many living wage jobs as Seattle is.

So that's a positive note.

And what it tells me is that we should think about connecting more people again and more communities to what makes the city's economy function as opposed to trying to build walls around those parts of the economy and sort of keep them entirely contained.

Now, having said that that's what's working well, this is the tip of the iceberg about what isn't working well.

The way that I think about the problem right now is that COVID revealed a lot of problems that long predated COVID.

as opposed to just creating its own set of challenges.

So if we're going to respond equitably to COVID, we need to really think about the sort of cracks in the foundation of our economy that predated it.

So just a few ways to capture what those were is, first of all, this economy was simply not producing enough opportunity.

There just were not enough good jobs to go around.

If you look pre-COVID, almost half of people in the region We're either out of work or in low wage jobs.

That's pretty profound for an economy that's done as well as Seattle says.

Secondly, the one thing that you might think that this region is doing well is creating lots of new, innovative, high growth businesses.

But that's actually not true either.

Seattle is lagging places like Denver, Nashville, Austin, Atlanta, et cetera, in terms of creating new successful businesses.

So for all of the overall growth that we've experienced, there aren't enough good jobs.

We're not creating enough successful young businesses.

And then of course you add on to that the fact that there's inequitable access to what opportunity we do have.

So you can look at this in terms of jobs.

Greater Seattle's among the worst in the country in terms of diversity and tech and management jobs.

There's a huge gap in terms of ownership of potentially high growth businesses by race.

And according to Brookings, Seattle has experienced some of the slowest progress on closing geographic inequities of any large metro area in the country.

So there are a lot of challenges.

And again, those that we need to solve for in the COVID recovery are really much longer term challenges.

So when I think about responding to those sorts of things, I really think about four components of a strategy.

And this is not rocket science, but it's easy to overlook or underweight any one of these things.

So the first thing is I mentioned is this economy, amazingly enough, was simply not creating enough good jobs.

So one component of a strategy has to be doing exactly that.

The short story here is that good jobs tend to be in innovative industries, so tech, manufacturing, et cetera.

And so what I would think about, again, very briefly is, Where are the businesses that are rapidly growing in those industries?

And what can we do to make sure that they continue to grow, that they stay here in the city?

I think of something like Rad Power Bikes as a great example.

It's a sort of tech, sort of manufacturing, sort of clean tech company based in Ballard.

It's getting tons of outside investment.

It's creating jobs.

My question would be, has Seattle gotten inside of that company and said, how can we make sure that as many of those jobs are created here as possible and are connected to diverse communities as much as possible.

So job creation job preparation.

The main thing I want to say in the job preparation or workforce development sort of.

component of this is that what we know is that what works takes investment.

So we know what works, but the programs that work cost $10,000 to $20,000 per person to take them from the margins of the economy into high growth, well-paid jobs.

And unfortunately, the public workforce system tends to spend about 10% to 20% of that per person.

So we need to somehow close that gap.

Thirdly, we need businesses to change how they operate.

And a lot of businesses want to change how they operate and become more inclusive, and they simply don't know how.

And so that's why I have this bullet that says management is a technology, meaning that we help businesses all the time upgrade their technology and innovate and go through accelerators and all of these things to develop new products.

It's no different in terms of management practices.

We can help companies and teach them to become more inclusive.

And then lastly, access to opportunity.

We could solve one through three and people still might not be able to reach jobs.

People might be able to earn an income but not develop wealth.

And so we need to think about that.

Now to close, I'm just gonna walk through sort of one, I think compelling example in each of these four categories.

So in terms of job creation, this is a model that's been developed in Cincinnati called the Minority Business Accelerator.

I don't think that it should be kind of plopped down in Seattle and expected to work in exactly the way that it does in Cincinnati, but the basic components are revealing.

So the accelerator itself, what it does is it works with minority owned businesses with approximately a million dollars in revenue.

So these aren't really small businesses by most standards.

These are pretty successful businesses with 10 employees, a million in revenue, but they could easily get to.

100 employees and 100 million in revenue.

And that is a spot where a lot of companies kind of flounder and never reach their potential.

So there's a clear focus on working with a small portfolio of those high potential companies.

Before that, though, there's a minority business collaborative, which is the Urban League, the African-American Chamber, the County Economic Development Agency, and several others who don't have the capacity to work with businesses that need that really high quality support because they're already pretty successful.

What they can do is they can scan across the landscape and identify companies who are on the cusp of that.

And so this collaborative works together to identify 10 companies a year that they think could collectively create 150 jobs and they funnel those into the accelerator.

So they're really kind of the boots on the ground on the front lines.

working directly with companies and finding those that have this potential.

And then lastly, on the other side of this system are companies who've been organized such that they have changed their procurement processes and their procurement goals, and they are connected directly with the companies going through this accelerator.

And the success of this program, which has been written about, is quite remarkable.

And it's important because In general, small businesses do not create a lot of jobs and wealth.

And so there's a real argument for focusing in on those that really have the potential to do so.

So that's one promising practice.

In terms of job preparation or workforce development, what my kind of recommendation would be is to think about existing initiatives that are here in the city and the region and how those could be expanded.

And the reason I think that is that Seattle is fortunate to have amazing programs like Year Up as one example.

This is a program that connects young, low-income, primarily people of color to jobs in the tech sector.

A national evaluation by the federal government found that Year Up produced the biggest and most sustained earnings gains of any workforce development program that had ever been evaluated, essentially.

And this exists here in Seattle.

The challenge is that even though it's free and even though the results are amazing.

You have to take six or 12 months off work to be part of a program like this.

There's opportunities to create more wraparound supports for people who are going through these things because they're not able to provide child care or earn an income while they do so in many cases.

And then secondly, the problem with Europe is that it gets people into entry level tech jobs, but they often hit a ceiling after that.

So again, I think the opportunity is to think about this sort of tapestry of programs we have here and think about how can we use city resources and influence to help pull them into new occupations, to work with new businesses, or again, to provide more supports for the people who are going through these programs so that they can be as equitable as possible.

Thirdly, in access to opportunity, one frustration I have with this conversation is that it tends to be very narrowly focused on small business creation.

And small business creation is incredibly important for reasons that we all understand.

But you have to help 30 or 40 small businesses start to end up 10 years later with a single one that's still alive, generating wealth and hiring people.

So it's a pretty resource intensive way to get at building wealth.

Another complimentary approach is to think about how do we help existing businesses who may not have a succession plan and may be heading towards, their owners may be heading towards retirement.

How do we help existing businesses transition to worker owned co-ops?

So there's an example in Minneapolis, St. Paul where a nonprofit works really intensively with businesses who are thinking about exit strategies and helping them go through the co-op conversion process.

And the city government of Minneapolis has partnered with this and other nonprofits and said, we will subsidize 50 hours of consulting for a company who is thinking about going through this process to work with an entity like Nexus Community Partners.

And the hope is that as this gets up to speed, that in the city of Minneapolis, they will be able to convert 20 existing companies to co-ops every year.

This means that people automatically start building wealth without having to go through the incredibly difficult process of starting a business.

It makes those businesses more productive.

It gives the owners an exit strategy, et cetera.

Lastly, one more example in the access to opportunity category that I think is really impressive and important in getting a lot of attention is the Community Investment Trust.

Basically, the model here is that Mercy Corps and a couple of impact investors identified a neighborhood in Portland that was on the cusp of really gentrifying, and they bought a commercial property.

Residents in the immediately adjoining areas could buy shares in that property for as low as $10 a month.

And in three years, the group of people who have bought shares in this building will own it outright.

The group of people who have bought shares are, as you can see, 62% women, 49% immigrants.

It's a very diverse and generally low-income population that has bought shares in this building.

In addition to now owning a commercial property in their neighborhood that will increase in value over the next handful of years, they're able to proactively and thoughtfully lease out the space within that building to minority owned businesses and nonprofits.

So it benefits the owners of the building in terms of wealth, but also gives these businesses a place to operate out of in their own neighborhood.

So again, I'll try to be brief here, but my parting thoughts would be as follows.

Number one, I think there's obviously a lot of pressure to focus on stabilizing the economy after what's happened.

I think it's really important, however, to think about as we stabilize the small business sector and everything that goes along with it, how do we sort of take proactive steps to build new industries and build companies that are going to create good jobs and create wealth.

That won't happen if the focus is just on stabilizing the most vulnerable businesses.

Secondly, as I showed, nearly half of people in this economy previously were in low-wage jobs or out of work.

That means we don't need to create hundreds of jobs or 10s of jobs we need to create thousands of good jobs and train thousands of people for those good jobs and so I would focus constantly on how to develop programs and initiatives at scale.

And that probably means linking with existing regional systems and organizations to do that quickly.

And then lastly, I'm just really encouraged that there are investment-ready opportunities, like I've highlighted, that are being developed here in the city and the region or in other communities across the country.

And so I do think that with the right framework, you could begin to invest in some very high-impact opportunities with with the upcoming ARPA funds.

And with that I will close and I'll be happy to answer any questions later.

Thank you so much, Ryan.

Very exciting.

I do have maybe just one or two questions before we move on.

You and I had a conversation, had a couple conversations, and in the PSRC meeting that we had, I don't know, maybe it was a month ago, last month.

You shared some data about what it means to be really strategic in how we target investments.

And you highlighted the need to focus on black women for very particular reasons.

And I'm wondering if you can talk just a little bit about that research and how that focus sort of jives with what we're talking about here today.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So, uh, I worked with a big regional task force on a regional recovery framework, which was kind of convened and led by greater Seattle partners.

And that report just came out last week.

And when we developed that framework, we tried to illuminate the full scale of the challenge facing this region, which as I mentioned is. we somehow need to find a way to create tens of thousands of better jobs.

In order, I think, though, to get complicated coalitions of organizations to actually begin working together on solutions, you need to sort of come up with a nearer term, more tangible, more achievable goal, right?

Because it's hard to stay motivated when your task is to do something so big that it's so hard to see your day-to-day progress towards.

So we said, okay, we know we need to create tens or hundreds of thousands of good jobs or thousands of new businesses.

if we're going to set a nearer term goal, what logical approach can we take to doing that?

Like, we don't wanna just say, well, let's do 5% of it a year and we'll get there eventually.

Like we wanted a real logic.

And when you look at the data, it's pretty obvious where the greatest forms of economic exclusion are, and that is among women of color.

So as one example, There's this great Brookings research on who has good jobs in the economy, which here in Seattle, let's say, is $20 an hour plus benefits.

And I'll get the numbers wrong, but I can correct them later.

But it's something like 65% of white men with a college degree in this region have a good job.

If you go down then through white women, black men, et cetera.

What you find is that at the bottom of that list by quite a long stretch is Hispanic women and black women.

And you can see this in business ownership and any number of other categories.

And we also know that women of color were the last to recover from the previous recession and were the most impacted by this one.

So there's a litany of data points that basically say, If we do not build programs and strategies and investments that take their particular needs into account, they will be missed.

We've seen it time and again.

And so what we did in that process is we said, let's just start by doubling down on that population.

And the point is not that we should only serve women of color.

There's lots of other populations, depending on how you break it down, that are excluded and disadvantaged and marginalized.

But the sort of theory is that if you can build programs that work for those populations whose the data seem to say are most marginalized, then those programs should work for other populations that face other forms of discrimination and marginalization.

So I think that that lens is a really effective way to make sure that you're taking into account all of those needs when you do develop programs and services.

Thank you, thanks so much for sharing that.

Okay, colleagues, any questions before we move to the next presenter?

I'm checking the hand function.

Okay, let's move on.

I'm looking forward to hearing next from Jaguna Gishudu with People's Economy Lab.

Are you prepared to show your slides?

Yes, I think she's gonna do that, okay.

Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you, Council Member Morales.

Hello, my name is Jaguna Gishoro and I am a lab leader with the People's Economy Lab.

And today I'm going to be giving you a little bit of background on the People's Economy Lab and then speaking to some of our insights and recommendations related to an economic recovery in our region and how that recovery can better advance a transition to a more just, racially equitable and restorative economy.

Next slide.

I'll start by giving you a little bit of an introduction to our organization.

The People's Economy Lab is an organization that centers the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and people of color and works to convene community leaders to workshop transformative ideas and build new economic models that advance a just transition locally.

We are working towards an overall just transition in our broader reach, broader national and global economy, but have taken it upon ourselves to be the local leaders in guiding and sort of stewarding that transition among local BIPOC community leaders, connecting them to larger stakeholder institutions and incubating and supporting their transformative work by offering our network, our resources and our compassion and deep community in walking through their struggles with them.

Next slide.

As we talk about the People's Economy Lab, I'm going to talk a little bit about what we consider a people's economy.

A people's economy is an economy that is restorative and is just and that puts people in place first.

It meets local needs here and everywhere and now in the future.

And this means that it's an economy where investments, enterprises, and transactions are designed around our values as folks in BIPOC communities that are low income and disempowered in the current economy, and where power is seeded in the people, in those who consume those products and those who produce those products.

And so we are working around a vision of a new economy that is just and restorative rather than extractive and exploitive.

That comes from an understanding of the deep realities that folks in our communities confront.

And we work from that awareness to define the steps that are necessary to advance a just transition locally.

And we work to sort of support that advancement.

Next slide.

And so while we call this a people's economy, there are many other words for the new economy that we're envisioning and that many others around our nation and around the world are envisioning.

So you could hear it called a solidarity economy, a new economy, a well-being economy, a living economy, and maybe a circular economy.

But what we're seeing nationally and globally is that largely, Folks on our planet have realized that this economy does not work for us, both here in our city and in cities and communities around the world, and that there is something better that we all are working towards.

And so we find ourselves in different spaces, defining this economy with different terms, but we see the same values resonating across the globe.

I'm largely growing out of the experiences of our current economy, which are the experiences of colonialism, white supremacy and extraction, those realities are global.

And so what we're seeing is a global response growing out of the people to create a new economy.

We believe that that is the basis for a transition to a society that provides us all with greater satisfaction and well-being.

And we're working locally to lead that, really, actually, to support the leadership of our BIPOC community leaders who are leading that.

Next slide.

And so the People's Economy Lab was formed years ago around a set of seven values that local community leaders identified as what they saw as really the basis for working towards that new economy in our region.

The first was around local needs, really focusing our work and our crafting of this new economy around local needs, local ownership, and a local ecosystem.

Resilience, cultivating a diverse economy that is not centered in powerful, large stakeholders, but one that is distributed, much like our natural ecosystem.

Being resilient in the sense of learning and adapting from our experiences in our indigenous knowledge and practicing continuous innovation in response to the forces that we're confronting every day.

Another one was equity.

We want to advance an economy and work that provides equitable access, community ownership, and advances democratic decision-making and leadership.

Again, shifting power back to the people on the ground who are not empowered in this current economy.

Getting back to what we consider the natural state of those people, being empowered, not disempowered.

Next is stewardship, care and service to people and planet.

That is what drives us.

We feel that that should be the core driving motivation of this economy and this work.

Rather than profit, rather than power, care and stewardship of people, planet and the commons.

Next is collaboration versus competition.

We want the basis of all our work to be collaboration.

Always looking to collaborate and cooperate and looking to break down systems of hierarchy which inherently disempower our people.

Next is integrity.

We are looking to advance work in an economy that's transparent, that's inclusive in decision-making, and that brings in the interests of as many folks as possible.

And we want to align all our work and all our goals with community priorities.

So we strive to authentically and transparently work to advance goals of community.

We understand that there can be challenges with that transparency and that inclusiveness, but we feel that the value in terms of long-term sustainability is rooted in the integrity of the work.

Next is relationships.

We believe that in the value of deep relationships, we believe that this work becomes substantive and effective as deep relationships are engaged because it enables us to get to the core issues and core realities that we're trying to confront.

And so while engaging in deep relationships through our work may be costly, we feel that those investments and those deep relationships are really what will allow us to build something that's sustainable.

Next slide.

And so I'm going to speak now a little bit about the Just Transition Framework.

The People's Economy Lab operates within this Just Transition Framework, which is a framework drawn from the environmental justice movement, which which articulates specific strategies to transition us from an extractive economy to a living economy.

And so as you'll see on our screen, what we identify as the extractive economy is our current economy based on a worldview drawn from historical realities such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and consumerism.

An economy where resources are extracted, where work is exploited, and where this system is protected by militarism, police protection, et cetera, for the purpose of enclosing wealth and power.

And so in terms of shifting from that economy, we're looking to shift to an economy based on a worldview of sacredness and caring, where we feel most of our people's indigenous values align.

an economy where resources are not extracted but are used as something that is regenerative, where the earth is viewed as a part of our being rather than an inanimate object to extract from, where we focus on cooperation through work, not of exploitation of labor for the purpose of profit, and where the ultimate purpose of the economy that we're working towards is ecological and social well-being rather than the enclosure of wealth and power or dominance of the earth.

And so again, we feel that this system will be ultimately governed by deep democracy rooted in deep relationships and so.

As that is the great living or people's economy that we'd like to achieve, we understand that there's a lot of work that it takes to get there.

And so the Just Transition Framework are a set of strategies to enable us to work towards those goals.

And so that involves stopping the bad, stopping those elements of the extractive economy that we need to end immediately and building the new.

It also involves divesting from power systems of the extractive economy and investing in new systems of the living economy.

And so the People's Economy Lab focuses on our area of this strategy, which is building the new.

And we focus on building new economic models that center and empower communities of color locally and support local leaders and communities in advancing their work towards a just transition here in Seattle and Western Washington.

Next slide.

And so as part of our work.

A few months ago we convened a coalition of community leaders to really do to do a just transition mapping project to really map the extractive economy is our local BIPOC community see it currently.

To then map the living or regenerative economy that our leaders envision on behalf of their communities, and then to really work through mapping the areas of intervention and the barriers that are there on our path towards that new economy.

So some of the participants in that experience are on this call, but we had the African Chamber of Commerce, Rainier Beach Action Coalition, Black Dot, Nailahi Fund, MCC, Puget Sound SAGE, African Communities Housing Development, among others, gathering over a series of about six convenings together to map the extractive and living economies and really talk through these specific areas of intervention.

And the specific barriers that they see as most relevant in getting us to a more just economy locally.

We found it to be a tremendously valuable experience in bringing those leaders together around that vision and being able to really.

sort of do work in deep community with those leaders.

They gave even more time that they're giving than they're giving regularly for their work.

But we were able to collectively come to alignment on our vision for a more restorative economy and to collectively identify those opportune areas of intervention that we see as leaders and really to shape a clear picture of what we feel that just transition looks like locally and what the new living economy can look like locally here in our area.

We feel that by giving that vision life and by building relationships through this process, we are helping to build that momentum and take steps towards that.

And so, again, during those mapping project exercises we spoke towards our strategic framework for address transition.

And so, in those conversations, what we really did realize was that this transition is a process of navigating tremendous contradictions.

That we will not be able to get to our living economy tomorrow, but that we will need to be able to really be able to assess the extractive economy and opportunities for advancing to this living economy in a very sophisticated way that requires us to navigate a myriad of contradictions.

There's no formula for this.

There is no roadmap for this currently, but we believe that we are crafting what is essentially the roadmap and formula that others will look to in the future.

But what we realize that it takes is.

The investment of into this process.

And a collective effort when we're able to mobilize.

a tremendous reservoir of community capital, experience, and genius, we're able to see things that none of us can see individually.

And we're able to really connect in the spirit of deep community caring and sacredness.

We're able to unlock a different level of collaboration from those folks.

And so we feel like that process is something that needs to continue for us to work towards that local just transition.

Next slide.

And so as we're talking about some of the key defining characteristics of this new economy and just transition locally, what we see as keys are decision making and ownership of production and consumption moving to the hands of workers and consumers in our BIPOC communities.

What we would like to see ultimately is that the purpose and scale of production is ultimately shifted to meet the needs of our people in place.

We know that that is not where the economy is right now, but we believe that that is the goal that we need to be working towards.

And that ultimately, though navigating the contradictions will be difficult and will be challenging, we feel that the only way for us to really overcome them is to have a clear vision of what that goal is.

Next slide.

And so one of our other groups that we convene as a lab is the Community Capital Working Group, which is a group of local stakeholders from community development organizations, financial institutions, and government institutions who are interested and invested in advancing more access to capital that is affordable, that is equitable, and that meets the needs of our local BIPOC communities.

Next slide.

And so in our conversations with our community capital group, we've asked questions about what's missing from our capital ecosystem and what some of the barriers are to their success.

Some of the feedback that we've received from folks are that the community capital ecosystem is not adequately identifying and addressing the root causes of some of the inequality that creates barriers to capital.

Access to affordable capital is still a problem.

Underwriting and the financial system is very much tied to the five C's and our businesses and our consumers are not able to access financing when dealing with that paradigm for the most part.

We are looking for a holistic approach to lending.

They're also looking for culturally relevant technical assistance providers.

And when we say technical assistance, we see that term a lot.

Ultimately, what we need is human capital.

Largely, it uses the term technical assistance, but what we found from our organizations, from our small business people, is what they need are the human capital supports that white people have in their communities.

They don't have you know wealthy bankers they don't have lawyers they don't have accountants they don't have rich uncles they don't have rich cousins to give them this ecosystem of support in order for them to be successful in the current system, we are going to need to provide that system for them.

Anything less than that.

ultimately fails to some degree.

For the most part that support is called technical assistance but I think that we need to really have a more a wider view of what that actually is so we understand what is needed and what's being provided because often the term technical assistance is a bit reductive.

We've heard that commercial affordability and lease agreements are still big challenges.

We have heard that new policies are needed in legislation to create the the supports for our folks to advance past some of these barriers.

And we have heard that there's a big role for anchor institutions, such as large government institutions, large businesses to work with BIPOC community coalitions and businesses to find solutions to these problems.

We're seeing too many silos.

And again, we're hearing that human capital needs to be invested.

Next slide.

And so, throughout the last year, we've worked as a lab to support the leaders which are advancing new models that we feel will be the basis of a more just and restorative economy.

As part of that we have launched the new frontline community fellowship.

which is a fellowship program through which we provide direct financial support and ongoing technical assistance, consulting, and a network of support to five projects in our local area led by BIPOC communities and leaders that are advancing new economic models that are transforming.

And so those include Lata Ahmed.

Our fellows include Lata Ahmed of the Drivers Union, which is the union of drivers that fought for $15 an hour.

They are fighting for benefits for gig workers and rideshare drivers and are working to develop really a framework for mutual aid and for shifting power to gig workers.

in an environment where technology is being used more to disempower them.

We're working with them to figure out how to shape a community-controlled entity that allows folks that are driving Lyft and Uber and doing gig work to access power, to organize themselves to advance mutual aid, and to take a leadership role.

and also charting what does an inclusive economy look like locally?

What do the rideshare drivers want?

What position do they want to play in this shaping of a new inclusive economy?

We feel like this organization is sort of a great seed for that leadership organization that can represent the interests and the realities of gig workers, largely low-income gig workers of color here.

We also have Aerial Banks, a plant-based food share, which is a community-based food share program, which is building a local BIPOC, largely women-led food ecosystem rooted in Southeast Seattle.

Aerial Banks started this organization by giving out food to her community at Cafe Red in Southeast Seattle.

And through her direct community service and outreach, she was able to build out a local community food ecosystem.

that we've now been able to support her in expanding.

So we feel that a local leader like this, a black woman in community who has created a solution in her community deserves to be supported and to be amplified.

Next we have Asia Tale of Yahao.

Yahao is an indigenous artist collective.

that brings together artists from many different nations and also urban natives to work together to develop themselves as artists, to collectively find opportunities for economic advancement, to advance their skills, and also to support other communities.

Throughout the last year, they had a Black Lives Matter support program.

But they have really created themselves as an organization deeply rooted in the leadership of Native women and Native culture that is creating opportunities for Native artists and is also utilizing those opportunities for wealth creation to shift power socially and to send messages of solidarity with other BIPOC communities.

We also have Mark Jones of Community Owned Resource Development, which is a coalition of 40 plus BIPOC community leaders from Seattle with over 200 years of collective experience, who are looking to create new models for our communities to own and control real estate, and really to combat displacement by creating the economic infrastructure that our communities need to really fight this tremendous globalized wave of gentrification we're facing.

Next, we have Analia Bertoni of Via Comunitaria, who is launching the Salsa de Vida Farming Cooperative in South Park, which is a project led by and controlled by low-income Latina women who are building a farming cooperative and looking to establish a food business cooperative based on those farming activities.

And so those are our fellows.

We also have some peer learners, including Lizzie Baskerville, Miss Ling Chui, who are launching a community composting operation in the international district to empower small business owners and community members in the international district.

Next slide.

And so I think I'll go to the next slide as I think I'm towards the end of my time.

And so lastly, I just want to touch on our steering committee.

We are led by an amazing steering committee of six leaders, one of which is on this call, Ms. Hjordanos Teferi of the Multicultural Community Coalition.

Our steering committee also includes Bilal Aden of African Community Housing and Development, Solomon Dube of Cafe Avo, Triana Holliday of Africatown, Elena of Puget Sound Sage.

And so our steering committee is not just A board that, you know, abstractly creates a strategy for us and gives it to us to implement.

We work with our steering committee by really living in deep community with them as community leaders, digging deep into the challenges and realities of their communities in a safe space and helping them to work through those challenges.

getting invested in their problems because their problems are our problems, and then using that collective solidarity and work together to identify our common areas of challenge, the common systemic problems that we're all facing, and then we get direction from them on where they would like us to be working.

So these are the leaders really doing the work on the ground, dedicating their lives to the communities, and so we take their direction, work in deep community with them, and just work from work from that direction to create the systems and supports that they need to lead the JETS transition.

Next slide.

And so I'll end it there.

I'd just like to give a special shout out to my colleagues Shiho Fuyuki and Derek Gruen.

They could not be here today, but we greatly appreciate this opportunity to speak with you and we'd love to entertain any questions at the Q&A.

Thank you so much, Juguna.

This is great.

Really exciting to hear about, you know, your picture about how we really have to shift the way we think about how these systems work and be very creative about how we can start to create new models that center our community members and their desire for healthier systems that continue to support them.

So very exciting.

Colleagues, are there any questions for Juguna as we're Moving forward, I'm sure Council Member Juarez wants to give a shout out to her niece who was on one of your slides here.

Thank you, Madam President.

Yes, Asia, my niece is on there.

She works with my daughter, Raven Juarez, and they are part of the commission and the show, and they've been doing that work for a couple of years now.

And they just got the commission to do the work at Bellevue Community College.

So I didn't want to brag, but I kind of texted to the chair.

Hey, there's my girl.

Full ride, Cooper Union.

I'm embarrassing the hell out of her right now.

Thank you.

Very exciting.

I think that calls for a committee field trip sometime soon, maybe.

Okay, so let's move on then.

I do want to save some time for a broader discussion at the end.

So next we have Gregory Davis and Yordanos Teferi to talk about disaster gentrification.

And Eliana is here.

Thank you, Eliana, who's going to walk through the slideshow for us.

All right, thank you.

Well, I'll take that as my cue to start.

I'm Gregory Davis, and I'm managing strategist at the Rainier Beach Action Coalition and newly selected member of the Equitable Development Initiative Advisory Committee.

I want to thank the city council and council member Morales for inviting us.

And I'd actually be remiss if I didn't also ask you to send our warm regards to your legislative aides, because we know the kind of work that they put in to support you and to support this city.

And also got to give a shout out to Eliana Horn, who's been our consultant on this work.

I'm being joined by the stellar partner, Yordanos Teferi, and she seems to be everywhere, ubiquitous.

And we've been working on this.

So what we're going to do is we're going to kind of rotate.

She's going to take one slide.

I'm going to take the other slide and through the whole presentation.

So as you can see by, you know, this first slide, we're kind of talking about this in the manner of disaster gentrification in King County and how to stop it.

Puget Sound SAGE Multicultural Communities Coalition and Rainier Beach Action Coalition came together in the summer because we knew the effects of the pandemic would be devastating to our communities.

And we were worried about what would happen in terms of Blacks, Indigenous, people of color, land, neighborhoods, and communities.

As we know, a lot of uncertainty lies ahead.

So what's going to happen when the ban on evictions moratorium lifts at the end of the month?

What's going to happen when banks start foreclosing on households who have fallen behind the economic and public health crisis.

So we're going to talk about how COVID-19 crisis has created increased risks and for what we call disaster gentrification and what the council can do to stop it from happening.

We wrote a policy brief, community policy brief, and a learning tool that are available on Puget Sound SAGE's website.

When we looked at what we're going to share as priorities for today, you know, we made sure that we talked about, you know, what was most urgent.

We talked about, we wanted to talk about what could be done swiftly and what was going to have the most impact.

So I'm going to turn it over to Jodanas to kind of take the next slide and talk a little bit about disaster gentrification.

Thank you, Gregory.

So before we go any further, we want to quickly define what we mean by disaster gentrification.

Disaster gentrification is when real estate speculators take advantage of a disaster to buy or take land and housing for cheap from lower income households and then sell or rent to higher income households for a profit.

In the US, this often results in the dispossession of land, loss of wealth, and forced relocation of BIPOC community.

Disaster gentrification begins with pre-existing vulnerability of BIPOC communities.

When a disaster strikes, there is then simultaneous or the prospect of dispossession of BIPOC communities of their land and housing.

Then speculation by developers and financial entities looking to make a profit takes place, which ultimately leads to displacement.

Without intervention, disasters contribute to a cycle of dispossession and displacement that creates deeper vulnerability for BIPOC communities when the next disaster inevitably comes and the cycle begins again.

And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Gregory.

All right, thanks, Odana.

So without going into too much detail, we saw this play out very clearly in the subprime mortgage crisis, 2007, 2008, referred to as the Great Recession and the recovery there.

Now we put quotes, recovery in quotes, because our communities didn't recover from the Great Recession.

In terms of the impacts on our housing, many of our community members were displaced through the recovery period due to disaster gentrification.

So we wanted to just kind of go through how that cycle played out.

First, we know that our black indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable to subprime loans and the impacts of the recession.

So the first thing is just our vulnerable state.

The next thing that happens is dispossession.

So we saw how foreclosures disproportionately impacted Black, Indigenous, people of color communities.

And there's more information on that in our brief.

So this was true nationally, it was true in Seattle, and it was true in South King County.

So white neighborhoods like Madison Valley, only had 2% of their housing stock foreclosed on, but black indigenous people of color neighborhoods experienced a much higher impact.

So Rainier Valley, for example, 8%, Bryn Mawr Skyway, 13%, Tukwila, 14%.

So then the next step is speculation.

So that's where the corporate landlords, they amass billions of dollars.

and the rate of buying up our land increased dramatically.

So for example, in 2013, major investors in Puget Sound brought over 3,100 single family homes.

That was five times more than in 2012. Then the next thing that happens is displacement.

Our community members were foreclosed on, displaced, priced out of their neighborhoods.

One in 11 blacks, one in 11, black adults were evicted in King County between 2013 and 2017.

And now, if we are to examine the COVID-19 crisis, two of the four spots in the cycle have taken place.

And it's really up to our local government to take action to make sure our BIPOC communities are not dispossessed and displaced again.

We know that so many families are behind on rent, for example, and in Washington State as of April 2021, estimates were 239,000 people were behind on rent.

The conservative estimate from the Department of Commerce is that $150 million per month of the pandemic is needed to stabilize Washington households.

Rent relief and the protections recently created are not enough, especially for Black households.

We know that a lot of Black renters have not been able to benefit from the lottery system that was recently utilized.

the amount of rent relief money is likely not enough to cover all households and it is difficult to access.

The eviction prevention fixes in the Washington legislature don't address economic evictions and still rely on people having enough money to pay ongoing rent and a payment plan for the back rent.

The economic recovery isn't happening fast enough for that to happen.

So it's just dire, as you all very well know.

And also, Washington rates for FHA loans given to low-income households is not good.

16% of FHA loans in Washington state are delinquent, with 12% seriously delinquent, which means more than three months behind.

Meanwhile, corporations are preparing for our demise, gathering $245 billion across the country to purchase distressed properties.

Gregory?

Yeah, so our policy platform consists of six policy solutions.

And we want to see these passed by local governments across King County.

They fall into three categories, building Black, Indigenous, people of color power.

And I'm glad I got this slide because I can say the word power and Black and Indigenous people of color in the same sentence.

The other strategy is addressing the symptoms of the crisis.

And then the third strategy is deterring profiteering.

So we want to act now to address COVID-19 disaster gentrification.

But we also want to put in place the best practices for the future.

So as the presentation on disaster gentrification showed, our communities have been in this cycle of dispossession and vulnerability to disaster.

We need policies that's going to increase of black indigenous people of color autonomy, decision making and power in order to truly address gentrification.

That's the first thing.

The second thing is that we want to address the housing related symptoms of the pandemic.

These are immediate repercussions, evictions, foreclosures, loss of our homes.

And then the third, we want to deter profiteering.

The private sector does what it does because it has a chance to make a lot of money off of our land.

And we want to pass policies that make it less profitable and less appealing to take our land.

We need all three approaches to address the problem of disaster gentrification.

As our number one funding priority, we want to highlight and emphasize community acquisition and preservation funding.

The first policy in our platform is to greatly increase investment in community acquisition and preservation funds.

As we look back to history and research and talked about what could have prevented the extreme loss of Black homes and wealth in the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008, the ability for community to buy distressed properties came up over and over again.

Our communities need resources now to buy the properties that are distressed and or vulnerable as we as well as to get us as much land in areas of high risk high displacement risk off the market as quickly as possible and into the hands of community to permanently store the property.

This is what we call community stewardship of land which Gregory will talk about a bit more in a moment.

Properties are at risk now and we need money earmarked for community acquisition now before it is too late.

The equitable development initiative has laid incredible groundwork for this to happen and actually I proudly can point you to the picture on the slide it's it's the MCC building in Helmand City that we acquired on May 12th, and we did so having learned that that building was on the market.

And so we moved quickly to try to get it off the market because we knew that they stood to be displaced.

And so.

Yorgonis, you are breaking up just a little bit.

We can't hear you.

OK.

I was, what did you all hear last?

There we go.

You just bought the MCC building.

Okay, wonderful.

I was just highlighting that that's part of the EDI effort.

We got that building through EDI funds, but we really looked, or we targeted that building specifically because it houses eight East African small businesses that would be at risk of displacement.

Because we knew that other potential buyers were looking to develop condos and a supermarket.

So we move quickly and because of EDI, we were able to acquire that building.

But that aside, I just want to highlight that we need more, which is why we're talking about community acquisition and preservation funds.

And we need the funds to be targeted to vulnerable distressed properties.

The city can purchase properties now and hold them until community is ready to store them.

We also need more funding to seed and support organizations working toward community stewardship of land and to create and to try new things such as community investment trust.

We don't have time to go in depth into various examples, but some models to look at, to look to, I should say, are the Washington, D.C. Affordable Housing Preservation Fund, which targets properties that may be distressed and other community-led examples, such as Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston and several community investment trusts, which enable community to pool resources to buy property as quickly as possible.

Yeah, thanks.

So I told you she was a stellar partner for for MCC to be able to be in a position to acquire that property after all the resilience that they had to go through is just tremendous.

So, you know, talking about community stewardship of land, you know, we we know that that funding and the policies need to center a shift to the framework of community stewardship of land, transforming from something that creates individual wealth into a shared resource that generates community prosperity.

To me, this is the new state of things.

Community prosperity versus just individual wealth.

And so we want to see this throughout policy and budget priorities.

Get as much land off the speculative market and into community hands as quickly as possible.

That's kind of our mantra.

And so, you know, this may mean buying now to hold until the community is ready, although we've got some groups out there that are ready to manage land.

You know, the projects that we're talking about fit very well in the community stewardship of land, and because they embody the principles.

And you heard Njuguna talk about some of these principles, principles that are driven by values, including racial justice, affordability, and community over profit, centers collective ownership and self-determination, has dramatic democratic decision-making, governance structures, the land is permanently affordable, and in community hands permanently, and builds community power.

We can talk about how the project that Rainier Beach Action Coalition is centered in this community stewardship of land, because the idea of it actually came out of the neighborhood plan, Rainier Beach neighborhood plan process.

And now in terms of the current building that we have, you know, we're looking at doing tenant improvements and we have our farm stand that launches June 19th.

We've conducted crime prevention through environmental design workshops out of there recently with the young adults.

And we've just located some code storage unit there, which is one of the things that many in the food justice field are saying that there's a lack of.

So, you know, our project is centered in this community stewardship of land.

And we thank the city for its support in helping us acquire that.

If I dive into our top legislative, I just want to, Gregory, if it still continues to break up, please let me know, and I may have you take the ranks.

So this is our second policy and top legislative priority, and it is the Tenant or Community Opportunity to Purchase Act.

We want to take what we built in the EDI framework to be able to respond more urgently and more timely in order to avoid greater displacement.

The tenant, community, or community opportunity Opportunity Purchase Act gives tenants, the city, or designated organizations, the ability to make a first offer when their property is going to be sold, as well as the ability to match any offer.

This policy would help preserve affordability and create a path to tenant ownership.

Here's briefly how it works.

The landlord gives notice to tenants that he or she intends to sell.

This is already a requirement in Seattle with the 90 days notice that we have in place.

Next, tenants have the right to make the first offer.

Seattle has some version of this in place already, but it needs to be strengthened.

Next, the landlord either accepts or rejects this offer.

If the landlord rejects the offer, the tenants have the right to match any other offer or have priority and have priority, which is otherwise known as the right of first refusal.

We also want to emphasize the need for this policy to apply in the foreclosure context.

In California, for example, they passed legislation which created the right for tenants, families, local governments, affordable housing, nonprofits, and community land trusts to exceed the highest bid at a foreclosure auction.

The policy can be structured in many ways, and there are a few examples listed on this slide, including in Washington, D.C.

and San Francisco, as well as the legislation that we spoke of that I just mentioned in California.

To really be successful, it really needs to be paired with funding for acquisition and seeding organizations to support this work for it to happen well.

Agree?

Yeah.

Um, policy recommendation, um, by the way, the, these policies, there is precedent for them.

Uh, we're not just pulling them out of nowhere.

You know, we scan the country, um, a lot of work going on in DC, a lot of work going on in the Bay area.

So Seattle and taking on some of these would be, um, in good company.

So the third policy recommendation that we want to see the creation of is what we're calling equitable development zones.

So this is, uh, it equips communities and high displacement and low, uh, access to opportunity areas with increased decision-making and the ability to develop their own community in a way that will stabilize and increase community prosperity.

So the Rainier beach neighborhood plan is a good example of one piece of this.

So within the equitable development zone, The community would be equipped with community planning power, with community development review, and with community-led public development authority.

So the planning power is true community-led planning, where communities determine what should happen in their own communities.

And the communities know.

The community development review is where the community would have the ability to review permit applications.

to ensure that they comply with community-led plan.

And then the community-led public development authority is a development corporation led by and accountable to the community that could purchase properties before they're lost and have greater impact on local development.

Examples are here in Seattle that can start paving the way.

The Seattle Historic and Special Review Districts including the International Special Review District as well as Pike Place which are both historical review processes and a PDA.

The Cultural Spaces PDA is a strong example also of community-led, community accountable PDA, and it's a good start, but we do need more.

Our fourth policy is non-solicitation or cease and desist zones.

excuse me, non-solicitation or cease and desist zones which restrict real estate agents from harassing our communities.

This seems to occur especially in economic crisis when our communities are vulnerable to this kind of solicitation.

In addition to preventing loss of our land generally, this kind of solicitation increases vulnerability to scams and bad deals.

our elderly are especially vulnerable.

And we actually started hearing of this taking place in Seattle in around March or April at the height of the pandemic.

And from a few residents within the central district, this was shared by our partner, Africatown.

And it's just, I feel like even for those elders, it just brought back old memories of an overly, an overabundance of some of the

I'm wondering if you turn your camera off, if your audio might be a little more stable.

I have to do that sometimes myself.

Let's try again.

I apologize.

I'm not sure what's happening today.

So the other example that we hear of is the P.O.

box example where a lot of these solicitations are being sent to P.O.

boxes even.

And so it just seems to be on the increase during this time of crisis.

And there are two different ways that a policy can be structured to address the solicitation issue.

One is to designate an entire area where people are automatically not allowed to be bothered.

The other is an opt-in system where people need to sign up individually.

New York, for example, has had one on its books for decades and has expanded designation during the pandemic.

New Jersey also has an ordinance that addresses this issue.

Gregory?

Yeah, so so we've got two two policies left to policy recommend.

So hang in there now.

I'm sure we all seen on TV these these TV shows that promote this idea called flipping and it looks very good on the camera.

But flipping is when a home is brought for the purpose of selling it quickly for a large profit, not for the purpose of living or providing housing.

So on the slide you can see this This map is using data from the city of Seattle, which used data from the assessor's office, documenting flipping from 2015 to 2019. So we see this problem is concentrated in black, indigenous, and people of color neighborhoods, such as Rainier Valley, Rainier Beach, and Dill Ridge.

So that's why we had to have this as part of the policies that we had to address.

So a flipping tax creates an additional cost on flipping, which would make it less appealing for investors and the like.

The best way to structure this is to make the tax large enough to make the practice less profitable and to have the tax graduated over time so that the longer a person holds on to a property, the less they're penalized.

So this would need to happen at the state level, but the city can put its lobbying power behind that.

Finally, we want to talk about the need for our local governments to cancel grant debt, extend eviction moratorium, and prevent foreclosures in the first place.

We already talked about the reason why rent relief is not enough, and June 30th is way too soon for our communities to be stable.

The scale of disaster gentrification is dependent on what local governments do around these issues.

because canceling rent debt, extending the moratorium will prevent dispossession and displacement due to COVID-19 in the first place.

There's federal legislation on the books that you all may have heard of by Ilhan Omar.

The city can put their weight behind and the Tenants Union of Washington is leading the local campaign.

In the meantime, we need to continue to make rent relief contingent on debt cancellation as well as increase the amount of time protections will be in place and make it easier for tenants, especially BIPOC tenants, to access rent relief money.

We also want to see local governments place new or extend eviction moratorium.

or extend the eviction moratorium.

Create a defense to eviction if failure to pay rent is due to the pandemic.

Aggressively prevent foreclosures and stabilize homeowners.

And especially have in mind small BIPOC homeowners and multifamily landlords.

Yeah, so you can take a deep breath, but you know, there's a lot of work that we've done, a lot of work to do.

And when we were asked to make this presentation, one of the questions that we were also asked was, you know, what are our top priorities?

We shared six and a whole lot of values and principles and ideas.

And like I said before, we had to look to see what was most urgent, what was, what can be done quickly as possible and then what's most impactful.

So we determined that, and what we spoke to before in the presentation is that our budget priority that meets these criteria is community acquisition funding.

And the legislative priority that meet these criteria is the Tenant Community Opportunity to Purchase Act.

So we need the city to set aside money now to buy vulnerable properties.

Can I tell you what to do?

We need the city to set aside money now to buy vulnerable properties as they come up.

This is one of the most important things the city can do.

to stop gentrification and displacement in black indigenous people of color communities due to this crisis.

We need to identify vulnerable properties, buy them and hold them for community land stewardship.

At the same time, we need legislation to increase the rights of tenants, community groups to purchase properties by giving increased rights to the sales process and the ability to match any offer that through the act, through the Tenant Community to Purchase Act.

Thank you for the opportunity to cover our community policy brief with you today.

And a special thank you for bearing with me as I've had technical issues.

We also want to honor our partner SAGE, Puget Sound SAGE, that is not here with us today.

You can read the full community policy brief and go through a webpage that outlines the community policy brief at the link on the slide.

And we'd also be happy to provide it to you.

Thank you.

Wow, thank you so much, everybody.

This is very exciting to hear from all of you and all of your great creative thinking.

I wanna go ahead and open it up for questions and discussion to my colleagues.

I will get us started if that's okay.

So, you know, I think for me, It's really important to recognize that, well, I'll just say that I come to this work and these ideas with kind of a theory of change, if you will, that if we close the racial wealth gap, we will have begun to build those new systems that you're all talking about, right, that are rooted in greater access and greater democracy.

I don't think it's lofty.

I think it is strategic.

And, you know, that's why this work excites me is it really is about, you know, if we close the gap between a black family and a white family, then that means that we've successfully done all the other things that are many of the things that we need to do to dismantle what isn't working and build up what is working.

You know, we, as Paul Wellstone said, we all do better when we all do better.

So I'm hearing all of you talk about new ways of supporting businesses, new ways of home ownership, you know, assuring home ownership, or, you know, protecting people from foreclosure, new economic opportunities.

Well, we heard several things from Gregory and Yordanos, but I'm wondering, Ryan and Juguna, if you can maybe talk about two things that you think the Council really should begin to pursue to start to build those new systems that we're talking about and really see the kind of impact that we would like to start seeing.

I'm happy to go first just to keep it in chronological order of the presentations.

I think that one thing that I have heard a lot in discussions in Seattle is that the discussion around small business can get a little bit muddied.

The federal small business administration might call anything under 500 employees a small business.

For other people, small business is less than five employees.

Then there's terms like micro business and scale up business and startups.

And there's dozens and dozens of terms.

They each have their own constituencies.

People use different words for the same thing and the same word for different things.

And it causes a lot of friction and maybe duplication.

And so one thing that I think is really important going back to that Cincinnati model is developing a system where we're not only helping create businesses and stabilizing those that are vulnerable, but where we really have a strategy for identifying those that have the potential to truly scale and providing them with the connections and capital and services they need.

And a lot of this, again, gets sort of lost in the small business conversation that there's huge distinctions between a small restaurant or a retail establishment versus another business that might be considered small, but it's in the tech sector and has huge growth opportunities if it connects with the right people or the right sources of capital or a manufacturing company with 25 or 30 employees, like these are all very, very different things with very different needs.

And I think in all of that, what often gets missed is this focus on Again, as in Cincinnati, those five to 10 employee, 500,000 to a million in revenue companies that have worked so hard over years or decades to start and begin to grow.

And then they get to a point where the capital runs out or they don't have the same connections as perhaps white owned companies do.

And so I think that that's a really important thing to focus on.

And there's several entities in the region that are beginning to do so.

The other is I would just again kind of plug, and this is building on what others have said, the community investment trust model.

This is not my area of expertise.

I tend to work in kind of more traditional corners of the economic development world, but it's appealing to me just in that, as I mentioned, small business creation is like a very difficult and fraught path to wealth creation.

And for a lot of people, It's not a really accessible means of, of wealth creation, even when all the right supports are in place.

It's just a brutal lifestyle to, to try to grow a business that succeeds over the years.

And so finding these other mechanisms by which people in communities can develop wealth is.

I think a super important compliment that that could be overlooked, at least in the kind of worlds that I operate in.

It's certainly overlooked because there's such a narrative about the power of small business.

And I don't mean to take away from that.

But I think that these sorts of alternative means of developing wealth, whether it's the Community Investment Trust or co-ops, are, again, I think, a really important complement.

Thanks, Ryan.

And touching on kind of in terms of building wealth through workforce development, I would love to see the city articulate a greater focus on developing a strategy for advancing economic inclusion in these industries where there are high wage jobs and opportunities to build economic power locally.

However, from our perspective, currently there are tremendous gaps in those workforce development strategies.

Some of those problems are that they do not fund people for the time that they're required to spend in those programs.

So they need to fund the time for people to spend in those programs if they want those programs to be sustainable for our people.

So I think that the city can be a powerful leader in terms of creating public-private partnerships that align State Department of Commerce, large tech businesses locally, Port of Seattle, other government and government related institutions, which have these workforce development goals and are looking to meet them, but have the same challenges.

Ultimately, these programs are not accounting for the lives of the people that need to be in them.

So if we could fund more people to get through those programs, I think we would see more success in getting folks to those jobs where they can increase their incomes and build wealth.

But then they also need institutions that are controlled and led in our community to help them advance while they are in those companies.

We do have a tremendous number of high value folks working in diversity, equity and inclusion for private corporations who are from our communities here.

My sister leads that work for Netflix.

So we need to mobilize those people as well.

So what I would like to see is the city sort of being that fulcrum, that leader that is defining the strategy, that an inclusive and equitable workforce development strategy.

that is really going to fill those gaps.

There needs to be a commitment to that.

And I think that the genius and the community capital that's in the community that's not coming to this work needs to be brought to this work somehow.

And maybe through those relationships that folks at a high level in the city have with other executives, maybe they can initiate kind of more of those collaborations.

But I think that's what's going to be needed to make workforce development really work as a a mechanism to create wealth for our people.

Their lives and their realities need to be recognized.

They need to be funded to get through these programs.

Definitely hear what Ryan's saying about also about business development.

I think that we need BIPOC community institutions to be funded so that they are able to work with both the micro businesses and larger businesses.

I would encourage you all to look at the Project for Lending to Underserved Markets, which was started by the Obama administration and the SBA and covered Los Angeles and Baltimore, and focused on identifying the businesses that employ the largest numbers of folks in Black and Latino communities and creating strategies to specifically advance those businesses in that top 10 list.

I worked on that project when I was in Los Angeles, and it was pretty effective in terms of creating options for new programs and then getting those options funded by SBA and by the Milken Institute and by the federal government.

There were funders committed beforehand to funding the solutions.

And so we need to, I think we need that same kind of mobilization locally in terms of public-private partnerships.

And I think it should align with the State Department of Commerce's key industry strategies, particularly looking at clean technology and software engineering and tech.

I think those areas are key.

We'd love to see folks like our drivers union involved in that process.

That's what we see is part of that shift.

If we're going to create a new system for workforce development, let's build institutional power among our gig workers by bringing them into that process.

But we can't bring them into that process if they need to pay all their bills and feed their children and then spend another 10 hours every week on these projects.

We need to fund capital.

So I just want to keep that message up front.

We need the city to fund the human capital.

We have the leaders.

We have the people.

They don't have the time.

They don't have the money.

Well, I'm excited to say that we did begin some of this work this morning when we were moving through our discussion about ARPA funding.

So we do have additional funding that we are sending to work with the Port of Seattle for their opportunity initiative.

It's a apprenticeship program for young people.

They've been doing it, did it the last summer and we will be partnering with them.

if we pass this bill, to be able to start working with young people.

And then I don't recall exactly how much Council Member Strauss put in.

Maybe one of the other Council Members can remind me.

I think he amended the bill to put $60 million in for acquisition funding.

I might have that number wrong, but we're starting to have these kinds of conversations.

And I do think it's beginning to percolate among among council members and the city.

So I'm getting excited about the conversations that we're having.

Colleagues, are there any other questions or issues that folks want to address or ask our panel about this morning or afternoon?

It's been a long day already.

Council Member Peterson, please.

Thank you, Chair Morales.

I want to thank you and your staff for assembling this panel and thank all the panelists for being here.

I think just each presentation individually, they supplemented each other really well because there are all these intertwined strategies for building wealth among marginalized communities and preventing the disaster gentrification that we were talking about, whether it's for targeting those well paying jobs that are have that for employers that are likely to expand and we can employ more of our own residents.

And then also making sure that we don't have that speculation from those who do have extreme wealth to take advantage of those who don't.

And so I look forward to working with Chair Morales on some of these strategies, especially regarding the real estate development issues.

So thank you, everybody, for being here.

Thank you, Council Member.

Any other questions?

Okay, I do have, sorry, I just want to ask another question or two, and really just for some clarification.

Ryan, in your presentation, you talked about geographic inclusion.

Can you talk a little bit about, I think I probably know what that means, but could you just explain that a little bit?

Sure, so if you all want to look up these statistics, Brookings puts out a report every year called the Metro Monitor, which is a series of indicators that compares metro areas across the country in terms of inclusive growth.

And if you pull up the Seattle profile on the Metro Monitor, what you see is blue everywhere across the sort of matrix of indicators, and blue indicates good performance.

And then down in the corner, there's this bright red spot, which is geographic inclusion.

And what that measures is progress over time in terms of median income, poverty rates, and one other measure by census tract.

So basically, there's been obviously tons of job creation.

Median incomes have gone up.

On all these other indicators, at least from a high level, this economy is performing well, at least relative to national standards, though that is admittedly a low bar.

But the one place where very little, if any, progress has been made over time is in terms of closing the gaps between the neighborhoods at sort of the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile.

So we just have more and more and more wealth, more and more and more jobs, income, et cetera.

But it's not closing the gaps between, again, those sort of very top neighborhoods and very bottom neighborhoods, which comes as no surprise to anyone on this call.

Useful to know that even relative to other metro areas, Seattle seems to really be struggling on that front.

Useful indeed for that.

Okay.

Any other questions, colleagues?

Does anybody else, Gregory, Yordanos, Chaguna, any other comments that y'all want to make before we Wrap things up, please.

Yeah, thanks.

And I just want to reinforce some points made by Ryan and Jaguna, and then just kind of say the city is kind of like on the cusp of this.

So, you know, when it comes to small businesses, we know Office of Economic Development has the Only in Seattle resource.

But, you know, we've got a project manager for Rainier Beach alone And there are over 200 entities that this person has to try to support.

So more money is needed there.

And your reference to that possibly happening needs to happen.

I think the other is around the workforce development.

And I got to speak to it because we were responsible for helping this ordinance come into reality.

And that's priority hire into the construction trade.

And the fact that it has, you know, moved over to King County.

It has moved over into the Port of Seattle.

The City of Seattle Public Schools has actually picked it up.

So we're on the cusp, but more resources needed there to open that pathway further, not only into the constructions trade, but into the gig economy.

That has already been said.

So you got models, you got structure there.

We just need to put that, put more resource in there.

I'd like to ask Gregory in your presentation, you know, Donald's mentioned that the kind of urgency of the opportunity for the city to allocate funds to reclaim land terms of the you know, in parts of this conversation, we talked about particularly workforce development and procurement, right?

Being areas that are more opportune.

for increasing income in our communities.

Do you see opportunities to reclaim space for those purposes even before we necessarily have a project aligned, say, maybe funding in your community in a specific space that could be ideal for workforce development done in the most equitable and robust fashion or procurement done in that way?

Because I do think you did touch on really the urgency and the opportunity of the moment.

And in the moment we've been talking about, we specifically talked about workforce development and procurement, right?

That money comes in a little bit quicker than small business growing from micro business to a big business, maybe in five to 10 years.

So yeah, I just love to hear what you think about that.

Also, Yordanoski as well.

I would say it's not something we've touched on, but obviously there's there's a there's a need and it's I would absolutely say that there's opportunity as well in the way in which we are calling for.

certain community investment funds to be available to meet those urgent needs.

But it's, you know, with disaster gentrification, it's not an area that we delved into, which is interesting considering, you know, My work with the People's Economy Lab, we probably should have collaborated and thought through some of those additional strategies that we could have incorporated into the community brief.

And it's not something we heard of, to also add, in some of the community engagement sessions that we held.

But absolutely, there would be an opportunity for that.

Terrific.

Thank you.

Well, I want to thank everybody for being here.

We've heard some great ideas this afternoon for how to support businesses and how to support our communities as we come out of the fog of COVID.

So I'm looking forward to really working with each of you.

move these ideas into policy and budget proposals.

So you will be hearing from us as we start to think about the process this fall and and any opportunities we have for getting some legislation crafted.

I do want to thank my staff for helping pull this together.

Alexis Turla was instrumental in getting all of you here today and getting your slides ready.

So I want to thank her.

I want to thank Lakeisha Farmer on my staff.

This is her last meeting as clerk before she leaves us to attend graduate school.

So congratulations, Lakeisha.

We're very excited for your next path and can't wait to see what great things you're going to do.

of huge congratulations to her.

And let folks know that Darzel Touch on my staff will be stepping up to serve as clerk from now on, starting with the July meeting.

So thank you, Darzel, for agreeing to do that.

The next meeting of the Community Economic Development Committee is July 20th.

2 p.m.

and we will see all of you then.

Thanks so much again everybody for being here and we are adjourned.