Housing and Human Services Committee 7102024

The time is 9.31, and the July 10th meeting of the Housing and Human Services Committee will now come to order.

I'm Kathy Moore, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council President Nelson?

Present.

Council Member Saka?

Here.

Council Member Wu?

Vice Chair Morales?

Here.

Chair Moore?

Present.

There are four present.

All right, thank you.

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

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

So I want to thank everyone for being here today for the July 10th meeting of the Housing and Human Services Committee.

Today we have two items on the agenda.

First, we will hear from some housing providers on the current challenges they face providing housing in Seattle.

And secondly, we will hear from the Human Services Department and the Mayor's Office on HSD's community safety initiatives.

I want to note that I was alerted this morning by our IT staff that the incorrect committee login and ID were sent out to people who signed up for online comment.

So the error has been corrected, and the IT team has sent out emails to inform all of the public commenters who signed up.

So please check.

If you signed up online for public comment today, please make sure to check an email.

You should have received just before 9 a.m.

this morning with the correct logon information.

Again, there was...

an error in the logon information that was submitted.

We have that since been corrected this morning and a new correct email has been sent to log in.

So please double check your email sent this morning.

All right, so we will now open for hybrid public comment period.

Public comments should relate to items on today's agenda or be within the purview of this committee.

Clerk, how many speakers are signed up today?

Currently we have three in-person speakers and 10 remote speakers.

Okay, thank you.

Each speaker will have two minutes and we will start with the in-person speakers first.

And clerk, can you please read the public comment instructions?

The public comment period will be moderated in the following manner.

Public comment period is up to 20 minutes.

Speakers will be called in the order in which they registered.

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

Speakers' mics will be muted if they do not, and there are comments within the allotted time to allow us to move on to the next speaker.

All right, thank you.

And our first in-person speaker?

The first in-person speaker is Marilyn Yin, followed by Suzanne Koval.

Thank you.

One moment, and let me get your timer set up.

One second.

Okay.

You ready to go, yeah?

Ready to go.

Okay, good morning council.

My name is Marilyn Yim.

I'm a co-founder of Seattle Grassroots Landlords, providing peer support and mentorship to 730 small housing providers.

For our members, Seattle's rental laws are like walking barefoot through fire or glass, greatly increasing our costs and risks.

That's why Seattle has lost 19% of its small rentals in the last five years, with 74% of those who sold citing the city's regulations as the top reason why.

We hear constantly from our members, I will never be a landlord in Seattle or Washington again.

Many of those who sold still wanted to invest in real estate just outside of Seattle.

The lesson here is that laws can make investment leave.

Small guys like us were the first ones affected, but now it's spreading to the bigger housing providers.

Nonprofits, affordable housing, even Seattle Housing Authority and bigger landlords are having a hard time managing rentals, tenants, rising costs, and dwindling financing.

All of them are bleeding red ink.

It's a bloodbath out there.

The reason is our laws, and behind closed doors, everyone knows it.

The slides today are mild compared to the reality.

Rental laws are not protecting people.

They're harming vulnerable people and rewarding bad behavior.

Nobody will invest in a new building that gets thrashed after two years with high staff turnover and destructive, violent tenants that threaten neighbors and can't be removed.

Once you burn investors, they won't be back to get burned again, and it'll take decades and a total leadership turnover to rebuild that trust.

Nonprofits are already being denied financing dozens of times over right now.

It's happening now.

The stakes are high.

We won't get the housing that was promised out of the $1 billion housing levy that passed just last year if we can't attract the required financing.

Mayor Harrell, county and state leaders, please listen to what housing providers are telling you today.

And please, council members, I'm glad you're listening to us.

We need a holistic of our laws and how they're administered at the city and in King County courts.

We want to house our neighbors, but both housing and the people that we're trying to house are being harmed.

We need to take a step back, look at the big picture and partnership, partner together.

It's a crisis and we're sounding the alarm.

There's a small window to act and we need to do it now.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Next speaker.

The next speaker is Suzanne Koval followed by Wolfgang Zorn.

for GMD Development.

We're a small Seattle-based real estate developer specializing in affordable and workforce housing.

We operate almost 600 affordable units in Seattle, King County at or below 60% AMI.

We care deeply about all of our residents, but particularly the families with children who live in our housing.

I have spent the last six months working at our Southeast Seattle Workforce and Family Housing building that has one and two bedroom units at 60% AMI.

We have had several bad actors move into the building and take up dealing drugs in the back hallway.

They have allowed active drug users into the building and actively smoked fentanyl in the units and the stairwells.

We have had residents come in and say that they have to move because they can't continue to allow their families to live in this environment.

We have tried to get these folks out of the building, but we have been unsuccessful with the delays to eviction.

These delays to eviction are causing immeasurable harm to our families, children, and our staff.

We are not alone.

Many other housing providers in the area are in the same situation.

We have been unable to keep staff.

Many folks that we've hired have come in and they've gone out on medical leave and such because it's just so stressful to work in a building where when you walk down the hallway, you're smelling active fentanyl use.

Our building is two years old.

Many folks with the mayor and Dow Constantine and Inslee were at our grand opening and the building is destroyed.

Two years later, we have serious physical issues in our building due to the damage that's been caused.

So we'd like to ask that you help protect most of our residents.

Thank you very much.

Next speaker.

The next speaker is Wolfgang Zorn, followed by our first remote speaker, who is Elizabeth Powell.

Good morning.

My name is Wolfgang Zorn.

I'm a current participant at Share Wheel and have been with my husband since October of 2023. As an intentional community at Share, We oppose the weakening of the eviction moratorium and will continue to oppose such a motion until shelter is sufficiently available for all.

The lifting or weakening of this eviction moratorium can only at this time service to put more people out on the street in a current state of emergency.

The simple stance that we take as a community is that without shelter, people die.

Underneath this truth, it is inhumane to consider any options that do not lead to safe shelter for all.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Next speaker.

Our next is remote and that is Elizabeth Powell followed by Angie Gerald.

Elizabeth, you can press star six and start to talk.

Good morning.

This is Elizabeth Powell.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay, thank you.

I have a little bit of a bias towards tenants.

I've been practicing landlord-tenant law for the better part of 24 years now.

And I have seen the compromises that have been brought forward to make life easier for everybody.

At this point, I work for an organization in what we call eviction prevention, which is trying really hard not to get to the point where the court and the sheriff get involved.

So I do want to point out that there's a myth out there that it is impossible to evict a tenant with a behavioral problem in less than a year.

And I apologize, but that's nonsense.

And so If the notices are done correctly and if a landlord attorney who knows what they're doing brings that matter to the court, there have been not one but two expedited procedures in Seattle and King County to make sure that that happens even faster.

And it is trying to respect the due process rights of everyone.

But anyone who says, oh, it takes an hour or a year to get somebody out with a behavioral problem, that's simply not true.

So one of the ways that this matter could get resolved faster is to make sure that the courts are adequately funded, not a huge increase in administrative people, but making sure that there's pro tem commissioners, pro tem judges, Okay, I'm getting undone.

All right, thank you very much.

Our next speaker.

The next speaker is Angie Gerald, followed by Bill Cook.

Okay, Angie, press star six and begin speaking.

Angie, you need to press star six.

Try that again.

Hi Angie, can you press star six?

It looks like you're still muted.

Oh, there she is.

Angie, we'll come back to you.

Okay.

The next speaker is Bill Cook.

He is not present, so we will go to Leslie Hodge.

Leslie, please press star six, and you can begin to speak.

Okay.

I think you can hear me.

Yes.

I want to thank you for taking the time to actually listen.

I felt very unheard in the past few years, and I haven't had time to prepare comments, but what I wanted to say is my husband and I are small landlords.

He's an artist.

I'm a self-employed graphic designer, and we were able to purchase a few rentals in the 90s because for some reason banks are willing to throw money at two people who barely made minimum wage.

And we've made it a point to be connected to our tenants for them to be able to call us if we don't have any layers, if we don't have property managers.

And we just love what we do.

We've met some great people.

We've given a lot of new families, new businesses, people starting out a start.

We've been able, up until recently, to give people the benefit of the doubt if we get multiple applications.

But now the regulations are so confusing that we are always afraid that we're going to make a mistake.

And what we found especially difficult is first in time because what we found is that even though that was developed to protect people from discrimination, it discriminates against people who don't have instant access to the Internet who can constantly scour for rental apps.

The roommate bill is scary, too, because you don't always know who's moving in.

And the $10 late fee is absurd if somebody's paying $1,500 a month.

It's not a deterrent.

We found late fees to be deterrents.

We've had great tenants.

Some of them stayed for, well, actually 25 years.

So we're hopefully doing something right.

But we ended up selling a duplex that we owned because we were so worried about all the regulations.

We just couldn't keep up.

So anyhow, the regulations caused us to get out of the market.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We'll go back to Angie.

Hi, Angie.

Angie Gerald, if you could press star six and let's see if we can go.

Hello, are you able to hear me now?

Yes, we can.

Yes, thank you.

Great, thank you.

Good morning.

My name is Angie and I'm a member of Seattle Grassroots Landlords, an organic network of independent rental operators from throughout the city who share information and offer peer support to one another.

For years, small landlords have been contacting city council regarding how Seattle's onslaught of flawed experimental laws are impacting viability and safety of housing operations.

Small independent rental housing offers the most scalable and diverse inventory of affordable rentals.

But Seattle has been smacking it down created in a bubble of well-intentioned but seriously polarized politics.

Our city's risky complicated laws were created without any housing provider input and the consequences to our entire rental ecosystem are piling up including thousands of properties having disappeared from the city registry despite ever increasing demand for housing.

King County's eviction court system despite its recent history of some of the lowest eviction rates in the nation is a mess and the lack of oversight and accountability for housing justice projects right to council implementation deserves a very bright spotlight.

I'm grateful to see today's agenda item on challenges for housing providers.

I appreciate that nonprofit housing providers are beginning to speak publicly on these issues.

Safety for residents neighbors and staff is of high concern.

but also basic viability.

I asked City Council to lead in creating a new era of collaborative good governance.

We need comprehensive reform and improvement of our rental laws to enable safe stable diverse and accessible housing.

Please push for the mayor's office to clarify leadership and strategy on this issue as well.

Amidst Seattle's housing crisis, many people have been advocating for zoning changes, renter protections, building code improvements, and development incentives.

But the nuts and bolts of operating rentals, from the smallest scale on up, need serious attention and caretaking in Seattle.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

The next speaker is Anita Freeman, followed by Casey Burton.

May the record reflect that Councilmember Wu has joined us.

Anita Freeman then followed by Bill Cook, who is present now.

Anita, please press star six.

Just a second, she's still on, what is happening?

Technical difficulty with Anitra, so we're gonna go to Bill Cook.

Bill, if you could press star six.

Good morning, my name is Bill Cook.

I'm the Director of Affordable Housing for Thrive Communities here in Seattle.

Thrive Communities manages a little over 1,000 affordable housing units in the city, and we find the information presented to be true, and we wanted to add that these circumstances have created unsafe working conditions that make it hard to attract and retain the employees needed to keep these communities stable and safe, and that we've witnessed that our clients are really struggling in the environment they're currently living in.

The current situation is vastly different from the system that properties operated pre-COVID.

Remediating behavioral issues is essentially impossible.

I know the previous speaker says that it isn't, but we are finding that it's different.

We're also experiencing damages with both individual units and in common areas created by residents and the guests that we don't want in the buildings.

Some of this damage has been staggering and a lot to bear for ownership.

So thank you for the opportunity to speak.

Thank you.

The next public commenter is Anitra Freeman, followed by Casey Burton.

Let's see if we can unmute you.

I'm sorry, Anitra, we're having some issues, so we will come back to you.

Next up is Casey Burton.

Hi there, can you hear me okay?

Yes, thank you.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Casey Burton.

I'm a senior staff attorney at the Senate Law Center.

And I just wanted to take the time to encourage the council to refrain from using profit-based complaints as an excuse to destroy protections for tenants.

Studies show that regulation does not cause landlords to leave en masse.

Anecdotes are not the same as a comprehensive study.

And I see in the presentation that will be coming up that there are concerns about paying rent.

But I have a study right in front of me that says Washington has the highest on-time rent payment rate in the country.

It's about 90%.

Properties comprised of two to four units have the highest on-time payment rate.

Now, it's not 100%, but there's no such thing as 100% return on any investment ever at all.

I think that there's no such thing as a sure thing like that.

And the discussion regarding behavioral issues is a distraction.

Courts have overhauled the unlawful detainer process to ensure that landlords facing behavioral issues can get accelerated hearings.

There's the landlord mitigation program through the state to cover damage to units.

And delays in cases are often caused by landlord failure to issue a notice that meets the basic requirements under the law.

And further, there's about a 50% default rate for unlawful detainers in our county.

So there are a lot of evictions going through.

The Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections offers trainings to landlords to help them understand these laws.

And there are a lot of online resources.

If you're going to profit off of a basic human need, then there needs to be regulation and there needs to be protection.

If you have the power to make someone homeless, then there has to be limits.

So please ensure that you continue to protect Seattle renters and voters.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The next public commenter is Alberto Alvarez.

Alberto, please press star six.

Hello, testing, can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

Yes, thank you.

A jury weeks ago in Washington federal courts upheld the rights of free speech and protest graffiti.

An image not published by the Asian Weekly was that of the phrase, Tanya Wu hates black people.

CM Wu was the one to submit Mr. Ascari Addison's editorial to the paper.

She took it upon herself to limit the usage of graffiti photos, perhaps to set the focus of her as a victim of racial attacks.

Where are the images of racial slurs against

I'm sorry, I'm going to interrupt.

Your testimony is outside the purview of this committee.

No, I'm getting to the point.

So we're going to conclude your call.

Thank you.

Move on to the next call, please.

Anitra, we are going to try you again.

Okay, if that doesn't work, let's move to the remaining in-person commenters.

Okay.

We have two more in-person commenters who have signed up.

The first one is Katie Wilson, followed by Kate Rubin.

Hello, council members.

My name is Katie Wilson.

I'm the campaign coordinator for the Transit Riders Union and also organized with the Stay House, Stay Healthy Coalition.

I've had a lot of conversations recently with people who run or work at affordable housing nonprofits about the issues that you all are gonna be discussing today.

Clearly affordable housing nonprofits are facing a lot of challenges right now.

These are complex issues and they need more support.

They need more support and also their tenants need more support.

The first point I want to make is that that's going to mean more resources from all levels of government, including the city.

And that means that as we're looking at the upcoming budget process, the city really needs to start looking for new progressive revenue to address the budget shortfall so that we are not cutting into funding that otherwise could be used for affordable housing, both for new construction and support for existing projects and operations.

Affordable housing nonprofits need additional operating funds in part because large numbers of people are behind on rent.

And we know that even in low-income housing, a large number of renters are severely rent-burdened, paying half or more of their income in rent.

This is a serious problem, and the city's solution absolutely cannot be to make it easier to evict people for nonpayment of rent.

If that is our solution, then people are going to be evicted into homelessness, and that is a much more expensive and damaging problem to solve.

I also want to point out that there's nothing in Seattle's laws that is preventing or slowing down the eviction of people who pose health and safety risks to their neighbors.

We know that the court backlog is slowing down evictions, but that's not something that the city can address.

That is a problem that will eventually resolve.

It's caused largely by large numbers of evictions, and people facing evictions for any reason have due process rights.

So please find a way to address these problems without evicting...

Thank you very much.

The next in-person speaker is Kate Rubin.

My name is Kate Rubin.

I'm a renter living in Beacon Hill and I'm the organizing director of Be Seattle.

It's really frustrating that this committee has spent so much time working with landlords that they were able to put together a whole presentation today, but hasn't even found a few minutes to review appointments for the renters commission in the last seven months.

Part of the commission's role is to provide advice to city council and the mayor.

Ignoring your responsibilities in approving appointments and engaging with the commission is disempowering the more than half of Seattleites who are renters.

I reviewed the slides for this morning's presentation, and it's clear that affordable housing nonprofits are struggling alongside renters.

We need more resources to solve these problems.

Making it easier to evict low-income tenants is not a solution.

It's just going to further lead to our increasing homelessness crisis.

I think that raising progressive revenue is the best way to create real solutions that actually support renters and housing providers and keep people in their homes.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

We have two more remote speakers and then that will be our final.

Okay, thank you.

The next remote speaker is Jasara Schrader.

Press star six to speak.

Hi.

My name is.

Hello.

My name is Sarah Schroeder and I'm speaking on behalf of share shares a group of homeless and formerly homeless men and women.

And we know why we're homeless.

I hear that affordable housing is struggling with funding, but it's not fair to take that out on the tenants.

I was homeless because I wasn't able to pay my rent.

I get behind on my rent and then have a late fee on top of it and be a week into the next month and now have to make up the rent for the next month with even, you know, three weeks when I'm already struggling to make the rent.

And eventually I wasn't able to make it and then that's why I ended up to be homeless.

So I just want to say that SHARE then completely opposes eviction of tenants who can't pay rent because we know what happens because we've lived it.

We end up homeless.

So thank you very much for listening to my testimony.

Thank you.

And the final speaker is Christopher Anderson.

I think we have one person in person after that.

Go ahead with the phone.

Okay, Christopher Preston.

I did that.

Hi.

My name is Christopher Anderson.

I am also a chair and I'm here to talk about not just what you heard earlier, but also what you leave us with when you decide to make this change.

When you first heard the winter eviction moratorium and set this, you did hear about the consequences of what happens when you evict folks.

So there is serious threat of severe hypothermia and death as a result of your policy change if you decide to make this change.

And we take people in.

We know these stories.

I have lived that story.

And it's very important that you're reminded of that story because that was one of the things that we talked about when you met on this and set this moratorium.

Please keep the moratorium.

The behavior of tenants during an entire year does not justify lifting a winter eviction moratorium.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

And our final in-person speaker is Bisrat Gibray.

Hey everyone, thank you, and thank you for pronouncing my name really well as well.

Hey, I've been living in Seattle for about 25 plus years.

I own a home down in South Seattle, and my parents also own a couple of properties that I help them manage.

And I've kind of seen firsthand some of these rules and regulations and how hard they've made it for landlords to manage their properties.

I understand where the city is coming from and where some of the other speakers are coming from in terms of like being ethical and understanding that, hey, some people do fall on hard times and we need to protect members of our community.

But it's just been extremely difficult to manage these properties.

We've had one tenant that we've started the eviction process on.

They were about $16,000 behind on rent.

their rent, and we're still not able to get them out.

And somebody at the kind of evictions office has turned over, and so now we have to restart the whole process.

And at the same time, we still have to pay the mortgage.

We still have to pay the bills.

And so I understand there are some things that we can do for tenants to make sure that we're being ethical and helping members of our community.

But it does put a strain on us that are trying to follow the process and follow the rules and regulations.

So I just want to appreciate and say thank you for those that gave the presentation today, as well as see how we can work together to kind of meet in the middle and help both sides.

Okay, thank you very much.

Set our last.

That concludes our list of speakers from the public.

Okay, thank you.

All right, so there are no additional registered speakers, and we will now proceed to our items of business.

Members of the public are encouraged to either submit written comment on the sign-up cards available on the podium or to email council at council at seattle.gov.

We will now move on to the first item on our agenda.

Clerk, will you please read the first agenda item into the record?

Agenda item one, current challenges for housing providers for briefing and discussion.

Can you hear me now?

Okay.

All right.

My apologies for that.

All right.

So thank you, Colleen.

So there we go.

As chair of the Housing and Human Services Committee, I've had so many housing providers across the spectrum from small landlords to nonprofit housing providers to for profit housing providers reach out to me to express their serious concerns with Seattle's particular environment for providing housing.

I've had meeting after meeting with solutions-oriented housing providers who genuinely want to continue providing housing here in Seattle, but are being pushed to a breaking point.

So after really hearing from the spectrum of housing providers with many of the same issues, and sort of a chorus of we need help, I decided to invite a few, just a few of many of the housing providers I've heard from here with us today to talk about what specific challenges they are facing in Seattle's housing market.

So, excuse me.

So without further ado, I will turn it over to Andrew from Community Roots Housing, Michael from Southeast Effective Development, and Ida Cater, a small landlord in District 5, to share their experiences.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council Members, for inviting us to speak on challenges of affordable and housing providers in general here in the City of Seattle.

My name is Andrew Uman.

I'm the Chief Operating Officer at Community Roots Housing.

Just as a little bit of background, we are a citywide public development authority established by the city of Seattle, the City Council, in 1976. For nearly 50 years, we have partnered closely with the city to tackle housing and community development challenges citywide.

We have been on the forefront of equitable development practices, partnering with community groups to develop projects to support both our affordable housing goals and capacity building for those organizations who have historically been disenfranchised and excluded from real estate ownership, AND MANAGEMENT OPPORTUNITIES.

THIS INCLUDES BIRD BAR PLACE, AFRICATOWN COMMUNITY LAND TRUST, GEN PRIDE, SOUTHWEST YOUTH AND FAMILY SERVICES, WHITE CENTER COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT ASSOCIATIONS, AND YOUTH CARE, JUST TO NAME A FEW.

OUR RISE TOGETHER CAMPAIGN HAS SECURED NEARLY $40 MILLION OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE FUNDING TO SUPPORT OUR COLLECTIVE WORK AND WE'RE PROUD TO HAVE BROUGHT ON LINE SEVERAL HUNDRED UNITS OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING IN THIS CITY JUST IN THIS LAST YEAR.

Today, we'd like to provide just a general overview of some of the challenges that we're currently facing.

Our hope is that this will help spark and continue a public dialogue on these challenges so that we find reasonable solutions that balance the needs of our diverse communities.

And on that note, I want to thank everyone who attended today to provide public comment to join us in this critical conversation because their voices matter deeply.

As you know, the cost of housing is a national and regional crisis.

Every community across the country is impacted with Seattle being one of the most expensive rental markets in the country.

Affordable housing is an important part of the solution.

It provides a safety net and a springboard for low-income families to thrive in their community often in the same neighborhoods that they grew up in, often in the same neighborhoods that they work in, who would otherwise be most likely displaced because of increasing and rising rents.

The core promise of affordable housing is providing safety and stability for families who are in need.

Simply put, our ability to provide affordable, safe, and healthy homes is under threat, and I'm going to focus today on the health and safety issues that we've been facing since the start of the pandemic.

As you know, the effects of the fentanyl and opioid crises are ever more prevalent, especially in the city of Seattle.

Although we see it on the streets, we also see it in our communities.

Complaints of drug use has grown significantly in the last several years, creating significant health risks and real concerns amongst our residents and our staff.

This is coupled with significant increases in violent and criminal behavior in our building, including physical assaults on residents and staff.

The behavior of a small subset of our residents is putting the whole community at risk.

In some cases, this behavior causes neighbors to flee, displacing families.

These families might be struggling with the same mental health challenges, recovering from trauma, managing their substance abuse disorders, trying to recover in a safe and healthy environment.

More and more, they are forced to either accept an untenable environment that threatens their own path to health safety, and stability, or face the prospect of finding another affordable home, which we already know is in short supply.

In other cases, this behavior requires leaving units vacant in two different ways.

First, we have extensive damage, not just in one unit, but often in several, after repeated episodes of destructive behavior.

The cost in these cases can easily exceed $100,000 in each case.

Second, we face the prospect of moving a family in to a dangerous situation, which we cannot honestly do in especially extreme cases.

In both cases, in damage and in danger, the consequence is clear.

We are active losing affordable housing units in the city.

This reduces opportunities for families to move into affordable housing, perpetuating the shortage of housing we already know actually causes homelessness.

Our property managers and our maintenance staff increasingly serve as crisis responders.

This is a new rule that hasn't historically been part of their jobs, but they were forced to do it because they are now on the front lines of this health and safety crisis.

Even worse, our residents face the brunt of this burden, often the first to call 911 for help.

Even when they call, they often receive no response or very delayed response.

In most cases, it takes nearly a year to remove someone from a building, even in the case of violent behavior.

The only way to expedite the process is to engage the criminal justice system to substantiate the case.

I sincerely doubt that anyone intended to replace the eviction process with calls to 911, arrests, police records, reports, and prosecutions.

Clearly, a criminal record significantly increases the risk that tenants face, even if they remain temporarily housed.

So in summary...

The lack of a comprehensive behavioral health system is leaving our most vulnerable residents without the care and the support that they need.

Simply put, the status quo isn't the housing first model that we've championed over the years.

Outside of the permanent supportive housing context, it's only housing.

That's setting up our most vulnerable tenants for failure.

We need a system to appropriately place support and respond to the challenges we're facing.

Housing alone doesn't work.

That's the status quo, and it's failing.

Lastly, or second, the lack of a responsive legal system is leaving our residents to bear the consequences of this health and safety crisis.

Residents who would otherwise be successful in their current homes are struggling to stay in their homes.

They are at risk of displacement.

They are losing opportunities to move into affordable housing as units remain vacant and come offline.

A slow process doesn't solve the root cause of our housing problem.

It may buy more time at the expense of our neighbors, but it can't create the housing we need.

Lastly, I just want to note that our residents are compassionate, understanding, and have direct lived experience with the challenges of attaining and maintaining their housing.

They are not landlords.

They are not crisis responders.

They do not want to call 911 for help.

They are not attorneys, judges, investors, public funders, or politicians.

They are our neighbors.

They are at risk of real displacement, slipping into homelessness, taking a step back from the progress they've already made in their lives.

Balancing the community need, housing our neighbors, means balancing resident needs, including the vast majority of our residents, who we often forget about in these conversations.

And with that, I'll pass it to Michael.

Thank you.

Just before we proceed, I want the record to know that Council Member Rivera has joined us.

And before we move on to the next set of slides, if there are any particular questions from on this Council Member, Council President Nelson.

First of all, I'd like to thank and commend you for coming here today, you too, Michael.

I know that it is difficult to talk about these issues and I would note that both city funded affordable housing providers and also private housing providers of whatever level of AMI served are facing some of the same issues.

And so we're all in the same boat here.

So thank you very much for being willing to speak out.

I just wanted to note that Community Roots does have a history of being brave on this front.

In February, when Council was considering indefinitely extending the eviction moratorium, Chris Persons, CEO of Community Roots Housing, wrote a memo to Council talking about the impacts on their units, on your units.

And he says, quote, the moratorium and impacts of the pandemic, this is in February 12th, 2022, The moratorium and impacts of the pandemic have created significant unpaid residential rent due, unpaid rent to community roots housing.

We have received through the City of Seattle and King County funding covering much of these arrearages but are still owed $1.7 million in past due rent.

We anticipate one more round of funding assistance from the city and then there are no further known public resources to support rental assistance moving forward.

This places a significant burden on our organization which impacts our ability to maintain properties and support residents.

He goes on to note, an unprecedented increase in harmful and destructive antisocial behavior in our communities from a small number of residents.

This is a trend that is reported nationally.

When coupled with eviction moratoria and restrictions on public safety response personnel, our ability to provide safe housing is severely diminished.

So it sounds like the situation hasn't changed much.

And I do have a question.

When you are talking about the on page nine vacancies in some of your units, I would like to know if you can tell me what is the average vacancy rate across your units and seed as well?

I have asked this question to the Office of Housing and was only given 2022 data, which is not relevant anymore given the issues that are impacting housing right now.

So do you have an idea and you can give me that offline?

if you would, or if you know it off the top of your head, you can say it.

And why is this important?

Because we're about to spend 60% of a billion dollars of a housing levy to build more rental housing units and we're also telling people that are living in inhumane situations in encampments outside that we're not helping get them into units because these vacant units are off the books.

They're not being recognized as available for the tenants that you often seek or for people that usually have shelter as a first stop before getting into permanent supportive housing.

So these issues are really important.

Thank you for the question.

I think Chris is very eloquent on the topic, and I think you quoted him quite well.

We track vacancy very closely.

We're in the business of housing people.

Everyone who comes to work for Community Roots Housing is passionate about housing, and they want to move folks in as quickly as possible.

It can be a challenge, especially when we have units that have faced extensive damage.

It can take months and months and months for us to remediate all of the damage that happens in our communities.

At last look, and I think that was last week, we're about a 6% vacancy rate, but we track it very, very closely because it's one of our key performance measures.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Morales?

I think Council Member Rivera was next.

Oh, okay, sorry.

No, that's okay.

Thank you.

Thank you for being here and thank you for this information.

echo council president's comments I would love to know what the vacancy rate is which I know you're not going to be able to tell me but just I can't seem to get an answer on the vacancy rate across the city and that is a problem because it's hard to know how much housing we have if we don't know what housing is currently vacant and I also understand that There are issues with the vacancies because there's significant damage, as you said, and it can take a long time.

Can you also talk about the costs involved with remediation?

Because I've recently talked to a social housing provider, and they're experiencing the same, and I know that it's very costly.

would love to hear about the costs involved.

Also very concerned and compelled by the fact that there are folks living in permanent supportive housing situations that you and other housing providers provide housing.

And they are living in conditions where it's not helpful, as you said, to their recovery.

So I just want to underscore that point.

And thank you for raising that, because that is a huge concern and something I've heard about.

Here we are trying to help people recover, and then they're living in these conditions which we did not intend.

when we are trying to help people.

So that is really concerning.

And the other thing I want to say is on the physical assaults and the just violence in these housing units and places is the fact that I understand that sometimes it puts you all in a position to have to hire private security to deal with this.

And that is something that your funding through the city does not cover, is my understanding.

Can you confirm that?

And then what costs are involved with that?

Because that just adds another layer of cost to this.

Again, when we're trying to help people who need housing, people who are trying to recover, would love to hear about that if you have that information.

And if not, you can you can provide it later, but I know it is an issue and I think that we should really understand the scope of the issue.

Thank you for your question.

I'll invite Michael as well to provide some additional information.

As I mentioned, easily these costs can exceed $100,000 in each episode.

And again, often, you know, we think of units as being self-contained in an affordable housing context or really in any building, but anyone who has lived in with folks who live above them know that a subwoofer has an impact on their quality of life.

Heavy feet have an impact on their quality of life, and so it's no surprise that water that gets onto the floor leaks down below.

In some cases, sewage leaks down below.

It really creates significant health risks to those folks who live in surrounding units from problematic ones.

We often see costs in the $20,000, $30,000, and $50,000 range, but simply put, in our affordable housing model, I think nationwide, our buildings can't sustain that type of cost.

We are not set up to do that.

That easily depletes operating reserves, which are there for covering some of those short-term deficits, but we don't get enough funding in our housing to supplement those expenditures, right?

We deplete all of our resources in order to resolve some of these issues and then WE'RE LEFT OUT TO DRY.

WE DON'T HAVE ANY OTHER FUNDING THAT COMES IN TO HELP REMEDIATE THOSE THINGS.

I THINK THE POINT ON SUPPORTING RECOVERY AND THE CRITICAL ASPECT THERE I THINK IS A REALLY GOOD ONE.

AND AGAIN, I THINK REACHING OR CONTINUING THIS CONVERSATION, INVITING MORE FOLKS FROM THE PERMANENT SUPPORTIVE HOUSING COMMUNITY TO COME IN AND PROVIDE THEIR EXPERIENCES I THINK WOULD BE A VERY INFORMATIVE NEXT STEP FOR THE COUNCIL TO TAKE to learn more.

For private security, we recently had a pretty significant incident involving both assault to resident and for staff.

We ended up hiring an armed guard to stand in the hallway just to be a presence, and that cost us $11,000 every week.

obviously something that a small building in particular can't sustain over a long period of time.

If it's the question on if it's fundable from the city, generally speaking, most of our buildings don't get ongoing operating support.

And so I think it's a really good question of where can we find funds to continue to support the ongoing operations for our buildings?

If it's helpful, I can speak to the security issue a bit more.

And again, good morning, council members.

Michael Syrath, Executive Director of Southeast Effective Development.

Yeah, building on that, we do a quarterly needs assessment of our residents.

We send them a survey.

What are your greatest needs?

How can we show up for you?

Security tops the list almost every quarter.

So we're spending well north of $100,000 a year on private security.

that we can't afford.

And what we hear again from residents is, we want more security, right?

There's no funding in our financial models for this.

This week, my organization is making a hard decision.

Do we lay off the security or keep a vacant maintenance tech position vacant?

Those are the kind of week-by-week choices we're making right now.

And that's how close we are to the breaking point on a lot of these buildings.

Thank you.

Very helpful information.

Thank you, Councilman Morales.

Thank you.

Thanks for being here.

So I think we all acknowledge the impact that the fentanyl crisis is having throughout our community, but particularly on the ability of our housing providers to try to keep people housed.

It's obviously something that we need to address, not just as a city, but working with our other regional partners.

I do want to ask a few questions about—really about eviction prevention services.

You know, we've heard about the slow process for eviction.

We know that we don't have an eviction court.

But evictions are increasing, and so obviously the courts are overwhelmed.

And the fact of the matter is that people who are going through a court process are allowed due process, and so that itself takes time.

Nevertheless, you know, folks do have a right to eviction.

You do have a right to evict with just cause.

And so I'm trying to understand the...

understanding that that itself is an expensive process, what role or how you engage with service providers in the area to try to prevent evictions in the first place.

So landlords, you know, in my opinion, should be given access to lead and co-lead services for drug addicted folks who are drug addicted in their units or with other mental health issues.

We know we have organizations like the Tenant Law Center, Solid Ground, Wellspring Family Services, King County Dispute Resolution Services, the PDA.

These are organizations that are set up to provide services to help prevent eviction.

Drug crisis is its own category of issues But for some of these other issues I wonder if you can talk a little bit about your work with infection prevention services in the city of Seattle And whether you have any case managers on staff who can help guide people toward these services Thank you for that question.

It's a really really important one and Before the pandemic, Community Roots Housing actively tried to prevent evictions.

We've always tried to prevent evictions, including setting up rental assistance funds before kind of everyone else started doing it during the pandemic.

We will continue, right?

We are absolutely not in the business of evicting our residents.

We want folks to remain stably housed.

And so we will continue to fundraise for eviction prevention, especially with regard to rental assistance.

engaging private philanthropy to try to raise those funds on our own.

We would absolutely embrace and support additional rental assistance from public funders as well.

So I would encourage the council to seriously consider that as well.

One of the best ways to prevent eviction is to support resident services.

It's a proven model to help keep families stably housed.

It's very hard to get funded, though.

I was encouraged just this last year that the Office of Housing made some funds available to support resident services.

but it's simply not enough.

We currently employed three resident services coordinators and one resident services manager to support over 2,000 residents in our housing.

Not nearly enough folks, not enough hands to really tackle the issue, and that's due to lack of funding for those positions.

Sorry, before moving on, what did they do?

They primarily provide information and referral directly to those outside service agencies that can provide them resources, not just in the context of eviction prevention, but also mental health services, health services, connecting them with the community resources that are already out there, and just creating that connection between those services and our residents.

If it's okay, Andrew, and I just want to contrast that with case management and supportive services, which we don't provide.

We're doing 30 to 60% AMI housing.

We're not doing permanent supportive housing 24-7 the way Plymouth and DESCR, very good organizations.

So we don't have a funding stream for that.

Yeah, the resident services is really a connection between to a lot of the providers and nonprofits Council Member Morales was referring to.

But again, yeah, we have two people serving 1,600 residents in 1,100 units.

So again, they're stretched very thin.

And one final point on this as well, where we do see folks ending up in the eviction process are often the folks that are hardest to serve.

They're often service resistant.

And so we would love to serve those folks.

We try to get ahead of the eviction process, but they often don't engage in those services.

That's often also why the eviction process becomes so lengthy.

As was noted, there are due process rights in the state of Washington, which is a really interesting innovation, I think, that both the city and the state has led on it.

But that's what slows, in particular, it down.

You can't appoint an attorney quickly enough to make that process go fast enough, because folks simply don't engage in the resources and the services that are available to them.

Thank you, Councilmember Wu.

And that'll be our last question so we can move on to the rest of the presentation.

Thank you.

Just want to echo my colleague's thoughts and thank you for what you do in helping people stay housed.

Also wanted to commiserate with you.

Something I thought was really helpful was Office of Housing has a grant that allows for a resident services coordinator, more like someone with a case management training.

That was during the pandemic.

And for the short amount of time we had this person offer services, meet people, and chat with people, as well as provide food.

This person had to leave and we were not able to fill that role again.

There's such a shortage of case managers.

We also have work with Housing Connector.

They provide case management for their clients who are in the building.

And there is a huge shortage.

They were not able to fulfill some of those duties, unfortunately, and the building, the community had to step in to help people.

And so there is a real shortage of case management, but I do agree that, you know, with customer morale is that having a case manager on site is helpful, but the cost is really hard.

Trying to, yeah, choose security, case manager, maintenance person, partner manager on site, it's these choices you have to make every month.

Also, the safety component in terms of, you know, When the department manager offers assistance and connection to services, the tenants have to meet the department manager halfway in trying to obtain these services in phone calls and requests.

And so like Andrew said, sometimes people just don't want to engage, and that's really tough as well.

There was an incident where there is somebody in the building, in the Louisa, that the park managers have been dealing with, I heard about, has a hammer and sometimes will hammer people's doors, hallways.

There's hammer marks everywhere.

They have come and tried to...

do that to other people as well.

And we are worried about people's safety.

The whole floor says they're terrorized.

People are taking matters in their own hands.

They're using tasers.

They're fighting back.

They're protecting one another.

And as, you know, department managers tell me, there's nothing that they can do.

They could do a 10-day, but that will take about a year.

And, of course, no one wants to file charges This is a community that's fearful of retaliation as well.

So it's a tough situation.

And also, there's a huge turnaround when it comes to apartment management staff as well because they constantly come and tell us they don't feel safe or they need additional services or support that we...

find hard to provide sometimes.

But like Andrew said, we don't want to evict people.

We have people living in the Louisa who haven't paid rent for three years now.

Um, and that's really tough.

And usually we try to work with people and they work with the part managers to try to come up with a plan.

Um, that's always the route, but sometimes people just don't respond and department doesn't know what to do and, and have to go through eviction process to actually get a response.

But that's, not usually the goal.

And so I thank you for what you do.

I understand how difficult it is and would love to be able to, like people say, reach a compromise to solution together.

Thank you very much.

Go ahead with the presentation.

Good morning.

Again, Michael Syrath.

I'm the executive director of Southeast Effective Development, council members, and Chair Moore.

Nice to see you all at this time.

First a bit on my org and then into the slides.

So Southeast Effective Development's 49-year-old mission-based, place-based, majority BIPOC, nonprofits serving the South End.

We focus on arts, economic development, and affordable housing.

We clean up polluted land.

We provide innovative solution.

We invest in sites and communities where the market historically hasn't.

And now that they've showed up, we're there fighting displacement every day.

With innovative solutions, we're looking at how we can build wealth on the ground floor of our buildings, fight for black-owned businesses to stay in community, own their own space, move towards wealth building, and continue to build family-size housing.

We hear again and again from our community that there's a desperate need for.

First and foremost, we're housers, we're play space, we're committed to this community and this very work.

We believe that home is the foundation from which people thrive.

And we know that we urgently need collaborative solutions that braid together public health, affordable housing, and homeless solutions.

And we know we can't have these strong communities without sufficient investment in the community.

And we believe and get up every day with the knowledge that all residents need to have an appropriate, safe, and stable place to live.

And we're part of a really challenged sector, and we're talking particularly around the nonprofits, but it expands beyond this.

We're facing major increases in operating costs for both repairs and workforce.

I spoke a minute ago about the hard challenges and decisions we're making every week.

to best serve our residents with not enough resources.

Y'all have probably heard the national news about insurance costs.

We're getting hit with 30 to 200% insurance rate spikes, not once, but year after year after year.

We all hoped that costs would come down after the pandemic.

It hasn't in our sector.

So there are systems that are failing the most vulnerable.

You know, if you go by our buildings, they look pretty much the same as it did 15 years ago.

But who we're serving on the inside is a very different population.

We're serving some of the most vulnerable, those without sufficient funding or options.

There's a dire need for more options to serve untreated mental illness, substance abuse, and family needs.

We both spoke to the limited capacity we have for resident services staffing that show up every day to connect them to services, and those numbers don't work for the amount of people and the amount of need we're facing.

Rent collection just plain isn't covering our costs.

We're facing non-payment of rent that remains unprecedented.

We have underfunded and aging properties at a time when costs are higher than ever.

What's this doing?

It's jeopardizing the millions of dollars in public investment and philanthropy.

It's jeopardizing the creation of more affordable housing.

So we're having to defer maintenance.

Thankfully, CETA has not had to do this yet.

Some groups are selling buildings.

Nationally, we are very sobered by what happened in Los Angeles and Chicago, where two highly regarded nonprofits collapsed.

And it left wreckage behind with their housing portfolios.

So we're here today saying we need to avoid this in Seattle.

We need to avoid this with our nonprofits that have been around for decades.

And we need more units.

We all know there's 149,000 affordable units.

We're short in this county today.

We're all here to be part of the solution.

It's a highly leveraged sector.

Our financing is more complex than ever for new projects.

We have these critical partnerships with the partners of the city, the county, the state to close those funding gaps.

And we as organizations are taking on significant risks in this public good in trying to create more housing and address the housing and homelessness emergency we're facing.

So we need more financial tools and resources to support new development and maintenance of our existing buildings, which sometimes includes strategic disposition of properties.

So what's needed?

We need more coordination among first responders, the elected officials, and the courts to address these challenges.

We know that the court issue is a county issue and not a city issue, and we ask you to put all of your political will towards working with the county on better alignment with the courts.

We need behavioral health systems coordinated with the Affordable Housing Center to help our residents and compassion, easy connection of residents to the type of housing that supports their needs.

What's that look like?

That looks like a pipeline from 30% to 60% AMI housing into permanent supportive housing.

We have a pipeline out of it as people get more stable, and we welcome that.

And when a resident is in such deep crisis that we don't have the resources to serve them, we need to find a way to get them into housing that's more appropriate for their level of needs or income or both, and we need to find a way to do it quickly.

We need better tools to open dialogue with residents who've stopped paying rent.

As we were saying, it's often the residents most behind in the rent that are the least communicative.

And for those engaging in violent behavior and threatening the well-being of their neighbors, we need swift eviction proceedings.

And finally, We need more support and show up together for the most marginalized, those suffering from severe trauma, mental illness, and substance abuse.

And we're here for dignified and compassionate response that meets resident needs.

and with the county, with the state, and even the feds, a collaboration to scale up the resources to address the housing and homelessness emergency, the behavioral health crisis, and the coordinated issues we're all facing at this time.

Thank you very much.

Questions?

Any questions?

Council President?

Yes.

I had never thought of that before.

What you're talking about is the reverse pipeline.

I always think of it going in one direction.

So are you saying that you can't just call up somebody who does run a permanent supportive housing and say, hey, do you have any space?

Can we move this person who obviously needs a higher level of care or case management, which you don't provide, into your facility?

Correct.

We cannot call up someone and do that for two reasons.

One, there's no room at the inn, right?

The affordable...

the permanent supportive housing, there's not nearly enough to meet the need.

And the second is we have coordinated entry.

So there's one door for people moving into permanent supportive housing.

Well, I look forward to better statistics or current statistics or something on vacancy rate at permanent supportive housing as well.

So perhaps there is more availability than we know.

I'm just putting that on the table.

But that is something to think about.

And when you say coordinated entry, then I think that's a big complex issue.

So thank you very much.

Ms.

Morales.

Thank you.

So for those folks who are not going through eviction but who are late in rent, I'm interested to know how you work with them to create a payment plan.

Do you accept current rent from them?

Do you accept rent pledges that are partial?

I'm wondering if you can just talk a little bit about how you work with tenants who are behind, but who have an ability to pay some of their rent.

And if you've accessed the Landlord Mitigation Program or any of the other, you did talk a little bit about rental assistance, but can you just talk about those processes and how you engage with them?

Sure.

And so, yes to what you said, Councilmember, about payment plans.

We're in the housing business.

We offer anyone who's behind on their rent a payment plan and work with them on it.

We are extraordinarily patient, too.

If someone has a big balance, we know that it's nothing they'll be able to pay back on short term.

And we look for a good faith effort to pay this month's rent and something towards that arrear.

We'll continue to work with them, connect them with services, you know, and yes to more rental assistance.

We absolutely welcome that.

Sometimes we're challenged by those that are farthest behind or uncommunicative where they want to we have trouble like sign this piece of paper and you can have six months rent paid.

and they won't answer the door for months after months after months.

So those are some of the on the ground challenges that we're facing.

Same experience at Community Roots Housing.

As I said, pre-pandemic, we had a rental assistance program.

We had, in fact, a resident services coordinator whose specific role was eviction prevention.

So we are very much trying to engage all of our residents in a conversation and a dialogue on how we can help them stay stably housed.

Our priority is trying to focus on folks who really have those balances that just don't make sense over a long period of time.

$20,000, $10,000, even $5,000 is pretty, a pretty hard stretch for any one of our families.

And so what we try to do is engage folks before they get to really the point of no return, which again for our low-income families is a lot lower than most other folks.

Council President, did you have another question?

It just has to do with this section.

So before we go on.

So to the point of, did you receive direct rental assistance during the pandemic?

Because there were federal funds that were set up that were distributed through, I think it was United Way and other organizations.

And I have, so you did, but now you don't.

We, council put in a budget last year, a whole, yet more millions of dollars.

I think it was two or three or something like that for to help renters, and I made the point that should be direct rental assistance, not paying lawyers at an advocacy organization because that is used to prevent eviction.

Let's make sure that people have the resources to stay in their units and also so that you have the resources to maintain.

So are you getting any of that funding this year?

I don't know if we're getting that source of funding this year.

Community Roots was on the list, I think, of...

I'm sorry to interrupt, but go ahead.

Yeah, sorry.

So I don't know exactly if we're receiving those particular funds.

The Office of Housing did just do a competitive NOFA for some additional operating support, so maybe that's that pool of funds.

I'm not exactly sure if that's it or not.

But we do receive pledges periodically.

We do accept pledges for rental assistance, and so maybe those funds are coming from the same source.

But we would as I said earlier, we'd gladly accept more rental assistance.

We want to be able to serve residents before we get to the eviction process.

And we do our best to engage every single resident who's at risk of eviction because it's costly for everyone.

It's costly, certainly for our operators, but It's very costly for just us as citizens, both in eviction defense, but also court costs.

It really racks up pretty quickly, especially with this backlog that we're experiencing.

Right.

And if the organizations that are doing the eviction defense, such as Housing Justice Project, are trying to stave off eventual evictions, Eviction, if that process is too long, that tenant, if they eventually are, the courts do decide, backlog, et cetera, fill in the blank on the problem on that side, but then they've got even more money, and so it's a disservice on that front.

And I would say that I believe that this is an area where HDC could do some better advocacy for its members who do collect rent from 30% to 60% AMI and below.

So good continuing conversations.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Just a few comments to follow up on your comments about rent arrears.

We had asked the Office of Housing for some figures, which they said they'll get to us by July 12th.

And as you noted, they did issue an operating stabilization document.

a 14 million competitive bid, and out to 26 eligible affordable housing organizations.

They received 24 applications requesting over 21.8 million in an operating stabilization funding.

for over 10,000 housing units.

And they said 18 of the 24 applicants requested a maximum amount of funding possible of $1 million.

So, you know, they were able to give 14 when there was a minimum request of $21.8 million.

And it would note that the things that the money were able to go to were rent arrears.

And they, again, we don't have the exact figures, but they said the four largest providers have over 4 million in rent arrears and affordable housing providers are collectively reporting millions in unpaid rent.

And it's my understanding too that unpaid rent, as we've heard from Sharon Lee at Lehigh, and maybe you've had similar issues, is because affordable housing has so many different, really you have to piece it together from so many different providers, the braiding of it, And to bring in private funding, you have to show strong state funding.

But Lehigh is not able to get private funding because of the extent of the rent arrears.

They are viewing it no longer as a reasonable business risk for them.

And so they sent me an email of all the providers that they had reached out, private lenders.

you know, eight and only one was willing to engage.

So I'm assuming you're experiencing or among your colleagues have heard some of that as well.

Yes.

So I think at our last look, if I'm remembering correctly, we have about $2 million in unpaid rent, which again, for any one of our buildings is really detrimental to the long-term, both financial and physical stability of our public assets.

It's hard when you're doing new developments to underwrite to unpaid rent and the expectation that you're not going to be able to achieve the financial projections that you go to a bank or to public funders to get some additional support.

So unpaid rent is having, I think, an impact on our ability to bring units online.

Thank you.

I think that was the end of your presentation.

I wanted to offer an opportunity to our small landlord if there was anything you wish to add or highlight or supplement.

Yes, thank you.

And thank you for having me here today.

I want to lend support to all of the comments that Michael and Andrew have shared today.

And also just add another perspective from the small housing provider.

So I'm a small landlord in District 5, and like many small landlords, I'm just an individual.

But much like nonprofit housing providers, small landlords strive to provide affordable housing and foster positive and personal relationships with their tenants.

And small landlords also provide a disproportionate amount of family size housing in Seattle, which Michael indicated is desperately needed in Seattle.

And Seattle's rental laws so far, and especially since 2019, have really ensured that if there is a problematic tenant, it's very hard to get them out.

And that is with complete disregard to the damage caused to those and the buildings around them.

So, today we've heard a few comments about what happens when you evict someone, understand that there are issues around homelessness, hypothermia, food insecurity, and I want to emphasize that no one wants to evict.

It is a worst-case scenario, and it is emotional, it's expensive, and so it's something that housing providers only pursue when they've exhausted all other options.

So I want to consider what happens when you don't evict a tenant who is harmful, dangerous, uncooperative.

There's serious harm to others, and these bad situations become worse.

It's not just a matter of keeping a roof over that individual's head.

It's about the other tenants that are in the building.

It's about the employees.

who are helping to manage the building.

It's about also the housing provider that needs to pay back mortgages, utilities, and making sure that it's a safe environment for everyone, not just one individual.

And so as we consider the many millions that we are gonna put toward building new housing in Seattle with the levy funds, please consider what will happen to these buildings after they are built.

The operational issues that we've described today will continue if we don't comprehensively and thoughtfully change the rental policies in Seattle.

There is another issue at the county level with the courts, and I understand that is outside the purview of the council, but I also urge you to please use as much political will as you have to partner with the county on that.

Housing is a network.

You need it to be balanced, to be a healthy network.

And right now, it is very unbalanced.

Housing providers are shouldering an enormous amount of responsibility that they are not equipped to do.

And there are many different kinds of affordable housing.

We've got the permanent supportive housing.

We also have ones that are more independent.

We have Andrew and Michael.

And so these are all very different.

We need to be targeted and thoughtful about crafting policy that applies to different types of housing.

And just two more comments.

This is a highly leveraged sector with complex financing and investors are paying attention to what's happening in our region.

The challenges here, how difficult it is to collect rent.

And as a result, these new affordable housing proposals are being faced with funding denials over and over again.

how can we build more housing if funding is running away from the city?

So please think about the feasibility of operating housing, especially for the new buildings that I'm very hopeful will be built in the city.

Key to that are the housing policies that we operate under.

And so I hope that we can find more long-term sustainable solutions and balance in our housing network.

Thank you very much.

Looks like we have a question from Council Member Rivera.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you for your comments.

I do hear from a lot of small housing providers, sometimes just folks that have one unit that they're trying to manage.

And these things become very difficult when they have tenants that are engaging in behaviors that are problematic.

and then they're left with having to saddle that mortgage, which they often rely on the rent to actually pay the mortgage of the unit that they're renting out.

So thank you for sharing your experience from a smaller housing provider standpoint.

I want to thank both of you again for the information.

This is all really helpful.

One thing that I'm struggling with is There is a lack of information by which to be able to make some decisions, I would say.

Not knowing what the vacancy rate is is very problematic.

Not knowing what the level of, you know, the struggle with having to manage for damage done to units that then are out of commission for months on end, at the very least.

but not knowing what the need is there.

And not knowing, how to provide services to folks that are in units that need more level of service than you're able to provide and how to make sure that we're able to get those folks the level of service that they need while at the same time then being able to let you all HAVE HOUSING FOR OTHER FOLKS THAT DON'T NEED THE LEVEL OF SERVICE.

SO IT IS REALLY CHALLENGING WITHOUT ALL OF THIS INFORMATION TO, YOU KNOW, WHEN YOU SAY CITY, COUNTY, AND STATE COLLABORATION TO SCALE UP INVESTMENTS, YOU KNOW, I AGREE WE NEED COLLABORATION.

I THINK IT'S HARD TO KNOW THIS SCALING UP OF INVESTMENTS PIECE BECAUSE I'M NOT REALLY CLEAR, AGAIN, YOU KNOW, DO WE HAVE less or more vacancy than we think we know.

So is the issue really we need to repair some of the things we need to make sure that those folks that need higher level of service, if they're the ones that are becoming challenging in these units, they clearly need more.

Is it putting more for those folks and then we're able to open up units to other folks that don't have that level, right?

It's hard to know.

So I just wanted to underscore that because these are really complex issues, but I often feel like when we are asked for more in terms of investment, that is challenging when we don't have the information by which to make these decisions.

And so I really wanna underscore that point.

we need to get information that will help us know how to best everyone work together to solve for these problems and in the absence of solving sorry in the absence of getting that information it's hard to to find the solutions so just wanted to underscore that but thank you for coming here um you know, daylighting this issue in this way, because I've heard a lot anecdotally.

I appreciate the chair for bringing this through committee so we can have an open dialogue about it.

Thank you.

Thank you, Council President.

Yeah, and we can't just keep talking about increased investments in, you know, the investments that's going to be required to help you deal with your arrearages, etc.

We are already talking about the investments of the, you know, our the people that are contributing to the tax base that provides for the construction of of new housing etc we have to own up to the fact that we can do a better job preventing a lot of these um what we are seeing is the results of policy and you're not alone when you talk about thank you very much for mentioning some of the regulations that are on the books when it comes to landlord-tenant regulation.

Yesterday, or the day before, I was talking to somebody at Plymouth Housing because there will be an audit that is presented in my committee tomorrow, Governance, Accountability, and Economic Development.

It's a new audit that addresses the overlap of overdose and crime.

And one of the people that we'll be presenting is somebody from Plymouth Housing, and he was saying that one of the problems that they struggle with is the roommate law, which prevents their ability to really...

vet folks that are in their units.

That's just one example of a regulation that we need to examine if that is a problem, we need to listen.

And that's why I was talking about advocacy by your membership organization, that they should be taking the lead on helping the city do better so that we are not dealing with the results of some of these policies, but we can head them off.

You, Andrew, said something that was really bold.

You said the status quo isn't housing first, it's only housing.

Well then, Plymouth also said more recovery-based services are needed in these locations.

And so we need to examine some of our existing approaches and laws that are contributing to the problems that you are dealing with now.

instead of just simply resorting to throwing more money at a problem.

Great.

Well, thank you.

I think that's a good moment in which to conclude.

So I want to thank all of you for being here today.

I want to really thank you for being willing to come...

be public about the struggles that you're experiencing as housing providers.

I mean, the goal here is to continue to provide for all of our residents from the whole spectrum of need.

And so it's important for us to know that that ability is truly in jeopardy.

and as chair of the Housing and Human Services Committee, and everyone else who serves and is an honorary member of this committee, we are all very much committed to making sure that everybody gets to be stably and safely housed.

So thank you for being willing to articulate the struggles, and thank you for the small landlord's perspective, who is also, they also provide an important role in our housing ecosystem.

So again, thank you for being here and for everything that you're doing for our community.

Thank you.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

All right, we will now move on to our next light agenda item.

If the clerk would please read that into the record.

Agenda item two, Human Services Department Community Safety Investments for Briefing and Discussion.

All right, so today, thank you, we have with us the Human Services Department and the Mayor's Office to talk about HSD's investments in community safety.

Thank you.

Thank you, I'm gonna turn it over to Director Kim and her team.

Okay, I was thinking, is it morning?

Good morning.

Thank you Chair Moore for allowing us to be here and of course the council committee members.

This is a big topic.

So I just wanna acknowledge that within 30 minutes, we're going to talk about community safety.

And we're going to review this body of work, but we'll first start off with introductions for the record.

So I'm Tonya Kim, Director of the Human Services Department.

Morning, Council.

My name is Erica Pablo.

My pronouns are she, her, and hers.

And I'm Division Director for the Safe and Thriving Community Division in Human Services Department.

Good morning, Council Members.

My name is Brianna Thomas.

I am the Operations Manager and Senior Policy Advisor in the Mayor's Office.

I always like to start with our mission to ground the viewing public and us, especially when we're talking about community safety or any particular topic that is large and complex, that the Human Services Department exists so that we can connect people with resources and solutions during times of need so we can all live, learn, and work, and take part in strong, healthy communities.

And you can see here, we cover six different impact areas, meaning just in regular terms, these are the six areas that we invest our energy, our resources, our subject matter expertise in.

So everything ranging from prevention, preparing youth for success, all the way through supporting our aging populations to live in place.

Today, we are focusing on the supporting community, excuse me, safe communities investment area.

It's very broad.

And of course, we're committed to taking questions and following up as needed.

And I know that this is the beginning of probably multiple briefings.

In our agenda, we're gonna review a little bit of history of our investments, what the city has done.

Then I'm gonna pass it over to Erica, who is going to talk about our work that we're doing locally, as well as regionally, and some national touches as well.

We're going to talk about the Human Services Department specific division that works in this space.

It's called the Safe and Thriving Communities Division.

And we'll do a brief overview of some of those investments, but not do a deep dive.

We will then preview some of the work that is in process.

And there's work that's happening at the departmental level and city level, henceforth Brianna.

And we are going to look ahead with some of the activity, what to expect coming up, not only in 2024, but also that's gonna impact 2025. And I believe that we're gonna be taking questions here and there and throughout the presentation as well, but we've certainly got some time at the end.

This is a little bit of a dizzying slide, but I'm gonna walk us through.

So first, we're gonna talk about some of the history, and this is longstanding, but I'm gonna start in 2009. You may have heard of...

You may have heard of an initiative that the city of Seattle launched.

And the city launched the Seattle Youth Violence Prevention Initiative, also known as SYVPI, in 2009 to address, at the time, what was increasing youth gun violence.

So this was city-sponsored.

We had city staff directing this initiative.

They aim to serve young people up to the age of 17, and in the later years, they started to expand the services to 24. And SYVPI focused on three geographic areas, the Central District, Southeast Seattle, and Southwest Seattle.

They offered wraparound services for youth at risk of violence.

Those are things, case management, mentoring, street outreach, and more.

And there was coordinated effort.

So there was centralized referrals, database, trainings, et cetera.

Then five years into the launch, Mayor Murray at the time directed the Human Services Department to re-bid the funds to address the current needs at the time.

HSD re-bid the funds, which resulted in new contracts in 2017. And then a couple years later, you know this, we faced a global pandemic, and then we contemplated a national civil rights reckoning with the murder of George Floyd.

Mayor Durkan invested $100 million.

She announced an investment of $100 million in community to build opportunities for health and wellbeing.

And part of that, HSD received 10.4 of one-time dollars to do another RFP, a request for proposal, which that purpose was to increase our capacity to offer more community safety programming.

In addition to the investments, We were asked to stand up a new division.

Council Member Rivera is giving me eye contact.

A lot happened during that time period.

And it's really just to demonstrate all of the movement that occurred just in recent years.

But I wanted you to know that we also stood up a division organizationally.

And the reason being is because we were getting really clear that HSD's role was to support the community-driven solutions because, of course, there's this ecosystem.

There is this broader work around public safety.

But what is HSD's role?

And so we were organizing ourselves to support those community-driven solutions and to better coordinate our existing investments.

And Erica will talk a little bit more about that.

So today, our budget is about $37.7 million in the Safe and Thriving Communities Division.

Now, that includes a lot of things not just around gun violence reduction.

And in that division, we function as a funder, a direct service provider, and a convener.

So that means that we have contracts, we do the procurement processes, the request for proposals.

We also have direct service providers, and we have some administrative support.

Some of our colleagues are here in chamber today.

Now, you know that we are facing a rise in gun violence.

particular heartbreaking violence that are happening in the schools specifically, and demographics are changing.

And so the age group is also expanding.

And so before I talked about 17, it moved to 24. Now we're looking at higher age range of those who are being impacted as well as those who are engaging in this activity.

Now, given that history, I just wanted to share with you where we've been to explain why we are advancing the work and doing more.

Now is the time for us to get clearer and to advance the work.

And with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Erica.

Thank you, Director Kim.

So I wanted to first share some of our community safety work that's happening on the local, regional, and some of our national partnerships that we have.

So on the local level, again, for most of the presentation, we'll talk more about our local investments in our work, but one highlight here is based on the recent incidents at our schools, the mayor issued an executive order on addressing youth and gun violence.

So this seeks to increase physical safety and improve safety outcomes for our students and the school community.

And again, Brianna will touch on that a little bit later.

On the regional level, some highlights is our city's public health contract.

So this includes both our investments in the regional peacekeepers collective and the hospital-based intervention program.

Another highlight is the Executive Leisure Advisory Group on gun violence prevention.

So the Mayor tri-chairs alongside Executive Constantine and Council President Ed Prince from Renton with a focus on coordination and collaboration to better address gun violence in our region.

And then last highlight for the regional level, the county is issuing 100 days of action plan, actually later today.

There will be an announcement to ensure better safety for the summer.

And we look forward to that announcement later today.

And then lastly, on the national level, some of our key partnerships.

One is with Cities United.

So Cities United is a national technical advisory organization focused on supporting cities and local organizations on public safety and more focused on gun violence.

So we have two, I guess, connectors with Cities United, both through their Roadmap Academy program.

We're one of nine city cohort receiving technical assistance support.

And then the second big component of their work is annual conferences.

And so we're co-hosting their conference this year in October.

They'll be joining us.

And then the last partnership I wanted to highlight is our partnership with National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.

They're also a national organization that focus on data and research around public safety.

And we're partnering with them, the county, and the Alliance for Gun Responsibility on a three analysis process and hoping to release those analyses later this year.

And again, for today's presentation, we'll focus on our investments on community violence intervention programs, both the Seattle Community Safety Initiative, Regional Peacekeepers Collective, and hospital-based intervention that include trauma-informed case management, safe passages, critical incident response, and resource navigation.

These are promising research-backed strategies that are being tested and refined here and across the country.

While these investments are considered intervention, our division also invests in prevention initiatives through our community safety RFP and our gender-based violence RFP, which are ongoing processes right now.

And this is a reminder that these investments are in HSD as a whole is only one part of this larger public safety ecosystem.

And so this includes CARE, SBD, FIRE, investments at Department of Education, Early Learning, Parks, et cetera, working as a collective to address these issues.

I did wanna highlight just for right now, but again, it's not a focus of our presentation today, some of the other work within the Safe and Thriving Communities Division.

So we do hold the Mayor's Office on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault, where there's about $14.5 million in investments to address gender-based violence.

And we also staff the Domestic Violence Prevention Council as a part of that work.

And lastly, our Crime Survivor Services Unit, which is a victim advocate team that supports victim survivors of violent crime.

So we'll go into a little overview of our community safety work specifically.

So our partnership with the Seattle Community Safety Initiative, also known as SCSI, is a partnership of four majority BIPOC-led organizations to lead community safety efforts with a focus on gun violence prevention.

This means that when there's an incident of gun violence, our trusted community partners are called in by law enforcement to mitigate conflict, offer support, and resource navigation for families and community members.

Another example of some of their work is through the Safe Passages program that uses a place-based approach at some of our Seattle schools.

Community provider staff are provided a consistent on-campus presence and lead safe passages for young people after school to better ensure safety to home or their next destination.

So an example of this work, a young person is leaving Rainier Beach High School.

On campus, they are immediately met with someone, a trusted familiar face, one of the community provider staffs.

The staff checks in with them, and the young person shares they were almost in a fight earlier that day.

So this community staff is able to address their immediate safety and long-term they're someone that's consistently there that they can turn to and confide in.

So overview, our community partners with SESI and the Regional Peacekeepers Collectives are intentionally located at three community safety hubs.

So in Central District, West Seattle and South Seattle.

These are neighborhoods that hold the most impacted communities of gun violence here in Seattle.

Next, I wanted to share a little bit of our work through our public health contract with the county.

So we have a strong and growing partnership with Public Health Seattle King County, and we are committed to a regional approach to address gun violence.

With a focus on our hospital-based intervention program, our partnership with Harborview and Public Health is a nationally recognized model.

So it's where Harborview social workers and our community partners provide trauma and emotional support, mitigate retaliation, and offer housing supports to gun violence survivors and their families starting at their bedside.

Victims are provided with links to community-based services, mentoring, home visits, follow-up assistance, and long-term case management during these interventions.

So using another example of a young person, this young person just witnessed their sibling getting shot.

And at that moment, when they are at the hospital and their sibling is getting treated, they are immediately connected with a social worker from Harborview.

Their family is connected with our community providers to develop a safety plan.

and they have the opportunity to look into another place to stay through our other provider that provides housing support.

And I just wanted to note there was a recent article in the Seattle Times by the Firearms Injury UW Research Team that gave a great introduction overview of this program.

So I just wanted to note that.

And about our program, so a lot of our contract is through alongside King County, but based on recent research that Director Kim alluded to, based on the data, there's been, a higher increase of injuries and deaths for folks that are above 24 years of age and into their 30s.

And so because of that, as a result of the council action, we've been able to expand the hospital-based intervention program for one-time funds.

So now we serve folks of all ages through that program.

And we know when we invest in evidence-based strategies, it leads to community safety and wellbeing.

So now I will pass it off to Brianna to discuss the mayor's recent executive order.

Thank you, Erica.

Mayor Harrell issued executive order 2024-01 on June 14th.

There were nine action items in that executive order, including partnership with King County for their 100 days of action, the issuance of a gun trace data report in partnership with ATF and the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, convening community groups to come up with a plan for the 2024 school year, which we were able to do yesterday.

So that work got kicked off already.

And we also are focusing our efforts on supporting diversified response teams in partnership with SPD.

Those last two things, the diversified response teams and community-based investment plan are where HSD's work really comes in.

We are gonna continue to convene providers over the summer and should, before the start of the school year, have a new set of investments that we are looking for the 2024, 2025 school year to, balance and complement the county's efforts over the summer.

I'd just like to make sure that we stay grounded in the fact that we are doing this work to save lives, and it is a public health crisis, and we are taking it very, very seriously and working with absolute haste, but it's easy to Sorry, I get a little emotional.

It's easy to turn some of this into just numbers on paper and forget that these are actual kids.

These are actual people's babies.

So thank you for caring about our work and continuing to support it.

Thank you, Brianna.

So another focus on our recent work that's in process is our community safety request for proposals, or RFP.

Our goal with this RFP is to align our investments to meet the greatest need based on best practices, research, and community feedback.

So our current scope is to focus on investments in prevention, intervention, and restorative services for young people between the ages of 12 and 30, with the potential to have significant impact.

We are working closely with consultants to refine our theory of change.

And as a part of this theory of change, we utilize a results-based accountability framework, leading with the performance metrics on the contract level with the goal and result of improved safety outcomes for all the young people that are served through our investments.

So our timeline for this is planning for an early September release, and the funding available is about $5.7 million.

And then just an overview because we shared a lot with you today that we have in the works and we're holding.

So our timeline is laid out here for the rest of the year.

Some highlights that I wanted to note are the implementation of the mayor's executive order with a plan to focus on this upcoming school year.

So the plan will be released before September.

And then the Community Safety RFP released in early September as well that I just mentioned.

And then what we're really excited about is the Cities United Conference co-hosting that.

That'll be in October.

And then we plan to issue Community Safety RFP awards by the end of this year.

The last slide here just is another view of the timeline specifically that HSD is going to be issuing in the months to come.

It's just a different view of that beautiful timeline that Erica outlined.

And so with that, we have a few minutes for questions or comments.

Thank you very much.

Questions?

No questions?

Oh, you have a question, okay.

I'm gonna go to Council Member Wu and then we'll come back to Council Member Rivera.

Thank you for all that you do and this really important work.

I have a quick question.

Where does the funding come for this work?

We have a combination of funds, and so we have base funding that's in our budget.

The two million is being contemplated right now.

Is that a part of?

The third quarter supplemental.

Yes, thank you.

And that's the work that we're doing for schools, the school year safety plan.

But primarily it's general funds.

We do have small amounts of federal grant, and that's right now with the Mayor's Office on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.

We are also writing for other grant opportunities at the federal level.

And were you part of the 20 million mental health, I guess, the planning and implementation of the telehealth services that was just released, I guess, will be released, I guess, in the fall?

Did HC have any part in that or part of that 20 million total?

I'm really proud to say that HSD piloted that contract with June and it became an opportunity, unfortunately, but it became an opportunity for the Department of Education and Early Learning to expand in that work.

And so it's deals contract that they're going to hold in the future state, but right now we're offering some support just because we already had that going with some one-time dollars that we had.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Rivera.

Thank you.

Thank you for this presentation.

Thank you for the reminder, Director, on some of the difficult work we had to do together during the pandemic.

So I'm not laughing as that it's funny.

It's that it's hard to believe all the things that we had to do during that time.

But we're here today, I think overall in a better place, but nevertheless, the gun violence issue amongst youth has been As you pointed out in the history piece, since 2009, we've been trying to figure out what to do about this.

I do have a question.

And if you don't have the answers, we can follow up offline.

But just I'm wondering when in 2014 funds got redirected, what does current needs mean?

Like what were the current needs that these funds got redirected to?

It looks like it took some time between 2014 and 2017 to issue new contracts.

So would appreciate knowing what happened during that time, what were the new contracts, what did that accomplish?

And then I also have questions about the community safety initiative, who participates on that initiative.

And I noticed that the community hubs are in the Central District, West Seattle and South Seattle.

We all know North Seattle with the Ingram shooting in the school, there was a need in North Seattle.

So wondering how, what the plan is for accommodating kids on the North End.

And then these convenings related to the executive order on gun violence and the current situation would love to, do you have a list of who participated in those convenings?

Just to make us aware, I know many of us, I know I have gotten a lot of, reach-outs from parents and other folks related to gun violence in the schools, a lot of the parents who've been impacted.

And this is an issue that most of our high schoolers and middle schoolers have faced across the city.

I recognize that there are some schools where there's a higher percentage of kids.

At risk, but it is something that is across the city and I too as the parent of two Ingram students that were at the schools the day Sadly a student got shot inside the school.

I share your concern so This is all something I very much care about, we all care about, and I'd love to get more information about the convenings and how we got to where we are and the investments that the mayor's office and HSD is proposing because, quite frankly, I don't have any information really on who participated in the convenings.

I know the proposal that recently got sent about the $2 million for June for the telehealth services, $2 million for community-based, But I really don't know who participated, what the level of scope was when folks got convened.

And I know that's in the weeds.

But you know me, Director Kim, I like to get in the weeds.

So when I'm talking to my constituents and other parents that reach out because I chair the education committee, I am able to aptly respond to their concerns and their questions.

So if you don't have answers, that's fine.

We can take it offline.

The last point I'll make is I was reading, this is indirectly related.

There was an audit on evidence-based assessment of the City of Seattle's crime prevention programs.

The audit was done in 2012 by our auditors.

David Jones and Claudia Gross Shader and the one I mean one huge takeaway from this was there were various programs and some youth focused focused on crime prevention and The thing that kept coming up in this audit was the fact that the city was not tracking outcomes.

We often track outputs, which is number of people served, but not outcomes, what effect these programs had on the issue that we were trying to solve for and so my question to you is in these new rfps what outcomes are being measured so we're not continually in the space where we don't have the information by which we're measuring whether these investments are making a difference given that we've been at this for so long so i really want to hear would love to hear about what are the outcomes that are getting included with these rfps

So all such good questions and would be another lovely hour.

So I do know it's 11.31.

Do you want me to try to briefly answer some of the questions or we can follow up offline?

Can you do a brief answer and then what's a more detailed follow-up?

And Chair, I'm happy to follow up offline if that's easier.

I really appreciate that.

I don't sit on this committee and I appreciate the opportunity to ask the questions and I don't want to take up the full time.

Okay.

Well, I do see we have two committee members who have questions, so I'll take that offline, give you a little break there, and ask committee members to ask a brief question.

It can be easily answered, hopefully.

Council President Nelson.

Or was it, I'm sorry, Council Member Morales.

Thank you.

I am looking at the $5.7 million that is going to be issued as an RFP.

I need to understand better the plan since this is intended for the 24-25 school year, but the funding isn't going out until December.

Okay.

Will that mean that whatever the plan, whatever is getting funded with this will be for five months of the second semester of the school year or will that programming continue through the summertime?

Like what's the plan there?

Great question.

And also like for how many schools or students?

I'm sorry that we weren't as clear as we could be.

So let me clarify.

The two for the school year is separate from this 5.7.

So we're working very quickly and we are working with our existing providers because they're subject matter experts.

They're on the ground.

They know this work.

They know the schools.

They have relationships to develop an implementation plan and that we're striving to have in place and have contracts ready to go by September of 20...

What is this?

2024.

In three months.

So we've got a couple months, and that's these meetings that we're having.

So I was able to answer some of you.

So it's our existing providers that we're working with.

That's separate from this RFP.

This RFP is a big chunk of our base budget.

These are organizations that typically have had contracts with us for four years.

it's time to re-bid.

And we're laser focused on having a theory of change that has performance metrics that include meaningful outcomes.

And so we will gladly report on that.

But we're still developing the RFP in consultation with all of those technical assistants.

And we've got some other folks queued up because we've learned a lot throughout the years, including from the city auditor's office reports.

which triggered some of those other changes in the past.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member, Council President Nelson.

Thank you.

Speaking of that audit, on January 8th, 2024, so just this past January, the Mayor Harrell and I wrote to the city auditor, David Jones, and said, we request that your office update your 2012 assessment of crime prevention programs funded by the city.

identify the evidence-based programs, those with no evidence of effectiveness, those that may be promising, and those that may cause harm.

And we also ask you to suggest to us if there are any programs the city is not using that we should consider implementing.

The auditor took us up on that and that was underway.

And then I was prompted after the tragic shooting at Garfield to follow up with David Jones and say, hey, how's that audit coming along?

And he said, oh, didn't, well, that was canceled in April.

And in fact, I went back in my email and found an email from Deputy Mayor Burgess saying, we've asked the city auditor to pause updating the crime prevention assessment because HSD is preparing to issue a new round of RFPs that will result in new funding opportunities.

And I struggle to understand why the decision would be made to cancel an audit on the effectiveness of existing programs before putting out an RFP to issue new funding for programs.

I'm supposed to, and that is not your, you're only responsible for the RFP.

So I understand you can't answer that question.

We do have a representative from the mayor's office.

I would like to know.

more about that decision because that should be informing this RFP going forward.

And because I don't know what the evidence is that anything that we're doing is working and what we need to do differently and look what different things do we need to look for in organizations that we're going to be funding going forward.

So we talk a lot about, you know, results-based I can't remember the term.

Anyway.

Accountability.

Right, right.

And I'm not seeing that we're reflecting that in our decision to cancel an audit and then issue additional RFPs.

So do you have any, can you?

I've got a little insight.

Yes, please.

I don't have the whole answer.

It's my understanding that the audit, and we should always give a shout out to the auditor's office.

They're a real jewel for the city.

It's just paused.

waiting for the scoping for the theory of change to come in to further inform what it is we're actually auditing.

The next RFP that's coming out is outcomes-based.

It is making sure that we've got those metrics, that we can make sure these programs are working.

But until we actually have our theory of change in place, we need to ensure that we're measuring the right things.

It's also my understanding that you are meeting with Deputy Mayors Burgess and Washington next week, so I don't want to get over my skis on where they're at on the restarting the audit, but it is my understanding that it is just a pause and not a complete cessation.

We have lost April, May, June, July, August, probably until this is started up again, or maybe just four months to look at how things are going.

And so I do look forward to that meeting, but I just need to understand better the timeline for Will we get information to inform the RFP instead of just responding to what some, and I don't know when the new theory of change will be issued, et cetera.

So the sequence of events will be helpful to understand.

I think that's included in one of the slides.

What's that slide?

maybe, yeah.

So on the timeline that we've got here, council president for 2024, the community safety RFP will go out in September.

So we will have the theory of change completed before that.

Again, I think it would be imprudent for me to get ahead of deputy mayor Burgess on his intentions on reactivating that audit.

And we'll have to see if the auditor's office has the bandwidth to do any kind, to take this up again, because they do have- We do ask a lot of them.

Yeah, thank you.

So I have a couple of questions.

One, you mentioned theory of change.

What's been the current premise that you've been operating from?

And what is the, I know you haven't yet completed it, but sort of in what direction are we moving the theory of change?

I could speak to this a little bit since I have a little bit more history.

Erica, how long have you been on the job?

Seven months.

Okay, so I'll take this one.

I reviewed a little bit of the history of how we got here, of our total budget.

We've been scaffolding some of these ads and doing a request for proposals.

There's been council ads.

That's the collection of our current contracts.

And so we've had individual theories of change for a request for proposals.

So say, for example, this is not a real number, but a $5 million investment.

Here's a theory of change that we have for these contracts.

Agencies will apply, we'll have the contracts, and then we might have these other contracts that were either ads or from a different RFP process.

So what we're getting towards, Council President, is having a theory of change for our violence reduction portfolio.

we need a comprehensive theory of change that says, what are we investing in and why, and what are the outcomes that we are going to achieve collectively so when agencies apply for those funds, we're all speaking the same dashboard.

We can tell that story, and we're being really clear.

And so right now, in the past, it's been a little bit more open-ended, and again, it's depending on what was happening at the time four years ago.

or with an ad.

And there's a lot of good work happening, but one of the things that the city auditor's office remarked on before in like SYVPI, for example, there's some well-intended contracts, but to link it directly to gun violence reduction, for example, it was maybe not as focused as they would have liked to have seen.

And so those are the things that we've learned from.

And now we're going to have laser focus in our upcoming theory of change that includes our entire portfolio.

Okay, thank you.

That was very helpful.

And just to follow up Council Member Rivera's question about the community safety hubs.

And I know that this is, they're based on historical data.

And But again, as the district five rep, I'm gonna continue to make this point.

Aurora really needs to now become a community safety hub North Seattle has significant challenges and a lot of the work that needs to be done for gun prevention and intervention would also be well suited to the District 5 community.

So I would just make that plea for that to be taken into consideration.

And another question I have is, one of the things I met with the community passageways and they talked about that they don't have much of a You know, part of the, I mean, as you know better than I do, part of the success of their work is their connection to the community, and they don't have those connections in the North End.

And we don't really have sort of the culturally competent mentors, or we have a large East African population in District 5, and yet we don't really have the people.

We don't have those connections in those communities to have those cultural mentors and messengers.

And I'm just wondering, what's the work that's being done to work with those communities?

Because they also have a very different, both from being an immigrant, but also immigrant communities of color.

I mean, it's sort of a double whammy.

And wondering how we're sort of trying to make inroads and connections.

I hear you, Councilmember.

I think one of the things that we as a city would have to look at is figuring out how HSD may be able to partner more intentionally and thoughtfully with our Office for Immigrant and Refugee Affairs to have that real foundation in community and making sure, to your point, that we're sending the right messengers in there with the right message at the right time.

And I think as we grow our infrastructure to interrupt gun violence, that would be where I would start if anybody asked me, is making sure that OIR was front and center at the table.

And just to add to that, so OIRA does have an immigrant and refugee immigrant safety access network.

It's beginning stages and it's newer, but there has been a recent partnership from us in investing in that program.

And so that's exactly what they do amongst other things.

And so they help decrease the impacts of and burdens of gun violence, especially when there's a sudden death.

in the family due to gun violence and wrapping around the families to support funerals and wraparound services.

But it's a very small, invested program.

So I think it's about, they fund three organizations at $66,000 each.

And because it's beginning stages, we've been partnering with them on that program as well.

yeah thank you and i met with them um and they also voiced that they too are having difficulty identifying and accessing communities so it's it's a challenge i mean Anyway, this is something to continue to work on.

That's one of the things, the importance of rebidding our investments too.

So again, the needs, while some of the needs are the same, and we're tackling these very long standing systemic issues, there are some evolving needs that are coming up.

And so having the data, being informed, and looking at potentially reallocating our dollars based on the data is gonna be very important for us.

And so these four year cycles are important to make sure that we're current.

Great.

Thank you for making that point because that was what we said in this letter.

We would like this assessment as soon as possible to help inform these decisions for the 2025 city budget, which will be made beginning in April.

All right.

Well, we have taken up too much of your time, but I very much appreciate the presentation today.

We've just scratched the surface, but I am so relieved to know that you are there and that you are doing this work.

It's work that we absolutely have to upscale and adequately resource and make sure we're doing it in the right way, that it's effective and not just just trying to look good.

And we're all trying to act in the best interest of everyone and do what we can in a society that unfortunately is awash in guns with very limited tools in which to address that fact.

But I do appreciate what you're doing every day and for being here.

So thank you so much.

Thank you.

And if I could just say, we're representing this work, but the organizations that are in the community who have been doing this since 2009 and before, and the emerging agencies, they're the ones who really need our support and long-term commitment.

Absolutely.

Couldn't agree more.

Thank you so much.

All right, looks like there's nothing else.

This concludes the July 10th meeting, the Housing and Human Services Committee.

The next meeting is scheduled for July 24th, 2024. The time is 1146. We are adjourned.

Thank you, everyone.