Seattle City Council Select Committee on Homelessness & Housing Affordability 31219

Let's do it.

Good afternoon, everyone.

It's 2.03 p.m.

on March 12, 2019. This is the third meeting of the Seattle City Council Select Committee on Homelessness.

I'm joined today by Councilmember Juarez.

Thank you for being here.

This is a select committee of all nine Councilmembers.

Hopefully other Councilmembers will be along soon.

The Select Committee on Homelessness is chaired in a rotation by myself, Councilmember Baxhaw, and Councilmember Mosqueda.

And the previous two meetings, as many of you know, were chaired by the other two Councilmembers.

This one is being chaired by my office.

And today we have two important topics on the agenda.

First, we will discuss with residents of the share and wheel shelters about the six-month instead of a year contract that they were recently awarded to keep the basic shelter, keep open the basic shelters they operate.

They will talk about what they think this new notification from the mayor's office means.

We also have central staff here to help us discern what what we think this means and you know we want to just go over some of the questions that have come up based on this new announcement and what that means to the residents at Cherville.

The second discussion will delve into some of the causes of homelessness in Seattle and specifically connections to eviction.

There is an ongoing and really exciting new series of studies from the University of Washington in collaboration with other researchers and we are lucky to have Dr. Tim Thomas here who is leading that study to help us understand what that study tells us and also what it means for Seattle in terms of policymaking.

And so both these discussions today are related to homelessness and also housing insecurity in general.

But first, of course, we have public comment.

This committee is being assisted by Ted Verdone and Nick Jones from my office.

Nick, will you be reading the names of the people who have signed up for public comment?

And each of you has two minutes to speak.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

First republic comment we have David Haynes followed by Alex Zimmerman.

Share needs to be held accountable and honest and not give excuse me we need an accountability for the paid board members of share and wheel.

City Council President created this committee to create a transparent working group that develops strong policy and investment decisions as well as enforcement strategies.

Yet Scott Morrow of SHARE, Anitra Freeman of WEAL, and the board of SHARE WEAL thinks the performance improvements are nebulous, meaning vague, unclear.

Accountability goes to the heart of solving the crisis and justification of financing self-appointed, politically connected, six-figure salaries, getting rich, not helping innocent poor.

This committee needs investigations into Sharon Lee, Ronnie Gilboa of Urban Rest Stop, Scott Morrow, All Home, and many of the do-nothing power mongers failing the poor daily to ensure that they have a 20-year working career and pay plan at the expense of innocent poor.

The City Council needs to know why ShareWheel office is only open to screen homeless for about 20 minutes per day, six days a week.

And that Scott Morrow refuses to help an innocent homeless person in an emergency by helping them get shelter if they don't meet that requirement of showing up at the office.

And he claims it's because he's not allowed to use the cell phone to call another shelter, like Overseer, because if the City Council finds out that he can use his cell phone to screen somebody in.

He claims city council will take away his office.

But he only owns this office that he doesn't even open usually for like 20 minutes, six days a week.

It needs to be investigated about his lack of effort.

He wants to keep the homeless caught in subhuman mistreatment.

Has he ever stepped up here and represented why he treats people the way he does and keeps them there?

He's subhuman and dishonest.

He tells me you're not allowed to tell other people about different nonprofits because we compete for the same budget money.

That's outrageous and revolting.

He needs to be held accountable along with the whole shared wheel board and low-income housing, mortgaging their future off of urban rest stops, shakedown of that square footage of that dilapidated building.

After Alex Zimmerman, we have Jim McMahon, then Queen Bee King Rios, and then Alex Finch.

Say hi, my Dory Fuhrer.

a criminal and killer.

My name is Alex Zimmerman.

I want to first talk about homeless.

Each homeless costs approximately $30,000.

$12,000 costs approximately $400 million.

We can do this in an easy way.

Rent apartment costs $10,000 per person.

Simple.

We have a thousand and thousand empty apartments.

We spent approximately between $120 and $150 million.

We fixed all problems once and forever.

And you, someone sitting six years in this chamber, never talking about this.

It's number one, easy fix it.

All.

Without.

We have enough money.

Number two, about rent.

I have eviction six times and I bring you 96, 20, more than 20 years ago, biggest class action about eviction for 500 families in Bellevue.

Class action.

And I win this class action.

Very simple.

Another point of eviction.

We need to establish a government fund.

This fund can operate like a debit card or credit card.

You know what it means?

When people have a problem, give their money, when they have money, he can give you payback with probably percentage zero or something like this.

Simple, easy, you need couple million dollars only.

Why you don't doing this?

Not have sense.

So before we doing this, what I recommend you, because I'm probably smarter than you all together.

Why you seven, for six years, never talking about what is I talking right now.

Very easy, very simple, you don't need big money for fixing this.

If you have this money in system, it's a problem.

So while you crooks sit in this chamber for many years, you don't do nothing.

So I speak right now to Seattle.

Stand up, Seattle.

Clean this dirty chamber from this crook, criminal, and killer.

200 people die every year from you, freaking idiot.

Next, we have Jim McMahon and then Queen B. Kingreels.

Jim McMahon, Workers World Party.

don't defund the city's safety net for the homeless, and fully fund, share, and wheel.

These homeless organizations might have more experience providing the homeless with shelter than the whole city council and mayor's office put together.

This city is not dealing with homelessness as an emergency as declared.

Instead, it has bided its time and used brutal sweeps to deny those living outdoors with even a place to lay their head.

And the city has greatly contributed to the deaths of 120 people living outdoors in the past year.

Don't pass the buck for responsibility to the county government and other levels of government.

This is one of the richest cities in the whole world, and the city stands embarrassed in front of the whole country for refusing to tax the rich corporations, especially to provide housing for the homeless.

We demand a moratorium on evictions.

Housing is a right.

for city council, we elect Shama Sawant and tax Amazon to provide housing for the homeless.

Can you read them?

Hang on.

After Queen Bee.

After Queen Bee, we have Alex Finch and then Imogene W.

Good afternoon, Seattle City Council members.

I am Queen B. King Rios.

I'm a member of Will and a leader of Women in Black.

I was also formerly homeless.

In 2018, Women in Black stood silent vigil for 120 outdoor by violence deaths in Seattle and King County.

The Share Will Shelter Network provides a warm, safe, loving, church-based shelter network for clean and sober homeless women and men.

I thank God for the Will Women's Low Barrier Shelter that it accepts any woman in any condition at any time of night with the no turn away policy and it's the only one of its kind in the city of Seattle.

The city asked Will to start this as a winter shelter 20 years ago this May and it is now a year-round shelter.

If it was needed 20 years ago, we can surely see that it's needed more today.

Women are scared and afraid our city isn't more than a crisis.

It is a health human health disaster.

If we don't have the Women's Will Women's Shelter, what should I say to 40 or 50 women who depend on this shelter nightly?

We all know how important shelter is since we got 20 inches of snow last month.

A big thank you to you City of Seattle for opening warm safe doors last month for people to get out of the cold.

If we really want to talk seriously about the future of our city, we need to get serious about how we help our less fortunate.

I'm not talking about simply throwing away money at the problem.

I'm talking about permanently funding shelters like ShareWheel and programs that help change people's lives.

This help includes from temporary to permanent housing.

You can't expect a high exit rate to permanent housing when we don't have enough housing to exit people to.

City Council, we need you not to let Mayor Durkin and the Human Services Director defund the share wheel shelters.

200 or more women and men will be affected by this defunding.

The funding isn't a want, it's a need for our people and our city.

Thank you.

God bless you.

The first speaker, the first speaker.

I'm sorry, Eugene.

First is Alex Finch, and then you.

You're next.

Sorry.

Good afternoon, members of the Seattle City Council.

My name is Alex Finch, and I just moved to 3814 4th Avenue Northeast.

Before then, I stayed as chair of Wheelstead City 3, and I am on the chair board of directors.

On February 26th, the mayor's office and human services interim human services director told us they plan to cut shares contract for our indoor shelter network to six months, the end of June, 2019. We believe this cut is in retaliation for our outspoken support for requiring the human services director to go through a racial and social justice based open to everyone thorough hiring process.

Cutting our shelters bypassed this council's unanimous decision to fund our community building and cost effective shelters for the next two years.

It was the second year in a row you had to restore funding for two shares indoor shelters after the Mayor and Human Services Director kept them.

It's already March, we don't have a contract, and we've been performing services in good faith without reimbursement since January 1st.

We're doing well at placing people into stable housing, and there are many other agencies doing much worse than us in reporting demographics and other markers.

However, the most important reason for shelters, though, is ignored by all of HSD's data and metrics.

It's to help homeless people who would otherwise die in the streets.

With last year's outsider by violent death count at 120, and this year's at 28, which was more than last year at this time, how can HSD keep ignoring this metric?

How can we keep being apathetic in this state of emergency?

We know that there's always room to improve.

We've made many changes over the last decade, and we'll continue to do so.

But the approach of the mayor, Mr. Johnson, and the Human Services Department of retaliating against us for our views instead of working collaboratively with us makes positive change much more difficult.

And for the record, I don't get a paycheck to do this.

I do this out of the goodness of my heart.

After Imogene Williams, we have Tracy Arndt and then Rebecca Morrow.

This funding cut has already been restored once by City Council.

I believe it was unanimous.

So this should not be happening.

The first speaker talked about problems in the leadership that is serious, that would need to be addressed.

On the other hand, we can't be careless with these spaces.

We need every single space.

And we're glad Share and Wheel is providing them.

So I guess city council, you just got to do it over again.

I also picked up confusion about what improvements the mayor wants, because I did not pick up anything about the leadership from anybody else except the speaker today.

what improvement she wants, movies, continental breakfast, hot showers.

There is confusion on that.

So City Council, I just guess you've got to restore them again.

I hope it sticks.

I thank you.

My name is Tracy Arant, and I currently work for the Wheel Shelter over at Trinity Episcopal Church.

And at the end of last year, we spoke to y'all, and y'all voted unanimously to give us funding for two years.

And it was like, this is great.

Went back to the women, and the women were actually excited about it, because they know that we struggle to get funding every year.

And then we got the news that it's only going to six months.

We haven't received any money so far this year at all.

No contract to sign, nothing.

It's like a slap in the face to the women.

I mean, y'all need to get to know the women that we serve.

The women that come to our shelter, they have, yes, they have the addiction problems.

They have the mental health issues.

But there's also women that just, you know, through no fault of their own got kicked out of their, they got evicted.

They, you know, they got nowhere to go.

The women, you can't do this to the women.

I mean, there's, they trust us.

I mean, I was one of the women there.

I slept at the shelter for a long time.

Had a woman come in not too long ago and she, somebody sent me and said that she had talked to me.

She had been raped.

And she had dealt with the physical pain for three days before she came to us because she was embarrassed and didn't want to be embarrassed when the police and everybody talked to her.

And she trusted us enough to call the police and sit with her while they talked to her and make a report on it.

Last year we lost two women at the end of the year.

One died in housing at a friend's house and one died in the hospital.

And we grieve with the women when these women die, when they die so young.

If you don't restore our funding and, I mean, you're condemning these vulnerable, vulnerable citizens, the ones that really need the protection the most, you're condemning them to an early death as well.

I mean, we ask you to honor the democratic process.

Y'all voted unanimously to give us the funding for two years.

Why can't you do that?

I mean, you have to.

It's right.

It's the right thing to do.

I mean, that's the bottom line.

It's the right thing to do for these women, for the city of Seattle.

You know, that's it.

After Rebecca Mora, we have Megan Murphy, and she should be the last speaker.

Good afternoon, council members.

I'm Rebecca Morrow.

As a new hired employee to the Willow Women's Shelter, I get to work firsthand with the women and see their struggles.

We operate as an emergency women's night shelter.

We accept women throughout the night and early morning when other places are already closed.

We receive phone calls and requests for spaces from hospitals and other agencies when they're out of room.

We have a housing worker that comes in and meets with the women and schedules appointments.

We also hear the term that I can't afford that too often from the ladies when we suggest places.

The women depend on us to be open.

Last night we had 64 women sleeping in the shelter instead of on the street.

The women deserve to have the funding back for the two years.

They don't need to have extra stress trying to find a new shelter to go to.

Thank you.

Hi, I think it's deplorable in this day and age that organizing enough to provide basic shelter for vulnerable women is an issue.

We should be well ahead that we know that this is morally Part of the the formula for how we spend money because I know firsthand if a woman is diagnosed mentally ill And if the diagnosis isn't correct or is correct or whatever some of that medicine the side effects are horrible could leave her totally vulnerable to the forces of eviction and then once, you know, she's evicted or, you know, if I were evicted and then I had to find some guy that would let me couch surf just to stay safe and it's probably going to be an abusive relationship and there's probably going to be drugs.

involved because it has to be fast, fast, fast.

So nobody's sleeping on the street and left open to predators on the street.

I can't believe none of this is taken into consideration.

It would save a lot of money in the long run.

I read an article on CNN that some women were spending like $6.4 million for their kid to get into an Ivy League school.

That money is just being wasted by that political agenda when it should be pure talent.

And that doesn't cost any money.

So the only people really talking about this are socialists.

Because Pelosi is really disappointing me that the so quote unquote neoliberals aren't addressing this, unfortunately.

That's why I had to talk about this because Durkin should be the most feminist because she's married to a woman and she's letting this happen to women.

And Johnson, that thing irritated her enough to threaten funding for women.

That's misogynist on her side, which might win her big points from the patriarchal capitalists to inflict pain on women.

Because that drives her, what they define as testosterone up, or I don't know what it is that they call it, or their sense of superiority.

Because I know a lot of good men who disagree with this also.

Thanks.

And that should be the last speaker.

Is there anybody who didn't sign up who wants to speak in public comment?

Okay, seeing no, no, go ahead, go ahead.

And then you should sign up on the sheet as well after you speak.

I will.

Gene Darcy.

I would like the council to look more deeply into the data that was used to make this decision.

I went out to the All Home website.

That data is over a year old.

How can anybody in the public know what the performance is on these shelters?

The missing data, there are a lot of other shelter providers who have worse track record than ShareWheel.

Please look into the data.

I don't think it's correct and I don't know what the Human Services Department is using to make these decisions.

I don't trust them.

Thank you to everybody who provided public comment.

So our first agenda item is discussing the City of Seattle's contract with ShareWheel to provide basic homeless shelter services in the city.

Could we have presenters at the table, please?

And I also want to acknowledge we've been joined by Council Member Herbold.

Thank you for being here.

And could we start with one-sentence introductions from everybody, and then I just want to preface the item a little bit, and then you guys can speak.

Michelle Marchand, I'm an organizer with SHARE and WHEEL.

Nicole Calhoun, I'm staff at WHEEL and also the data enterer.

Anitra Freeman, I'm formerly homeless participant of WHEEL and SHARE.

Christopher Anderson, bunkhouse participant and SHARE board of directors.

Oh, and I am the president of the share board of directors and an elder of Weill, they call me.

Edward Owen, Council Member Swatzoffice.

Alan Lee, Council Central Staff.

Thank you.

I wanted to let the members of the public know that my office did invite the mayor's office and the Human Services Department leadership to join at this meeting because we really wanted to hear from them about this issue and the reasoning behind the decision that was taken and to explain their thinking.

Unfortunately, their response was, and this was in response to a letter from my staff member to the mayor's staff.

It says, thanks for writing the same message from before applies to the select committee as well.

No hearing for Jason means no HSD staff or mayor's office staff coming to council.

And it's it's unfortunate in my view that the mayor's office has taken this intransigent position on this question to not engage in any issue at all.

Because, you know, based on the what's happening with the appointment to the Human Services Director.

But I also wanted to make sure everybody knew that since we had the discussion on the Jason Johnson question, the Human Services Department has released information on the survey, employee survey that they did last year.

I don't think we have that here, but we'll make sure that's shared with the public as well.

But we're not here to discuss that issue.

We're here to discuss SHARE wheel.

At the table, you will find I think the one on, yeah, my leftmost, is a packet, it's a statement from Share and Wheel.

It's an email, that's the top, an email from the Human Services Department explaining their reasoning for the notification that they sent to Share and Wheel.

And the last one is the notification to Share and Wheel itself.

And the notification itself, it says that it changes The letter says the mayor wishes to convey that she is happy with improved access to will provide incentive for improved utilization, which could result in extension of the contract.

Now, we, unfortunately, since we don't have the mayor's office or the human services staff to explain this, we will rely on Alan Lee as council center staff, who will obviously not be speaking on the mayor's office's behalf, but will give us whatever insight he can give.

I will say just from my standpoint, it's odd to say the least, to say to a service provider that you're happy with the improved exits and happy with the performance, and that's why we are making your funding even more contingent than it was before.

It does not make sense to me, but we'll see what it means.

And hopefully, coming out of this meeting, we can also have a set of questions that we can send to the mayor's office to explain certain things.

Having said that, and making sure that the public knows there's information that they can get, we should get into the discussion.

Maybe we can start with the Sharon Weill representatives here who are at the table to let us know, you know, one, how you found out about this.

My assumption is that you were notified on the 26th of February.

And also, have you had further communication from the mayor?

Or the human services leadership, have they told you when they will decide whether what will happen to the shelters after June?

Like, have they said what the process will be?

And so on.

And if you want to make some opening remarks before that, that's fine too.

And I also invite Alan to make any opening statement that you think would be useful to us.

So, sorry, Alan, did you want to speak first before they, in terms of what you know, and then maybe we can go to Cherville?

So I have actually nothing to add outside of what you've already described, Council Member.

Okay, thank you.

So we each have opening remarks and they've directed me to start for share wheel.

Good afternoon, Council Members.

I'd like to thank you for allowing me to address you today.

I'd like also to thank my community, share and wheel members and leadership for releasing me from our standard protocol, homeless people speaking for themselves, in order to discuss contract matters with you today out of my role as the contract specialist for our organizations now and also from past work experience here in Seattle.

On February 12, 2018, I addressed the Council Housing Committee and outlined the arc of my work experience in Seattle, which is the arc of downward mobility, solidarity, love, and hard work.

I currently am one of the lead organizers with Wheel and Share and have been working with this community since 1993. I and all of my organizing coworkers make minimum wage.

This is a matter of solidarity philosophy and also a necessity because of our shoestring budgets.

Before I came to work with Wheel and Share, I was a Jesuit volunteer and then a shift worker and supervisor at St. Martin de Porres Shelter for Older Homeless Men.

Then I was recruited by Catholic Community Services to start up a winter women's shelter just before the snow emergency of 1990. That shelter was proposed to be a short-term project, but need demanded our advocacy and negotiation for its continuation.

Our working together with Mayor Rice's administration and many others resulted in it staying open and growth into Noel House, Rose of Lima House, and Bikita Gardens.

I was just 25 years old when Noel House started, very green, and new to the task of running a large, important, life-saving shelter.

At the time, that shelter was in the same building as the Seattle Human Services Department, the Alaska Building, in an unleased and ramshackle deli space on the first floor.

With just 10 days' notice before the shelter opened, HSD staff, the Seattle Conservation Corps, and community volunteers helped prepare the space, clean it up, install heaters, and laundry machines.

HSD workers routinely spent time at the shelter, hanging out with women, conversing, and asking what we needed.

An HSD contract monitor sat down with me and taught me how to prepare budgets and navigate the forms needed to invoice the city for the work we did.

Those were glorious days, but they were not without struggle, public conflict, and criticism.

Even though we disagreed on many things, HSD and the mayor's office worked with us in order to create something that would save lives and offer dignity, comfort, and community to homeless women who had no other shelter before ours opened.

I left that job after four years, having learned a lot and done some critical analysis and discernment.

I decided that community organizing was a better fit for me and a more powerful approach to people surviving and solving homelessness.

What always rankled me about my time at Noelle House was the demand for me to speak for the women rather than allowing them to speak for themselves at the same table with decision makers.

and also the tension of having to say no to very reasonable, very human requests from the women because of bureaucratic rules or fear of liability or lack of funding.

I wanted to find a way for our city to say yes to those very reasonable, very human requests.

Seemed to me we'd be a better city if yes were the answer.

Since 1993, I've been arrested many times in the cause of seeking shelter with others during the administrations of Mayors Rice, Schell, and Nichols.

And still we, and those administrations, found ways to work together, shoulder to shoulder, as funding and provider partners.

In the year 2000, HSD staff approached WHEEL and asked us to partner with them to operate a severe weather shelter for women.

They helped us identify space and supported us when we moved to another location in our second year.

Several years later, HSD invited WHEEL to convert that shelter to an all-winter women's shelter and accepted and helped clarify the literally back-of-an-envelope budget that we wrote together for its operation.

In 2002, after a long struggle in legal action, HSD and the city attorney's office sat down at the same table with us and crafted a consent decree guiding the operations of 10 cities in Seattle that since served as a model and guide for many other cities in the United States and our own groundbreaking and life-saving Seattle Encampment Ordinance.

In 2007, HSD staff sat down at the same table with share leaders at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral and crafted a deal to allow our participation in the HMIS in a way that was not antithetical to self-management.

This collaborative spirit became spottier in the 20-teens, just as the city was growing wealthier and wealthier.

Homelessness, which fundamentally is a problem of economic injustice and painful lack of affordable housing, got worse and worse, and homeless people and programs started getting blamed for the intractability of the problem.

Fault lines kept changing, and new RFPs for city funding came and went in 2013 and 2017. Each time these new funding initiatives or policies were proposed, we were worried, but the rhetoric of their resulting RFPs gave us will and share, cause for hope that finally the strengths of our homeless-led and decentralized shelter model would be understood and valued.

Cost effective?

We're the best.

The sweat equity put in by our participants in our self-managed shelters and minimum wages of our handful of organizing staff mean we remain the very least expensive per-bednight shelter program in the city.

community building, and breadth of partnerships.

We have the broadest partner network of host sites of any provider in Seattle, 10 different locations, mostly churches, spread throughout the city.

Councilmember Bagshaw called this out in her remarks during last autumn's budget process.

I've talked to your faith community hosts, she said, and understand that you allow them to live out their ministries in ways they couldn't do on their own.

Empowering participant leadership, deeply living out the city's race and social justice values.

Very few other programs in Seattle, if any, can claim they live out their shelter operations in this democratic and participant-led way, as Sharon will do.

Housing outcomes.

Last year, due to strengthening our circuit riding case management component in partnership with Catholic Community Services, SHARE had a year-long exit rate to housing of 19% to permanent housing and 10% to transitional housing.

This outstripped most other basic shelter programs.

As one of our SHARE shelter participants said in testimony before this council last fall, low cost, high performing, what's not to like about SHARE?

Council members are asked to be critical in your thinking and thoughtful in your deliberations.

Last fall, you heard our testimony, saw the evidence, and weighed public testimony from us, from our faith community hosts and the church council, from our provider partners and the human service and homeless coalitions.

You looked at the number of people living and dying on our streets for lack of shelter, and then made a unanimous decision to guarantee our funding for two years.

We were so grateful and relieved.

Such stability hasn't been ours to share for many a year here.

Your decision was the right one and called us all to the common good of working together in good faith on our sheltering efforts.

So you can imagine how shocking it was to us to learn on February 26th, nearly two months into the contract year, that the mayor circumvented your authority and intends to contract with us only for six months this year, pending improvements that were not named to us.

We were told that the mayor hopes that this reduced contract and its resulting threat of defunding again will incentivize improvements.

We are human, we are Americans, and we love Seattle, even as we challenge our city to be better than it is right now.

Think about this in human terms.

Humans do not perform best under threat of harm or extinction.

Just think about this in terms of a civics 101 lesson.

It doesn't inspire faith in democracy to have a decision democratically and unanimously made by the city council after a huge amount of public testimony and discernment reversed in this way with no explanation or real justification and outside the boundaries of council authority and the expectation of all of us and our partners and supporters who weighed in during your deliberations.

Just last Friday, March 8th, at 9.35 p.m., we received our first direct communication from HSD about what this threat of defunding designed to incentivize our improvements regards.

They said it regards occupancy and then missing data fields in the HMIS.

Holy moly, this is how we operate in a state of homeless emergency?

About our occupancy, it's true that shared shelters were a hair under the contract capacity percentages last year.

At 82% capacity year long, 85% is the contract norm.

Our being under capacity related in part to our high exit rate to housing.

In other words, our shelters decreased in occupancy because we were so good at getting people into housing.

We're working to build our numbers now.

We started this year in good faith and good spirits, and with a serious game plan, we're living out right now for outreach and recruitment.

Outreach which will be made much more difficult with another defunding threat hanging over us.

And SHARE's occupancy rate is not the only lower than capacity rate among shelters in Seattle, none of which are getting threatened with defunding.

Wheal's occupancy rate at our extremely low barrier women's shelter was 138% last year because the dire need for the kind of shelter that we operate and our no turn away policy.

How can Wheal and its homeless women participants be condemned or penalized or put on probation for that?

about the HMIS data.

Again, we just learned at 9.35 p.m.

last Friday what this concern specifically regards.

At no point last year or this year did HSD flag concerns to us or sit down to meet with us about those issues or requests or suggestions for improvement.

We knew they were worried about housing outcomes, and we worked hard on those last year to very good effect.

I've already mentioned those share housing outcomes, but Wheels worked on this hard, too.

With perceived funding security, last August we finally began an outreach case management component, which is different from shares because our constituency is different.

Long-term homeless women, many with multiple vulnerabilities.

The wheel case management outreach component is just starting to bear fruit.

We had two housing exits in January and four in February, which in February comprised 15% of our exits.

We should be celebrating this progress, but instead are terrified for our future again.

The other HMIS data points just named to us last Friday regard data completeness in the HMIS.

Here's the thing.

Many other very good and important city-funded shelters, including the ones I started my work with here in Seattle, have data completeness issues.

None of them is being threatened with defunding.

So how can we not analyze this information and data and conclude that we, share and wheel are being punished for being publicly critical.

I looked up the meaning of that word, critical, before I came here today.

It has many meanings, important and analytical and judgmental and also sometimes condemnatory.

I learned long ago that my personal and our collective progress require critical analysis, judgment, and also speaking up when things aren't right.

SHARE does that, and WEAL does that, and I would argue that even though it makes folks uncomfortable when we disagree, we are called to speak up and speak honestly, and we have done it many times before and still work together.

Another data set that I wish we spend as much time analyzing and critiquing and arguing about and doing something about regards the deaths of homeless people in our community.

A critical project of WEAL's is Women in Black Vigils to remember and reckon with the deaths of homeless people in King County.

WEAL advocacy and partnership with the King County Medical Examiners resulted in their providing data to us and many other stakeholders, including HSD, about homeless deaths.

Women in black are standing vigil tomorrow for 10 more people who died outside or by violence in King County already this year, bringing the outdoor violent death total to a record-breaking 28 of 38 homeless deaths altogether.

The average age of death is shockingly low, just 47 years old.

With tomorrow's vigil, women in black will have stood for 1,006 homeless women, men, and children who've died outside or by violence since our vigil's founding 19 years ago.

Without shelter, people die.

That's a pretty simple mission statement, but it is, in fact, our motivation and animus.

It should motivate us, all of us, together to do everything we can to help people in programs like SHARE and WHEEL, rather than incentivizing data improvements by threats.

These past two years of work here have been particularly fractured, dissonant, and painful.

Time and again, through recent conflicts, our communities, allied organizations like Nicholsville, and many others have cried out to be treated as equals and partners and stakeholders and collaborators with our Seattle Human Services Department.

Nothing about us without us is what we've requested over and over again, but we seldom, if ever, are allowed to meet at the same table with decision makers until after decisions are made, if then.

Through public testimony over the past weeks, HSD employees themselves, many of whom I admire greatly, have been saying the same thing regarding the HSD director nomination process.

We desire to be treated as equals and partners and stakeholders and collaborators, and we are not being treated that way now.

I have old friends who've remained in the field like me and are still working in traditional social service programs today.

I respect their longevity and dedication and expertise.

Many share our analysis and critique, but are too afraid of retaliation or defunding to speak up publicly.

We'll and share and our participants need the security, dignity, and promise of a full year contract in order to move forward toward possible improvements this year.

Bigger than that, We and HSD employees and HSD bosses and the council and the mayor need to be honest with one another and be at the same table together and work together as partners for the sake of homeless people's survival and strength.

Anything less than that kind of true collaboration in good faith and despite critique and criticism is squandering the true wealth of the city, its humanity.

Thank you, Michelle.

Before the next speaker, please just want to acknowledge we've been joined by Council Member Baxter.

Thank you.

Thank you, Michelle.

Go ahead.

Thank you.

As I said, my name is Anitra Freeman.

I stayed in a shared shelter while I was homeless, late 95 to early 96. And I've remained involved because this is my community.

I'm the president of the Board of Directors of SHARE, an elder of WEAL, a founder of WEAL Women in Black, and a founder of the WEAL Women's Shelter.

In 2000, as Michelle said, the city of Seattle asked WEAL to start a severe weather shelter for any woman in any condition at any time of night.

We located a host, First United Methodist Church, which at that time was at Fifth and Columbia, and hired staff members out of our own community.

I filled in as extra staff for those first few nights.

The atmosphere those first nights was relief at being inside, dry and warm and safe, combined with anxiety about how long this would last.

The shelter was open only during severe weather.

Then the women would be back on the streets, which was still dangerous.

Everyone was glad when the city asked us to become an all-winter shelter.

The women felt more secure, and so did the staff.

It was even better when we became year-round.

During last Thursday's Pioneer Square Art Walk, I was sharing dinner with activists and homeless people at Impact Hub.

I was describing our shelter when a woman at the table burst out, I love the wheel shelter.

She told everybody that it was her favorite shelter, that she felt treated better than anywhere else, and that you can walk in, lie down, and feel safe.

I've also felt fear and anxiety among the women of the shelter again.

Everyone was so relieved and happy last November.

We were secure for two years.

Everyone's attention was turning to plans for the future.

Now, suddenly, we can't say for certain if we'll be open past June 30. Homeless women are under fear and stress all the time.

I got into housing in February of 1996. It was the summer of 2014 before my guts unknotted.

It does not help anyone to add more fear on top of that.

I'm quite sure that women will keep coming to our wheel shelter.

We've averaged 138% capacity for a year.

I am worried about the share shelters.

One of the appeals of a share shelter is that you screen in once, then you know where you're going every night and you can stop worrying about that piece of the survival puzzle.

Many people uncertain about the stability of our, making people uncertain about the stability of our shelters does not incentivize our occupancy rate.

I take part in hiring interviews for the wheel shelter.

All of our staff, all staff in share and wheel make minimum wage.

$15 an hour this year.

Thank you so much.

Living on minimum wage, you don't have a margin.

Our cash flow is already under strain because we don't have a city contract and can't be reimbursed for the work we've done for two months.

That makes staff nervous.

Now we can't guarantee paychecks past June 30th.

This would be demoralizing to any organization.

I'm very proud of our staff for how well they are performing under this anxiety.

I'm worried about getting any new staff.

We had planned to open new share shelters this year.

Now, prospective hosts are bringing up the funding crisis, asking if we really want to start something new right now.

Current hosts are bringing this up, asking if we're going to continue.

Even when we get our contract, because HSD would not offer share and wheel a cost of living adjustment, citing a technicality, we're going to have a funding gap that we have to fill by fundraising.

Now, how can we fundraise if funders are afraid that we may be closing in months or weeks or days?

But what is in the forefront of my concerns is the effect this is having on the women in the wheel shelter.

120 homeless people died outside or by violence last year.

We stood vigil for them.

As of tomorrow, we will have stood vigil for 28 already this year, which is an even higher rate of death than last year.

I don't just feel grief from our community at these vigils.

I feel a palpable fear.

Now that fear has been turned one screw higher.

The reason my gut stayed knotted for 18 years is because while I was homeless, I could never admit I was scared.

I stuffed it.

My guts aren't knotted now because I can tell you I'm scared.

But my guts feel like they're running an electric current This idea of six months at a time funding isn't helping.

Withdraw that.

Give us the full year contract that you voted for and that HSD originally offered in their January award letter.

Then sit down with us and help us continue to improve our shelters.

Fear itself can kill.

Hi, my name is Nicole Graceland.

I'm the staff member at the Wheel Low Barrier Women's Shelter, and I'm also the data enterer.

I have received approximately 700 HMIS forms from women who have stayed with us since we first started collecting data.

Most of the women request anonymity and the forms are often incomplete.

We are currently contracted to accommodate 40 women per night and we have been consistently operating at 135% to capacity every month or 50 plus women a night.

Our numbers have gone up recently and last night we accommodated 64 women.

When we get up to around 60 women, we run out of mats, utilize just about every square inch of our floor space, and do everything we can to stretch our resources so that we do not have to turn anyone away.

We let women into our shelter all night, so if a woman is getting off of work at a late hour or if a woman needs to get to warmth and safety any time of night, they know that we will let them in.

Our shelter functions as an emergency room in many ways, and data will never tell what we experience on the ground.

We can't show you through data the woman who was terrified sitting up on her mat in a crowded shelter because she was recently evicted from her apartment.

She's around 70-some years old and is now out on the streets.

Okay, this is the stuff we see constantly.

You can't see the women who are working, who get in late or wake up early, struggle to hold on to their jobs and hope simply just to find some place they can afford at some point.

The women who stay with us utilize other services during the day.

They're on waiting lists, entering lotteries, working with case managers at other agencies, and staying with us until something becomes available.

Some women stay with us for only a few days and manage to stabilize their situations and move on, and we never hear from them again.

Many women have stayed with us regularly or on and off for years.

We receive calls from social workers at hospitals when they are discharging a homeless patient in the middle of the night and they need to find a place for them to go.

Women have been referred to us by the police, Operation Night Watch, and the mobile crisis teams.

I have personally struggled with homelessness since 2012, and Sharewheel was the first organization that I utilized after several years that enabled me to stabilize and improve my personal situation.

All I needed was a place to stay, a sense of community, and mobility.

Sharon will do shelters best.

I wish I could say that there wasn't any need for what many would consider to be austere emergency shelter.

I cannot.

In the last month alone, we have received several women who were recently displaced and had just become homeless for the first time.

It's still going on.

A significant number of the women staying with us are actively fleeing a violent domestic situation.

And when a low-income or no-income woman decides to escape a violent domestic situation, she often leaves with nothing and becomes homeless.

As the data enterer, I was instructed to de-identify any woman who is currently fleeing to ensure her safety.

Women of all ages utilize our shelter.

We have women, a high percentage of whom are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and even up into their 80s.

while they're battling chronic and debilitating illness on top of that.

I never thought that senior citizens in the U.S. would find themselves without the ability to access shelter.

Now we have senior citizens dying on our streets.

Many become ill, incurred medical debts, lost everything, and must now recover without stable housing.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story this last week titled Aging Onto the Street.

all of our policymakers should pay attention.

I have witnessed this firsthand since 2012 when I first experienced homelessness.

It's going to get worse, and everyone should be looking ahead to provide shelter equipped to accommodate the growing number of elderly on our streets, and we're currently serving that function.

We have a lot of elderly women.

The Wheel Low Barrier Women's Shelter has been a trusted and reliable fixture for many women over the years.

I cannot understate the violence that pervades every aspect of life for a woman experiencing homelessness.

I wish I could say you could just house everybody currently on the streets and just like that, homelessness would be a thing of the past.

It's not like that.

The need for easy to access emergency shelter is now greater than ever.

I can't think of a worse time for this funding to be cut.

That's it.

Thank you council members want and consummate.

Oh yes, we have some other all of you.

Thank you Appreciate your time here appreciate your time there should I move okay?

Not a problem Thank you All right

My name is Christopher Anderson.

I reside at shares bunkhouse in South Seattle That's one of their 11 programs providing shelter to the 170 men and women each night so our organization was excited and encouraged by your budget when we learned that our That had changed and allowed us to get set to work through 2019 and 2020. We are very, very encouraged by that.

After working hard in 2018 with good results in exits to permanent and transitional housing, we began looking ahead on helping more folks.

New communities continue to welcome our self-management model, and we hope to fulfill the need by adding to our shelter network.

We can't do that without your help.

Our self-managed shelters are unique in the country.

Though folks in other cities do some of what we do, none suffer the numbers of homeless coupled with such a roller coaster of treatment as has been handed our organization recently by city government.

We see the recent reduction in our contract as a direct attack on the needs of the homeless and our rights to conduct ourselves as members of the communities you serve.

This is another aspect of our self-management model you'll never find on any HMIS data sheet.

Agency and opportunity for self-actualization.

This isn't a grade school social studies project, it's real people forging with purpose toward real life solutions, and we hope it's this committee that'll make things happen.

There's many individual examples of success.

Assistance with housing just scratches the surface.

Continued sobriety, renewed sobriety, assistance through case managers on a number of fronts, including mental and physical health needs, to name a few.

And from time to time, I've been lucky to run into former participants of our program recently.

Folks like James B. Mike.

These folks that I've run into attribute the structure of our shelter program as a contributing factor to their continued success after getting housing.

So they learn something from their experience because it's a self-managed model.

Seeing successes is always, always very rewarding.

They're real outcomes of self-management.

We hold ourselves accountable for the function and condition of our shelters.

And that moves forward when people leave.

Our HMIS data is similar to many other basic shelters, and we cost a lot less than they do.

They're not being treated with defunding, and neither should we.

Thanks.

Thank you.

We're trying to turn the lights down a little bit because it's too bright.

OK.

OK, while they're doing that, where is Alan from central staff so that we can ask some questions?

He said he had to run, but he'd be back.

OK.

Sure, go ahead.

And is this good for the lights right here, the setting?

There's five settings.

It's good for me, as long as it's good for others.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

First of all, I want to thank all of you for your speeches today.

Michelle, I didn't catch your last name.

It's Marchand.

Okay.

So I noticed three of you had, or all of you had written statements.

Is there a way that you can, we can maybe give those to Ted and have copies for us?

Let's do that offline.

We'll do that, yes.

Just so that by the time we leave today, we have your statements because obviously with the email exchanges going back and forth between HSD and everybody and all these things being said, it was really good for me to hear what you were saying, what you were saying, all of you were saying, so we can at least try to distill, you know, facts and data and what all that means just so I can have some kind of baseline.

So, if I can have your, if we can, before we leave today, and I'm sure my colleagues would like copies as well, so if we give that to Ted, then we'll make sure those get dispersed.

So, thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you.

Thank you to all of you for being here and we have met before.

I want to follow up with one of the suggestions and I appreciate what we always say here is nothing about us without us.

I'd like to come and meet with you off-site if we can do that in the next couple of weeks so I can see your facilities, we can talk further about what your needs are.

I know that many of you that are in the chambers today that I've met with you in the past, like you I'm completely shocked that what we had put forward in the budget last year was suddenly taken away and we weren't talked to either.

And frankly, we've got some work to do to mend some fences with those that made the decision without talking to us after we had passed a budget about it.

So before we leave, I'd like very much to get your contact information.

Maybe Council Member Sawant has it, but let's just get it written before you walk out the door.

I'll follow up and we'll come and meet within the next couple of weeks.

Thank you.

I too want to thank you for joining us today and sharing both your work, the history of your work, the successes of your work, and the frustrations and difficulties and uncertainty and fear surrounding your work.

And I apologize that this uncertainty that you're faced with right now is creating additional fear.

And so I just want to share as one small way to try and address those really legitimate fears about the ending of a contract mid-year.

I want to share some correspondence that I received from the mayor's office today after speaking personally with the mayor last week about this situation.

And I had mentioned earlier that I was working to facilitate a meeting between ShareWheel, CCS, and HSD.

And today, it was suggested that we should first allow ShareWheel, CCS, and HSD to meet without my facilitation, which I get that, that's okay.

But I want to share what the mayor's office said specifically about their hopes.

They say, I have optimism.

that this can get resolved and SHARE, WHEEL, and CCS's concerns can be addressed before the mayor's office and council start attending meetings.

And if it doesn't, we can evaluate next steps.

I'm grateful for your encouragement for HSD and SHARE, WHEEL, and CCS to meet and for raising the issue with the mayor.

And this has helped ensure that this first meeting happened promptly.

I was also notified today that there is a meeting scheduled for, next Tuesday, is that correct?

It's next Monday at 4 p.m.

Next Monday, okay.

That's good to get that confirmation that that is happening.

And I also want folks to know, I believe Councilmember Sawant has asked for similar information, that you have made us aware that as it relates specifically to the data completeness data sets that there are other organizations that are falling below what HSD tells us is an 84% completeness rate.

And so I've asked them for for information about the organizations that also fall below that average and how HSD is working with those organizations to seek continuous improvement on the data completeness data set.

And I'm doing that because I want to make sure that Chairwheel is not being held to a different standard than other organizations.

And so once we get that information, we'll, I think, know more about sort of the impact of these types of ways to influence performance outcomes and whether or not they are being used across the continuum of providers that the city funds.

And I do have to leave.

I have a meeting in South Park, but that's why I wanted to get all that out.

Thank you.

Let's keep discussing this offline as well.

Thank you.

I did have some questions, some on the data completeness.

I'm glad Alan is back at the table.

But before that I just I just wanted to say I mean in my viewpoint You know we We should do everything possible and my office will do everything possible to ascertain the specifics of what Apparently, the mayor and the Human Services Department leadership seems to be saying, I'm not clear yet, and that is why I have some specific questions.

But I also want to make it clear, and this is along the lines of the statements you all already read, and what I say is not going to be even half as eloquent as what you've already said, which is that it doesn't matter what those specifics are.

The overarching reality is that homelessness is an absolutely devastating and brutal experience, and SHARE and WEAL are some of the very, very few basic shelters that provide that welcoming space, especially for women who are experiencing violence on the streets or in their homes, and that's why they're leaving their homes.

And so I think the bottom line that we need to make clear, at least from my office, is that Only homeless people and the vulnerable are treated this way.

When was the last time you heard the mayor signing a contract with big business that requires them to apply every three and a half months?

That does not happen.

It is very clearly linked to the fact that we are talking about homeless community members and there's no there's no concept of the mayor's executives being asked to And I have to say it's just, for me, it's Orwellian double speak to say we're happy with your performance.

That is why we are revoking your contract that was assured for the rest of the year and then make you apply every six months.

That makes no sense whatsoever.

I think we have to make those bottom lines very clear while at the same time seeking as much specific information as possible.

Let's not mince words here.

And I really appreciate not only the people from Share and Weal who have come here, but people who've come here in solidarity with them.

Really wanted to recognize you all for being here.

It's really very, very important.

On the data completeness question, Alan, I had a couple of questions on this.

is didn't the, didn't the city council pass an ordinance, I'm referring to Council Bill 11925, 245, sorry, in which, I mean, it's, these are whereas clauses that I'm looking at.

I think you also have it.

I just wanted to read it for the benefit of the public.

I mean, one of the things that it seems to be conveyed to share in real from the mayor's, mayor's side is that there's a question of the incomplete data being collected in the HMIS, which is Homeless Management Information System.

Am I saying that right?

That's correct, council member.

But here, the whereas clauses says, whereas use of HMIS scan cards shall be voluntary for both providers and the clients they serve, and the Human Services Department does not intend to compel providers or clients to use HMIS scan cards in any fashion, and whereas the Seattle City Council requests that the Human Services Department ensure that service providers make amply clear to their clients the option of using an anonymous or de-identified profile in HMIS.

It seems to me, and I would like Alan to put on this, it seems to me the spirit of these words is very clear that we don't want the funding for the providers or the provision of the services in any way contingent upon providing data.

So I'm not sure.

And then I had a follow-up question also specifically, so go ahead.

So hopefully I can be of assistance.

So actually for the vast majority of the city's homelessness contracts, as well as region-wide, so this includes King County as well, that for most programs, the city and the county actually do require use of HMIS to track data.

So the recitals that you read, The first one actually refers to the new pilot, well it was piloted last year, HMIS scan cards.

So that's a physical card that contains, that links to a certain profile that a participating agency can give to willing participants.

This allows them to expedite services, they can also more accurately track data.

So that's what that first recital refers to.

It doesn't refer to the HMIS system overall.

The second recital, yes, so, and this is actually a challenge with data management, is that per the report that the Human Services Department provided last year around privacy, that anybody who engages with HMIS can choose to have a de-identified profile or of course not participate at all.

And that is a challenge of the data because one person can have multiple profiles in the data.

Good.

So, and that would, I mean, I think the speakers earlier made it clear why, particularly for women who are escaping from violent situations, why people would very much want to keep their, or have concerns they'd want to keep elements of their data private and HMIS.

asks lots and lots of personal information and people have a basic right to privacy.

It seems like, and I know it's quite vague what this letter from the mayor's office explaining that talks about the quote-unquote incomplete data, but it seems like incomplete data, what that's talking about is that second whereas clause.

It's talking about people, not filling in all the forms, forms that they might have chosen for good privacy reasons to keep blank?

Yeah, I actually don't know.

So that would be a good question for the executive.

However, if I had to posit a guess, I would actually guess that no, it would not involve participants using a de-identified profile or choosing anonymity.

But again, I actually don't know any of the details around that claim.

Thank you.

And please, let's follow up on that with the mayor's office.

Absolutely.

And secondarily on, but on the same point, this is, and I'm, what I'm, what I'll be reading is from the letter by Meg Olberding in response to the queries, a letter dated February 28, in response to the queries from council members about why Cher and Weill were told that their funding will not be continued past June 30th, contingent on whatever, we still don't know what it is.

But in that, she clarifies that the 2017 RFP scored performance in the following categories.

Length of stay, entries from homelessness, rate of exit to permanent housing, utilization, and returns to homelessness.

So data completeness is not one of those criteria.

So I'm a little confused.

Why would they change anything midstream?

And just to explain what I'm saying further, it's very misleading to us.

It feels misleading that in the letter she clarifies that the performance criteria are this, this, and this, and none of those includes data completeness.

But then later in the letter, she says, we understand the rate of entries from homelessness.

Sorry, sorry, it says, the following sentence says, related to this, SHARE and WEAL need to continue to improve its data completeness.

and so on.

So I'm not sure what, it seems to me like they're sort of changing midstream and saying, well, now data completeness should be a criterion that you should be judged on.

And so certainly we want to find out if other service providers are being placed, being asked to fulfill the same criterion also.

However, again, I wanted to make the bottom line very clear, regardless of what the data collection is, we cannot We cannot put this additional fear in the minds of people who are already facing vulnerability.

So I don't think we should keep funding contingent on that.

So that's one thing, if we can ascertain what happened there.

But can I go ahead and ask another thing?

In that same paragraph, in my Goldberding's letter, it says, share wheels completeness rate, data completeness rate is 59% compared to the basic shelter average of 84%.

So I have two questions related to this.

One is, which are the other basic shelters that they're benchmarking against?

And also just from a general standpoint, I feel like nearly 60% is a pretty good data completeness.

It's not as good as 84%, yes, but it's, not like saying the data completeness is 16% or something, do you know what I mean?

So that's one thing I wanted to have, like, is there a general idea in, not just in Seattle, but overall, that we can get a sense of?

And also, my previous question is, what other shelters are they benchmarking against and how do they get this average?

Those are great questions, Council Member.

Certainly those second ones, the second set regarding drilling into that 84% and seeing how that compares with the share wheel rates.

I'll note for the first set of questions, Meg Olberding's letter describing the performance along the various measures.

So again, not knowing what the executive specific concerns are on a technical level to the fine granular detail.

We do know that that paragraph concerns the share wheel application for the 2017 RFP, which did substantially rely on data in HMIS.

So that was about their RFP application, which they submitted in 2017. And then this apparent issue with data completeness, And again, I don't know without having further information from the executive that it seems to concern the method in which information is obtained to report on those various performance measures like exits to permanent housing, length of stay, and so forth.

But I will certainly follow up with the department and get these details.

Did you all have anything on this?

Yeah, it's we don't really conduct exit interviews because we have been Exiting them after three months of in of not attending our shelter.

That's been my You show that as an exit when you don't have that person coming back for for three months when I don't see them for that long and I mean women have gotten housing on their own or with their other case managers or while they're staying with us and the only ones that I've I've Exited to housing or the ones that have been confirmed by our case manager that we've been doing with the hands-on but I mean the women are getting housing that isn't showing and isn't being reflected in the data.

And it's very impossible to do that.

It's very common for large shelter programs, including many other emergency shelter programs, simply not to know where their people go.

They're providing a safe place for the night.

And when people don't return, then after a time, they exit by attrition.

People leave without saying where they're going.

It's very common.

We're not the only sheltering program that has that data incompleteness sort of record in that area.

And we're lucky when we do get it.

And when we get it, it's filled out by the participant, indicated that it's either self-exit but more specifically self-exit to housing so that we have a delineation there.

A lot of times we do that when we need the bed, when we can't wait that extra day to hold that bed for that person, that person is releasing that bed so that we can fill that bed.

And sometimes we do get indications of exit to housing and we ask for that documentation when we expect that they're leaving for housing.

But again, we don't always expect it.

We don't always get the heads up.

Another area is sort of entry into our shelters from what HUD now says is true homelessness, which is sort of street homelessness.

They don't count couch surfing or you were in an apartment and got evicted.

So, you know, the wheel shelter takes a number of people, about 70% of the women are coming from what now is considered to be true homelessness, share a little bit lower than that, but that's because the feds changed up the rules about defining homelessness.

Okay.

And when did that change happen?

Quite some time ago.

Okay.

Do you know?

No, not exactly.

It's not recent though.

Yeah.

It's got to be at least three years is my guess, three to four years maybe, at the least.

It may have been more than that.

But, you know, don't trust my memory.

I feel like Alan and Ted both want to say something, so please go ahead.

Oh, I'm just articulating to myself that I need to get the answer to that, so.

I just wanted to say on the data question, and it came up in public comment, the need for council to kind of independently look at this data.

In Councilmember Sawant's office, we've been asking the executive for the raw data that they used to make these claims for over a year now, and they have not agreed to share that information.

So we only have their...

conclusions to go based on.

And, you know, they can, what question you ask can really change what answer you get.

So.

That's true.

And we don't have any way of verifying those responses.

At least we don't.

My office doesn't.

So I'm going to help your office craft a request to King County, who are the keepers of the HMIS data, to receive, if not the raw data, which I doubt we would be able to receive for privacy concerns, legitimate privacy concerns, but at least data that's much further upstream from what we're getting from the department.

That would be very helpful.

Thank you, Alan.

Yeah, let's do that.

In the interest of time, because our presenters for the next item are waiting, I just wanted to lay out some next steps that I think we should follow up on, first of all.

Alan and Ted will be helping us with following up on all the questions, technical questions that came up.

I think that's important that we have as clear answers as possible.

But then I, from my office, we will be initiating a letter to the mayor to reinstate the funding and, you know, and also clarifying that reinstating the funding would be in agreement with the decision of the council when we passed, My office brought an amendment forward to in the last year's budget so this was only in November 2018 to fund share and wheel for the for the two-year budget so it should go all the way to the rest of this year so in other words all we would be asking the mayor to do is to be in compliance with what the what the city council decided already rather than change it at this stage.

So I will be inviting other council members also to sign that letter and I invite edits so we'll send around a draft version of that to all the council offices and we'll see where that goes and we'll be in communication with the share and wheel organizers.

And I really appreciate you all being here.

And those were very moving statements.

I really appreciate the preparation you did in order to do justice to this committee.

So, thank you so much.

And thanks also to Alan and Ted.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So, will the presenters for our next item come up?

Actually, if the folks who came here for Share Reel, if you have time to stay, please stay because it's a very good study on evictions.

Get Kealani here.

Oh.

Oh, Kealani.

Come up here.

Oh, did we get a copy of this?

We didn't get a copy of this.

Did you hand one out?

Is there one?

Nick, can you bring a copy for Council Member Warren?

We got the presentation a little bit late, which was my delay in following up.

Yeah, nobody else's fault.

But we have copies there.

And we can email it as well.

OK, if I just have a hard copy, I can write notes on it.

Thank you.

You also want a copy of what we attached to the agenda, the report itself.

Wasn't this it?

That's the PowerPoint version.

Yeah, that would be nice.

Okay, can we have very short one-sentence introductions from both of you, please?

Sure.

My name's Dr. Tim Thomas from the University of Washington.

Hi, I'm Kaylani.

Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Thomas and Kaylani for being here.

If it's okay with both presenters, could, the discussion is about, mainly about the study on evictions that Dr. Thomas is going to present.

But in order to frame that discussion in light of what actually human beings go through, I wanted Kalani to share her story of what happened with her, and she knows what I'm talking about.

So if you could just take a few minutes to describe what you went through and Right.

What happens to people, yeah.

Well in the last few years I've been homeless.

Can you speak closer?

In the last like four years I've been homeless probably three times even with the Section A voucher.

So in other words you had a voucher but you were unable to find housing that would accept?

Well, with the threat of terminating your lease or eviction, yeah, I've been pushed from three separate places.

This last time I was almost evicted for owing $2.

Can you describe your fight to not be evicted?

It's just a struggle.

It is a fight.

It's a fight even now that it's settled.

I don't know how to describe it.

It's like almost being evicted for $2 and then coming to a court agreement that I would leave at the end of my lease and they would drop all their bogus fees or whatever.

Now I have less than 30 days to find a place and that's, it's just expensive.

It really is and I'm a single mom and it's, it is, it's just a struggle.

It is.

I can't even take up four times, and I'm still fighting, you know, just to get into a place and be able to afford it and afford all of the cost of evictions.

Right.

Right.

It's costly, it's stressful, and it's tiring.

Right.

Thank you, Killani, and, you know, Feel free to also add more things if you want later.

But for now, if everyone's okay with this, we'll move to the presentation itself.

And Dr. Thomas, you know, please share everything, like just the basic of why this study came about and so on.

I'll just leave it to you.

Sure.

Thanks.

Thanks for inviting me here, council members.

And I appreciate the chance to kind of speak on the behalf of this situation.

So I wrote my dissertation on evictions.

A couple years back, and it was in collaboration with the ACLU, Northwest Justice Project, and it was a very similar situation.

Basically, it was for a case where someone was looking for an apartment.

She had no voucher.

She was a person of color.

She had children.

And she mentioned that she had an eviction, and basically she was denied even the chance to fill out the application.

So this is kind of sharing, you know, the issue of what the mark of an eviction has on future chances of housing.

And so, the research I did was that I've been continuing to do is trying to understand this phenomenon, especially in Washington State.

But to kind of start from the beginning, I kind of want to talk about the theory behind where evictions kind of start, just kind of set a framework.

If you look at this graph right here on the x-axis, it's basically showing economic status.

This shows the type of people that move.

On the y-axis is residential mobility.

Anything that's high means it's high mobility.

Anything that's low means low mobility.

So on the far right-hand side, you can see that folks that have higher incomes basically move by choice.

So that's basically unforced mobility.

Folks who are in the middle class are less likely to move.

That's largely because, you know, moving is expensive.

And also maybe they just have a reason not to and they're trying to establish something.

But then there's a group on the left-hand side that is usually low income that are forced to move for various reasons.

And these folks are renters.

single mothers, folks that are making low incomes, students, minimum wage workers.

And we know a lot about, as a sociologist and demographer, we know a lot about the middle and the far right group, the folks that are middle class and upper, but we know very, very little about this left third portion of people.

And so what this research is doing is trying to kind of reveal who these people are, where they're being affected and all that.

So basically work by Matt Desmond.

He wrote the book Evicted and did his dissertation and work on, he did his study in Milwaukee looking at evictions.

He actually lived with folks.

And he came with this kind of triangle showing that evictions was basically falling at the intersection of increasing rent that is with house burden and inadequate welfare.

So basically income, with the inability to pay for rent that's increasing.

So for an example, the kind of dotted lines on the left are rent increasing at the very bottom line is a one bedroom in Milwaukee back in 1997 to 2008, and that's constantly increasing as well as like a two bedroom that's constantly increasing right above that.

But at the same time, that bottom dark line is showing stagnant wages at that time.

of minimum, I'm sorry, welfare that hasn't really increased over time during his study.

And then welfare, which basically saw a slight bump moving up.

Irregardless, he found that largely over 80 to 90% of folks' income was going towards rent of the people that he surveyed.

With the study in Milwaukee, he found that women were disproportionately overrepresented.

Black evictions were really high families with children.

In fact, he wrote a paper that basically said if you have a child, you're incredibly likely to have an eviction above anybody else.

He found that there was some, the poorest neighborhoods, neighborhoods with folks of color in Latinx neighborhoods were seeing a lot of high rates of eviction, but even in white neighborhoods, Latinx folks were seeing a high rate of eviction in there.

He also measured the outcomes of worse health, future layoffs, environmental hazards, and involuntary displacement, homelessness, and crime.

Sorry, Dr. Thomas, if I might interrupt you for a question, but also I want to acknowledge we've been joined by Council Member O'Brien.

Thank you for being here.

Can you clarify in the Milwaukee study also, was that based on court data on evictions or can you explain what that background was?

Yeah, so Desmond used court data as well as observations and surveys.

So it was a very, very complex, full, qualitative research study.

And it took him a long time to actually collect that data, which is really difficult to have.

Right.

The work that we're doing at the University of Washington as part of the Washington State Evictions Research Project is we're adding on top of that this idea that where you live can really impact your opportunities or impact your eviction.

So for example, we take into account market forces, residential segregation, and neighborhood change on top of what we can about household level characteristics.

The Washington State Evictions Project, what we do is we look at unlawful detainer data.

Sorry, if I might interrupt you again.

On slide seven and eight, if you can go back to, first of all, if you can go back to slide seven.

I just wanted to highlight that something that's really startling, not surprising necessarily, but quite stunning is for the evictions that in the Milwaukee study that were studied, you see the people who are, the data set that you're talking about is people for whom 80 to 90% of their income goes towards rent.

So obviously we're not talking about people in general facing evictions.

We're talking about the people who are absolutely devastated by rent who are facing eviction.

And then am I interpreting your slide number eight correctly to say that the first level of problems that people face is obviously related to their, you know, lack of an adequate wage or income combined with increasing rent.

But on top of that, they face sort of racial segregation, where they live, and is that correct?

Yeah, that's the purpose of the study is to see how segregation plays a role in this because we know that the legacy of economic disadvantage that has been forced on several populations, that has to play out in the housing realm eventually at some point.

But it's also, it's not only that, but it's also a combination of a lot of things too.

It's an umbrella of sorts of market forces, macroeconomic context, city changes.

Basically what happens in one space has a ripple effect and can actually impact other people as well.

And so what we try to do with this research is try to capture that ecology of evictions as you call it.

So to continue about our research project real briefly, what we do, what data we use, basically we are using what's called unlawful detainer data.

An unlawful detainer is an actual legal eviction case that's filed by a landlord and it's heard in court after the three-day pay or vacate notice.

So if I could kind of unpack that a little bit, basically, If a landlord wants to evict you for whatever reason, and to a large majority, what we understand why people get evicted, just based on the research, 80 to 90% of those evictions are because people fall behind on rent.

So again, to your point about low-income households are very, at a very precarious situation.

Landlord can file an eviction.

They post a note and they say you have three days to pay your vacate.

It really is unfortunate if you're getting that note on a Friday because a lot of businesses aren't open on Sundays and Mondays are difficult too.

Irregardless, if the person is actually staying past that three-day period, then they're considered unlawfully detaining the premises.

That's when there's a court order for them to go to a trial.

Within one week, this trial is heard.

It's absolutely amazing how quickly this actually happens.

If it's undecided or there seems to be evidence in favor of the tenant, it can go to trial, but that's set within 30 days still, not very much time left.

And eventually, if the person is still in the premises and resolution hasn't been met, you know, a sheriff can follow through with a writ of eviction, which basically physically removes them.

And regardless of the outcome, the important point of an eviction is that it stays on your record and impacts your future housing.

So a lot of the folks that you hear about that are facing a lot of homelessness, you know, they're facing that not only because they just got evicted, but they just can't really find another place to live either.

On top of that, it impacts where you can get a future apartment, because not all landlords are willing to take vouchers or take folks with an eviction.

So you have this, like, cascading, like, stack of things that are compounding someone's options when it comes to that.

So what we are trying to do is we're trying to understand the trends in unlawful detainers.

Now this does not account for people who, where rent went up and they decided to move or people that actually left during that three day period.

So we're looking at a very small fraction of people that are actually going through this process and these unlawful detainers don't necessarily mean that they actually physically moved.

However, the record does stick on there.

And in fact on that, I guess an interesting question to ask also is what compels the data set that you're looking at, what compels them to not move?

Because obviously it's better to not get an eviction on your record.

So there must be some sociological factors that you've uncovered.

to give some insight into who are the people who don't end up moving and end up having eviction on their record.

And also, might I say, the term unlawful detainer seems to be very, very anti-poor and sort of pro-landlordy term.

And I think you were saying that, right?

When I seen that in my court paperwork, I was just like,

I know, it treats you like a criminal.

I live here.

Yeah, it's implying that you're a criminal.

And I think, Dr. Thomas, you were saying that there are even worse terms in other states, maybe, so it's not like Washington is an exception.

Yeah, I can't remember.

One of the terms, I think, if I recall correctly, is like, I forgot the term, but it was, there are worse terms in other states, too.

I think Oregon has a pretty tough one.

But to your first question, why people actually get unlawful detainers, you know, hopefully if I have the chance, there's been a massive shift in the county or around the state.

So there's the compounding fact that you have an eviction on your record, but there's also just the chance that, you know, you don't have anywhere to go.

And so if you don't have anywhere to go, three days to figure out where you're gonna go next.

I mean, I can't do that.

I have a PhD, and I don't think I could do that.

And I also can't afford Seattle myself.

I need a roommate, even though all these situations are going on.

There's a lot of people that are...

facing that, and so there's this massive displacement, supply and demand's impacting where you could and could not go.

But that's a very localized effect, too, and so we're seeing this across the state, too.

So there's other factors that we're trying to impact as well, but here locally, specifically in King County, there's just very, very limited spaces that we could go.

So we're taking on a Herculean task to look at all evictions from 2004 to 2017. That's 271,000 court cases.

And if you guess, that's about 25 pages a court case, which is actually pretty small considering for a court case.

That's close to 5 million pages that we need to examine.

And in King County alone, there's 80,503 cases from 2004 to 17, and that's about 1.6 million pages.

So, and each of these documents are gathered at the county clerk level, so we have to actually talk to each of the county clerks to try and get access or purchase access through their electronic court records system.

So it's humanly impossible to look at all these numbers, so we apply data science methods.

So in particular we use machine learning to analyze all the court records, to digitize those court records, and we scrape them for important information using a natural language processing technique that basically looks at the the text and it identifies this is an address, this is a cause of eviction, this is an amount, all those kind of things and so we're doing that.

Right now we're focusing strictly on addresses because with an address we can actually pull and estimate demographic information for individuals.

It's unfortunate that the Supreme Court at the state level doesn't collect race information or gender, but what we can do is by taking the first name, we can kind of come up with a likelihood or estimation for each individual that's named in an unlawful detainer, estimate the likelihood that they're either male or female, and with the last name, the surname, we can take that and estimate the likelihood that they're of a particular race based on where they're living at the time of eviction.

So for example, if your last name is Jackson, that's a high likelihood of being an African-American name.

However, if that name is located inside a white neighborhood, then that decreases your likelihood of being an African-American.

And whereas if that name was located in a African-American neighborhood, it increases it.

So that's a Bayesian process.

I won't go into the details because it's kind of dull.

But by doing that, we've actually come up with some preliminary results.

And one of the things that we found is that there's an absolutely high rate of evictions, particularly amongst African Americans in King County, which is really troubling because King County only has about a 6 to 7% black population overall.

However, the eviction rate, white to black, is about two to one.

The fact that African-Americans are overrepresented in this is incredibly alarming.

So, for example, we find that female-headed households are evicted about 2% more than men, African-American-headed households are about four times more likely to be evicted than whites, and about 40% more Latinx households are evicted over whites.

When we combine sex and race, we find that black women are evicted seven times more than white women.

And black males are evicted about 5.4 times more than white males.

This, I think this graph right here actually helps settle that case that I was helping out without a court, because it's astronomical what that effect is.

I, in earlier research, I looked at racial differences in the neighborhoods, so kind of looking at segregation in Seattle.

Seattle had about 27% of the evictions, whereas the rest of the county had the others.

But South King County had the most, and we know anecdotally that African Americans have been being pushed out to those areas.

And in fact, we see that there are incredibly high rates of eviction within some of the most diverse neighborhoods.

So the South is really dominated by minority and integrated neighborhoods, whereas the East is mostly white and Asian.

But we're seeing a high rate of evictions within the most diverse neighborhoods.

So if we move on to the next slide, if you look at the neighborhood typology, on the left-hand side are all white neighborhoods, and on the right-hand side are the most diverse neighborhoods.

And basically, overall, the most diverse neighborhoods have the highest rates of eviction, but it's absolutely absurd to see how high the rate of eviction is amongst African-Americans are.

Basically, we come to the conclusion wherever there's a high, there's at all a presence of African Americans in certain neighborhoods, there's an extremely high rate of eviction amongst that population.

Latinx falls in second.

And the area where whites are evicted the most are located in white Latinx neighborhoods.

In other words, there's about a little more than 10 to 20% of Latinx population in that neighborhood is there.

This is a very intriguing graph.

the eviction rate for black households is actually the highest in integrated neighborhoods.

Yes.

Could you say a little bit about what your interpretation is?

We used to have a lot of segregated neighborhoods, which is interesting because when we talk about segregation, it's kind of a reference towards household of color segregation.

We never talk about white segregation.

And in fact, white segregated neighborhoods seem to have a protective effect against evictions, largely because there's a lot of income there for sure.

What happens in neighborhoods of color is that you have not only low income, but you also have the added effect of discrimination, both at an employment level, also at a historical level, but also at a contemporary level too.

And so integrated neighborhoods in particular, from my observations, are some of the neighborhoods that are seeing a lot of the gentrification transitions in the neighborhoods, things like that.

One of the things that's really shocking, too, is that evictions occur most in the most affordable neighborhoods.

So this is a graph showing rent, where on the left-hand side, we have the lowest rent in the county compared to the highest rent in the area.

And as you can see, there's some...

tracts who have a median rent of close to $3,000 to $5,000, but it's the areas with $1,000 to $1,400 that have some of the highest rates of eviction, anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000.

And again, we see that African Americans are being overly represented with Latinx followed up next, and then whites third.

So this slide got a little jumbled, it looks like.

What this slide shows is the next stage of our research where we're at right now.

So this is looking at all evictions across the whole state of Washington.

As you can see, King County actually has the highest rate of evictions, peaking around 2005, actually declining around 2017 to 4,700.

Now, this decline in my, you know, it might look like it's promising, but actually, I have a hypothesis that this actually means we've actually displaced everyone that we can.

and I hope to have a chance to explain that a little bit more.

Pierce County comes in second, Snohomish, these are both border counties to King County, Spokane, Eastside, Clark County is where Portland, the county that's closest to Portland is.

And there's similar effects that are going on in Portland, and it's actually rippling into Washington through Clark County.

What we found so far is that women are evicted way more than men across the state, except for in a few counties, which includes King County, for example, or Snohomish.

There's, I'm not really, I think that's largely because there's an even ratio of male to female in there, and in fact, some areas have more men.

Sorry, which county are you talking about, or in general?

Orange one is King County on slide 15, and then the green one is Snohomish.

Everything else, including every other county, is anywhere from 6 to 10% more than more women than men across the state.

But these rates are very different for per county.

And sorry, I missed your, what was your explanation for what might be happening in King and Snohomish?

It could be that, I'm really, I'm not sure.

It could be that just there are more men in the area at that level.

There's just a lot of hiddenness, so we're not really sure why that is.

It is a larger population.

You know, I'm not really sure why, to be honest with you, but we're trying to explore that.

By expanding the research that we did, we found that on slide 16 that, again, African Americans, so that one, Slide that I showed before was just from 2013. This shows from 2013 to 2017. And basically what we found is in that five year period, one in 11 black adults got evicted.

The number of evictions in King County equals 8.8% of the black adult population.

That's six times higher than whites.

3% of the Latinx population had the number of evictions for Latinx was 3% of the, equal 3% of the population, so that's two times higher than whites, too.

In Pierce County, it's even worse.

The number of black evictions that we saw there over that five-year period equals one in six black adults.

Now, we're measuring adults because, thankfully, children aren't named in unlawful detainers.

Otherwise, they would follow on the record.

So just adults are named from what we know.

And this is a severe undercount, too.

So we're not actually collecting everybody as possible, but this is about the best estimate that we can come up with.

So in Pierce County, the number of black evictions equals about 17.9% of the black population.

Thank you.

Is this one in 11 black adults were evicted once or one or more times?

Are you following individuals?

How can you explain that?

I mean, that's just absolutely a shocking number.

One in 11 during those five years.

You said Snohomish County, one in six.

I just love it.

Pierce County is one in six.

One in six.

And then, so have you followed the individuals to see if it's more than one time?

The level of more like duplicate evictions for people falls well under 1% of the sample.

So this is largely first time evictions.

Can I ask you a question, which I feel I should have known the answer to already, but I'm gonna ask it.

When the court sides with a landlord and an eviction happens, how does it work?

I mean, does only the adult whose name is on the lease get an eviction on their record, or all the adults in the household get an eviction?

I mean, you already said the children don't get it on their record.

Yeah, there are two options on there.

So the reason why this is undercounting what's going on is because sometimes they say, Mrs. Jane Smith, and all occupants of 1215 Main Street.

Other times, a lot of the times, they actually name other people.

So we don't know how many children are in these households.

We don't know who all the other occupants are.

So this is one in 11. I mean, in reality, it's probably one in seven in King County.

If we actually had everybody in there, including children, And also, a lot of legal professionals believe that this severely under-represents actual people who got evicted prior to the three-day pay or vacate.

So this is a very conservative estimate.

I'm sorry, got evicted prior to the three-day?

So if someone gets a three-day notice, they may have left.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

So they got an eviction notice and they left, but we don't have documentation of that.

Right, and termination of tenancy is not documented either, and that's a tool.

I'm sorry, what did you say?

Termination of tenancy is definitely a tool I feel like landlords use.

just to get a person out of their unit, you know what I mean?

And that goes unaccounted for.

I've had to terminate my tenancy before out of fear of getting an eviction.

Right, and we don't have a way of counting that, at least so far.

The data's out there.

It's usually held by those serving these evictions, but that data is private.

Landlords, property managers, that sort of thing.

Yeah.

And their lawyers and all that kind of stuff.

Right.

And wherever they're applying for next, right?

Exactly.

The data that we pull is public, but it's highly, you know, cost preventative.

For example, every single county has a different way of holding this data.

In King County, for example, the way that the laws are set up, I found this out recently, that apparently Washington State is the second least funded court system in the nation.

And that tacks on a lot of fees.

for access to these data, depending on the circumstances.

So the rest of the state is using this system called Odyssey, which is online, and it's about $500 to $1,500 to subscribe to get access to these court records.

For King County, they charge 25 cents per page to download it.

So I estimated the number of pages that we would need to do that, you know, somewhere around $350,000 to $500,000 to actually get access to these data at King County.

Right now, we only have two years of data, and it's only the summons, because the summons is the front page that has the address, and that's two pages.

And so, if you look back at that graph, you know, there's some years that have upwards of 7,000 court cases going on.

So our next step after this is we want to look at the complaints to get at the reason for eviction and hopefully maybe some demographics or some other stories behind this.

But right now we're just focusing on the demographic estimation by getting the address, using the names which are provided by the state to do this kind of assessment.

And so far, you know, with, you know, we have zero budget.

It's kind of guerrilla research at this point.

You know, we're working on the hearts of a lot of people that are interested in this.

It's hard to fund this kind of project.

But it's, you know, it's on the precipice of new sociology.

It's incorporating data science into this to actually answer new novel questions.

And the fact that, you know, even with what little we have to find that 9% of the black population in King County is facing eviction while at the same time we know they're being displaced and all this kind of stuff is, it's highly alarming.

And so that, you know, I've been down to Olympia and I've testified before the representatives in the Senate based on this because I think it's actually a civil rights issue.

How much more time do I have?

I have a meeting I have to get to off-site at 4.30, so maybe 10, 15 minutes?

Sorry, the foreshadowing went a little bit longer.

That's okay.

So I'll cut to the chase of like how we got here.

Basically, you know, a lot of the research that I do, I study segregation.

I just want to point out by showing this is a map in 2010 of block level race dynamics.

So each one of those points equals one person.

and the color codes them by the racial category that they identify by through the census.

And as you can see, there's really distinct lines in which people kind of fall in.

So the red are whites, blue are African-American, which little blue you see, that's part of the central district.

Green is Asian, which is kind of defining the, International District and Latinx are gold.

You can kind of see most of them down in West Seattle.

Now the way that these neighborhoods are formed are not random.

In fact, they're formed through history.

So for example, redlining was one thing.

You can notice that where those groups fall right now is exactly where they designed hazardous areas back in the 1930s and 40s.

We also have restrictive housing covenants that where over 400 restrictive covenants were, that we know of, 400 restrictive covenants were found in King County.

And these are some of the neighborhoods where they fall, you know, everything from Ballard, Capitol Hill, Central District, all these different areas, helping define where whites could live, but households of color could not.

So these restrictions helped push during the great migration in the 1940s, 1920s, it pushed most African Americans into the Central District, as you can see from this map.

And another form of neighborhood shaping was Japanese internment, as we know, where folks were actually taken out and put into internment camps, and when they returned, they actually couldn't live back in the areas where they had lived before, and that's what's formed the International District.

Now, We know a lot about this history, and I know that this city is very big on talking about this history, but I think what is actually happening is we're in a new era of a migration that I almost want to call it the Great Displacement, or the Great Inversion, because basically what's happening is that every single neighborhood that we concentrated a lot of folks into in the urban core is now shifting to folks moving to the suburbs, and that's...

not necessarily, it's good in the sense that it allows people to move freely, but as you can see from this map, you know, 1980, and it was kind of the last decade that we had really concentrated segregation.

It's showing this is all folks that are non-white moving over the past 40 years, moving into the outside of the urban core.

But if you kind of isolate that to African Americans in particular, they've only been able to live in certain parts of the region.

And a large part, one of the issues with this is that poverty has been increasing into those same areas where they've been displaced.

So if you see this map on the left-hand side, shows the blue is below median poverty, the red is above median poverty for the county.

And as you can see that some areas have seen increases in poverty from 2000 to 2016 by about 12 to 35 percentage points.

And there's a lot of areas in Central Seattle who've actually seen very low poverty, in fact, decreases in poverty.

And at the same time, rent has increased in Seattle, and rent has still increased in South Seattle, but below the median of the county areas of rent.

But what's interesting about this that we find is that there's a huge shift that's happened very rapidly.

One of the things that is really interesting, this plot shows the fair market rent and rent burden, or in other words, income needed to actually afford rent.

So fair market rent basically means if you and I were to go on Craigslist, we look for an apartment, that's, you know, the area is considered fair market rent, so how much a unit should be available.

So the bottom line, if you look at this, this is basically Washington State and the top five most populous counties in the state.

And Washington State, the orange line, back in 2003 was under $800 on median.

And by 2019, it increased to about $1,000.

That's the left-hand side.

On the right-hand side, shows the amount of money you have to make to afford rent.

In other words, the amount of money you have to make to avoid paying more than 30% of your income to rent.

That's called rent burden.

So in 2019, to live in Washington, you needed to make about $40,000.

If you look at the blue line at the very top, 2003, we see a really sharp spike that started around 2012, 2013. So that basically means that in about 2012 or 13, you needed to make about, or rent was about $1,400 a month, whereas by 2019, it jumped up to $2,200 a month.

And this is the median across all bedroom types.

So one studio, one bedroom, two bedroom, three bedroom.

So this is kind of a median across all those.

And if you look at the right-hand side, King County, to live in King County, you have to make $90,000 to afford rent, which is actually, that's deflated because this includes Snohomish as well.

So if we were to isolate Seattle, it'd probably be somewhere around 100 to $110,000 needed to avoid rent burden.

Right.

And I think that's important what you mentioned.

I think what you've called in previous discussions an inflection point in 2012, something interesting starts happening.

But before you go on, Council Member Waters had a question or a comment.

Thank you.

Thank you for your...

We just got your report, and then I just got the PowerPoint.

I just want to go quickly back, and you don't have to go back, but this is just a question.

If you can't answer it, that's fine.

On page 16, when you talked about evictions by race, I think what's a bit glaring for me is that we know that Native Americans are seven times more likely to be homeless.

And I'm wondering why, we know this through the Chief Seattle Club, the work of Colleen Echo Hawk, and of course her sister Abigail Echo Hawk at the Seattle Indian Health Board, and the other Native American organizations and tribes we work with.

So I was wondering why there isn't any of that material in here.

I really appreciate you bringing that up, actually.

That highlights the kind of flaws that the census and data kind of have, to a large degree.

Not necessarily the census, but especially in our estimates, is because there's such a small population of the Native American folks, and so they equate to about one to two percent of the population.

And the measures that we use can't really decipher between whether or not they're Native American or not.

So in other words, if they took the last name, they may change it to, you know, a name that would be identified as a different group versus another.

And so they kind of get thrown into what's, it's hard to decipher.

So this is a completely statistical estimate that we actually compared it to other counts and we were within one to two percentage point of the black and white and Latinx categories that we found.

In other words, their rates.

So we feel very confident in that.

But when it comes to other marginalized groups like, anybody else, especially like, for example, Pacific Islander that represents a whole different spectrum of folks.

And it's unfortunate that we can't pull them out.

If I was to make a best guess, though, I would say that their rates would be even higher.

That's our understanding.

And so I would hope that when you, if you have a chance, because the data is there, we know that through the Chief Seattle Club and the study they put out and how we fund them.

And we know that we make up way less than 2% of the population, but we are way disproportionate in the homelessness and the eviction.

So I'm hoping that's something you can follow up on.

And the whole history of, We all know what happened with the history with the redlining for African-American and Japanese.

And we understand all that history.

What I think people don't realize is, and I wish I knew the number off the top of my head, but I know just from my own tribe, which is Blackfeet, that there are 5,000, 6,000 Blackfeet Indians in King County alone.

And that's, those people are from Montana.

So we know that the Native American population, just city proper, is very high.

And that, so it's not that hard to find those numbers, whether you're self-identifying or through the census.

I guess I'm sharing with you that there are organizations out there that have gotten the money, have been able to get in and get this information, particularly Abigail Elkahawk and the study that she did in her presentation to the King County Board of Health.

So I'm hoping that maybe we can take a deeper dive in that area, because there is a time up until 19, I think 1920, Native American people who are indigenous to this land weren't even allowed in the city limits.

So I think that's an important picture that needs to be reflected in this, and I hope you would help.

If you come back again, we can work on that.

So thank you.

I really appreciate bringing that up because that's one of the big missing pieces that we don't have.

And you identified exactly how we could do that is through groups that are familiar with the group and can actually recognize those level evictions.

And we would love to collaborate.

and try to improve that because I think that you're right.

It's what Native American peoples have gone through is almost worse than any other group that's gone through these circumstances.

Thank you for raising that.

I'm almost done.

One thing that I, couple things I wanted to point out about this slide real quickly is that as a demographer, I've studied for, you know, over a decade now population trends.

This spike that occurred in 2013, the beginning of that, is just unprecedented.

Only, you know, massive shock events can impact something that, you know, that heavily.

You know, in 2008, we had the Great Recession, and we had a long period of recovery.

But for a lot of people, it was mostly a recovery for industry and folks that were higher income, whereas low income and middle class have been really impacted by this.

And there's just, it's kind of shocking what's going on.

And during the same time, we're moving from a service industry to a tech industry, too.

And with Amazon showing up in 2002, They've been here since 1995, but they started to occupy South Lake Union.

Around that time, that's when we start seeing these prices getting impacted.

Among those who can afford these rents, you know, on the left-hand side is Washington State.

On the right-hand side is the median household income by race for folks in the King County area on the right-hand side.

So at the top, the orange line is the overall median income, I'm sorry, the green line is the overall median income, orange is Asian, red is white, non-Latinx, blue is Latinx, and purple is black.

Right now, the white median, I'm sorry, the overall median income is somewhere around $90,000 with whites at about $97,000.

that's far above what's called the area median income at 80% AMI, or area median income that's considered low income.

50% is very low income, and 30% is extremely low income.

And those are definitions by HUD.

As you can see, Latinx are falling below the 80% or low income area.

So that means more than half of the Latinx population is below the poverty line, and then the African-American population is falling around the 50% AMI.

So that means that about half of the African-American population is falling below the very low income status.

So when you look at rates of $90,000 needed to afford or avoid rent burden, we're starting to unpack why we're seeing racial disparities and evictions too.

And I guess also another striking thing is, in addition to what you said about black and Latinx being below 80 percent AMI, also for overall median and white median, it's increasing, but you see, am I right, the black median income has actually decreased in 2016 compared to 2000?

The purple line is the African American median household income.

And all that increase, my theory is that basically it's not because the population improved, but it's because the population's been replaced.

So any kind of increase that you see in that area is not happening to our people.

But it is increasing amongst all the groups, but that may mean because we're displacing a lot of individuals in that process.

To kind of unpack a little bit about how important it is to not just look at evictions, you know, it's important to kind of be intersectional in this and look at everything.

So if we look at the housing crisis in particular, affordable housing actually has declined in Washington State.

So we've lost about 91,000 affordable homes at about $800.

per month, which is 2017 dollars.

And 85% of that loss started in 2012. If we look at the homelessness point-in-time count, which is, again, under-represents actual homeless because this only accounts for sheltered and unsheltered folks, we see that in 2017...

I'm sorry, the year after affordable housing started to decline, we started to see an increase in the homeless population.

And right now, in 2018, The number of individuals who are sheltered and unsheltered is surpassing the number of people that were homeless in the Great Recession period.

So this is actually a sign that we're actually facing something a lot bigger and a lot worse than when we did during the Great Recession.

And then finally, the evictions has fed folks into the homeless population, has been decreasing, but then again, we're looking at this idea that potentially the decrease could be because we're displacing a lot of folks into that population.

In King County, we see similar issues, but we're seeing a much starker increase in homelessness and a decrease in the eviction rate.

But that decrease seems to be related to the loss of affordable housing, displacement of folks who are low-income, and highly impacting a lot of people.

What's problematic about that is that There's a massive effect of what's going on.

This is a graph that shows kind of a tier theory.

I'm gonna skip this right now, but basically what it shows is that...

Sorry, can we go back one slide just real quick?

The number of units that are affordable in King County, that's a number that has been discussed in other committees on other topics.

Where did you get this information?

So I calculated this using HUD, fair market rent for King County.

So this is a number that I, there's a calculation that they make.

to determine what, I'm sorry, this was, oh no, this is pulled from the census actually, I'm sorry.

So each of those years, each of those points that you see up there are a point in time where we had a count of homes that were at $800, but I adjusted for inflation for 2017. So each of those points are adjusted for inflation.

So in 2017, there are less than 40,000 homes at $800.

In 2014, in 2017 dollars, there was about 50,000 or so.

And then up all the way to 2012, there were about 55,000 $800 units that are in 2017 dollars.

That adjustment for inflation tries to help standardize the issue.

This is really useful numbers because, you know,

There are periodically grandiose announcements of how much affordable housing is being built in Seattle, but this shows that on balance, the amount of affordable housing is going way down.

Yeah, what's also shocking to that, and I didn't have a chance to include this slide in there, is that the number of actual units being built is like somewhere around 50 or 100,000 across the state, while at the same time, we saw a decrease in affordable housing too.

So in other words, units are being built, but affordability is?

It's decreasing either.

At the same time.

It's either because the affordable units have been demolished or because they've increased in cost.

And is it correct to conclude that in the period when we had the worst effects of the Great Recession, affordability went up because rent increases plateaued or?

I'm sorry, repeat that one more time.

where you see the affordability going up in the years right after the Great Recession happened.

2009.

Right, that's because rent increases plateaued during that time because it was the recessionary period or how do you interpret that?

Well, you know, we need more.

The problem with census data is that 2000 to 2009 is kind of, you know, it's not as detailed as it is after about 2010 because they changed the way that they collected data.

So that 2009 number is an estimate across five years of an average.

So I think what, my opinion of what happened was that, You know, the housing crisis not only impacted homeowners, but it also impacted renters to a large degree because if homeowners are leaving or maybe there's just like a loss of affordable housing in general, there's a loss of units because a lot of people got out of the business or sold their property or shut down the renting market.

Maybe that had something to do with it.

I honestly don't know.

And that's gonna take further investigation because our focus has largely been on evictions, the relationship of homelessness.

But that period in time, I think that the fact that it happened in across the whole state, it tells me that there was some sort of, it's basically saying that people lost their jobs, people lost their retirements, they lost their homes, but we also saw a loss in the stock, the rental stock apparently too.

Seattle thought in, I think it was 2003 to 2004, for something like that, right after the dot-com bust, there was a lot of people that saw that Seattle was very resilient while the rest of the country was facing a lot of problems.

And while a lot of companies lost a lot of money and a lot of people lost a lot of money, It's understood that investors saw Seattle as an opportunity city so they started investing and and actually in 2003 I think the City Council came up with a study that said that the population of Seattle was gonna double by 2017 or something like that back then and So they started, you know, investing and developers started building buildings and stuff kind of on this like whim that, you know, the population was going to grow and there was a lot of good evidence towards it.

So by about 2005 or 2006, we started seeing the effects of the canary in the coal mine and the housing crisis and that's when all these towers stopped building.

So at that point, there was a lot of empty, you know, a lot of cranes in the sky, not as many as we have now, but there were a lot of cranes in the sky.

and they weren't working for about a long period of time.

Once the recession recovered, what happened was that a lot of low-income and middle-income folks kind of got highly affected, lost their jobs, retirements, all that kind of stuff, whereas those that were able to ride out the recession kind of picked up with the building right where they left off.

I remember I lived on Capitol Hill at the time when that was going on, and there was an apartment complex that finally finished after the recession, and they were like, you know what, we're just gonna auction this off.

We were gonna ask, I think it was like $500,000 or something like that for a townhome or something like that.

So they're like, you know, we're never going to get that back, we're just going to get what we can.

So they went to auction and they actually got more for what they built than what they were going to ask for in the first place.

So something happened where socially and economically a trend kind of got set, and I think that that really triggered developers to be like, oh, wow, this is actually a really hot market.

Maybe that's why we see that spike increase in 2012, along with we also saw a massive increase in the population.

You know, Amazon brought with it 40,000 to 60,000 new people.

A lot of those folks have six-figure incomes.

Supply and demand follows beyond with that.

There's limited housing.

Seattle, unfortunately, is not very geographically vast.

So there's only a few places that a lot of these folks could go, and that's mostly south.

And there's a lot of theory behind why they're heading in that direction related to networks, discrimination, neighborhood change.

I'm happy to talk about that.

But what's interesting is that there is a massive effect that's a macroeconomic effect on this that started way back before Amazon even showed up.

It impacted a lot of people, not only African-Americans or Latinx, but also low-income whites as well.

And what we're seeing is that a lot of folks have been moving into marginalized spaces.

you know, at first they were chasing culture, you know, like Columbia City and all those areas.

But then it was like that was the last affordable space.

And now Columbia City is completely, totally different and decimated from it.

You know, you can go to Broadway on Capitol Hill and a lot of the small businesses are not doing well either.

You know, you need a name, you know, a high, I'm not gonna mention any names.

But you need a high recognizable name to open a restaurant along with, you know, a lot of capital in the back end.

But small time businesses are really suffering.

And there's only like really two that are doing okay.

And they're, you know, talking about the, they're tightening the belt right now, proverbially.

But yeah, that's, I don't think I have much more time at all.

And I took a lot.

I really apologize about that.

No, no, no, please.

Apologies are all from my end because we did go longer on the first item, but were there any other comments?

You've really piqued my curiosity on this.

And when you said that, and looking at that top graph where the trends for affordable housing are going down abruptly starting in 2012. And I think you just said that the trend started before we started seeing 40, 50, 60,000 new employees in the tech industry.

But I liked what Ted said.

And I'd like to see the intersection of where We're building, and we know we're building, but we know we aren't building anywhere near enough.

I mean, those are the studies that we've seen in the last couple of years are saying we're 175,000 units short, tri-county, that it's going to take, according to the McKinsey report, something like $380 to $400 million a year of investment to catch up.

I'd love to see those graphs.

At what point, even though we're building, and building as much as we can, How do those intersect?

And will they intersect in order to accommodate the numbers that even people who are perhaps a little concerned about raising taxes, but are recognizing the need for housing, where those intersect?

So maybe we could talk a little bit more about this.

And we've got your website.

down here in the corner of your PowerPoint, and I'd love to follow up with that.

But thank you.

Please do, yes.

I'd be more than happy to talk.

I hate to say, but looking at these trends, and as an academic and scholar, I see no change.

I'm incredibly pessimistic about this, unless very drastic changes are made.

This is kind of like when climate change was discovered.

Unless we make really massive shifts in the city, in the state, in the country, this is not just a Seattle problem, this is highly impacting Pierce County as well.

And we need bold movement.

I don't have ideas of what to do, but because everything is so intersected, it's gonna take a lot, and it's gonna need to take, you know, a lot of people to actually believe that this is an issue.

You know, look at the red line.

Homelessness hasn't increased.

It hasn't dropped at all.

And that's not even the McKinto-Vinney definition of homelessness, which is people doubling up, sleeping on couches, things like that.

People using their networks to stay housed.

When those networks dissipate, you know, that's gonna just increase homelessness even more.

It's it's dire and It really concerns me to be honest with you and I'm You know, I'm afraid that I haven't seen much evidence that The city's not doing enough.

I'm just gonna be honest.

I

Thank you for injecting that sober note here.

I mean, the numbers are devastating, and I also agree with your, you know, with your analogy of the climate change question.

Like, you know, Obviously, it's different, but it's a similar situation in that without massive bold solutions, this is not going to be fixed.

And to support what you're saying, I also wanted to share, just as a concluding note for this meeting, this report from King County's Regional Affordable Housing Task Force, which found that 244,000 additional affordable homes are needed by 2040 for King County.

So obviously we're, yeah, we're, in terms of what's massive, that's how, we're talking about a quarter million homes that we need on an urgent basis to start being built.

And the key word there being, of course, affordable.

And what's really affordable.

What's really affordable, exactly.

And if I may say too, like based on a lot of the research on segregation, sociology, social impacts, health, employment, education, we're not even scratching that yet.

We're just talking about affordable housing.

And right now we're just talking about accepting the fact that, you know, it is a crisis.

Now people wanna pick at evictions being the problem or homelessness or, you know, it's choose your flavor basically.

But it's everything impacted on that.

And it's on a macro scale, too.

So, council members, I want to thank you for having this meeting.

And I also want to acknowledge that you of all people have been saying we need something bold and we need something big.

So, I appreciate your bringing facts and figures in here today.

And I want to follow up with you.

So, just a couple of things, I know you're running out, but in terms of the number of homes, we have got to get serious about this and not just say, hey, we need them.

It's what, and I will give council members what you're due, that you've been saying we need to do something big and bold.

I need to see our community come together in ways that they haven't and just trying, we need to do something that's driving something much bigger for tri-counties and four counties if we're talking Kitsap and it means the state.

It's going to need all of us to put our brains together and say, you know, what I look at when I see this, you know, it kind of reminds me that it's going to take something massive to change.

And an analogy that came up the other night was in 1972, half the people here weren't born, but 1972, we had the draft.

And when the college deferment ended and when fairly well to do young white men We're about to go to Vietnam.

Things changed and it changed like practically overnight.

It's that kind of shock and awe that we are really going to have to look at and say what are we going to do differently and how are we going to do that.

So around the evictions what you were saying and what you showed with the idea that one in 11 Families are being evicted one or more times.

The idea about the number of homes, the huge number that we're going, whatever, pick your number, pick your flavor, they all lead to the same thing.

And then earlier when the shelters, we were talking about seniors, and the number of women and senior women that are outside in the cold, this is like way beyond acceptable.

way beyond something that we can turn our backs on.

So I'm just really appreciative of what you've done today and bringing people together and just pointing to the stuff that we need to get serious about.

And it's going to take, frankly, a bunch of wealthy young people that are going to have their backsides on the line until we finally step up and say we're going to do something different.

Thank you, Councilmember Baxter.

I think that was a good concluding note for the meeting.

I appreciate both councilmembers for being here.

And thank you, Tim Thomas, for giving us insight.

And I agree with Councilmember Baxter, we should follow up on many of the interesting things that have come up.

And really, and to Ted's point also, that the continuing unfolding of your study is actually extremely crucial for us to keep having a solid basis of data analysis to advise us on what we are doing.

Thanks for the invitation.

I appreciate the time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'll adjourn the meeting.

Thank you.

Ted is waiting for me to say that officially.