Seattle City Council Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies & Investments 12/15/20

Okay, thank you everybody for tuning in and welcome.

It is December 15 of 2020 and the special meeting of the Seattle City Council's

Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies and Investments will come to order.

It is 2 p.m.

exactly, almost about to be 2.01 p.m.

I'm Andrew Lewis, Chair of the Seattle City Council Select Committee on Homelessness Strategies and Investments.

Will Committee Clerk Jacob Thorpe please call the roll?

Council President Gonzalez?

Here.

Council Member Herbold?

Here.

Council Member Juarez?

Here.

Council Member Morales?

Here.

Council Member Peterson?

Here.

Council Member Strauss?

Present.

Council Member Lewis?

Present.

There are seven council members present.

Thank you so much, Mr. Clerk.

And I want to thank council members Mosqueda and Sawant for informing me in advance that they would be unable to attend today's committee meeting.

They are excused.

So moving on to matter B, approval of the agenda.

If there is no objection, the agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

Chair's report.

So just to make a couple of comments at the top, there are two things that are on our agenda today.

One of those things is going to be an initial hearing on the bill that I introduced and put forward a few weeks ago on permanent supportive housing, and that is Council Bill 119975, and there is not gonna be a vote or consideration of amendments.

This is the first hearing on the bill for central staff to answer questions, to hear from stakeholders, and to give the public a general overview of what the bill seeks to accomplish and how that came to fruition.

The second item on the agenda will be a presentation from folks on the executive side of the city government, as well as some of our outreach partners from REACH and the Public Defender Association.

to discuss how investments are being stood up that this council funded in the budget and how we are going to start making more progress on implementing those budget ads and turning them into reality over the course of 2021 and to give the council a quick overview of where we stand on that and and open the door to more updates as we get into January of 2021. So given that, I want to move on to the public comment.

At this time, we will move into the remote public comment period.

I thank everyone for the ongoing patience and cooperation as we continue to operate this remote public comment system.

It remains the strong intent of the City Council to have public comment regularly included on meeting agendas.

However, the City Council reserves the right to end or eliminate these public comment periods at any point if we deem that this system is being abused or is unsuitable for allowing our meetings to be conducted efficiently and in a manner in which we are able to conduct our necessary business.

I will moderate the public comment period in the following manner.

First, the public comment period for this meeting is up to 20 minutes, and each speaker will be given two minutes to speak.

I will call on two speakers at a time and in the order in which registered on the council's website.

If you have not yet registered to speak, but would like to, you can sign up before the end of this public comment period by going to the council's website at seattle.gov slash council.

The public comment link is also listed on today's agenda.

Once I call a speaker's name, staff will unmute the appropriate microphone and an automatic prompt of, you have been unmuted, will be the speaker's cue that it is their turn to speak and that the speaker must press star six to begin speaking.

Please begin speaking by stating your name and the item that you are addressing.

As a reminder, public comment should relate to an item on today's agenda.

Speakers will hear a chime when 10 seconds are left of the allocated time.

Once you hear the chime, we ask that you begin to wrap up your public comment.

If speakers do not end their comments at the end of the allotted time provided, the speaker's microphone will be muted to allow us to call on the next speaker.

Once you have completed your public comment, we ask that you please disconnect from the line.

And if you plan to continue following this meeting, please do so via Seattle Channel or the listening options listed on the agenda.

The public comment period is now open, and we will begin with the first two speakers on the list.

And let me call the first speakers out.

And the first speaker will be David Haynes, followed by Naomi See.

Please remember to press star six after you hear the prompt if you have been unmuted.

I turned it.

Mr. Haynes, are you with us?

OK, well, maybe we lost Mr. Haynes.

So why don't we move on to Mr. Haynes?

Hello.

Yes, please proceed.

Can you hear me?

Yes, I can.

Hello, my name is.

Okay, hello, my name is David Haynes.

I'm homeless, and I just got out of the hospital four times in the last nine days with a cast and crutches.

I have nowhere to go.

I tried 211, and there's nothing suitable for me to get off the street and adhere to the doctor's orders.

I asked social worker at hospital for a motel voucher, and she just laughed and said I'm better off staying on the front porch of El Diablo Cafe in Upper Queen Inn, where I'm at now.

The thing is, my ankle is swollen and I can't take the MRI because it's constantly irritated from moving around, not able to elevate and ice and eat proper foods.

I'm asking city council to reclaim the $26.5 million that was specifically sent to solve the homeless crisis right now.

and help people like me get off the street into a room share with first month, last month and deposit.

I can take it.

I can take over the payments, but I can't.

I don't have the lump sum to move in.

We need the homeless crisis money sent from the federal government to be used now as they were intended.

We can demand Governor deploy National Guard to rapidly build tiny villages now.

We don't need to wait on Sharon Lee of Lehigh and Urban Rest Stop, who's always closed on weekends in Ballard.

And we don't need to use Homeless Crisis Grant money to buy off a political re-election support next year at expense of innocent homeless suffering a six-year crisis, furthered by redirecting money meant to solve the homeless crisis into political donors and owners of government contracts in a trade of integrity and forthright effort.

Please redirect the $26.5 million meant to solve the homeless crisis right now, today.

My phone number is 206-712-9621.

Please call.

If you can help me, I've tried your offices and no one will return my phone calls with some help from me. and others suffering unnecessarily.

David, thank you for your comments today.

Our next speaker will be Naomi C., although it looks like they are currently listed as not present.

So Naomi, if you're out there, sign in and we'll come back to you.

Our next speaker will be Hattie Rhodes.

And Hattie, you have two minutes.

Hello, my name is Hattie Rose.

I am the site coordinator for the Georgetown Tiny House Village.

I am on the phone today to advocate for a safe parking lot for RV campers.

Last week, I watched RVs being towed into a small area across the street from the Tiny House Village here.

We had not been told anything about this by the city, though we found out later this move had been planned since August.

This site has 12 RVs, two trailers, and many cars, and it is located in an area that isn't suited for parking long-term.

If the city knew these RVs needed to move, why didn't they find somewhere that is on asphalt?

Why didn't they talk to the neighbors?

They could have found a better solution, and I'm hoping that the city becomes more forward-thinking in the future.

A safe parking lot with porta-potties and purple bags is a starting point, and I hope we can help the RV campers with a longer term solution than what they have right now.

Thank you.

Thank you, Hattie.

Our next speaker is Harold Odom, although I don't believe Harold is currently present, followed by Sean Paul, who signed up but is also not present.

At this time, since we Oh, it looks like Naomi C is now present.

So we can go back to Naomi and Naomi, you are recognized for two minutes.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes.

Oh, great.

Okay.

Well, thanks for coming back to me.

I was having some problems, but I would just like to speak.

My name is Naomi C with the Low Income Housing Institute.

And I first want to speak on Council Bill 119975. We are in full support of this bill and are so, so excited that this legislation is being brought forward.

As you know, one significant barrier to creating affordable housing is the extensive land use process.

And while for-profit developers can absorb the cost of delayed construction starts and increased architecture and consultant fees, nonprofits are forced to use up little public resources available and delay their delivery of desperately needed units.

Design review can introduce uncertainty into the project schedule, delay our tax credit allocations, and additionally, affordable housing developers are already held extremely accountable on a variety of levels to deliver high quality buildings.

So thank you for bringing this forward and we look forward to seeing this implemented.

And then I also wanted to echo Hattie's comments on the RV safe lot.

We have been in touch with the Georgetown community who has expressed over many years their frustration with this.

It's disrespectful to the people living in RVs, the Georgetown community, and the residents of the tiny house village to create this scenario where there's tension among service providers and people experiencing homelessness instead of coming up with a solution that is really meaningful and can make a difference, which is an RV safe lot.

There are parking lots.

that are owned throughout Soto and Georgetown and other places in the city, by the city and by for-profit owners that would be readily available to use for these safe lots, or to working with the council and the community on coming up with a solution for the RVs.

So thank you.

Thank you for calling in.

So with that, we don't have any other speakers who are present.

So at this time, I am going to close the public comment window.

If we couldn't get to you or for whatever reason you couldn't log in today, folks are encouraged to submit a public comment via email at council at Seattle.gov, and that comment will be forwarded on to the rest of the members of the committee and myself.

And I apologize if we weren't able to get to you today.

Moving on to our items of business.

So item one, we'll now move on to the presentation on Council Bill 119975. So Mr. Thorpe, will you please read item one into the record?

Briefing and discussion on Council Bill 119975, Permanent Supportive Housing Land Use Code Regulations Presentations by Tim Parham of Plymouth Housing, Eric Bellegarde of Chief Seattle Club, and Ketel Freeman of Council Central Staff.

Thank you.

I also see that Jeff Sims, Tracy Ratzliff, and Brian Goodnight have joined us as well from Council Central Staff for this discussion and are available to be a resource to us.

Before we begin our presentations, can we do a quick round of introductions by stating your name and the organization you are here representing today.

And why don't we start in the order that you put them out there, Jacob.

Why don't we start with Tim, then Derek, and then Ketel.

Good afternoon.

I'm Tim Parham, the Director of Real Estate at Plymouth Housing.

Hello, everybody.

Derek Belgar, Deputy Director for Chief Sale Club.

I'm Ketel Freeman, Council of Central Staff.

Jeff Sims, Council of Central Staff.

Tracy Ratcliffe, Council of Central Staff.

Brian Goodnight, Council of Central Staff.

Excellent.

So why don't we move on then to the discussion?

And I'm happy that we're all here today to have a big conversation about this before we go on recess so folks can I can think about this and it can ruminate a little bit over the recess as we take this up in more detail in January.

But what I'm really hoping to get out of today's hearing is twofold.

First, for central staff to walk through the technical elements of what this legislation will do.

and all of the different components and parts to it and answer questions that myself and my colleagues might have about how those elements work and some perspective areas colleagues might be thinking about for potential amendment or flagging for potential concern or support.

And then also hear from some of our community partners who helped my office and central staff draft this legislation about how this is going to really work in practice.

for folks who are building and operating permanent supportive housing and why these changes that were brought up in a process that was led and facilitated by community and community organizing are going to help us achieve our long-term goal on scaling up permanent supportive housing.

So with that, I want to start with the technical elements.

And Ketel Freeman from central staff has been the key person on preparing and drafting this legislation and shepherding it through the process so far.

When we transition out of that, Jeff has some context setting information generally about the nature of permanent supportive housing, the current supply in King County, and what we need to do as a region to scale up to meet the demand.

And I think that'll be a good segue into hearing from our community partners.

So why don't we start off by hearing from Ketel.

I think we should also take the advantage after Ketel's presentation to have a round of technical questions.

And then when we transition to the next phase, hold our questions until after we've heard from Jeff and our community partners for some of the more policy and implementation based discussion.

So, Ketel, why don't we start with you and then following your presentation, I'll pause for some questions from colleagues.

Sure, happy to do it.

Ketel Freeman, Council Central Staff.

Attached to the agenda are a couple of memos from Central Staff, one from me that describes the particulars of Council Bill 119975, and another from Jeff that puts some numbers around the demand of for permanent supportive housing.

I'll just say a little bit about some legislative history that informs some content in the bill and the council's considering to take it up, what Council Bill 119975 would do, and then remind the committee about the procedural posture for the bill.

So I don't know if it's useful for me to share the memo just in the interest of of having something on the screen that is not my face.

I'll go ahead and share the screen here.

by way of background here.

In 2019, the state legislature passed and gross substituted House Bill 1923, and that bill included a definition in the Growth Management Act, which is the broad framework for regulating land use and for regulating planning and land use in the state of Washington, included a definition for permanent supportive housing.

That bill was not just about permanent supportive housing, it was also about other changes to the Growth Management Act to encourage the provision of housing more broadly, including all forms of low-income housing.

But among other things, Council Bill 1923 precluded jurisdictions planning under the Growth Management Act from prohibiting siting of permanent supportive housing in multifamily and mixed-use zones.

So our code does not currently prohibit or preclude siting of multifamily housing in mixed-use zones, but it doesn't have specific regulations that govern development of permanent supportive housing.

What would Council Bill 119975 do?

First, it would define permanent supportive housing for the purposes of the Land Use Code, eliminate some development standards that can be barriers to permanent supportive housing, and also authorize the SDCI Director to waive certain development standards for permanent supportive housing as an administrative decision.

With respect to definition, I'm here on the second page of the memorandum.

Um, the definition for permanent housing proposed by Council, the 1, 1, 9, 9, 7, 5 would define permanent supportive housing as a multi family residential use with at least 90% of units affordable to households with incomes that do not exceed 50% of area median income.

that receives public funding and that has a contractual term of affordability for at least 40 years.

I'll note that the Office of Housing has suggested some revisions to this definition that would narrow the definition in some senses to include a minimum percentage of units affordable at 30% of area median income.

The definition also contemplates the provision of onsite supportive services, which is a key element of permanent supportive housing.

And those supportive services could be available to clients and residents of the building or to clients more broadly.

The bill would also eliminate some development standards that can be barriers to permanent supportive housing.

Those include exempting floor area ratio for the supportive services from floor area ratio maximums, exempting permanent supportive housing from required street-level uses where street-level use requirements are in place, and also exempting permanent supportive housing from short and long-term parking requirements.

The bill would also broaden the locations where permanent supportive housing can be located, specifically in our commercial two zones, which are sort of the city's most auto-oriented commercial zones.

Affordable housing or multifamily housing generally is typically authorized as an administrative conditional use, and this bill would allow permanent supportive housing as a use permitted outright.

Finally, the bill would authorize the SDCI director to waive certain development standards for permanent supportive housing as an administrative decision.

So projects would be exempt from design review, but could still receive some of the design review type benefits by meeting a test in the bill, which is that certain development standards can be waived if it leads to the provision of more permanent supportive housing units.

So that's what Council Bill 119975 would do.

Just a reminder about the procedural posture here.

As the committee knows, any changes to the land use code come with a fair amount of procedural friction.

This bill is subject to review pursuant to the State Environmental Policy Act.

STCI has published a threshold determination of non-significance, meaning that an EIS is not required for this piece of legislation.

That decision is an appealable decision and it comes with a comment period.

The comment period for this bill will end on December 24th.

The appeal period will end on December 31st and council will hold a public hearing on the bill in January.

So that's what I have to present.

If you all have any questions about technical aspects of the bill, I'm happy to answer them.

I have one at the top, Ketel, and then I'm happy to open it up for some technical questions.

The first one is, I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the conversation with Office of Housing around how the AMI goalposts might be able to be adjusted while still keeping this a workable bill that will have the intended effect.

I remember part of our process in drafting and going back and forth with the Office of Housing is originally, you know, I did want it to be set at 30%, you know, 90% of units at 30% or below, but that had certain issues impacting sources of funds, access to lending, and other problems that nonprofit developers encounter.

It sounds like there might be a way around that to have a mixed formula that does include an explicit 30% AMI level in that formula.

I wonder if you might be able to talk a little bit about that, and then I'll open it up to more questions from colleagues.

Sure, yeah, happy to do it.

So the definition in the bill as introduced would require that 90% of units be affordable to households with incomes that are defined in the land use code as very low income.

That means 50% of area median income or less.

The population that's likely to be served by a permanent supportive housing would qualify at a much lower income threshold, the one that's often used for the purposes of pursuing federal law and housing tax credits is 30% of AMI.

So it's likely that most of the projects that are developed under these code revisions, if there are, The office of housing sometimes likes to include a mix of units in permanent supportive housing because it may make projects more attractive to low-income housing tax credit investors.

They've recommended requiring that at least half of the units be affordable at 30% of AMI and below.

with the rest affordable up to 50% of area median income.

They think that's the right unit mix for attracting tax credit investment for permanent support housing.

So just to summarize, Office of Housing thinks this would be effective at a revised formula that would essentially be 50%, 30% AMI and lower, and then the rest would retain the same language as You know, between 30 and 30 and 50% for the other half.

Is that what.

That's my understanding.

I would say at least 50% is likely that there would be more than 50%, but it sort of depends on.

on who the respondents are to the city's NOFAs.

One thing to keep in mind is that this is a land use code definition for permanent supportive housing.

So this is a definition, not that the Office of Housing will use in making NOFA funding decisions.

This is a definition that a land use planner or a zoning plans examiner at STCI will use to determine whether or not a project can avail itself of the of the administrative decision process and other exemptions that are proposed by this bill.

But to get it closer to what the Office of Housing expects when it comes to awarding funds for permanent supportive housing, the mix would be at least 50% at 30% of AMI and the rest up to, I should say at least half at 30% of AMI.

with the rest affordable to households earning up to 50% of their income.

Thanks, Ketel.

I appreciate that.

I do just want to signal my interest right now in pursuing that amendment as has been recommended by the Office of Housing, just for central staff to be aware of that, even though we're still a little while off from this.

So that's certainly a post-recess project.

I do want to flag that.

With that, I want to open it up, Council colleagues, technical questions for Keetle before we move on to the rest of the panel.

Thank you.

Thanks, Ketil.

This is really helpful.

And my first question was also going to be about trying to reduce the AMI limits.

So I'm interested in continuing to have that conversation as well.

I wonder if you could, a little further down the list, it talks about SCCI's ability to waive or modify specified development standards.

With a couple of exceptions there, I wonder if you could give some examples of what that might be if it's not related to height, bulk, or scale.

And then my other question is if there's any more information about what the community relations plan that developers are required to submit might include.

Sure, and maybe I can share another screen here to sort of show what the development standards that could be waived or modified are proposed to be.

Apologies here if I'm not doing this quite right.

Are you all seeing the bill language itself on the screen?

Okay.

So the types of development standards that could be waived that don't necessarily pertain to height, bulk, and scale, a lot of them have to do with architectural detail.

So overhead weather protection requirements, facade openings, articulation, modulation.

Depending on the zone, there may be requirements, there may be development standards that are intended to break up the mass of a building.

So those development standards could be waived.

A common recreational area, depending on the zone, there may be a requirement.

There'd be community rooms or outdoor or indoor amenity areas.

Those requirements could be waived or modified.

And then there are some also, depending on the zone, there are some other standards.

I like transparency standards.

So, and pedestrian oriented zones, there's often a requirement that there'd be some level of transparency at the street level.

those types of development standards could be waived as well.

There's also a blanket permission here for the STCI director to identify other similar standards that could be waivable if they don't affect the size of the building envelope.

The community relations plan requirement, this is a requirement that goes along with any receipt of city funding through the NOFA process.

I'm happy to forward you what the Office of Housing requires of those applicants.

But generally there has to be an early engagement component where the recipient of NOFA funds goes out and talks with near neighbors of a project and other stakeholders about the type of development that they're proposing to build and the timeline under which that will be constructed.

There's a requirement now that a draft plan be submitted to OH and so that similar requirement is echoed here in the proposed regulations.

Just to jump in for a second on, oh, sorry, Council Member Morales, do you have a follow-up?

I'm sorry.

Well, yeah, going, thank you, Ketel.

Going back to the previous question, I guess what I'm trying to understand is how, if there is an interest in waiving something, common areas, for example, and there might be, I'm not an expert in this, but I'll call it a therapeutic reason why a common area might be appropriate or any of these things might be appropriate for providing the kind of support services that the people who live there might need.

How does that intersect?

Waving something that the folks who are living there might actually benefit from having.

Yeah, and so that's there is a, you know, there's 1 thing that the code prescribes a sort of minimum standards and those minimum standards through the design review process, for example, can be waived based on a criteria that the project is somehow has a better design as a result of those waivers.

Here, the waivers would be based on a determination by the STCI director that more units can be provided by waiving those standards.

So there would presumably be some kind of a tradeoff.

I think that sort of the concern that you're highlighting is one that would be addressed not through a land use code regulation.

through competition among PSH providers for city funding.

So if there's a PSH provider who wants to receive some city funding and intends to serve a population that would benefit from having some outdoor space, they may not be a successful applicant for those funds if they're not going to provide that space.

Okay, thank you.

And Ketel, I wonder too on the I have a question about the community plans.

I know Councilmember Peterson has a question.

I just wonder since we do have two providers here, I know we are hearing from them out of order, but if Tim or Derek want to jump in and provide an illustrative example of that community plan process, this might be an appropriate time to do that.

take that on and maybe discuss what that looks like in practice just to, you know, put some meat on by giving an example instead of just having the technical explanation.

Sure, I'll go first.

Great.

Councilwoman Morales, that was exactly what I was thinking while it was being talked about, the harm that waiver could possibly do.

In a chief sale club our future projects will that community space that common area outdoor space is all important crucially important to our model and our model of healing our community, bringing back that sense of community that sense of belonging that family.

thing we're trying to create, we know that that is really vital in that healing process of the spirit of their mental health and their physical being.

And in any project we're going to do, it's going to be really important for us to actually make sure we have activity space to bring people together, to break bread, to actually have events, have ceremony, outdoor space, so we can connect people with nature again, I mean, the best we can.

Obviously, down Pioneer Square, we don't have that option, but we need to get our people back out and to retouch with nature again.

That's healing as well.

So both those things are very important to us.

And I'd hate for that to actually make it so competitive where we're pushed out or something.

But I do understand the importance of trying to squeeze as many units out when we have such a shortage of units.

Derek, I appreciate you speaking to that half of Council Member Rouse's question.

I wonder if you could also maybe provide an example of the community planning process that Chief Seattle Club engages in as well.

The other question that was asked, and Keith will provide the example of the requirement that Office of Housing has to receive the public money, and maybe an example of what that process is like.

Um, it kind of broke up there.

I have an unstable connection, but I think, um, yeah, I'm not, I'm not really sure.

I'm sorry about that one.

I can't really speak to that.

No, no problem.

Um, Tim, could you maybe jump in on this too before we move on?

Thank you.

Yeah, take it in that order.

Council member Lewis, the community relations plan is something that's long been required by office of housing for any applicant.

Um, so we would, you know, uh, I can't remember the exact timing, but we'll, we mail hard copy letters to people within 500 feet.

Um, and then we need to designate point people throughout the process, both in the development phase construction and then ongoing, um, to be a point of contact with the community.

Um, but I, I have to say many, especially PSH providers go above and beyond, um, real or perceived.

communities have concerns about our projects or questions, and we have to be out there addressing those head on, and that wouldn't change with this legislation.

It's always been a practice that's enforced by our funders at the Office of Housing.

I'm happy to discuss that more, but if I could just address the community space as well real quick.

It's a good point, and I think this legislation doesn't preclude that.

uh a provider doing robust community space indoors and outdoors.

I think at Plymouth and perhaps some other providers have found that um the city's current requirements for the outdoor space in particular with our populations can make it difficult to achieve the amount of outdoor space and keep tenants and staff safe.

Um and that's a lot of feedback that we get from our property management staff um in designing buildings is uh you know how are we going to keep something safe.

And like many of the things in this legislation, we are missing out on housing units by some of these requirements.

So I'm in support of allowing for more flexibility here with the providers.

Thank you.

So with that, Council Member Peterson, you've been patiently waiting.

You have a question.

Thank you, Chair Lewis.

Thanks to our guests for being here with us today.

Appreciate it for your wisdom on these issues.

And so my question is about the thrust of my question is trying to the nonprofits that we work with do an excellent job with design and construction and operation of low income housing and extremely low income housing.

There are other, there are for-profit developers who also try to work in this space.

And what I'm concerned about is if somebody is, you know, going in at the beginning saying they're going to do permanent supportive housing, but then they, um, for whatever reason, they don't get the financing, the extra financing they need to support those services, or they, they switch to a different model of, of low-income housing, which is not providing the supportive services, but then they, they got through on the lower threshold design review, the administrative design review.

I know there's a regulatory agreement, but I'm uncertain in reading the legislation how we would ensure that somebody saying that they're going to do permanent supportive housing, they get the exemption to not do the full design review.

And then a year later, they go back to lower services are not providing those supportive services anymore, for whatever reason, how do we ensure that there wasn't a bait and switch?

I can answer part of that question.

I'm going to turn to my colleague, Tracy, here to see if she has any understanding of what maybe the Office of Housing would do.

From a land use regulatory standpoint, it's probably not likely that the The Seattle Department of Construction inspections would require that applicant to go back and go through design review or something else like that or go through some entitlement process for a building that has already been built.

It may be the case that if they are not living up to the regulatory agreement, there may be some potential for there to be a civil action to enforce that agreement under some land use code.

I don't know if there's a provision related to enforcing the land use code but I suspect that the remedy would probably come from whatever is contained in the regulatory agreement and how those are enforced.

Tracy, what are your thoughts on that?

Act like they're going to do a permanent supportive housing project.

I think there might be already existing types of projects that they can do that would be similar to it that may have some regulatory requirements related to it.

I'm thinking of small efficiency dwelling units, but it's quite a task to put together a permanent supportive housing project.

And as some of the current providers have indicated, there's a community relations process that they would have to be going through to notify the community.

The city obviously is looking at that, particularly if they were to come in looking for funding.

And again, that activity takes place well before they come in to get funding because we require that.

And it's actually required underneath our housing funding policies that council has adopted.

So it's hard for me to imagine that there will be a for-profit developer who would go through the guise, I guess, of looking like they're going to develop PSH when they had no intention of doing so.

And there, frankly, are a very limited number of even nonprofits who are in the PSH world just because of the requirements related to doing that type of housing.

But if I may follow up with that, just looking at the legislation, and maybe I'm not reading the right section, but looking at page 20, where it talks about the definition of permanent supportive housing, it just says that receives public funding or an allocation of federal low-income housing tax credit.

So I guess what is locking them in?

I still don't see what's locking them in to doing the permanent supportive housing.

That's my concern.

I support the intent of this legislation and am happy to see, we want to see more permanent supportive housing built and we want to see things streamlined for those types of projects, which are the most important projects we can build for the greatest need.

I'm just concerned that the way it's written currently in this draft, somebody could come in and try to build something and then they lose their funding or they switch their plans after they've already skipped the design review process.

So another component to the definition is that they are subject to a regulatory agreement as well.

So there's several components to the definition, the level of affordability and the number of units that are affordable, the fact that the funding is coming from the public, and then also that there's a regulatory agreement with a minimum period of time of 40 years.

So that would be something.

But Kito, if I may, it says, that receives public funding or an allocation of federal long-term housing tax credits.

So they don't have to receive public, they can just get tax credits, right?

And they have to be subject to a regulatory agreement.

But we don't have the form of regulatory agreement attached to this legislation at this time, is that right?

The form of the regulatory agreement?

So we don't know what it's going to say yet.

It would be the standard regulatory agreement that I, I'm not sure that there may be different kinds, but every recipient of the city funding has a regulatory agreement.

Tracy, maybe you could speak to how.

That's correct.

So maybe, maybe that's a solution is to say that it has to be a recipient of city funding to meet this definition.

Because OA, Office of Housing does a great job with their regulatory agreements for that Seattle housing levy funds.

But the way this is written, it says public funding or low-income housing tax credit.

So it doesn't directly tie it down to the Office of Housing's standard regulatory agreement, which is excellent.

Yeah, Tracy, I don't know if you know off the top of your head, but are there any permanent supportive housing projects that only receive federal low-income housing tax credits as their financing mechanism?

Not right now, but I would hate to forestall the possibility with the recent passage of the county sales tax for affordable housing that actually might become a source down the road of being capital, providing some capital for PSH that might replace the city's funding, for example.

Typically, I would say no, the city is in all of the PSH that's being built in the city.

I can't think of one project in 15 or 20 years where the city hasn't been involved in that project and for the most part have also gotten a tax credit.

But with this slight change in the funding environment, does it necessarily mean that every project would have to have city funding plus the tax credits in it?

Possibly not.

It would be worth talking to the Office of Housing to see if they agree with me about that and not wanting to foreclose that possibility to make that an and versus an or.

But I would want to check with them about that just because of this most recent change that may have a subset of PSH that could in fact be funded with tax credits and the county, but not necessarily the city, at least on the capital side, and likely on the capital side, mostly on the operating side as well.

Thank you.

Chair Lewis, just one more question.

I really appreciate Council Member Morales' question about the, which talked about the amenities and that design review, especially when focused on the amenities portion, can actually benefit the low-income housing or the low-income tenants.

And so speaking of amenities, is there, we've passed an internet for all resolution to try to increase access to the internet Is there a way to ensure projects like this have internet connections?

So I understand that HUD has recently put forward minimum standards for connectivity.

I think that if the city were to have similar requirements for projects that receive city funding, probably the best vehicle for that would not be a land use code requirement.

It would probably be something in our housing funding policies.

And those reside in a couple of places.

There's the administration and finance plan for the housing levy, which governs levy dollars.

And then, but of course, levy dollars are not the only source of funding for affordable housing in the city.

And we have another plan, I think it's actually just called the housing policies document.

It's periodically amended that has other standards that apply to projects that receive city funding.

So probably an amendment to that policy document would be the appropriate place for such a requirement.

Those will be coming to council for re-adoption in 2021. The ANF plan has to be adopted every two years, and so we will be actually looking at making some changes to the ANF plan policies in 2021. I also have got the Office of Housing beginning to collect some information at your office's request to find out what is the current practice for nonprofit providers in terms of providing internet access to the residents of their buildings.

And so hopefully we'll have some data to help frame that conversation that might come up in 2021 on this issue.

Thank you.

The only reason I ask, well, another reason is because if a developer is not getting office of housing funding, then they might, they wouldn't be subject to that.

that plan you're talking about, I don't think so.

But we'll keep talking about this issue.

We're just always looking for opportunities to increase internet access.

So thank you.

All right.

Thank you so much, Councilmember Peterson.

Councilmember Herbold.

Thank you, just a clarification.

I heard a couple things, or I thought I heard a couple things that are contradictory.

This proposed legislation, as I understand it, would exempt permanent supportive housing from all design review, correct?

Including no administrative design review?

That is correct.

I thought I had heard something that suggested that these properties would still be subject to administrative design review, which I think many of them already are only subject to administrative design review.

That's correct.

Yes.

As it stands now, because of the ongoing COVID civil emergency, affordable housing projects aren't subject to design review at all.

But that is a temporary provision that will expire, I think, within a month or 2 after the covert civil emergency ending, which brings us back to kind of.

The old, the old normal, and under the old normal, portable housing projects are subject to administrative designer view.

And do we have, it may have been included in the staff memo, and I apologize if I did not see that.

Is there information that gives us some data around how many permanent supportive housing projects have gone through administrative design review over the last few years and how long that usually takes?

We can get that information for you, but that information is not in the staff memo.

Okay, thank you.

I would love to get a sense of what the impacts are as it relates to saving time associated with no design review at all, including no administrative design review.

That would be very, very helpful.

Due to COVID, in some respects, we may actually have some better information there.

We know how long we have information about generally how long it takes for projects to get through administrative design review, but we now have a suite of projects that are being, a suite of affordable housing projects that are being entitled under these current regulations.

We can do a comparison of administrative design review to the COVID projects that are no design review at all.

Correct.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

That'd be great.

All right, thank you, Council Member Herbold.

Are there any other technical questions at this phase?

I might ask one more before we broaden it out to the rest of our panelists.

Okay, so the last question I wanna ask Ketel, no one asked this yet, but I do think it's important to, start the conversation about the bike storage requirements.

And this is something I want to flag for Derek and Tim also when we move on and talk a little bit more about site-specific needs and the impact some of these regulations have had on them as providers.

But I wonder if you might give an overview of the current nature of those of those regulations and what the impact would be of the ordinance if it went through on those?

Sure.

Currently, multifamily structures are required to have one long-term bicycle parking space per unit and one short-term space for 20 units.

The short-term spaces are intended for visitors.

One thing to keep in mind about short-term spaces is that they don't necessarily have to be provided in the project.

They can also be provided outside of the project.

But there is, under existing regulations, the opportunity for the STCI director to modify those requirements based on the population that's being served in a building.

I confess that I'm not great here with Zoom stuff, so I'm not sure if you're seeing the screen that I'm looking at or not.

I'm not seeing the presentation screen that is on the Seattle Channel.

So if you are not seeing these particular regulations in front of you, maybe I'll just read them just in case.

So for each dwelling unit and income restricted unit at 30% of median income and below.

which is likely the population that would be served by Permanent Supportive Housing, there is no minimum required long-term bicycle parking.

So that's existing regulations.

For each dwelling unit and income restricted at 60% to 31% of median income, long-term bicycle parking requirements can be wholly or partially waived by the SDCI director.

So that's the current state of regulations.

The proposed bill would eliminate the requirement of long and short-term bicycle parking for permanent supportive housing entirely.

So for those units that were provided between 31 and 50% of AMI, there would not be any bicycle parking requirement.

That's not to say that a permanent supportive housing developer might choose to provide bicycle parking, but there would not be a regulatory requirement that would compel them to.

So it would afford more flexibility to the builder.

And I think that now we're getting into a point where these are more questions for Tim and Derek about how this might influence plans to create permanent supportive housing, maximize units, but still accomplish those goals around providing sufficient bike storage.

So maybe it'd be best to transition onto them and have that discussion in a little more detail.

But I did just want to, have a little bit more of a preview of what that particular element is since that hadn't been asked yet as a question.

So I think it's a good transition to transition this conversation over to talking with Tim and Derek a bit more about permanent supportive housing and the way this bill and perhaps some other things that aren't in it yet could help to facilitate the creation of more permanent supportive housing and more units per project.

First, I want to go to Jeff and have Jeff maybe give a brief overview about where we are and where we need to go with permanent supportive housing.

Jeff distributed a good memo to us earlier this week talking about some of the statistics around current supply of permanent supportive housing, and the current need.

And so I want to give Jeff that opportunity first, and then hear separately from Derek and Tim and have a bit more of a conversation with them.

So Jeff, why don't you kick us off here?

Sure.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Jeff Sims, Council of Central Staff.

So the permanent supportive housing, as just discussed by Ketel and is the subject of the legislation on the agenda, is the primary evidence-based strategy to provide services to people that experience chronic homelessness.

Chronic homelessness is an especially acute experience of homelessness.

There's a two-part definition to determine when a person is defined as chronically homeless.

First, they either would have experienced homelessness for more than a year, or over the course of four separate episodes of homelessness, over the course of three years, experienced a totality of 12 months of homelessness.

And in addition to one of those pieces, just based on the duration or the length the time they experience homelessness.

The person also has to have a disabling condition.

So something like a serious mental illness, perhaps substance use disorder or something along those lines.

Every year in January, our continuity of care does a count at the end of January to estimate just at that point in time, how many people are experiencing homelessness.

Because it's an attempt at capturing a population that's difficult to find, it's widely regarded as an undercount, but it is some of the best data that we have and it's done nationally.

Our point-in-time count this most recent January identified 3,355 people, or estimated, I should say, 3,355 people that experienced chronic homelessness.

There are other groups that estimate higher numbers.

For example, the Third Door Coalition has, as noted in your memo, has developed a methodology that estimates we have a larger population than that, probably closer to 6,500 people that would require PSH.

I'm still working with them to get a better understanding of their methodology.

They've been helpful in providing a lot more information on that.

Currently, we have approximately – I actually want to be cautious in giving exact numbers.

Let's say we have around 5,500 PSH units and maybe around 1,000 that are coming online.

And the challenge in giving that number precisely is because what gets defined as a PSH unit in terms of the level of services or what would be counted as active versus in the pipeline.

Those types of things can vary.

And so sometimes it's hard to call something as it's definitely in this bucket versus a different one.

But overall, you'd be talking about something like 6,500 units of permanent supportive housing that are already available.

And that's in addition to, so it's separate just to make sure there's not a conflation of things.

You have more than 3,000 people that we've identified as chronically homeless.

They are still currently homeless.

They're not housed.

The 6,500 or so units that we have of permanent supportive housing has served people that have experienced chronic homelessness in the past.

So you want to talk about the numbers differently.

With that, that will leave us with something in the range of a 2,000, 2,500 unit gap, if you use that estimate, though there's a lot of other approaches one could use to estimate what our potential need for permanent supportive housing throughout King County would be.

With that, I'll stop and take any questions or turn it over to our other presenters.

Are there any initial questions for Jeff?

Okay.

Thank you, Jeff, for providing that baseline information.

I think it's important because there's a lot of discussion and conversation and scrutiny in the media on a regular basis about what are we going to do to make progress on homelessness.

We really know what we do need to do.

And the metrics that you just laid down, I think, helps make that clear in the scope and scale of the need and how we can keep making progress on it.

And that's a perfect introduction to Tim and Derek to talk a little bit more about what their providers do in this critical space.

Tim with Plymouth Housing, Derek with Chief Seattle Club, both doing really outstanding work in the community, providing really great permanent supportive housing placements.

And both Chief Seattle Club and Plymouth were really key stakeholders in crafting this initial draft of the legislation and really appreciate their feedback and input.

So, Tim, why don't we start with you?

Just provide an overview of how this legislation is going to impact projects that Plymouth is putting together, why these changes are necessary, and just what the hurdles that you've experienced as a developer in getting more units online because of regulations that don't necessarily apply to permanent supportive housing but might be appropriate for market rate housing.

So with that, Tim, I'll turn it over to you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you, Council Member Lewis, and thank you for your foresight on this legislation.

So as has been mentioned, I work at Plymouth Housing.

Plymouth has been around for 40 years providing permanent supportive housing in and around downtown Seattle.

And we serve that population that Jeff was mentioning, folks that are chronically homeless.

So not folks that have just run across hard times and need somewhere for a few months to get back on their feet.

These are folks with many issues like many of us have, and they need a permanent housing before they can address any other issues in their life.

We operate 15 buildings with a little over a thousand apartments for folks that are experiencing homelessness.

And they're all studios or single room occupancy for homeless individuals.

I should mention that.

And so, yeah, we're just really excited about this legislation.

And, you know, we're five years into this state of emergency on homelessness.

And to me, this is just the first most logical step that is the most obvious for the city.

There's no cost impacts.

but there's huge potential benefits in increasing the efficiency, which permanent supportive housing providers can bring these units online during this period of critical need of whether that's, you know, there's some debate on the numbers, like Jeff said, 3000 or 6,000 units for chronically homeless individuals that we need.

We currently have six projects in development around 600 apartments.

And many of them would frankly be built already if we had legislation like this enacted previously.

And I don't have much of a presentation prepared, but the other factor that I'll touch on that relates to some of these points is what are the folks like that live at Plymouth and Chief Seattle Club maybe?

Our demographics are that almost everyone has some sort of disability or mobility challenge.

So I think like 96% of our, our thousand or so residents have some sort of disability.

Almost 60% of them have a mental health condition.

Um, and I think we're approaching half of our, our portfolio being at or above the age of 55. Um, and many of the folks are people of color, about half of our people of color.

Um, and, I give you that because the demographics matter for some of the legislative things we're talking about, particularly around bicycle parking.

I'll touch on that first.

I'm a big bike fan myself, and I'm trained as a city planner, so it's a little awkward.

But in this circumstance, I just don't think it makes sense for permanent supportive housing be so restricted on the location and the amount of bike parking.

Our tenants, there's like a handful across our 1,000 apartments that even own a bicycle.

And if they do, they usually prefer to keep it in their apartments.

We're making design accommodations in our new buildings in addition to the code required bike parking.

Our team costed it out on a couple of projects.

We're talking around three or $500,000 per bike room as currently required, which coincidentally is about the cost of providing another housing unit, getting another person that's chronically homeless off the street.

So we could definitely provide more housing without that bike parking requirement.

It's also the location of that space.

It has to be close to the entry.

Most of our buildings are what's called five over two construction.

So we're building the bike rooms and really expensive, the most expensive part of the building in concrete walls, right near the front door.

Happy to answer more questions on that.

And then I just want to go back on a little bit on Council Member Herbold's thoughts around design review.

I'll be interested to see what the city reports on these pilot projects that are currently under development without the design review process, but I think we'd see around a four to six month faster permitting schedule without design review.

And then you get into the harder to quantify benefits.

There's one that I know of right off the top of my head as a developer, and that's how much we have to pay our architects.

I'd say it's probably two to $300,000 per project less to not have to put together a design review project.

whether it's being reviewed by somebody administrative or by the public.

So there's significant cost savings, there's time savings.

And again, there's still a commitment by providers to do a good job with the community to ensure if design is a pressing issue in the community, we're going to hear about that and hopefully make those changes as appropriate.

So I just wanted to touch on that, but I'll turn it over to Derek to add anything else he wants to.

Thank you, Tim.

Yeah, so obviously Tim's been in this game a lot longer than we have.

Chief Seattle Club, we've gotten two development projects underway now.

Our first one, I'm sure everybody knows all, which is downtown Pioneer Square.

30% of the way through the project.

Now it's our first one scheduled to be finished, completed October 6th.

And our other one, Permanent Supportive Housing Project up in Lake City.

We're looking at late 21, probably break ground, I'm thinking.

So we haven't really got in there yet, but I have been through the process now a couple times and some of this early design phase and.

I do know it's very stressful and we've had that argument internally about the space that we're losing because of the bike room.

It's not even just the units, keep in mind too, it's valuable spaces on the first floor that we're thinking of.

Like I said earlier, that activity space that's so crucial, bringing people together, healing.

We wanna make a nurse's station, we have to decide whether or not we're gonna do that.

or the bike room.

So we've been through that.

And I've felt the headaches, too, of the design and review and all that, too.

And just the temperature check I've done with our development consultants, these are all common problems that I know I've heard everybody talk about, like what Tim was just talking about, the cost savings, the time saving.

There's so many benefits to just actually revamp and streamline this process.

I mean, we're trying to save people's lives and get people housed, especially the most chronic, the most vulnerable, ones with mental health issues, substance.

We've got to get them housed and we need to streamline this process.

So anything that can do that and bring our people back indoors and safe is good.

Well, thank you.

I'm sure there's going to be a lot of questions.

I want to jump on this theme with both of you a little bit more on the bike storage question.

Because I think it's a delicate area for a lot of us.

You know, I included it in the first draft because I wanted to center your experience, Senator, the needs of the people in your buildings, what you go through as developers and community leaders in putting these projects together.

And I heard uniformly, this was something that really needed to be in this bill.

I wonder if you guys could expand a little bit more, because we do know that there are folks in permanent supportive housing who do use bikes and how it's a primary mode of transportation for them.

not at the same density as there are in market rate housing.

But Tim, in particular, you mentioned that a lot of residents, if they do have bikes, tend to prefer to store them in their unit, or there are other ways to deal with biking as an option for the residents who do want to use it.

I wonder if you might just expand a little bit on that, centering the needs and the experiences of the people who live in your units who do use bikes and the kinds of planning you guys will continue to incorporate in your projects if this requirement isn't there to reflect your unique needs.

And this current regulation is kind of a blunt instrument as I understand it.

So Tim, why don't you go first and then Derek.

Yeah, thank you, Council Member.

One of the things we're doing at one of our buildings under construction and looking to do at all of them actually is adding hooks for people to store conveniently and giving some foresight to the design inside people's apartments where you can hang up a bike, keep it safe.

And I think that's often the case where we hear of the few tenants that we have that are bicycle owners is They want to keep it with them.

It's one of their valued possessions, and they want to keep eyes on it.

I mean, another thing I'll just go back to is our population.

There are bicycle owners, but I feel like this may be, to Derek's point, we have to look at the policy context here.

We're trying to save people's lives and get them off the street.

Climate change and encouraging bike riding is important, I just would defer to the providers here to allow us to be flexible and not necessarily be legislated into exactly where and how big those bike areas are.

We'll still continue to plan for bikes in our new buildings, but we'll work with our staff and our residents to find the right way to do that.

Thank you, Derek.

Hi.

Yeah.

So obviously we haven't had our structures built yet, but we do have Eagle Village, which is out in Soto.

We have 29 rooms there, and it opened up last October.

So it's been open about a year.

And I think we have two bike racks in there.

And now it's, I think we have about three bikes we see in there.

And that's people who've probably been housed for a whole year.

And I agree with Tim.

Our people, whenever they have bikes, they're just as valuable to them as cars are to car owners.

And I don't see it being used unit per parking space or whatever it is, the formula seems a little ridiculous.

But I'll tell you, day to day at Chief Seattle Club, obviously pre-COVID, we're seeing about 130, maybe 140 people a day homeless.

And we'd see maybe two or three bikes come through.

So that kind of tells you what we're dealing with and the need for bikes.

But I mean, put it out there, though, when somebody's housed, their willingness to actually get a bike might change.

But we don't really see a need for a lot of bike storage.

Really appreciate that context from both of you.

Thank you so much.

So with that, I want to open it up to other questions from my colleagues.

Anyone have questions for Tim and Derek?

Great.

Look at how thorough you guys were.

No questions.

Excellent job.

Well, look, there's going to be plenty of time for that later, given that we are very early in this process.

This was just a first bite at the apple for people to identify issues, to really hear the need directly from Tim and Derek, who are on the front lines.

And by no means are Tim and Derek the exhaustive representatives.

We are probably going to have folks in the future from DESC and from Lehigh and from so many other local providers and developers who are doing this critical work.

all with very similar concerns and who have been very helpful throughout this process.

So, Tim and Derek, thank you for being available today to kick this process off and really get us rolling.

We'll certainly call you back as we have more questions and as we continue to vet this legislation in January.

and appreciate you making yourselves available.

So thank you so much.

And thank you to central staff for queuing this up and answering the critical technical questions at this early stage.

It's always good to get those flagged early and start working on those issues well in advance.

So I want to pivot now, since we're doing pretty good on time.

Oh, yes.

Sorry.

Oh, yes.

No, I'm just saying goodbye to Derek.

Yeah, that's great.

I really appreciate when we as a council can just take advantage of the awesome wealth of community that we have in the city.

And without Derek, this bill wouldn't be here.

So I wanna express my appreciation to him too.

Okay, moving on to item two.

So I thought it was important.

Well, first, Jacob, can you please read item two into the record?

Briefing and discussion on 2021 homelessness strategies and investments.

Thank you, Jacob.

And the presenters are going to be Deputy Mayor Sixkiller, Chloe Gale from REACH, and Lisa Dugard from the Public Defender Association.

And I believe they're all present with us, which is great.

So I did just want to say at the top of this, we made a considerable amount of investments for outreach, for transitional shelter, for completely redefining how we are going to conduct business as a city in terms of leading with engagement, leading with outreach going forward in 2021. As a council, that's the vision that we manifested in our budget that we passed at the end of last month.

I realize it is still 2020 and these are 2021 investments, but it's never too early to hear from some of our partners who are going to be the recipients of many of those resources and from the executive on the status in scaling up these new investments and these new approaches for 2021 to make progress on what all of us see every day in our communities, the incredible crisis several years into the state of emergency on this crisis of homelessness in Seattle and King County.

Some of the key things I just want to flag at the top, but I do want to go through and give our panelists opportunities to briefly introduce themselves.

And then if we might have a conversation first about maybe where we are on some of the timeline to standing up some of these additive investments, might be good just to hear, for example, where we are on the hoteling, where we are on tiny house villages, where we are on the enhanced shelter.

And then also just an update on the HOPE team and the work that Chloe, Lisa, and the Human Services Department have been doing to strengthen our outreach efforts.

I know that work continues to be ongoing and it'd be good to get an update for the committee and for the public today.

But then giving an opportunity for committee members to have an open-ended discussion generally about these homelessness investments.

And I'm sure it'll be a conversation we'll be reconvening at the committee in January for another update.

So with that, I want to give our panelists an opportunity to introduce themselves.

Casey, why don't we start with you, Deputy Mayor Sixkiller, and then Chloe, and then Lisa.

and council member, just to clarify, you just want me to introduce myself or do you want me to launch it?

Yeah.

Well, how about this?

Why don't we go through and just say name and role versus introductions?

And then why don't we go on after we go through that round of introductions?

Casey, why don't we come back to you first and then hear from Lisa and Chloe and then open it up to general questions.

OK, that sounds great.

Good afternoon.

My name is Casey Sixcar, Deputy Mayor, Mayor's Office.

Hi, my name is Chloe Gale.

I'm a co-director for the REACH program.

And I'm Lisa Dugard.

I'm the director at the Public Defender Association.

So, Casey, now that we're all introduced, why don't we go back to you and just kind of get a broad overview of the budget ads that the council has made and how the executive team is approaching this.

I do want to clarify some of my earlier remarks.

We did make some of these outreach investments and outreach changes through legislation actually I introduced in the 2020 budget as well.

So it's not, this isn't just about the 2021 investments.

We are also talking about an ongoing outreach project that we've been working on for the last several months.

So feel free to include that in your remarks.

I don't want the panelists to feel like you were sort of hemmed in to just what is prospective.

Obviously, there's a lot of ongoing initiatives as well.

So Casey, over to you, sir.

Okay, all right.

Well, thank you.

Thank you, council member and council.

Appreciate the opportunity to come before you toward the end of the year and provide an update about a number of efforts that are underway within HSD in particular.

Many of them, all of them actually supported by council through the 2021 adopted budget.

And as Council Member Lewis just referenced, some additional things that we're working on between now and the end of the year that are a holdover from the 2020 budget.

So if I can just kind of hit a few of those highlights, give you an update of where we're at, and then I'll turn it over to Chloe and Lisa.

So first and foremost, as we think about, as we work toward our surge, in our street to housing efforts in 2021. We are in the process of finalizing three different RFQs to do that work.

And that includes, number one, we have now narrowed the field down to three to five potential hotels to lease.

So FAS is working through that process now with potential locations that I was after a really pretty wide search that went from I think somewhere in the 90s of potential properties to again now as we've gone through a series of site visits and other work with potential host hotels down to three to five.

So our goal is still to bring one of those hotels online potentially toward the last week of this month, probably more likely at this point, not until the beginning, the early part of January.

So that's very exciting for us.

The second is, you know, we are working and we'll be announcing soon who our hotel operator or operators are going to be.

So we have the hotels themselves, and then we have the folks, those agencies who are going to be actually managing these shelter assets for the city.

And so we have finalized that process as well.

And we'll be sending out those award letters here shortly and getting to negotiate those contracts.

The third part of that, of the RFQ world is our street to housing RFQ.

So this is our rapid rehousing services that we feel confident we'll be able to serve up to 231 people.

We have identified a service provider for that as well, and we'll be able to make that announcement here shortly.

So by very beginning of January, announced the location of our hotels, announced our hotel operator or operators, and then also announced our rapid rehousing service provider.

And again, just as a reminder, our goal is to stand up 300 new temporary shelter units In addition to that, 125 new enhanced non-congregate shelter spaces as well using likely one operator.

Thank you very much to council for supporting that proposal by the mayor and working with us in that.

We're really excited to be able to bring on these new assets.

Council Member Lewis mentioned his legislation and our 2020 outreach dollars.

that remain from a few different moves earlier this fall.

We have about a million dollars in money set aside for additional outreach activity.

About $265,000 of that will be spent extending the hotel stay for individuals who previously were residing at the Everspring Inn.

And so we've authorized that work that was a universal request from the outreach continuum of of preventing the potential for those individuals to exit from hotels into homelessness.

So we're excited about that and unified response.

So that work is is moving forward.

And I want to thank Lisa Dugard and the PDA for stepping into.

stepping into and stepping up to really support those individuals and working in partnership with us.

So that leaves about $800,000 left.

We have been collating requests from the service outreach provider continuum about things they could use, those types that they could procure here at the end of 2020. Those include tents, sleeping bags, heaters, blankets, socks, shoe, gift cards, lots of different things to try to keep people warm and safe as we head into, you know, continued dark, cold, and often wet days over the next several weeks and months.

So that process is moving forward as well.

We're not making it hard.

We're not amending contracts and creating some new RFP process.

We're trying to make it as simple and streamlined as possible.

so that our outreach continuum partners can be focused on the work that they do and not on a bunch of paperwork that just slows everything down.

Also related to Council Member Lewis's legislation, we have been working with the outreach continuum on a mutual vision for outreach in the city.

We are learning a lot about each other, or at least now that I'm involved in that, learning more about where we have opportunities for improvement, where we continue to have perhaps some friction.

But I have to say that I really appreciated the opportunity to work with our outreach continuum and think through solutions and new approaches for our overall response to unsheltered homelessness.

There is work going on.

I know there's been some talk publicly about outreach is no longer occurring.

That is not true.

All of our contracts are active.

I think Chloe Gale can talk about the work that her team is doing across the city.

The PDA is deployed, Chief Seattle Club is doing work.

A lot of folks are involved in both helping move folks out of shelter, I mean, excuse me, off the street and into some form of shelter while also trying to meet their needs given that they're gonna remain outside.

So, obviously, there's work going on in a number of our parks across our park system today.

Lisa do guard.

I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about the work that the PDA and reach and others are doing with county resources called just care and the Chinatown and find your square area.

We're learning a lot about what that work looks.

And a few other places around the city as well as working with other stakeholders on, you know, whether it's construction projects or other obstructions that were coordinated work and outreach from our contracted providers really helpful in resolving some of those issues.

So we continue to work through that.

And also working through how we can have a more coordinated and geographic approach to how we're conducting.

outreach.

And again, I want to really thank Chloe and her team and others for their participation in that work.

We also are learning as part of this conversation where our technology lags behind.

And I think that is in particular around the shelter, you know, just the database around available shelter on a daily basis and a number of other things.

I also want to thank our A hope team and again, folks that work with our outreach, continuing for participating in conversations and trying to figure out how we can make the technology work for us and for those who are in shelter and rather than working against us and being a sort of an impediment to getting resources out in the field.

I'm sure Chloe will talk about some of the number of the innovative things that REACH is doing, both to connect folks to shelter, but also meet their needs as we go into cold months.

So I won't go into that here.

But I do want to just talk a little bit about the HOPE team.

I mentioned the fact that they have been involved in all of these discussions about the future of outreach, again, and also working with them to help coordinate referrals into the shelter system.

So over just the first month, the full implementation of this new HOPE team, You know, we've made referrals with reach Seattle Indian Center Seattle and health board mid and others.

Again, the hope team is coordinating a shelter recommendations from out with providers who are they finding the best match for available resources for their clients.

So, also means that we're working across 15 different outreach agencies for contracted and not and so both are contracted and non contracted partners to submit these recommendations for referrals into vacant spots.

A lot of work going on, on the back end from the HOPE team.

And I think those folks, I think our team has really started to try to settle into its new role.

And I think has really approached that work in a very collaborative way.

Try to think, what else?

Last thing I would just say is, we are making a number of severe weather preparations.

Um, you know, we were fortunate last year, fortunate last year that the onset of COVID came after, uh, um, our winter, our first winter snow.

Uh, we did have a cold batch, a cold little spot there in March, April, but, uh, nevertheless, we are working, uh, to prepare our severe weather spaces.

Uh, that includes city hall, uh, SMT fish pavilion, community centers, uh, working with our contracted, uh, partners and others.

to make sure they are prepared so we can stand up those resources as necessary.

Again, the HOPE team will be the one coordinating that outreach and transportation to sites as part of our winter weather response for the city.

The last thing I wanted to mention is what we're doing around encampment trash mitigation and as well as the Clean Cities Initiative.

I want to be clear that the Clean Cities Initiative, which the council supported, is not focused exclusively on encampment trash mitigation and removal.

In fact, they are not in charge of removals at all.

The Clean Cities Initiative is an interdepartmental coordinated effort with parks and SDOT staff with support from SPU contractors.

It's an all hands on deck approach for trash, graffiti removal, power washing, really trying to get after the six plus months of deferred maintenance across the city.

There are times when that's going to where that work will intersect with encampments.

That's why our parks team and our, which has field coordinators who can work with encampment.

Inhabitants to, you know, deal with personal property, or most importantly, I think, be able to work with them to identify what trash and other resources they are trash and other refuse they may want removed from that encampment.

And that seems to be going well, I just would say that.

Last week alone, we collected 110,000 pounds of trash from our new community litter routes to parks, jamborees, and other citywide trash collection efforts.

Today, our team was at Rainier Playfield.

Last week, they were at Cowan Park and a few other places doing a more focused effort.

So just again, to recap, Council, you know, hotels coming online beginning in January, hotel operator and other partners who will help us with our street to housing approach will be announced here in the next couple of weeks.

We are continuing our work with our contracted outreach providers.

We have our winter weather plan in place and ready to go if and when we get to that.

And then our Clean Cities program is now up and running and we will be doing regular reporting, have a public dashboard so everyone can track and see where we've been, where we're planning to go, and what the output from that effort is.

Council Member?

Thank you.

Very thorough, Mr. Deputy Mayor.

And if folks can hold their questions until after we hear from Chloe and Lisa as well, and then we'll do all the questions at once.

I think that would be best.

And really appreciate that initial presentation.

So Chloe, can we hear an update from you next?

Sure.

I'm happy to build on what Deputy Mayor Sixkiller has spoken to.

REACH has been really engaged as part of the effort to try to redesign our unsheltered response.

And I'm actually really excited that we're going after your whole presentation on permanent supportive housing, because, in fact, that is the solution to our unsheltered response, is that the vast majority of the folks that we're finding outside really need long-term housing, and many, many of them need supportive housing, as those excellent programs described earlier.

So in the meantime, while we have a lot of people outside and not safe places for them to go indoors, We are trying to create a better system.

I'll just call it a couple items.

We are definitely trying to improve our referral system to get people into shelters with the new hotels coming online.

And I want to thank the HOPE team members who are very active in redesigning that process and trying to ensure that there's service match so that the people who come inside get their needs met inside of the shelters and that they also are put on a pathway towards permanent housing, which is what they need.

That's been a critical piece and it is a lot to manage all of the other outreach partners who've also been at the table helping to design that plan.

I also wanted to talk a little bit about our kind of principles coming in in terms of supporting.

The HOPE team has helped support us in thinking about hygiene and sanitation services, and that is critical and still a that there is not adequate hygiene and sanitation for people living outside.

Secondly, the trash mitigation, which was spoken to a little bit, the SPU teams have been incredibly cooperative and helpful.

And as one of my staff recently said a couple of weeks ago, when we're working in coordination with people living outside, people want their trash picked up.

He said, I've never found anybody who didn't actually want their trash picked up.

It really is how we go about that in a way that is supportive of them and Makes sense for the area.

So sometimes people collect their own trash and put them into purple bags.

Sometimes you will really need help.

And there's definitely a lot of illegal dumping happening all over our community that is exacerbating the amount of trash outside and that people living outside are having to contest with.

So we've really appreciated the SPU partners on designing that.

And then finally, survival supplies are really significant.

People have to have a way to stay warm, get food, try to stay dry in this weather.

It's really, it's an incredible challenge.

I, and part of that, I'll just mention the reach program is has started a new project, which is a pop up outside office model.

So you may see those around the community and we're happy to communicate more about that, which is we've had tense.

And we actually worked with private landowners in neighborhoods all over the city, and our staff are there on a regular basis so that people can come, they can recharge their batteries, they can have access to Wi-Fi and connect the services, and ideally they can get warm.

And we're quite concerned about people staying warm through the severe weather in the next few months.

And I do want to say that all of this work for us has really been towards and I think Lisa is going to speak more towards the provider, the providers that have been working with the city to try to design a new framework in terms of how we talk about unsheltered response.

And for us on the ground, we're really looking at creating a problem solving strategy.

So I just want to name some of those things, which is that we're preventing removals or moving people whenever possible.

As we know, the CDC does not want.

anyone displaced and moved around during this really critical time of disease mitigation.

We want to coordinate with the people who are living outside.

So we we start with a neighborhood community based approach where we really know who's there and that we design solutions in partnership with them.

So if that's a porta potty for their area, if that's a hand washing station, if that's getting their trash removed.

Sometimes it's better for them to move to another location, and that we can work in partnership with people to help figure that out, ideally to move people inside.

And finally, to do more community coordination.

So our problem-solving model is really looking at how do we also solve for the community, because different communities have different needs.

I'm going to just talk one minute about the Just Care Project.

I know Lisa will have a lot more to say.

And really, the Defendant Association has been the architect of that.

So they get the credit.

But I will say that's been an incredible opportunity using some CARES Act funds from the county to really try to create a demonstration model in two critical neighborhoods in the Chinatown International District.

and in Pioneer Square.

And I'm just going to speak a little bit.

We've been looking, REACH has been trying to organize the street response, and we did it with a lot of intentionality to bring in our community partners so that we're working together, and then to really learn about who's living outside and what their needs are.

And I'm going to speak a little bit to what we learned just by doing intensive assessments in that area.

We have, to date, in those two neighborhoods, done assessments with 165 individuals.

And those are pretty intensive.

People sign a release of information, and we try to get some kind of a sense of what their needs are so that we can accurately match them to resources and make sure that we're putting them on a good path for stability.

Approximately 80% of the folks that we've seen in that area have been chronically homeless.

So just to speak to your earlier presenters, it is a significant need, especially in neighborhoods that have very high concentrations of people and of services and have traditionally been where people with very high needs have congregated.

So 80% have been chronically homeless over a year.

The needs that they requested, over 95% was housing.

That's the number one choice.

But they also requested 79% requested substance use support, 70% requested mental health support, 40% requested physical health support, over 50% had legal issues that they needed to resolve, and 45% had benefits issues.

So people are having very high needs that they're trying to survive with, and they're presented with significant barriers to move inside.

In spite of that, with the, you know, excellent Lisa will speak to the resources that have come online and the excellent partnership we've had with the Asian Counseling and Referral Service, the Defenders Association, Chief Seattle Club, and other partners to help design models to build them in.

We have managed to move 71 people into motels.

And they have, and those motels are intentionally staffed to respond to people's cultural and their behavioral health needs so that we know that they're being appropriately matched.

I'll hand it over to Lisa then, thanks.

Thanks so much, Chloe, and thanks for having us, Council Member Lewis and colleagues.

Let me just explain how, first of all, the organization that I work with, the Public Defender Association, hasn't provided public defense services for a few years.

And we're about to go through a renaming process.

So next year, you'll probably hear me introducing myself from another, using another name.

But for the time being, PDA finds itself in this conversation.

We are actually not a city contractor to provide homelessness response or outreach, but we do have a city contract to manage the LEAD program.

Now LEAD stands for Let Everyone Advance with Dignity, previously Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion.

And LEAD is an alternative community-based care response to problematic behavior and law violations.

But over the lifetime of that program, between 75% and 80% of those who are referred to LEAD at point of referral are unsheltered.

So there's always been a very strong degree of overlap.

And in 2020, I'm going to rush through this background here.

This is just by way of introducing why I'm even sitting with you.

In 2020, as COVID hit and really not only the jail, the courts, and law enforcement really closed down and drew back in their capacity to engage with low-level public order issues out of concern for COVID transmission.

But those public order issues became more and more acute in neighborhoods.

has people experienced great need, shelters were de-intensified due to COVID, lawful sources of income were really cut off to people, and neighborhoods were really, you know, emptied out of ordinary traffic.

So as I think we all know, in the city and regionally, the impact of people living unsheltered in neighborhoods became more and more acute.

And we just noticed that our lead resources might be useful in response to those conditions.

So even though lead has never been defined as a homelessness response, using lead resources to respond to the condition of people living unsheltered seemed an obvious priority in terms of an alternative response to law violations and public order issues.

So we created the co-lead adaptation of LEAD earlier this year.

The council has previously heard short briefings about co-lead and there will be one later this week on Thursday as well.

That entailed recognizing that many people living in high impact situations outside high impact, meaning that they were posing the fact that people were living outside and the conditions that they were living in posed public order issues for neighborhoods and businesses.

Oftentimes, that population is struggling with really acute need, as Chloe detailed, and It has been the case for a long time that the ordinary systems of health care and behavioral health are not particularly responsive to or accessible to this population.

This year, that has been all the more true, such as it is the behavioral health care system.

sort of withdrew behind a telecare wall.

And for some people, there have been some very favorable media stories about how that's made behavioral health care more accessible to some people.

That's definitely not the case for people who are living unsheltered or in encampments, highly marginalized.

This just made an already pretty inaccessible system even less accessible.

So we built co-lead to really sort of step into that gap and attempt to do kind of like pop up behavioral health services, but also noticing as many as others did around the country, that there was this sudden availability of hotel space that was not in use for other purposes and where the hospitality industry actually itself was suffering and needed to find an alternative use.

So because of connections in the hospitality industry, we identified hotels that were interested in taking some of our participants in.

We co-lead sort of stood up rapidly a system of intensive case management specifically to provide wraparound care for people with acute behavioral health issues in hotels.

And so that was a short-term adaptation of an existing program starting in the late summer as King County was exploring what to do with, what best to do with its remaining CARES funding for 2020. there was discussion about the very significant impact of people living unsheltered in Pioneer Square and the CID and Chinatown International District.

And I just really wanna pause and call out the notable visionary leadership of business and residential organizations in both neighborhoods who simultaneously said, you know, the conditions that they were confronting in the neighborhoods were not viable, very problematic for small businesses and residents vulnerable in, particularly in the CID, very vulnerable businesses.

And yet they were not, they were, they were calling for a response, but they were not asking for an enforcement based response.

And they were not asking for what are often, referred to as sweeps, just sort of a per se decision that an encampment would be cleared regardless of where people went.

They said, we want to know that people are going somewhere where they'll be securely lodged, and we're asking for that.

And so when that, particularly businesses and neighborhood organizations in the CID in the summer, wrote to you all and said we want action but we don't but we want action that entails people being being lodged and and cared for not just swept dispersed or met with an enforcement response there was not.

an immediate sort of option like that to plug into.

But as we were in discussion with the county about how to use county CARES funds, the idea of bringing sort of a co-lead style response to scale in these neighborhoods that were asking for such a response came to fruition.

And that is what became Just Care.

So Just Care is a short-term CARES Act funded response presently funded through December 30th with CARES money and then through the end of January with a King County bridge award just for that one month to see if we can bridge to additional CARES funds.

It involves placing people for whom we can provide appropriate support in hotels in hotels, staffed by a multi-agency consortium, our co-lead program, Asian Counseling and Referral Service, and Chief Seattle Club.

Now, each of these teams is geared to provide support for a slightly different population.

And in so doing, we can provide strong quality care for a diverse array of people.

We do not have the perfect match for everybody out there.

And in particular, we need an additional provider or partner to work with people with highest acuity mental health needs.

So there are some people whom REACH is engaging in the field for whom we don't have the right hotel-based care response.

But so these are essentially quasi-residential care strategies.

COLEAD focuses primarily on people with pretty acute substance use issues.

ACRS, this is somewhat of an oversimplification, but ACRS is focusing primarily on people with higher acuity mental health issues.

And Chief Seattle Club is focusing on Native folks.

REACH is leading the field outreach work.

And I'm describing this just because it has become a sort of obviously become a potential model that could be in use citywide more broadly.

REACH is identifying, assessing and identifying needs and circumstances of people in the field and on a purely voluntary basis connecting them to these lodging offers based on their needs and based on the competencies and skills and capacity of the hotel-based service providers.

With those resources, REACH has been able to demonstrate something that Chloe often says, which is that it's very unusual to encounter somebody who is unwilling to accept an appropriate offer of housing or lodging.

uptake rate, if you will, in these Just Care efforts in the two neighborhoods has been extraordinarily high.

Very few people have declined these offers.

It hasn't been an instant or overnight turnaround, but the absorption level has been very high.

So let me just pause and say that the viability of that model has informed the partnership work that we have begun to do with the mayor's office and with HSD in trying to design a new approach that neither centers on enforcement nor is built on displacement, but is built on voluntary engagement the council heard during budget about an agreed framework that the mayor's office and a consortium of service providers tried to work through as a way to try a new approach in 2021. And the key principles of that framework, I just want to name, are to recognize that we have no matter what, a limited pool of appropriate sort of COVID appropriate sheltering resources to offer while the city's investments are going to increase that pool, it will still fall far short of the number of people who are living and sheltered in the city.

So it becomes a challenge of allocating those scarce sheltering resources in a way that is most impactful and meets the needs of those with greatest barriers and highest impact in the city.

How exactly to do that is the subject of ongoing conversations.

And I don't think that anybody feels that those conversations are completed.

You know, how to identify where to make those offers.

It then becomes important for everyone to acknowledge that because of that resource scarcity, Most people currently living unsheltered will continue to be unsheltered for the near term over the next many months.

And so the primary function of outreach is to make that viable, as viable as possible, allowing people to shelter in place as safely and humanely as possible and improving the impacts of that situation on surrounding neighborhoods.

So really focusing on problem solving, hygiene, sanitation, and problem solving, resolving issues without displacement.

That's a new framework.

It is one on which there was a values-based agreement, but what it really looks like in implementation is still I think, to be to be seen.

I want to name the other partners who participated in framing up that agreement, along with REACH, Evergreen Treatment Services, and my office.

That included Chief Seattle Club, the Urban League, Downtown Emergency Service Center, and the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness.

So we continue to meet with the mayor's office.

And I think we have been able to sketch out the sort of the hard decision points that need to be grappled with.

And in coming weeks, we will all make best efforts to firm up that framework so that it gets implemented in a way that has legitimacy as well as transparent.

and accountable and achieves the most that we can with the resources that we have while being real with the public about what, when there are not, when there is not an appropriate match to meet the needs of everybody out there, what does that mean about, you know, what the plan is going to be and what the role of outreach will be.

Thank you.

Lisa, thank you so much.

I have a couple of quick preliminary questions for some panel members, and then I want to turn it over to the committee members.

First, I want to thank everybody here for being collaborative, energetic, coming forward with a problem-solving attitude to engage in this.

since we really started talking on a regular basis as a provider community, executive branch and legislative body in the fall.

And I think that that in a lot of ways has set up some great success for 2021. And I think the overview and the presentation really speaks to a lot of the things that are in motion and that are happening on the ground.

I wanted to ask a couple of just quick questions from the presentation.

The first one's for Chloe or anyone else that wants to jump in and address this.

Really appreciate that one of the things that's being grappled with is improving the referral system, which is a conversation that there's been a lot of back and forth about for years.

And I wonder if the panel could maybe dig a little deeper into What that process has entailed and what the vision is for fine tuning that referral system to make sure that we are making it as seamless as possible.

to get people appropriately matched and into a lot of these additive transitional shelter assets that we're standing up.

And for that matter, hygiene and rapid rehousing resources as well.

So Chloe, I'm addressing that to you because you brought it up, but if anyone else wants to jump in after Chloe to that question, I'd appreciate that too.

Yeah, it's very, very much in development right now.

City staff have taken the lead on designing and convening it.

A group of providers that are meeting weekly to talk about the redesign.

So I can talk about some of the principles, but it's partway done.

I don't know what the final result will look like.

I would say some of the principles right now is some of the challenges with the previous referral system were technical.

It was not particularly accessible because There are technical issues around getting this many referrals in and then in a timely way, getting to select people to move into shelter.

It was what happened and would leave people behind who really were high needs people who needed to move forward into a shelter.

So we as a group are talking about what will be our priority groups that move forward into shelters.

How do we design a service match?

So we ensure that people are getting to the right shelters.

All providers have an opportunity to talk about what are our priority populations.

So that includes vulnerability.

That includes referring black, African-American, indigenous folks who are disproportionately represented outside.

making sure that they have and then also COVID is another opportunity for us to think about the welfare of people living outside and how who needs to be prioritized.

So there's a priority discussion and then there's a technical discussion about for at the moment it may be that there will be some rapid response shelter beds for immediate need that somebody shows up and they just they need a place right away and how do we continue to have a rapid response but for some of our Enhanced shelter spaces, they're really designed to serve people with higher needs who may take multiple touches or even months of work before they're ready to move inside.

And we need to make sure that we may slow that down.

And so we have a pool of applicants, and so continue to make sure that our high need people are matching our more advanced resources.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, and I look forward to hearing more about that project as it develops.

And I'm glad that work is underway and that you all are involved in that, because I think that's a conversation that has been going on a long time.

And I appreciate it might be getting close to resolution.

So I don't actually have any additional follow-up questions from the presentation.

I'd like to open it up more broadly to other council members, if there's folks here who have a question for any of the panel members.

Yeah, Madam President.

Yeah, when pressed to ask a question, I'm just going to go ahead and do it.

So I think it would be helpful to hear You know, there's the referral process, and I think that, you know, I'm heartened to hear that we're moving towards a direction where we have a better way to do that.

And I think it's, I would be interested in just hearing from, you know, either Lisa, Chloe, or Deputy Mary Sixkiller, just, you know, how, in terms of the inventory side of the referral question, right?

So, you know, what are some opportunities to be able to continue to work on sort of that supply side of the referral equation, right?

Like what can this, I know that in the past, the service providers have been really concerned about, you know, particularly as it related to the navigation team model, the city holding on to what availability was in terms of shelter beds across the city.

And I think, you know, my hope is that that's now evolving into something that's different and much more iterative.

And so just wanted to hear from the panel sort of, again, what are the opportunities and ongoing challenges as it relates to not just having a robust referral system, but sort of resolving the issues around the supply side of the referral system in terms of, you know, who needs these shelter options?

What are the shelter options needed?

And sort of where do we know there are ongoing gaps that the city council needs to continue to prioritize?

And I think that for me, it's really, as a citywide representative, I want to make sure that we're sort of taking a very geographically equitable perspective on that to make sure that we're really reaching every impacted corner of the city.

I can start since we find ourselves kind of on that inventory side of the balance.

I think it hasn't the city has not yet announced who will be staffing the hotel facilities that they're going to bring online and it will matter who that is right so optimally we match.

the outreach teams are doing a really good job of matching individuals to the right care team who can well meet their needs and have that go well and have it be a really meaningful next step for that person that sets them up well.

An array of different, you know, sort of teams with different skill sets and the right expertise and the right level of staffing to match the need will allow that outreach sort of referral partner.

I'm kind of gesturing at Chloe, at least for me, I'm gesturing at Chloe because she sort of represents that function here.

It gives them options and for greatest impact of this whole undertaking, those matches need to be really good.

There has been really heartening, to me, heartening discussion from some providers who feel like their existing facilities may not be being used for optimal impact.

For example, DESC and the Navigation Center, they've named that They've had people placed there in the past who maybe didn't need the complement of services for people with higher acuity mental health needs that they are positioned to offer.

So there's some sort of like, if you take all the moving parts and look at what we've got, figure out what each partner can do, we can get the most out of the slots or uh, placements that will be available to that to that team.

It still begs the question of where are the priority?

Where will shelter where and for whom will shelter be allocated?

Because every neighborhood in the city assuredly believes that they are that highest priority place and, um, you know, everybody could be right about that.

And yet the numbers just will not allow for that offer to be made everywhere.

So intentionality about, and I'm not trying to say that any one of us knows the answer, but clarity about how those decisions are being made, the ability to explain them and stand shoulder to shoulder and explain how those decisions are being made is going to be very important.

And I don't think we're quite there yet to be able to name how that will, how that decision-making process will, the principles on which that decision-making process will run, but we need to be, we need to be able, everybody needs to be able to understand that.

Council President, maybe I just add just some basic comments to what Lisa just said is I think a lot of the work that the HOPE team and our contracted partners are working on is trying to also just is to improve the backbone of the referral system itself.

You know, as you know, the city has, you know, we have contracted shelter beds.

We have other shelter beds that are not contracted with the city.

And so that creates can create a disjointed view of what shelter availability actually is.

And I think importantly, to Lisa's point, what kind of shelter availability there is.

And so for us, part of the work here is making sure that we can, and as we do this work, is having visibility across the entire shelter network.

And then also going that next step to make sure that our outreach the folks on the ground actually doing engagement with individuals experiencing homelessness, have that information so that when someone decides that they're ready to come in, it's not four days away.

It's more of the goal is a real time.

And I keep saying, it's sort of like Ticketmaster, right?

You'll be able to select your seat, you know where you're going, you know if it's enhanced or not.

And I'm not trying to be funny about it, but I do think That level of, if I were an outreach provider, I'd want to know every day, what tools do I have available to me to bring people inside?

And I think that is the goal of a lot of this work, is how do we do that?

How can we do that better?

And technology is part of it, and we're working on that.

But I think, again, I think also many of the things that both Lisa and Chloe said is also ring true just in terms of what we're navigating to and who we're prioritizing in that work.

Thank you.

And does that answer all your questions, Madam President?

It does.

Thank you so much.

OK.

Council Member Morales has a question.

Thank you.

Yes, it's not so much a question, but I do want to thank you Lisa for, you know, as you were talking.

About the framework that I know there's been a lot of conversation about over the last several months now, the idea that the framework is really rooted in.

Neither enforcement nor displacement, I think is worth repeating because, you know, the way that we've been doing this for a long time is not really serving.

Many people or our community members and so.

I do think that it's really important to be realistic about the fact that there are limited shelter spaces right now, particularly for adults, that there are many thousands of people who will spend the winter outdoors because we don't have the space.

We have additional shelter plan.

We have a plan for more permanent supportive housing.

But right now, those things are not available.

And so I think it's important that we be straight with our community, with our business community, with our neighbors, that we are in this position.

And we're working towards moving out of this situation.

when I hear about things that are happening at Cal Anderson Park.

You know, there's certainly, it is certainly unacceptable for city workers to feel unsafe, feel they can't do their job when they're trying to do regular maintenance in an area.

But it is also unacceptable to be moving people when we know that there's not enough places for them to go, that, you know, we're going to have people who are going to be living outdoors during the winter.

And that we are working on getting more space, but we just don't have it right now.

So I think if we're, if we're going to continue to have these conversations and continue to ground what we're trying to do in the notion that the best way to move forward is not to displace and is not to enforce.

What are basically people who are trying to survive outdoors.

then the way we rebuild trust among all of our neighbors is to be straight about what our limitations are and the work that we are working hard to accomplish, but it's gonna take a little bit of time.

So I just wanna thank all of you again.

This is complex and it's gonna take time, but I'm excited for all of the work that you're doing.

And so I just wanna thank you for that.

Yeah, can I speak to that just one?

I'm sorry, it wasn't really a question, but I do feel like To council member Gonzalez's question about the shelter referrals and geography, part of the issue was that shelter referrals were really connected to encampment removals.

And I think that we have slowed them down.

They have not stopped.

And it is our obligation to describe the gap of resources every day in what we're seeing outside.

We are very happy to do that.

And in partnership with the city, with mayor's office, with council to say, and you said it exactly right, there are not sufficient places, particularly at this time, single adult men, there are very, very, very few available spots for people to go.

So that's the reality for people outside.

Council Member Kerbald.

Thank you.

Along the lines of this, I think, important value that we all have in addition to serving the people who are unfortunately, living outdoors for many years now and now in this crisis as we are about to enter the winter months.

Another, I think, important value is to be straight with members of the public who are contacting us about encampments in their communities, whether or not they are motivated by concern about their unhoused neighbors, or are trying to file a complaint seeking a removal.

And so one of the things I'm really interested in is knowing more about how the city accepts information from Seattle residents about encampments and what response do they receive.

what information is provided to them upon making a report to the city that both informs them in a way that accurately explains the scope of the challenge and sets some common expectations for what kind of response and when there might be a response.

So just really wanting to understand what HOPE does with the information it receives from residents about encampments in their communities, how the city prioritizes with our outreach providers, which locations to respond to.

And, you know, we heard a little bit about this at the beginning, but I just want to affirm again for the viewing public that outreach is currently happening today.

And so there is this belief, this continued belief, that since the navigation team is not operating, that that means that outreach has stopped.

an important component of undoing that thinking is that we have a robust response to people who are making reports of encampments.

That again, like I said, explains the scope of the problem, but also explains how we are prioritizing encampment locations for outreach.

And what that means, some encampment locations will not be prioritized for outreach, some will be.

We may not have places for people in those locations to go, but I think it's really important and it's an opportunity that we have to to inform the public about the complexity of this issue.

And I also want to just thank everybody for engaging in this conversation over the last several months.

I think it's really important to move towards this problem-solving approach that we're working together with our advocacy community, the mayor's office, and the council, and Deputy Mayor Sixkiller, I really appreciate your personal involvement in this issue, and it just really shows your commitment to our shared goals, and just, again, Um, heartfelt, uh, and sincere gratitude for you for the work that in the time that you've been spending.

Thank you very much.

Uh, council member for, for that.

And, um, also for the questions, um, you know, I think, uh, to your question about, you know, where is outreach?

Yes.

Outreach is still occurring, right?

I want to say that again and again, outreach is still occurring across our entire outreach continuum.

These are folks that are out working every single day.

Councilmember Lewis and I have been on several conversations with Chloe and her team and her outreach worker who literally spends every single day in Denny Park working for folks there.

I also want to acknowledge the collaboration and cross-agency work that is also occurring today.

Two of those organizations are also on this call working to try to figure out how best to to steal her word, braid together resources, steal a phrase from Lisa Dugard, to try to match those resources where we have them and when we have them.

And I think a really good example of that is at Denny Park just recently.

Chloe's team was able to identify a group of Native people that were living in the park.

Because of the work through Just Care, Lisa and her team were aware that the Chief Seattle Club had some vacancies in a hotel block that they are operating, so culturally appropriate for these native folks.

And the city team was able to work with them and support that voluntary movement from Denny Park into hotel units and into culturally appropriate hotel units with services being provided.

is where we all want to get to, right?

Hopefully, as more resources come on, as Lisa Dugard mentioned just a little bit ago, is how we're prioritizing and where we're prioritizing.

And I want to also acknowledge Council President as well, that we want a geographic approach.

One of the things that I've learned talking with Chloe and others in the continuum, or come to appreciate more, I should say, is just homelessness looks different in different parts of the city.

right, you know, and in so far as who is experiencing homelessness.

And, you know, up in the university district, we have a larger, you know, group of unhoused young people, young adults.

And, you know, we had an opportunity to visit with David, who is the REACH worker, who's up there working every single day, has a relationship with folks.

And so, you know, really, you know, we are working hard on trying to really and I'm looking forward to doing this over the next few weeks, I hope, and certainly beginning of the year, is a much more robust, visible blueprint for how we're going to be conducting outreach around the city that not only is focused on how we connect people to new resources as they come online, but as Chloe said, how we're supporting individuals who are going to continue to remain outside.

And I want to acknowledge that from the continuum and our shared principles that That's a big acknowledgement from our folks who dedicate their daily life to meeting the needs of individuals experiencing homelessness is to admit that some people are going to remain outside.

And so that also means working with those agencies to support as best we can the ability, especially in the cold winter months to get through those cold winter months, just even clean dry socks.

warming centers, other things that the other agencies are experimenting with and standing up around the city.

But to your point, Council Member Herbold, is being transparent about that.

And I can tell you, in the calls that I've had over the last several weeks, some plans, some random, when I answer the phone, I don't know who it is, with a resident who's concerned about an encampment or concerned about the condition of an individual in an encampment, when we begin to talk about what we're trying to do, people I think really appreciate and I find our residents are able to understand the limitations of what we're able to do.

But I think that we can do a better job and need to do a better job both of articulating the plan and then executing on that.

And that is the thing I am very excited about working with not just Lisa and Chloe, but a whole bunch of other folks and within our department in the first quarter of next year.

So thank you very much for your comments and your support for the work that we're doing collectively.

I'm just, again, I'm trying to, I would like to know that we could at some point be able to tell people, not just what the plan is, but to tell people whether or not Whether or not there is a process that the city has for assessing a particular location that somebody calls us about.

And it may be, yes, we're going to assess the location and it's not a high priority.

Or we can't assess this particular location because it doesn't meet some other criteria.

that we create.

But I just feel that it's very important for us as elected officials and for our departments as well to be able to share The good news that there is somebody coming to help when we can share that, and the bad news that, no, I'm sorry, this is not a high priority location and here's why.

And I just think that is incredibly important for us to be able to do as difficult as it can be.

I agree, council member.

And I think that is something, again, that we're trying to reach some consensus with, with the outreach continuum so that we all have a shared understanding.

And it's not just the city setting those parameters, but we're doing that with those who are on the ground.

But yes, I would very much agree with what you just said.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you so much, everybody.

I don't think we have any additional questions unless there's anyone else who wants to jump in for one more that we are We're at the 420 mark here, so I think it's getting close to wrapping it in for today.

But if anyone else has a final question, I'm happy to indulge one last question.

Seeing none, thank you, panel, and thank you so much, council colleagues, for making the time.

I know we're starting to close in here on the recess deadline, and I appreciate everyone's flexibility to provide the quorum for these two really critical conversations this afternoon.

With that, unless there's anything for the good of the order?

Seeing no hands.

All right.

Well, with that, this committee's adjourned.

Everyone have a great recess.

And we'll come back in January to talk about probably these same two items with some updates in mid-January.

Thank you, everybody.

Bye.

Thank you.