Seattle City Council Select Committee on Homelessness & Housing Affordability 1142019

Good morning, everyone.

Today is Monday, January 14th, 2019, and the Select Committee on Homelessness and Housing Affordability will come to order.

It's 1045, my name's Teresa Mosqueda, and today I have the honor of serving as co-chair of the committee.

I'll be joined by my other two co-chairs, Council Member Bagshaw, hello, thank you for joining us, and Council Member Sawant will join us soon.

Thank you, Council Member Herbold, for being here, and we will welcome the other council members as they arrive.

We have a packed agenda and we're getting started a little bit late, so we're going to ask folks to stick to the times that they've been allocated for both the presentation and for public comment today.

We will also have the clock available for our panelists so that they can see the exact allotment of time so that we can all stay within our categories.

We'll also be asking folks to stick to a two-minute public comment period.

Just by way of reference for our agenda, we'll begin our meeting by reviewing the recommendations from future laboratories on how to address the homelessness crisis in our region, and we'll also hear from the mayor's office.

Then we will hear from Christine Margiotta, who will lead us in a conversation on their lessons learned from Los Angeles City and Los Angeles County from the Home for Good Coalition and her 10 years of experience working in LA.

She worked with businesses, nonprofits, unions, providers, and local government to help get everyone in alignment to come up with new revenue resources and specifically to today's conversation, recommendations on consolidated governance.

Lastly, we'll hear from a panel of our local friends and experts on the ground to identify meaningful next steps in Seattle and what we can do in this region to make sure that we're resulting in true change for those on the ground, those who are in homelessness, and those who are at the risk of becoming homeless.

Thank you, Councilmember O'Brien, for joining us as well.

And at this time, we're going to move into public comment.

Sound good, co-chair?

Okay.

Oh, we did.

We moved it back to the front.

Yeah.

We only have three folks who are signed up, so Alex Simran, you are first, and please keep your comments focused on today's agenda.

And your time starts now.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

You're welcome.

Go ahead.

My name is Alec Zimmerman and I am president of Stand Up America.

Thank you, Consul, for your very good job.

What is you doing with homeless?

I don't see more homeless in Seattle.

I see only dead people.

That's it.

So thank you very much for your good job.

You hired my lovely Fuhrer.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Next person we have is Kira.

From All Home, Kira, could you pronounce your last name when you get up there?

Sorry about that.

No problem.

It's difficult.

Zylstra.

Great.

Thank you.

Good morning, council members.

My name is Kira Zylstra, and I'm acting director for All Home, the continuum of care lead here in Seattle King County.

Our community is facing a defining moment as the housing and homeless crisis reaches unthinkable levels.

More than 12,000 individuals are living unsheltered and sheltered every single night on our streets in the county, and more than 30,000 people are experiencing homelessness over the course of a year.

Though the performance of the homeless response system has significantly improved in recent years, housing twice as many households in 2017 as just four years prior and reducing veteran homelessness by nearly a third in just one year.

Even so, people are falling into homelessness at far greater rates than our resources and efforts can support, emphasizing the need for prevention and cross-sector partnerships.

Inaction is not an option nor is it acceptable to continue to do business as usual and rely on incremental progress while thousands of people are without a safe place to sleep tonight.

No single organization, no one system can end this crisis on its own.

And fragmented system we're operating from now is not a sustainable mode of operating.

This fragmentation is felt by all, including our continuum of care staff at all home and the board leadership on our continuum of care board, including elected officials and service providers.

But most importantly, the fragmentation is felt by people experiencing homelessness today.

The reforms outlined for us in the future laboratories report are essential to a foundationally new approach.

Accountability is paramount to our work and radical collaboration towards common goals is critical to our success.

This truly unified approach is the only way to effectively operationalize racial equity in our homeless system, and the strategies establish new opportunities to pivot towards a client-centered system with clear accountabilities and mechanisms for ensuring all investments and policies are responding to our community's needs in concrete and meaningful ways.

The creation of a new central authority is not a silver bullet.

But collective commitment to these 10 actions combined with the creation of a clear actionable plan and the resources to create pathways out of homelessness into housing, we can make incredible progress.

Thank you.

Thank you so very much.

The next person we have is Janet Pope from Compass Housing.

Hi, Janet.

Good morning.

I'm Janet Pope, the CEO of Compass Housing Alliance, and I'm here to support the system reforms and the future laboratories report.

Compass has been around for nearly 100 years, and we have 23 locations.

That also includes four emergency shelters and permanent supportive housing, workforce housing, and our emergency shelters support single men, mixed shelter reports, mixed shelter men and women, and our housing is also veterans housing and also different populations as well as mixed populations.

So I think that helps us have a really holistic view of all aspects of the system and what might happen in all these reports.

And so we're really supportive of, while we've been around long enough to see a lot of shiny new pennies and a rearrangement of the deck chairs, I think this report is different.

And I'm very cautiously optimistic, particularly around the centralizing of all the systems.

I come from Snohomish County, where things are done a little bit differently.

And there is no different communication things between the county and the city, and as well as all the bureaucracy that comes down.

And so I'm very optimistic that this is going to be the real change that we need, as well as the centralizing of the funds and the mixture of the funds.

I really think this is what it's really going to take to get there.

As well, I think the system changes really mirror what Compass has been moving towards over the last 10 years of a real holistic approach that is really based in data, as well as in terms of a real scientific approach based in sociological reforms and psychological reforms, trauma-approached care.

and really getting down to what our clients and consumers really need.

So very excited about that.

And also that we are finally really tying housing and emergency response reforms together.

I know we've been heading that way in the last few years, but it feels like we're really getting there.

And also, while I'm here, really quick, I know in the last session we talked about Jason Johnson and his promotion from interim to the permanent as human services director.

I want to say, as one of the larger contract recipients, I did talk to the mayor about his permanent position, and I think this is a time where we really need some consistency in that position and really support his credentials and the ability for him to stay there in that position.

Thank you, Janet, and we will encourage folks to bring their comments to Councilmember Swan's committee where we will have that conversation on Wednesday.

And just on that, I think, I believe we're getting ready to set the committee meeting for January 25th.

Great.

Thank you very much, Janet.

And thank you to all the folks who've come to testify today.

We are going to move into our first panel.

As we do so, I would like to have Farideh Cuevas, thank you so much for staffing this select committee today, read first item into the record.

And while she is doing that, if the first panel can please join our central staff, Alan Lee and Tracy Ratzcliffe at the table, that'd be Mark Dones, Deputy Mayor Mosley, Tess Colby, and I'm looking forward to hearing from all of you.

Agenda item one, homelessness governance report for briefing and discussion.

Excellent.

And Tracy and Alan, we'll turn it over to you first to get us started today.

I'm going to provide some framing remarks to kick off this first part of the presentation for the committee as well as the public.

So as a reminder, the King County executive and the mayor signed a memorandum of understanding in May of last year to provide recommendations on, quote, joint governance structures for programs affecting people experiencing homelessness countywide.

That MOU had seven goals, and I'll just read a few of them here.

To study current models governing public health, homeless services, and housing investments in other U.S. cities.

Consider what elements of these governance models could be implemented to reach set principles and outcomes.

establish shared budget priorities and joint planning efforts to meet the needs of King County and Seattle's homeless population, and by December 1st, 2018, make governance recommendations to the King County Executive and Mayor of Seattle regarding potential system revisions to increase the effectiveness, reach, and efficiency of our countywide homelessness system.

So the contractor that was enlisted to explore and provide those recommendations, of course, we're about to hear for Mark Nones and future laboratories.

Before we do so, I would just mention that this is the first report that is a part of this effort.

There are two additional reports or studies that are forthcoming in 2019. Firstly, there will be an action plan, a comprehensive look at our regional system, showing all investments in programming and avenues for philanthropy to plug into that system, as well as an assessment of our homeless system performance regionally by Focus Strategies and Barb Poppy.

I'll also remind the council that governance was identified as an issue by central staff during the last budget season.

And accordingly, the council passed a statement of legislative intent, which describes a working group comprised of council members and senior level executive staff that will inform the assessment and implementation of these recommended strategies.

And so with that, I'll pass it on to Deputy Mayor Mosley.

Thank you very much.

Deputy Mayor, just a little button on the side there.

And as you do that, I just want to welcome Co-Chair Councilmember Swant, President Harreld, Councilmember Johnson, and Councilmember Juarez.

Thank you all for joining us today as well.

Thank you very much, Councilmember Mesquita, members of the council.

It's an honor to be here today to share with you the results of some work that's been going on since August related to recommendations or actions that needed to take place to improve our services and accountability to folks who are experiencing homelessness.

I am joined today by Mark Dones, to my immediate right, of Future Labs.

He is a consultant who has been working.

Their team has been working since August on the recommendations that he will be sharing with you today.

I'm also shared to the immediate right of Mark by Tess Colby.

Tess Colby is our new Senior Advisor on Homelessness that has joined our team about a month ago.

Tess has a very extensive background in system design of homeless crisis response systems, working very effectively and particularly most recently in Pierce County And Tess will be the mayor's office principal contact for implementation work associated with this new regional entity that we will be talking about.

I won't go into too much of the background because you're here to hear from Mark, not me, and Alan's done a good job of sharing with you a little bit of that background.

I just might say one thing that in earlier May, on May the 1st, the King County Auditor's Office released a report calling for a unified regional approach to the crisis of homelessness.

The work that then the mayor and the county executive did in their memorandum of understanding led to the work that Mark and their team has done on this.

So the city and the county and all home partnered with Future Laboratories and the Corporation for Supportive Housing to make recommendations for the creation of a regional governance entity, including actions needed to transform the homelessness response system and create a better and more accessible pathway out of homelessness.

And so the presentation before you today is a summary of the search that Mark and their team conducted that has resulted in 10 recommended actions that he will be presenting to you.

Thank you.

Tessa, I just want to say welcome into your new role.

I have not had the pleasure of working with you before, but I know a number of people who have, and you come highly recommended, so just want to say welcome to the team.

Did you have anything else you wanted to add?

No, just thank you very much.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Well, Mark, thank you very much.

I know many of the council members have already had the chance to sit down with you and go through the presentation.

Extensive work that you have done to get to the 10 recommendations and a very comprehensive methodology was baked in to make sure that you could really elevate the voice of those who are experiencing homelessness.

We know that this report is interactive.

It is online.

We have linked to it in our agenda, and it's hard to make an interactive presentation into a PowerPoint.

So we appreciate your work to condense it into that and to really focus on the 10 recommendations today.

We do have a number of slides in front of us, and I understand you want to sort of get us halfway through quickly, and then we'll focus on the remaining half.

Excellent.

Thank you, Council Member, and hello, everyone else.

Good to see many of you again, and some of you for the first time.

We did welcome introductions, quick level setting, is just to say, to echo the Chair, I will be moving quickly through the process.

So there's a lot of process.

I think it's important that we touch on it because it is why we're saying anything, right?

But I don't want to dwell on it, and I'm happy to meet with folks outside of this context or at a later date to provide any additional deep dives on that.

So with that said, very briefly, how did we get here?

So we began our work in August and identified that the current state of play was deep fragmentation across systems, profound funding difficulties, which I want to say at the outset, and this is said numerous times throughout the report, there is not enough funding in the system, right?

That even consolidation, you will get a lot of operational efficiency from consolidation, you will be able to do more.

I want to be really clear about that.

It will not be enough.

Understanding what the depth of the funding need is, I think our team is pretty confident, is only possible once you have operational efficiency, right?

But just want to be really up front about that, right?

That this is not the solution to a funding crisis.

There's a poorly articulated set of successes, and I think that that's felt a lot by staff, right?

Who are working every day, doing good work against a problem that keeps growing, right?

And so there's that delta between what you see when you walk around and what people do when they go to work.

And so it's difficult, you know, as Kira was saying, to say, like, this is what we have had success about, right, or with, when there is that continued physical presence of the problem.

And then that there's no shared theory of change, which we'll talk at length about.

but that was an early on diagnostic and we think that's quite important.

There's a schematic in here that I'm not gonna go through at great length, but this is just the process that we went through.

One thing that I will say is that we, that start with nothing that's up there, we put that there because a lot of us have done a lot of work in this space across the country, but we don't necessarily bring the assumption that what has worked in other communities will work here.

So we are doing some of this work now in other jurisdictions.

Those reports will have commonalities, but they will also have significant differences.

The 10 actions we've identified we believe to be the necessary and sufficient action for this community to tackle the scope of the crisis that you have.

We'll also note the one other thing that I will highlight and then move in directly to talking about is we did a lot of work with customers.

And we refer to people experiencing homelessness as customers.

in part to appropriately identify their agentive nature within the system that serves them, right?

Like, these are people who have choices, who deserve dignity, and deserve the same kinds of embedded supports that we put in delivering pizza, right?

Like, there is an expectation, I think, that people should just take whatever.

We don't share that expectation.

We worked with about 200 folks.

We also worked with frontline staff, and I want to be really clear about that as well, that we engaged the frontline staff of service providers to hear, right, the other side of that narrative.

Like, what is it that folks do when they show up every day, and how can we be clear that like in going through systems transformation, what we're not saying is we're doing this because you do a bad job, right?

That this is necessary in order to empower folks to make sure that what is being delivered actually is appropriate.

And if there is a need for change, right, making sure that in assessing what that change should be, we've spoken with the folks who'll have to implement it.

And then we also did a great deal of analytic work, but you'll hear about that.

What we heard from folks was that there is the desire for a regional authority, right, a new single entity, that folks want to be equity-centered.

So I'll talk about this at length later, but generally speaking, it's really important to note that nationally, and echoed in this community, the majority of people experiencing homelessness are people of color.

In this community, those folks are Native and Black predominantly, and it is important that in addressing homelessness writ large, there be a focus on those inequities.

Other populations beyond racial and ethnic categories are also overrepresented, and we'll talk about those as well.

There's a desire to be data-driven.

And when we talk about being data-driven, we don't just mean that there is, like, you know, a report on it, but that people are able to access data in near real time to make decisions, right?

That, like, when people come together, when you come together around these tables to lead, you need the right information.

And then finally that there needs to be a community-wide commitment, right?

That it cannot just be that the council or providers or the mayor or all, like everyone needs to be in.

That includes business and philanthropy and just people, right?

That like the citizens of this region need to commit to this crisis and commit to ending this crisis in a different way.

Briefly, we'll note that we worked with a lot of providers, I would say, like, without any doubt that, like, that should continue, right?

So the folks on this slide noted in green are folks that we connected with who either hosted something or recruited folks to participate in something.

We would like to see this entire slide be green and all the lists be longer, and that can happen over the course of implementation.

So we want to be clear that there is an iterative nature built into this process.

We'll also note that this is broken out not in the traditional way you see breakouts in terms of youth, vets, etc.

This is broken out through an equity lens.

So you'll note that there is a group that serves just LGBTQ folks, right?

With that group, we did a workshop specific to trans-identified people.

So, again, trying to layer in equity so that as we go through the actions, what we hope is the result, although, again, feedback loops are important, is that equity is baked in.

So it's not an add-on.

It's not like you come after the fact and then say, and here's the part for Native folks, right?

Like, we wanted to make sure that those voices were centered throughout the process.

In workshops, again, very briefly, we asked folks what their goals and priorities were.

What I want to highlight here is we looked, given the timeline, to do the minimum amount of translation, right?

Meaning that, like, what we didn't want to do was go out and ask a bunch of, like, complicated questions that then needed to be synthesized into, well, this is our best approximation of what people meant, right?

We just asked people what they wanted.

and then aggregated off of that.

Additionally, we asked folks who helped them and how.

We'll talk about how this rolls into the recommendations, but we'll note that what folks noted was that the primary thing they were looking for was housing, obviously.

The second thing that folks were looking for was emotional support.

And I think that that's really, really important to note because it suggests that the skill sets that we deploy and how we, frankly, compensate people for the work that they're doing and what management structures need to be in place might be different from what we normally do.

We also asked folks how they prioritize services, when they looked at providers, what they thought about in terms of barriers, like why or why not go to a place.

With providers, we asked them to do an inverse of that same profile, talk about what could they help with, what were they good at, what expectations did they have if someone showed up, and what could they commit to if those expectations were met.

Then ask them to talk about the services in their organization.

And then be honest.

Rate those services, right?

So does something need improvement or is it successful?

Where things needed improvement, we took a deeper dive and asked folks to talk about, is it a barrier to access on the customer side, meaning we're not on a major transit route, or there isn't, you know, an accessibility issue in terms of folks with different motor disabilities, right, that they can't get to where we provide services, or is it more of a delivery challenge on the provider side in the sense of, like, maybe we haven't had a director for four years, right?

So, like, the ability to consistently set a goal has not been a thing we've been able to do.

Again, trying to understand what would be the solution, right?

Simply to say that a thing needs improvement is not to identify what the solution space is.

So I wanted to drill down with the people who are delivering, again, those interventions, what the solution should be rather than making assumptions.

So that was a lot that I went through very briefly.

Again, offer up to any of you the opportunity to take a deeper dive there at your request.

But moving forward, what we identified were 10 system-wide actions to undertake.

So it was to institute a system-wide theory of change, consolidate first into a joint entity between the city of Seattle and King County, but want to be very clear that the scope of the problem is regional.

And so it can't just stop at partnership between those two formal political entities.

At a certain point, right, like other folks are going to have to come to the table in a really meaningful way.

And I think that that is very clear to us in terms of the intent that we had when authoring these.

The need to center the customer at every level of decision making.

Prioritization of economic stability as a clear output or outcome of engaging with the response system.

The need to undertake a digital transformation, writ large, we'll talk about that.

Redesigning intake so it is customer-centric and accessible.

Expanding health services, both physical and behavioral.

Public-private partnership.

Increasing the rate of housing development and long-term institutional alignment.

So I'm going to take a deeper dive into all of these, but I want to be really clear about a couple things up front.

The theoretical framework that underpins these is not sequential or menu-based, and I want to be really, really clear about that.

We are presenting these in a list because of how human brains work, right?

Like, time is structured in a certain way, and we can't really get outside of it.

That doesn't mean...

Sorry, you're saying that they are not in order of importance or...

No.

They are all important and all need to be done.

There's parallel and sequential action embedded across all of these.

And what that means is that you can't just do like one and four, right?

Like what they actually are is interconnected and reinforcing.

And as we talk through them, you'll hear me like go back or reference because they are really part of a body of work.

We see these more like this, and I'm not going to dwell on this, but it's a Venn diagram for folks.

And we see them as buckets of work around orientation, transformation, and connection.

And then there are things that straddle the lines.

And again, like, we don't have to dwell on this framing, but I just want to be really clear about that.

That choosing what to do will result in the undercutting of other things.

All right, so system-wide theory of change.

Theories of change, when instituted correctly, should be relatively simple and axiomatic.

They are different than mission statements.

They are used at a high level to set policy and program direction.

What we found when we worked with system administrators and folks in this community is that there was no system-wide theory of change.

There were theories of change for certain populations, right?

So young people had a theory of change for youth funding, right?

Or vets might have a theory of change.

But there was nothing that said, like, we do X in order to Y for people experiencing homelessness.

That sounds quite simple, but it's really, really fundamental to being able to row a boat in the same direction collectively, right?

And it matters especially for a community that has as many funding inputs as this one does.

So you've got the city and the county as sort of the core funders, but you have philanthropy, you have private donorship, right?

There's all this money that flows into the system, and being able to judge whether or not it's being spent effectively actually depends on having some high-level statement that affirms what the direction you're trying to go is and why, right?

So in order to get to the sentence in front of you, we worked first with system administrators in a discovery workshop in September, where we essentially asked people, why do you do what you do, right?

And what would you change if you could?

We then took that information and rooted it out into the community, particularly, again, to customers.

We wanted to hear from people experiencing homelessness, does this make sense?

Is this what we should be doing?

Is this what you want to hold your community accountable to?

What came back was, if we create a homeless response system that centers customer voice, then we will be able to focus on responding to needs and eliminating inequities in order to end homelessness for all.

Again, that sounds very simple, but embedded in it is a set of metrics and a set of decision points, right?

audit a system for how and where it centers the voice of the customer.

There are a number of ways to do that centering, through data, through listening, through design workshops, there's all kinds of things that customer voice can come to embody, but centering it is a process that you can audit the system for its capacity to do.

Responding to needs and eliminating inequity are two very measurable things, right?

So need response is about time and depth of need, right?

Did we meet your needs fast enough, and did we meet all your needs?

Again, those are very measurable things.

And this is also a place where you don't need to reinvent the wheel, right?

Like, what I'm describing in need response is essentially how emergency response systems rate themselves all the time, right?

How fast did the ambulance get there?

Was it stocked with everything you needed in order to make sure that you got to the hospital in time, et cetera, et cetera?

Eliminating inequity, again, you can focus on the population disproportionalities.

Are you still seeing a majority of trans women of color, right?

Like, that's a question that can be asked and answered.

And additionally, right, what's the long-term goal?

I would assert that this is the right one.

It's to end homelessness for everybody permanently, right?

That, as a policy question, right, translates into thoughts about functional zero and other really well, again, like, well-established ways of doing.

Any questions about that?

All right.

So the next recommendation was to consolidate, right?

And I want to be super clear about the image that you're seeing.

It is not an org chart.

This is a functional schematic, right?

So what we did was drill down into what functions need to be managed and then assess what their current management was.

So in this case, what you're seeing is that the first main bucket that we identified was emergency response.

And that's a bucket of work that is about managing the crisis, right?

There are people outside, they need stuff today, we gotta make sure they get that stuff.

Full stop, right?

What that also is as a style of work is a group of people who probably don't have more than a six week horizon.

Right?

Because you are responding to conditions in vivo.

Like, there is no daylight between, like, what you are doing and the current condition of the world.

Right?

That also means that, like, you can't do a lot of long-term planning.

What we found is that when we worked with staff and agencies, they were operating in both an emergency response and planning space.

So that was actually the first functional division that we noted needed to be made.

is the emergency response functions need to be consolidated someplace so that you can actually do rapid response.

And then, and jumping one over, with system performance, we noted that there were a number of planning functions that kind of weren't getting done.

When we talked to staff, they would say, you know, oh, I was at my desk writing the plan for the RFP, and then I got a call from so-and-so, and I needed to go down to blah, blah, blah, and then that can continues ad infinitum, and so you get like poorly done or poorly executed strategies in both emergency response and long-term system planning.

Not because staff are bad at their jobs, but because they aren't in a role that makes sense, and I want to be super clear about that.

This is about role delineation.

And finally what I would say is also when you ask a system planning person who is used to thinking in sweeps of time of 5, 10, 20 years, right, to suddenly manage down into an emergency response function, they don't do it well and they're probably pretty unhappy.

Conversely, there are some people who are like, you know what, I want to fly by the seat of my pants, I really want to engage and in the moment problem solving, that's where I thrive.

And when someone puts me at a desk and says plan for the next ten years, I actually don't know how to do it and I'm pretty unhappy.

So there are a lot of operational considerations here.

if implemented, could really impact the ability of staff to come to work, know what they were doing, and do it well and be happy about it.

We also noted that housing for people experiencing homelessness was not accounted for in a single place.

And I want to be super clear about this, because it's very important to note that in consolidation efforts across the country, where they have gone poorly, it's because housing isn't accounted for.

So what often happens is all the services are consolidated, which is a start.

But the goal is housing, right?

And so when you just consolidate services, you don't actually create a pipeline.

You create kind of like a lap pool.

Like, people can come in one side.

That's very clear.

But the exit strategy, who is keeping track of how much housing, where, right, for this population isn't necessarily being managed.

In this community, what we recommended, and this is in the report, but just to be clear, is that we delineate between service dollars and capital dollars.

We are really, really trying to make the necessary and sufficient separations, right?

Not just the wholesale, like grab a thing and move it just because, right?

In this instance, what we found is that the way the capital dollars are currently being managed.

You're getting a lot of bang for your buck there.

And stitching the service dollars to a consolidated authority creates the necessary joint where the planning function of, again, how much housing and for who, which is often dependent on the services, right?

So permanent supportive housing is service attached, right?

That can be done efficiently by only focusing on those dollars and not trying to move the entirety of capital deployment.

System performance, again, would note is just about long-term planning, right?

That's about, like, what are we doing in five years?

What are we doing in ten years?

How are we making sure that we're building those skids and managing them appropriately?

It's also the place where you run your RFP process, where you, like, do the mechanics of an organization that distributes funding.

community impact, these were a set of tasks that we found people were doing in like .2% of their time or like on the weekend.

So oftentimes in interviews with staff, what we would ask is, what do you do that's important that you don't have time to do?

And what folks said was like, oh I talk to the community, I plan communications plans, I think about public-private partnership, like things that are really important but were being like sort of cut up and moved into like the last second of the day.

We wanted to call that out as a necessary vertical, right, like that's a thing that needs to get done.

It's also the place where you can begin to see hinge functions to larger systems.

So prevention, for example, can sit here.

Because when you prevent homelessness, what you're talking about is stable, healthy, vibrant communities that have the resiliency to absorb a member in crisis.

That is everybody's job, not just the job of one system.

So you begin to think of community impact as the place where these really important partnerships that are ill-defined right now, come to live in much more robust ways.

An ombudsperson was a function that we identified.

Yes.

Just really quickly before you move on, Council Member Sawant, did you have a quick question on this?

Thank you, Council Member Mosqueda.

I did have several points on this, but just to start with two, I guess, questions I had.

One is, you mentioned that obviously there are two separate functions.

One is emergency response and one is planning for long-term way of addressing and obviously and that would obviously go into permanent housing options.

Those are two separate functions and I totally agree with you that they're equally important.

I mean the people who are homeless today absolutely need emotional and other support today.

And that is not and should not be in conflict with long-term priorities for housing.

And I think we as a society, especially in wealthy cities like LA and Seattle, we should get to the point where we are capable of addressing both immediately.

But you seem to emphasize the problems with holding both of those together in terms of role delineation as far as the human service providers are concerned.

I'm totally open to that, you know, that there's a lot of room for delineating the roles much more carefully and streamlining the process much more than it is now.

I'm totally open to all of that.

But don't you think that the main problem that the human services providers face overall and in terms of differentiating between how much to focus on emergency response, how much to focus on the planning, and especially going towards permanent housing is the resource question.

And so I want to hear from you, because you've done this in-depth study, what you have to say about the resources question.

And I appreciate you being very honest and clarifying that, you know, at the very outset that this is not a solution to the funding crisis, and I appreciate that.

Still, I think it is important to focus on that nonetheless because we don't want I mean, we have various forces stacked against us.

You saw how the Amazon tax was repealed because of big business pressure and threats.

We don't want this report to end up being unwittingly used in a way where it's not emphasized that ultimately the overarching question is resources.

I mean, that's my view.

I want to hear what you think.

That's one question.

Can we just pause real quick there just to get a response to that one?

Sure.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So on resources, I would say a couple things.

And not to be funny, I think it's important to delineate what you mean when you say resources, right?

Because if resource is just the sheer amount of money being spent, then it becomes the subsidiary question of on what, right?

So is it capital resources for the development of housing?

Is it staffing resources to, you know, more robustly staff or just up the pay for folks doing the responding, right?

I think our team would argue that both are necessary.

It's also really important to note, and I just want to be clear, and again, not to be funny, that when we talk about the investment of capital resources necessary to respond to the crisis that this community is facing, where by rough approximation, you have probably region-wide about 40,000 people experiencing homelessness, what that means is that from a housing development perspective, it will be years before you are able to house all those people.

To pivot resources and to scale resources appropriately means to think both about what needs to go into capital for the development of housing and what is going out in terms of services to make sure that people are not quite literally dying outside.

And I think that when we talk about resources and resource allocation, I think it's really important to have that clear delineation in mind first.

Secondly, I would say, and this will come later, but in relationship to a number of the findings around health and health needs and behavioral health and in relationship to the clear work that we are a language we heard from customers about the need for emotional support.

I think our team has really developed a different understanding about what frontline staffing needs to look like in terms of what are those job descriptions?

What are those roles?

What are people actually able to do?

And then what are they compensated?

And what is the, frankly, management support that is needed for people not to burn out in those roles?

So I want to say Yes, resourcing is a problem, but I can't stop at just saying it's resources writ large.

I have to then drill down into all these other facets.

I just, I appreciate all your responses, but you're saying I cannot just stop at resources question, but you're not even talking about the resources question.

That's my main problem here.

I really don't agree that the emphasis of any report should be that somehow consolidation and efficiency will solve the problem.

You yourself said that will not solve the problem.

It will make A dent, yes.

I'm not quoting you.

You didn't say dent, but you said it will make a difference.

And I am not an expert, and I am open to the idea legitimately that there is going to be a difference if we consolidate.

I totally agree.

I do have a problem with you saying, well, I cannot stop by talking about resources because you're not even talking about resources.

Nobody's talking about stopping at resources.

We do have to talk about everything, all of them.

And I agree that it's a complex problem.

But if you don't talk about the question of resources, of course, capital resources, staffing resources, all of that.

But overall, we're talking about financial resources.

And I don't remember if you said this.

And if you didn't, I apologize for misquoting you.

But I think you said, like, is it a question of throwing money at it?

think that we should be using that terminology.

That is a terminology of people and entities who are opposed to any kind of actual improvement in homeless services and affordable housing.

It is a question of money.

I mean, look at the amount of resources that is spent on the children of rich people.

It is absolutely a question of money, and it is a question of resources, and a lot of the service providers are struggling because they don't have enough resources, not because, as you said correctly, not because they don't know how to do their job, And so I think that while you are correct in emphasizing the question of consolidation, defragmentation and all of that, I do think ultimately the question of resources and funding should be emphasized.

And I also find it troubling that you say it will be years before people are housed.

Well, that's with the assumption that no dent will be made in the funding question.

I don't accept that.

I'm going to thank you for your points well taken.

That is the main question.

I'm going to thank you for your points well taken on resources, and I know we're going to get into this a little bit more.

I do want to keep us moving, and after conferring with the co-chairs, I'd like to keep us going through this, because I know there's going to be a number of questions.

Council Member Harrell, I think you were also interested in speaking, so if I could get us through the rest of the slides, and then we'll have about 10, 15 minutes for questions, if that sounds okay with you.

Okay.

Thank you.

But just clarification on the slides.

Number one, welcome to Seattle.

And I'm interested in the model because my discussion on resources has to be based on a model that works.

And so I appreciate you taking the time to sort of walk us through this.

My question is, this sort of model that is a very comprehensive approach, you start with emergency response.

We got a little snagged on questions on system performance.

a city department, or is this city, county, and state?

Can you put this in the context of the regional approach, if it is one, or is this just what the city of Seattle should be looking at?

I was just a little confused.

And then, with that, perhaps we can go on to the model.

Thank you.

Thanks for a little...

Leeway there, Chair.

You're welcome, Mr. President.

I had one question.

I had to lobby to get that one out.

Thank you.

What's being presented is a consolidated regional authority.

So this would be merging the resources and functions of first, again, the City of Seattle and King County to be able to administer these functions region-wide.

Thank you.

Bud's person, just to finish up this slide, that function is about being able to respond to the needs of people outside, right?

So what we heard over and over and over again is when people experience a lack of safety in a shelter or in a service provider, something is stolen, there's an assault, there's whatever, they don't have anyone to call.

They're disincentivized from calling the police and the only other option is to then call the service providers, right, to call the to complain to the shelter staff, essentially, who are disincentivized to engage with that complaint in the way that it really ought to be.

Again, this is not saying that people are bad people.

It's saying that it's literally a question of incentives.

When we spoke with folks, what they asked for again and again was accountability, that there be some accountability embedded in the system.

This essentially serves as a vertical where someone could call, text, send an email, go online, whatever, to say like, hey, this is what's happening.

Like, my stuff has been stolen the last four times I've been here, so I don't go there anymore, right?

Two things are really important about this.

One, overall accountability is important.

Two, the level of crisis is too significant to have people declining to be inside because of any concern, right?

It is not acceptable.

Those issues must be managed.

And it's not about blame, right?

This function is not a function where it's like, oh, I hear that Tess's shelter has had three incidents of theft.

So I call Tess and say, I'm shutting your shelter down.

Because that doesn't work either in this context, right?

The question is, how can I support you, right?

Like, what do you need in order to have a plan about this so that people are, again, able to come here and feel safe and feel listened to, et cetera.

And, right, what we also heard from folks on a number of the consumer advisory groups is, like, there needs to be follow-up, right?

Like, somebody has to, like, call me back, text me back, email me back, whatever, and say, like, this was dealt with.

That, again, is just a body of work that needs to live someplace and currently doesn't.

Operations is important, so we put it up there.

And then equity and innovation are cross-functional teams.

So that chief of staff is really a placeholder, simply to say that coming off of a director's office, there need to be teams that are focused on implementing equity-based strategies across all buckets of work.

And then also an innovation team.

And when we talk about innovation, we don't just mean like, you know, this is a good idea.

These are multidisciplinary teams that run short sprints on nested problems, right?

That it isn't really anybody's job to solve per se, but need to be solved in order for the overall health of the system.

I want to be really clear that again, this is not an org chart.

So like, we took a path of turning this into something organizational and came up with something like this.

Nobody has ratified this, but just want to be really clear, don't try to give all those verticals in those way to people.

It'll overwhelm somebody.

Mark, I'm sorry to interrupt.

Before you move on.

And I know we're running out of time here, but I was wondering if you could describe using the previous charts where potentially council members would sit inside that.

Sure.

So we proposed a board.

as agencies need, right?

And in that space, I think that the conversation, although this is certainly not our conversation to have, is about what representation both the county and the city of Seattle have on that board.

both in their executive office powers and in their legislative powers.

So wanna be, thank you for pointing this out, wanna be clear that the goal here is not to create like, this is the rogue agency over here that answers to nobody, right?

But that like, this is about scaling your resources and your capacities to be able to respond to the crisis in your community, which has exceeded the function of either the city or the county in its current scope.

And just as Mark's finishing up his presentation, for the council members this morning, I handed out the Los Angeles Comprehensive Homeless Strategy that has an example of the type of ways in which their council fit into a similar structure just by way of reference so that we could potentially ask questions about how it played out in Los Angeles as well.

Again, that's in here looking at pages 77 and 78.

Okay, accountability to customers.

This is about meaningful accountability through metrics, community engagement, and system-wide responsiveness, which you'll find in this action are building on the work that our team has done and continuing to engage with people, right?

So that it becomes routine, that it's circular, meaning like someone tells you something and then you do it and you go back and tell them that you did it, right?

that metrics need to be in alignment, not just, this is really important, not just with what we want to see sitting around tables like this, but what people experiencing homelessness, what customers say they want to experience as an outcome, and what frontline staff say that they should be like, measured on, right?

So we heard a lot, a lot, a lot from people who are responsible for, again, for delivering these interventions who said, like, look, like, if you want to, you know, judge me on something, like, not saying I don't want to be held accountable, but, like, these are not the right things, right?

Potential metrics that folks lifted up were, like, retention, right?

So, like, it's not, like, the number of times I get you an ID, it's that you keep coming back to me, right?

right, as opposed to other folks.

So thinking about, like, what are the ways to craft these kinds of metrics, because what you have in place now, just to be clear, are a number of process metrics, right?

So you count things like the number of times someone gets an ID, when really, it should, our goal is one time.

Like we get a person the thing they need and then we help them secure it and keep it.

So there are other things that are more indicative of performance than just like how often did you X, right?

I think that's very important.

Prioritizing economic stability, this is the ugliest graphic in this presentation, I apologize, I did it myself.

So, which is a lesson, don't do things that you shouldn't do.

But system diagrams are never pretty.

What this is essentially expressing is that on any given day, the population experiencing homelessness in that golden box in the center is a discrete number, right?

What we look at in systems is flow through.

So there's inflow into that and then outflow.

What is complicating that is bounce back.

And to the question of resources, right?

Scaling means understanding flow through any system, right?

Like, what can you do with x gives you an idea of what you could do with y.

That's not a possible, that you can't answer that question right now.

In part because the significant amount of bounce back into the population experiencing homelessness from folks who have theoretically been exited.

What that has to look like, there are a number of suggestions around.

We focus on our economic stability because that's what people said to us was the make or break it, right?

Like you get a time limited voucher and there's not like an employment strategy attached to that.

And so the question then becomes, right, like how, like what's the plan when that voucher runs out?

Additionally, that oftentimes, and this is just a thing that I feel compelled to say while I'm in front of a governing body, we talk about caste transfer because it's really important that as a society we figure that out.

Sometimes the difference between someone experiencing homelessness again or for the first time is $200.

And we just need to figure out how to give people $200.

Not $200 and like umpteen programs, not $200 and like we're gonna follow you for 10 years.

You just need your $200 and I actually don't need to know what for, right?

This is one of the few places where successful execution of this strategy saves you money, even if you're wrong most of the time.

So let's say you give 10 families $200, and only one of those families actually was going to experience homelessness.

Currently, a family in any system nationally costs at least $20,000 a year to support.

So this is literally one of the few places in public policy where you can be wrong nine times out of 10 and still be doing better than our current operating mode.

Customer controlled digital identity, so this is the digital transformation action.

This is, I'm not going to go into the specifics on this one, in part because they exceed some of my technical expertise.

I'm an anthropologist, not a tech person.

But identified a lot that needed to be done with regard to data.

And when we say data, we don't mean, like, let's get a better app in place to, like, count people.

We're talking about, like, data warehousing, data pooling, cloud storage, integrating some of the best standards that emerged in affordable health, I'm sorry, accountable, woo, ACA.

Why am I blanking on the ACA?

Like, I'm so used to government, I'm just ACA.

Thank you.

Affordable Care Act?

Yeah, there we go.

But in the Affordable Care Act implementation, ACA, I try to like not do acronyms, especially like, you know, but in Affordable Care Act implementation, right, we did patient-centered medical homes and electronic health records.

That work, right, essentially lays the ground for what we're trying to do here, which is say like people can control their own data and they should only have to tell you something once.

So if I go to Tess and give her the information about my whatever, and then later on I'm going to Deputy Mayor Mosley, I should just be able to say, I've sent this to Tess and I give you permission to access that file.

And we have that technology, we just need to deploy it in this space.

Related, we need to redesign intake.

So what we heard from folks was, oh my gosh, please don't ask me these questions anymore, right?

It's repetitive, it's dehumanizing, it's re-traumatizing, and often not connected with what they're there to get, right?

So if I come to a place to do laundry and you ask me about my childhood trauma, it doesn't make sense, right?

And oftentimes, providers are like, I don't even have a therapist on staff.

So, like, if someone told me all this information, I don't know per se what I'd be doing with it.

We need to make sure that people are asking the right questions at the right time and connected to a data backbone that says, like, look, say that Tess's agency hires a therapist, right?

Then all they need to do is go to the regional authority and say, we now have this capacity.

Please give us access to this data, right?

That, again, is just, again, things are reinforcing.

So you can't actually set standards around things like, this is technical, around metadata and the sharing of that data without the regional authority capacity around policy setting.

This is audio from a person.

And I've heard about it, but they have like, I don't know their program.

I don't know what I have to sign up for or what.

And nothing's automatic and they don't do an orientation.

So if someone doesn't tell me, I don't know.

And I'm like, really?

So now I can't do laundry because of this, this, or this?

Like, why didn't they tell me when I walked in the door?

Why did they assume I knew?

So I went back the next day, and I saw my counselor and said, you know, why didn't you tell me about that?

So again, I try to include as much, the report is fully interactive, would encourage everyone to go to it.

The stuff that I'm sitting here saying is the voices of people and just want to include some of that where possible.

Development of new health and behavioral health resources and programs, so what we found is that the level of need in the community with regard to health is so acute that it's not possible for the current system to respond, right?

So what that means, and just to give an example from my life, I started many moons ago on the Lower East Side of New York City in a methadone to abstinence clinic for like four months.

And in that time, when someone experiencing homelessness came in, if we had 21 beds and they were in the 21st, 20 beds weren't getting the attention they needed.

And that wasn't because no one knew how to manage that case.

It's that we were in our 20s.

and didn't know how to do that.

It requires a level of clinical understanding of how to manage all of those different competing needs that you just need to be able to staff for.

This bucket of work is very exciting because it's mostly about Medicaid reimbursability, which I know is super fun and everyone likes to spend a lot of time on.

But I will say that a lot of the funding for this is really about connecting to existing funding structures, and so it's about building the billing muscle at providers, which is a significant body of work.

I don't want to underplay that.

But it is just like medical billing is the thing you get certified in, right?

Like that's the work here.

I believe there's audio on this slide as well.

The institutions you know of that are keeping and perpetuating homelessness when you think about it.

The mental health system.

The mental health system.

Homelessness comes with.

One of the problems I noticed working with a lot of homeless people who have a lot of mental health issues is that the mental health

Care that they're receiving is not as high-caliber as, say, the mental health care that I can afford.

The doctors are overwhelmed.

The therapists are burnt out.

I think they pay $15 an hour, and they cap after three years.

What person with a mental health, MHP, or a master's degree is going to stay there for very long?

So turnover is a huge way that disrupts the lives of folks.

So again, I would just note that we do need to think about paying people more and staffing differently.

So funding alignment, this is about public-private partnership.

So again, this is a community that has significant philanthropic and private funding flowing into it.

It isn't set to the same metrics.

It's not flowing through a community-wide alignment.

So this is where a shared theory of change really rolls out across more than the public sector, right?

Buy-in from everybody into this is why we do this means that like if I have a project that I want to launch about vets, I can still launch that project, it just now is in alignment.

Goal is always housing.

It's just like really important to say that again and again and again and again.

What we identified in our report were a number of strategies for housing for people experiencing homelessness, which it's important to note is different from housing, right?

So we capped that at 30% AMI, right?

So it's zero to 30% AMI, permanent supportive housing, et cetera.

It's really critical that we have that conversation not in connection with all of the other housing development that needs to happen, which is not to say that 80% AMA housing isn't important.

It's just not for this population, right?

And so we just need to be very clear about that.

We also identified a number of strategies to shift the deployment of capital dollars so where you're building new permanent structures towards housing and not investing in the building of temporary solutions, right?

Which is to say that from our perspective, building a new shelter isn't necessarily a good use of capital dollars, right?

That especially in a crisis of this magnitude, new stuff needs to be permanent in its scope.

That doesn't mean, and I want to be very clear about this, that you slow down on opening shelters.

It simply means you shift the strategy, right?

So it becomes about identifying underutilized space, and figuring out how can you open temporary shelter rapidly, and not always thinking that the new shelter has to house 700 people, right?

20 people inside is 20 people inside, and there are underutilized spaces all over the county that could house 20 people, right?

You do that a hundred times, that's a lot of people.

So that, I think, needs to be the strategy shift in terms of thinking about how to accelerate both permanent solution development and simultaneously not taking your foot off the gas on making sure that people have someplace safe and dry to go tonight.

The last thing is alignment.

So in everything that was not suggested for consolidation, which were a number of things, and I want to be, again, very clear that this is an exercise in necessary and sufficient.

So not just like, let's take everything and give it to the homeless services sector, right?

But to say, what are the things that are actually necessary to govern well, to execute appropriately, And for the things that need to remain outside for good structural reasons but are connected, how do we engineer long-term alignment?

What we found is that a lot of the work in this community is personality dependent and informal.

So people have been working together for 20 years, and they go to the meetings, and they make the decisions.

And I think that's really great.

I think it's a testament to the work that you do as a community.

As a systems designer, it's not sustainable.

Because one day, someone will have your job, and they won't be as nice.

And so we just need to be thinking about that, right?

When someone occupies Tessa's role, and you're just right there.

When someone occupies Tessa's role, and they're not as experienced, don't come with 30 years of doing housing and community development.

How do I make sure that the decision point that TESS oversees is still structured in the same way, still has the same inputs?

And that is just about executing MOUs, right?

Long-term, stable, legal-binding relationships that say, this is how we make this choice.

We'll note, again, that this is all online, and I really encourage people to go look at it.

It is a lot, a lot, a lot of work done by a lot of people.

So I sit in front of rooms and talk all of the time.

It's a huge part of my job.

But there were a tremendous number of staff at our shop and in this community that contributed to this work.

A quick note just to see all their wonderful faces.

This is the team from the lab and some of our core partners that did this work.

And so just want to note again, well not again, I don't think I said this.

In doing this work, we contributed a significant amount of capital beyond what was contracted for.

And I'm not saying that for bragging points, but I am saying that we are committed to this community's success and staffed in order to execute on this work in a way that was reflective of that.

So thank you for your time.

Thank you, Mark.

Co-chair Bagshaw.

Thank you, Mark.

Thank you and your team.

I am very impressed with the work that you've done and I want to know maybe this is a question for Deputy Mayor Mosley.

Will he be around?

Will Mark stay with us for the next few months?

We are working on a scope of services for Mark to continue to work on the implementation phase of where we're going with this.

Great.

And I know that today we wanted to stay high level and not dive into what does implementation look like, but I would just like to say my hope is that we can find, as we're doing all these 10 things that Mark is saying, that we can get started on some things right away and not wait for a whole whether it is a new body, whether it is a PDA, whatever it is that you're looking at, rather than saying we're not going to do anything until we get that regional governance structure together, I'd like to be able to make sure we're doing on parallel paths so we can take some of the low-hanging things that we can accomplish or simply be able to get more people inside and be able to count the right things.

And I am totally dedicated here to make that happen.

That's our approach as well.

Great.

Thank you, Councilmember Baxhaw.

Councilmember Johnson.

Thanks.

Just briefly, Mark, I want to start by saying it's nice to hear somebody echo what we've been hearing from service providers.

I think one of the first conversations I had after I got elected was with a local faith leader who said, I've got an overnight shelter that I can't staff.

And if I just had one additional staffer, you'd have an extra 20 beds every night, 365 days a year.

So the idea that we are focused on capacity that is interim and stay focused on capital investments that are gonna be long term, I think is really valuable.

My question is really about timing, and the kinds of changes contemplated here have a lot to do with really the institutions of this government, other governments, and a whole lot of other things around funding, measurement, realignment of several different departments.

By necessity, we want to set up a system that will be successful, but will also require a whole lot of time and attention from us as a body in order to make sure that we're feeling like we've got all those ducks in a row.

So I wonder what happens next.

I can only speak to part of that, which is...

and would defer to the Deputy Mayor and Tess on specifics.

But from our perspective, again, we see a lot of this work as parallel and sequential, right?

Which also speaks to Council Member Bagshaw's point that like not everything has to wait, right?

I also would say that part of that community-wide commitment is continuing to engage in a thoughtful process that gets all of you, as a region, to a place where you're like, this is the commitment we're making to this solution.

And I think from your own work on the housing task force, I know that this is a thing, and interactions with the previous members of your staff, I know that this is a thing that you care deeply about.

And I think that It is possible to execute quickly and in an inclusive way if you lean into having, I think quite frankly, some uncomfortable conversations about decision-making authority and power and things that really matter and are real and need to be surfaced explicitly early on and put to bed.

But that would just be our recommendation on how to do that.

Thank you.

Council Member, if I could, not last Saturday, but the Saturday before last, Mark and their team and Tess and a number of people who are partners in this work spent most of the day on Saturday talking exactly about that implementation plan.

What are the next steps we need to start doing?

So that is being put together now based on the conversations that happened.

two Saturdays ago, and we will bring that back to the council for your consideration about that.

But we are absolutely dedicated to getting both of the functions and the structure up and operational as quickly as possible.

Sure.

Thank you very much, Deputy Mayor Mosley.

Many of us have been interested in figuring out what the implementation structure looks like on the council's behalf as well, and you and I had a quick second to chat about it.

But we will, I think, be interested in meeting with every single council member to talk more about what this implementation plan looks like, making sure that the council has a role and fingerprints in the implementation strategy.

and rolling that out collectively with you as some form of a path forward.

So I think a lot of conversations are still yet to be had, but more to come on that from the council's end as well, working with you and the mayor's office.

Thank you for that.

I know that there's a few other comments over here.

I just wanted to, since we're going down this way, maybe I'll take a quick second.

for the chair's prerogative to say thank you as well for your emphasis on needing to place funding into capital and workforce.

What I think we've struggled with in the last year is recognizing that the folks that are on the ground level at our shelters providing permanent supportive housing are often dealing with 30 and 40 percent turnover rates and the stress that accompanies such high levels of vacancies and turnover is causing complications for those experiencing homelessness.

So one of my real interests is trying to figure out how we continue to fold in your information into what we've been hearing directly from the service providers, which we will hear from in a few moments, and also directly into housing projects.

And when I say housing, I mean affordable, permanent supportive housing, one, two, three bedroom units, and not just a mat on the floor or even a 24-7 shelter.

That's one of the priorities that we have been advancing more and more of.

So I see Office of Housing and HSD in the audience.

I'm looking forward to that conversation around capital projects.

I also think, to use your words, we have a conversation that may be uncomfortable, but you encourage us to have uncomfortable conversations.

And I think one of those will be around the navigation team and how navigation services, picking up garbage, moving folks from corner to corner, how that actually fits in with the dollars that we need to go into capital construction projects.

and to I think many of the council members points earlier council members to want commented on revenue on what this means for our overall need to continue to generate progressive revenue which we have not yet done but I think your report along with the McKinsey report from the Chamber of Commerce last year really underscores We have hundreds of millions of dollars that we're lacking in this city alone and twice that amount in our region.

So thank you for your comprehensive report and I know it's interactive.

So we have a slide that is your last one that shows how you can scroll through it.

I hope people have the chance to do that.

Looking this way, any other comments from our council members?

Council members to what?

I think you're the last one.

Go ahead.

Thank you.

So, first of all, I really appreciate you, Mark, for including the audio that sort of made it very palpable that when you have workers who are not paid, equivalent to the services that they're providing that you inevitably have turnover and these are individuals who have invested a lot in their own personal education and training and so on and it's difficult for them to make ends meet.

I think it's important to point out that $15 an hour has been, you know, starting with Seattle as the first major city, but before that SeaTac has been a hard-fought victory, but it's a minimum.

We believe that workers who are providing human services, workers who are providing emergency services like the EMTs employed by AMR should be paid far more than that.

So I really appreciate including that because that's a concrete question on the question of funding.

It's not only funding for housing, funding for immediate services, but it's also funding in order to make sure that the service providers on the ground are paid in such a way that they are able to actually sustain themselves in those jobs and there's some sort of continuity and it's not impacted so much by turnover.

So I really think that that's the overarching question.

And as Council Member Mosqueda, you said the Chamber of Commerce's own report talked about the overarching need for funding overall, but specifically the emphasis in that report was the need for permanently affordable housing.

This is housing that's not going to be subject to the vagaries of the market.

It has to be publicly owned housing units, and they have to be not just for single individuals, but have to be able to accommodate different family sizes and extended families and so on.

Yeah, and I also wanted to echo what was just mentioned in terms of, you know, when we say navigation, I think we should make a differentiation between garbage collection and essential services that everybody needs, homeless people also need.

And that versus the sweeping of homeless people, which doesn't really achieve anything other than introducing even more instability in the lives of homeless people.

So I think those are things that we should be emphasizing.

And my next point is not so much directed to the staff members here and the people who have authored this report, which of course I thank them for their work, but more for elected officials.

I completely agree, you know, whatever consolidation and defragmentation we can achieve, whatever elimination of duplicated work, whatever actual efficiencies we can achieve through this regional approach to governance, we should absolutely be advocating for, but I think the question that we have to deal with concretely, and this is a question for the public in Seattle and for elected officials, is how do we incorporate accountability of elected officials and politicians?

We don't want this to be used in a way that deflects away from the accountability of the highest order.

I mean, this is the City Council, the Mayor, the King County Executive, the King County Council.

These are people who have been elected with the mandate of solving this problem in the region.

And ultimately, whether we do it citywide and, you know, sort of individual governance bodies, or we do it regionally, ultimately the question should be about accountability of elected officials to voters.

And then the other thing has to be, of course, and I'm sort of repeating myself, but I just wanted to say this because I feel like this should be the emphasis, ultimately the overarching emphasis for us notwithstanding the legitimacy of the reports and so on, should be related to funding and the question of resources.

Because with all of this being done, it still does not address the main question that we have to address.

Well, thank you so much.

I know this is just the beginning of the conversation.

We look forward to working with you as we talk about the implementation plan and look forward to the being involved in those discussions going forward.

Your team is huge.

And thank you for coming coast to coast to help us out with this.

And we look forward to that future conversation that you're working on the contract.

Tess, again, thank you for your service in this new role.

I know a lot of us are interested in what your new role will be.

And to central staff, thank you guys for being here.

You're welcome to stay at the table if you want.

We, I think, are going to transition to our second panel, which gets really into the Council President's question around what does this governance structure potentially look like if we were to look at the model out of Los Angeles.

So let's have Farideh, if you could read into The record our second item of business and while you're doing that christine if you could join us at the table, that'd be wonderful Agenda item two ending homelessness in los angeles for a briefing and discussion Thank you.

And as I mentioned this morning at council briefing, we do have this comprehensive report.

It's actually called the comprehensive homeless strategy That I believe was produced in 2016 From the city of los angeles and we have pulled for the council members the specific chapter on governance and governance consolidation.

I believe it's chapter six.

So some of the questions that the council were just asking about the role in which their city council had in the new governance structure could potentially be addressed by Christine.

But overall, really interested in your big takeaways from how you brought together a large coalition, who was at the table, and some lessons learned.

Thank you for joining us from Los Angeles.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me, and good morning, council members.

Very happy to be here today from a very rainy Los Angeles, ironically, to join you in sunny Seattle.

That is ironic.

What they say about Seattle is not true, apparently.

So, as the Councilmember said, I'm Christine Margiatta.

I'm now the Executive Director of Social Venture Partners Los Angeles.

What I'll be sharing today is primarily from my time both starting and leading Home for Good, which was a cross-sector, is a cross-sector initiative to end homelessness in Los Angeles County.

Just to provide some context on Los Angeles, I'm sure many of you are familiar with the similarities in our region.

So we, like you, are one county.

We have Los Angeles County.

That county includes eight regions that in many cases dictate the allocation of funding by regions.

We have 88 cities, each of course with its own mayor, its own council, its own set of governance.

And we span 4,000 square miles.

So in many ways, we have much in common with your region.

And when we were starting this work back in 2007, we often looked to communities, Seattle and other similar communities, that had that city-county dynamic as we looked to solutions around this issue.

So just to share some context about what Los Angeles looked like as we were getting started, and I would say this is around the 2009, 2010 timeline, and none of this is to imply that we've solved all of this.

So I'll say that up front.

We've made some great progress in LA, and we still have a long way to go.

So what we were seeing as we scanned the landscape, I was sitting at United Way of Greater LA and doing a scan of the city and county of Los Angeles.

And I'll echo much of what Mark shared in their presentation in terms of where the challenges lie, where they lie in Los Angeles and in many communities around the country that are struggling to solve this issue.

The first is we saw programs versus systems.

So we saw a lot of fantastic efforts coming out of community providers and governmental entities, but we didn't have a cohesive system.

So those efforts were not being leveraged in the ways that they could have.

They were not as effective, nearly as effective as they could have been when we work in concert.

The second is that we were very much managing homelessness.

We wouldn't even use the language of ending homelessness.

We talked about maybe reducing or addressing homelessness.

We didn't use that language.

There was a lack of will for permanent solutions, and we didn't have any clear goals.

And I would say primarily because as a community, I think it's very human to feel that when something, when you believe something isn't achievable, you don't want to put yourself out there as a community.

So I think there was a widespread belief that homelessness was not solvable.

And finally, we had, I would say, smaller scale and very disjointed public resources.

So our city and county were certainly investing in the issue, but not nearly to scale.

And we had significant tension between our city and county governments, and even within our city and county significant tensions, to the point where our city and county sued one another over the issue of homelessness.

just to put ourselves out there at the height of our dysfunction.

Council Member O'Brien?

I don't want to dig too deep in that, but I am curious, is it about like a different, you know, misaligned change theories, or is it personalities, or...

Again, probably all of the above.

I think there was a public pressure at the time to address the issue and both the city and county each thought the other was not doing their job.

So they each sued one another saying, you know.

A good way of deflecting responsibility.

Absolutely.

It was a little bit of this.

You know, fair enough, it's a complex system.

The city held most of, holds most of the capital dollars.

The county holds most of the services dollars.

So each were saying to the other, you're not doing your part.

We'll put our resources in when you put your resources in.

So that was back in the 90s.

I like to think we've progressed a long way since then, fortunately.

But as we were looking at this landscape, What we saw was the opportunity for a real cross-sector collaboration.

So I'll echo what Mark shared in terms of consolidated governance and the power of people working together.

So at the end of 2010, we launched an initiative called Home for Good.

This was powered by United Way and the LA Chamber of Commerce, but was really meant to be what's now referred to as collective impact.

We were a backbone for all for all sectors coming together.

So we had a significant emphasis on philanthropy, business, public sector, provider community, the general public, all coming together and each doing its part in the work to end homelessness.

So we were very clear that each of our roles is different.

It won't look the same for each of us.

And I think that's what led to inaction for so long is that each entity thought they had to have all of the answers.

and solve it all alone to shoulder it all on their back.

And what we tried to put together was literally in this kind of rudimentary graphic that we each have a piece of the puzzle and it can't be done without each of us at the table.

Christine, really quickly, in my conversations with folks in Los Angeles, it does sound like labor unions had a big part in this as well, so I was thinking that they might be in the non-profit category, but I just wanted to call that out because we think about business versus, but it was really a combination of philanthropy, business, unions, non-profits, etc.

Is that correct?

Yes, absolutely.

And my background prior to being at United Way, I was with the labor union and it was, I never dreamed it would be possible that we would all be sitting around the same tables.

That was one of the most striking experiences for me and the most myth-busting experience to sit with the Chamber of Commerce around this issue and to have all of us around the table, including unions, providers, et cetera.

Definitely, thank you.

So I won't go through all of the strategies that we employed.

I'll give three highlights from our journey over the last eight or nine years.

But you'll see in this center what some of our key strategies were.

Again, very much echo the recommendations in Mark's report.

But we focused on how do we bring to bear the resources that we need to solve this problem.

We were launching Home for Good in the aftermath of the economic downturn.

So we were very conscious that at that moment we might not have new resources, but we could do a lot better with what we had.

So we looked at how do we harness those resources.

How do we create a service delivery system that is efficient and effective for the people who are experiencing homelessness?

How do we deliver excellence and quality in terms of the services that are being provided?

And how do we build public and political will, which at the time was quite thin?

So this is our launch day, December 1st, 2010. You'll see the two co-chairs of our business leaders task force and what you can't see in this photo are the number of people sitting behind them who came up to speak throughout the day at this press conference.

We drafted this plan, this Home for Good plan in partnership with the community and with all the sectors that I mentioned, and we asked all of them to step forward and to sign on this day that we launched.

We had all five members of our board of supervisors, the majority of our city council, the mayor of Los Angeles, and many other mayors from key cities across the region, our sheriff, our police chief, heads of philanthropy, heads of major nonprofit providers, so it really was a moment when the community came together and said, we're all in, we're going to do this together.

And our key goals at the time were to end chronic and veteran homelessness by 2016 and to create an end to all homelessness following that.

I apologize if you mentioned this before, but can you talk a little bit about the length of time and the amount of meetings that led you to that day?

Because you didn't just roll out a plan and ask people to stand with you.

No.

Great question.

So we spent about a year partnering with community to both do a scan of best practices in Los Angeles and around the country.

I've shared with Councilmember Mosqueda that I came up here to Seattle to learn from the good work that you all were doing and the partnerships that were happening in your city and county.

We traveled to Denver, to Washington, D.C., all across the country to learn from what was going well in communities across the country, including deeply looking at our own community.

And following that, we crafted this initiative in partnership with community stakeholders.

So at the time, I had, I believe, over 100 one-on-one meetings with people to share our initial thinking, our draft strategies, to have them give feedback and edits to it before we actually rolled it out in December of 2010. So it was a long and very collaborative process with community.

So as we were launching this, we knew that our role could not and should not be just to bring the community together, that it was important that we create some concrete progress on the issue and actually, what a terrible, yeah, I was gonna use a terrible metaphor.

I'm gonna skip that.

You know, you realize that something's coming out of your mouth.

Anyway.

I don't know where that one comes from.

Yes, it caught it before.

So our first undertaking was the Home for Good Funders Collaborative, and this is to the resources point that I brought up earlier.

Our primary focus, to be honest, initially was on the city and county.

having small-scale investments in the issue relative to the scale of resources they had at their disposal, but also a very fractured and disjointed funding mechanism on both sides.

We also noticed and heard a lot of feedback from providers that, including those of us in philanthropy, we were incentivizing toward a multiplicity of outcomes.

So we might all be, you know, there might be ten of us funding the same provider, say an outreach program, but one funder was funding the outcome of how many sandwiches were handed out, another was funding, you know, how many were able to enroll in SSI, and the other might be focused on permanent housing outcomes.

So that provider would say to us, I can't be all of these things to all of you.

Could you all talk to each other about what outcomes you actually want to see us achieve so that we can focus our efforts?

So that was a big part of our focus as well.

We also took a trip to Washington, D.C., and then Secretary Sean Donovan, as much of a good face as we tried to put forward, he said essentially in his much more diplomatic way, I hear you all are a bit of a mess in Los Angeles, and I'm not sure we can continue investing in your community at the scale that we are if you're not able to better collaborate with one another.

So that was a good kick in the pants for us to really focus on this effort of funding.

He was pointing particularly to the fracture between our city and county.

And finally, as I mentioned, coming up here to Seattle and hearing about the good work that was happening through King County and the city of Seattle, leveraging one another's funding and braiding that funding together for impact.

So with that, we launched our Funders Collaborative, which was intended and designed to be a public-private partnership between our philanthropic community, the City of Los Angeles, cities throughout our region, and the County of Los Angeles.

Our vision was a joint request for proposals, a joint RFP that would be released six months after our launch date.

Our goal was that we would bring together $5 million in philanthropic funding and $35 million in city and county funding.

Those were the initial goals that we set.

We were incredibly fortunate to have a challenge grant from the Conrad and Hilton Foundation, who we partnered closely with to design this challenge.

I initially asked them for a dollar-for-dollar match.

I asked them for a million dollars and said, we'll match it dollar-for-dollar, and they gave us the grant award and said, we will be so happy for you to match this 4 to 1. So we instead created that $5 million goal out of their challenge to us, pulled together the $5 million in philanthropic funds, and then approached our public sector partners to say, as long as we have a dollar from the city and a dollar for the county, we'll release this $5 million in funding.

We created a big tent, we invited everyone to the meetings whether they were ready to invest in the collaborative or not.

I'm a big believer in relationship building.

We started each meeting with a question of the day where folks got to know each other around the table as human beings rather than as sometimes warring political and private entities.

So that was a big part of the relationship building in the early days.

And action was really critical.

We had been talking about joint funding for I would say close to a decade at that point.

And setting a timeline was really critical in spurring action, doing something and not waiting for a perfect product, but saying we need to get going and do something.

So happy to share that in that first year, as I mentioned, we had set a goal of $35 million in public funding.

Our public partners came forward with $100 million in resources.

That when that private funding was available to leverage and do things that the government money couldn't, our public partners were so happy and willing to step forward with resources as well.

So in that first year, six months after our start, we were able to release a joint request for proposals for $105 million in public and private resources.

And as you'll see here, that leverage has only grown over time.

This last round of the Funders Collaborative had over $700 million in resources released collaboratively.

You'll see here some of our funding partners, several cities from across the region, as well as our county, and the major philanthropic entities, both corporate and private foundations across the region.

And I included this in case anyone wants to see a full, full list of all the funders who invested.

Ultimately, over the last, I believe it's six years, a $40 million philanthropic investment has leveraged a $1.88 billion public investment.

And that is, again, accumulative over that time.

And most importantly in that is then the people who have been able to move off the streets and into permanent housing.

So you'll see the dark blue line are the direct housing placements that resulted from that funding.

The light blue are the placements that were leveraged through that funding that our funding was blended and leveraged other resources that those providers had available.

to in 2017-2018 enabled us to house as a region over 12,000 people.

So this is one significant effort.

I'll run through two others that were possible through this cross-sector collaboration, and I'll speak to these briefly.

I know there is a coordinated entry here in Seattle as well.

Our coordinated entry system sprung out of what you'll see as the graphic on the left, what was previously a maze that was for most people, not able to be solved if you actually try to solve this maze with a pencil.

You actually can't get to the housing, which as we spoke to people experiencing homelessness and providers on the front lines, this was their visual.

This is how they described the system they were navigating.

And our dream was to create a system that was much more streamlined and equitable for the people experiencing homelessness and the providers working with them.

We designed a system that was built very much from the ground up by providers and people with lived experience of homelessness working together and truly designing and piloting a system that would best facilitate people moving from the streets into housing.

And policymakers, from various public and private entities, listened and worked to clear the path, worked to pass the policies that would enable this system to function well.

So here you see some of our frontline folks briefing policy leaders from throughout the region.

The results of coordinated entry, and again, this is very much a work in progress in Los Angeles.

We have a lot of work to do as we move forward.

But the work has resulted in a dramatic increase in housing for chronically homeless people.

So you'll see a 536% increase in just two years' time of placements of chronically homeless people, which told us that the permanent supportive housing resources that we were building were not being dedicated to the people who needed them most, the people who had the most grave illnesses, who were the most likely to die out on our streets.

We also saw as we looked at, as we looked at this, these results from a racial equity perspective, we also saw that the people who are housed through our coordinated entry system more closely mirror the population out on the streets, that there is, and actually has created some very positive results from that perspective as well.

The other piece that became possible through coordinated entry was comprehensive outreach coverage, which in a community that is 4,000 square miles is a heavy lift.

But what you'll see here is an example of the map of outreach provision in our South Los Angeles region, really looking at how do we ensure coverage of every region.

which is so much more challenging when you have individual providers working independently to serve their mission versus providers coming together across a region to end homelessness in their region.

You start to see this kind of collaboration much more possible when we as funders were incentivizing this kind of outcome.

The third and final piece that I'll mention in terms of efforts that we undertook as a cross-sector collaborative was to increase public and political will.

Again, when we began, public was very skeptical that solving homelessness was possible.

Our elected leaders were hesitant to engage in the issue.

So I applaud your leadership in having these conversations.

These were not conversations that were happening in Los Angeles as we were getting started.

One of the first things we did in 2007, which I'll admit I was skeptical about initially, we started something called HomeWalk, which is a walk to raise awareness and funds to end homelessness.

But really what it served as was a base to mobilize the public toward real solutions.

So the first year in 2007, we kicked off this walk.

It was 7 AM on a Saturday morning.

We didn't know if anyone would show up.

We had 4,000 people come out saying that they they believed ending homelessness was possible.

It still makes me teary-eyed to remember standing on the sidewalk and watching thousands of people walk by and realizing people really do want to solve this issue.

They just want to know what they can do.

So over the last 11 years, 85,000 people have come out for this walk, and that has been day one of the engagement with them.

It's then, you know, that first year, I remember there was a permanent supportive housing site being built in a community called North Hills in Los Angeles.

It was receiving great pushback from the neighbors in that community who didn't want to see that supportive housing built in their neighborhood.

We sorted our home walkers by zip code.

I found the 14 people who lived in North Hills, and we called each of them and said, this solution is being built in your community.

Will you come out and testify in support of it?

And their testimony was some of the most compelling testimony that happened that day at the hearing.

And it did, the project did move forward successfully, not because of the four people who came out and testified, but I like to believe that that certainly made a contribution.

And we've continued that work ever since then.

The council member mentioned the city and county comprehensive strategies.

You have these with you as well.

This was a huge milestone for our community.

The city and county came together to create this comprehensive set of strategies collaboratively in February of 2016. This is now their roadmap for their work both within the city and the county, but also in partnership with one another.

And I believe all of this made possible two measures that passed.

Should I pause here?

No, go ahead and talk about the measures, and then I was thinking maybe we should take some questions for the last five minutes.

Yep, this is the end of it.

So very briefly, in 2016 and 2017, our city and county, respectively, passed two measures by two-thirds vote of our city and county, where our voters voted to tax themselves to fund solutions to homelessness, both through a property tax and a sales tax increase, and both measures passed.

with a significant margin, now bringing in billions of dollars to the region to support solutions.

But none of this would have been possible without the groundswell of public support, as well as elected leaders.

Our city council was critical in shaping the city measure that came forward, not only shaping the measure in collaboration with community, but also championing that with their constituents.

All right.

Can I give one more note?

Absolutely.

Last thing I'll share.

I do want to make a plug for systemic prevention.

So a big part of what spurred my transition out of Home for Good, which continues and has the incredible leadership of Chris Coe at United Way, I became very passionate about systemic prevention after looking at our data.

This is our data line on veteran homelessness, which we were seeking to end by 2016. You'll see here that we were able to reduce it by 59%, but not end it.

So you see we went from 7,000 to 3,000 people.

You might assume there were 5,000 or 6,000 veterans that moved off the streets over those five years.

17,000 veterans were housed over those five years and our count decreased by only 4,000.

So I want to give that as a word of caution and please learn from what we didn't know going into this, which is I think particularly now we're seeing the same thing.

We just had our first decrease in homelessness in four years.

But in one year, 16,500 people moved off the streets, and our count only went down by 3,000.

So if we, as Los Angeles, don't go upstream and look at things like our criminal justice system and our foster care system, as well as affordable housing, as has been mentioned, we'll continue to spin our wheels in terms of what we see out on our streets.

So I want to mention that as a key piece.

And I know Mark talked about this piece as well.

both the programmatic and systemic prevention are such critical pieces of this work.

Christine, this was very impressive.

Thank you for ending on that point as well.

And City of Los Angeles and City of New York saw decreases in the actual number of people living outside and fewer people living outside, I believe, than Seattle.

So we do appreciate that you came to learn from us.

Looking forward to learning from your implementation over the last three years in this effort.

And just by way of reference as well, we talk about Los Angeles having more than 50,000 people living outside, but per capita, it's important for us to remember that Seattle has more people per capita living unsheltered and homeless.

Comments, questions for Christine?

Council Member Baxter.

Thank you.

I really appreciate you coming up.

It's good to hear from you and to learn from your experiences as well.

Can you talk a little bit about your data collection and how data is shared?

Because I know it's something on many of my colleagues who are out here and I want to recognize that we'll be hearing from you too.

It's a big deal, both in terms of being able to identify individuals and what kind of needs they have, and I know Mark talked about this as well, is that we've got to identify the individual and then help what they need.

And it may only be $200 or it may be more, but tracking the data and respecting privacy issues as well.

Yeah, it's a great question.

Most of that now is happening through our coordinated entry system.

So that has become, I hesitate to say a single point of entry because there are a multiplicity of actual entry points, but that is the main place where folks are first engaging with the homeless services system and where caseworkers are seeking to understand what their needs are and then connecting them with the resources that make the most sense for what their needs are.

We do have agreements for sharing of information.

So when someone is, someone's information is entered into the coordinated entry system, they're signing a release of information, if they're willing, where they're not having to repeat that same interview and those same questions over and over again.

So if they're, if the individual is willing to consent to that, then the information is shared across providers, which helps streamline that process significantly.

Just wanted to see if you have a quick comment on the council president's question around the role that city government had in this joint governance structure.

Any lessons learned or things you remember that worked well?

Yeah, it's a great question.

You know, our city council has played a key role in this, and I know very well the complexity of the dynamics between governmental entities, but our city council plays a key oversight role in partnering with our, we have a joint powers authority between the city and county that administers all of our federal funding for homelessness.

They're called LAHSA, the LA Homeless Services Authority.

And they, along with our city mayor, play a key role in both placing members to the commission that oversees that body, and also providing general partnership and oversight to them.

And as I mentioned, was a really key driver of our local measure, our property tax measure that has provided significant resources for capital that are also flowing through multiple bodies in the region.

Thank you.

Council President Harrell, anything else on that?

No, thank you.

Any other questions, comments?

This is very helpful.

Just to correct what I said earlier, it was actually Chapter 5 on governance in your comprehensive report that came from Los Angeles.

So, thank you for providing us with some lessons learned.

As we think about implementing this strategy, as you heard us talk with Deputy Mayor Mosley, I think we are very interested in figuring out what those next steps look like, and we'll be reaching out to you and your colleagues.

I know you're no longer with United Way, now with Social Ventures, but we'll be reaching out to you all to get some ideas for implementation of a resolution.

Will you be here this afternoon, or are you heading back to Los Angeles?

I'm heading back in a couple hours, but I'll be here for the rest of the presentation and for a bit afterwards.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Yes, Council Member Swann, and then we should move on because we've got one more panel.

Yes, I know we're pressed for time.

Just very quickly, and if necessary, I'm happy for you to follow up like offline with my office.

I just wanted to ask this question.

First of all, thank you for that report and clearly you're very passionate about the work.

I appreciate that.

You reported some really impressive numbers in terms of permanent housing, especially with the veterans and so on, and I've not read this in depth yet, so I will go and do that, but I wanted to quickly use this opportunity to ask your opinion on how to sort of make sense of the numbers in the sense that in an article on January 9th, which is just a few days ago, the Seattle Times had an article about the homeless deaths in King County, and that's the main thrust of the article, but At one point, they say, compared with cities where data is compiled, Seattle's homeless deaths are high, although they are dwarfed by Los Angeles, which saw 831 homeless deaths in 2017. Obviously, keeping in mind the per capita aspect of it, proportionality aspect of it, and not to negate the work that you're reporting on in any way, but I just wanted to know your opinion on how should we reconcile this number.

how to reconcile the people who are dying in Los Angeles?

I mean, I would say just a basic rule of thumb, wouldn't it be to first prevent deaths?

Because that's the most extreme consequence of homelessness.

So if we're looking at metrics and deciding that this is a really good model, then how good of a model is it if this is still happening?

So I'm just trying to understand.

Absolutely.

And I would say, I would also point to the fact that 53,000 people are still homeless in Los Angeles as also a testament that we're not anywhere near done.

So I would say two things to that.

And one to be fully transparent are the number of people sleeping on our streets who died this past year actually increased.

to 899 people died on the streets of L.A.

in 2018. So it went up from the number that you just cited.

And I would say, one, to the focus that our region has, through the coordinated entry system, I mentioned the increase in chronically homeless people that were housed through that system.

That is part of the motivation and will to focus on chronically homeless people as we look at our permanent supportive housing resources has been their likelihood of dying on the streets if we don't create more housing and create more housing opportunities.

So that's been a huge focus and a huge increase.

That being said, we have a long way to go.

We have tens of thousands of chronically homeless people out on our streets that are not being housed.

And in my mind, a big part of that is, again, towards this systemic prevention that we are We are overwhelming our system by not going upstream and looking at how we prevent this.

If, you know, nearly 17,000 people moved off the streets last year and yet, you know, you would assume from that there may be something like 14,000 people became homeless.

So, the system is completely overwhelmed and I would say at this point, may not be able to scale much further.

We have to simultaneously go upstream and look to prevent the inflow.

But as I've said, we have a very long way to go.

I'd say our systems have come a long way, but our actual results on the streets need to bear that out in the results we see over the coming years.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Christine, thanks for making the trip and for sharing with us your experience.

Please pass on our appreciation to your entire coalition that continues to meet.

And with this, let's go and move on to our third panel.

Farideh, if you could read into the record item number three, and please, if we can have Daniel, Paul, Colleen, Chloe, Allison, and Sean join us at the table, that'd be great.

And item three, a community panel of local experts for briefing and discussion.

Excellent.

Thank you.

So we've asked some folks who are working as service providers, folks directly with the homeless community, people who are working to prevent people from falling into homelessness to talk exactly about what Christine just mentioned.

Overwhelmed systems and how we look upstream and how your lived experience and your clients' lived experience couples with the recommendations you just heard this afternoon.

And why don't we go ahead and get started.

Daniel, Paul, if we could just start on this end and we'll go down there.

Chloe, do you mind sitting down there just so we can all see you?

You're good.

Is that okay, Chloe, if we move you down that way?

That way we can all look at you when you speak in the microphone.

Okay.

Go ahead.

Yeah, that's it.

Perfect.

I don't know that.

Oh, there we go.

Hi, I'm Daniel Malone with DESC.

Thank you so much for having us speak following those two presentations.

I am inspired by a lot of what they're leading on in Los Angeles, and I'm so glad that that was incorporated into this here today.

Briefly, because I don't think we have much time for any of us, I wanted to make just a couple of key comments about sort of where we go from here.

We have significant recommendations from the consultants about redesigning our system, making changes here.

Some of them are recommendations that I think are familiar, that we have put into different plans over the years, or we've stated them in plans.

I don't know that we've really attempted to carry them out.

A very large difference here is the consolidation of the authority.

And I want to make sure that we don't miss something that the consultants said very clearly, both in their written report and in their remarks today, which is that the different components that they're recommending need to be done in concert, not as a grab bag of individual pick and choose kinds of things.

And so they're quite explicit about the need for significant new resources, especially dedicated to housing for people.

And our experience is that certainly there are more system improvements that can be made and we can benefit from that, but that's going to be around the margins.

We have to have substantial new resources for housing if we're going to have the kind of success that we all need and want here.

And I think the big dilemma before us all is how do we have a commitment to have those resources while we're moving on some of the other components of this?

Because consolidating the resources that we currently have is not a small thing.

It would take a tremendous amount of effort by government partners as well as nonprofits and others who are getting government contracts to deliver these kinds of services.

And it would be a shame if we moved on doing all that work without the simultaneous commitment to having the resources that are going to be needed, as the consultants have said, to actually achieve the aims that we have.

Final comment I'll make is that one of the recommendations is about improving behavioral health and other healthcare approaches to serving these populations.

And I'll note that there's a lot of talk, especially at the state level, both from the governor's budget proposal and by people in the legislature to making great investment improvements in behavioral health.

That is fantastic.

That's much needed.

But we are not going to realize the benefits from all those additional investments if we don't pair them with housing.

And too much of the proposals that have been made so far are really just for the creation of more treatment beds, which are very short-term interventions, quite needed for a lot of people, of course.

But I think it speaks to the idea that many people have that there is some kind of magic treatment car wash we can run people through, and they come out the back end all better, and then we don't have as much to worry about with them.

We don't get the benefits of the treatment that we put people through, oftentimes treatment that's quite expensive when we don't have housing to place people into.

And so all this speaks to the need for significant new resource investments in housing.

And we ought to make sure that there's a commitment to that before we move on the rest of these investment changes as well.

Thank you.

Thank you, Daniel.

Hi, Paul.

Good afternoon.

Paul Ambrose with Plymouth Housing.

And I'm going to probably echo a lot of what Daniel's saying, but a few things about what's going on.

read through the document, I think this new entity, this new design can be very helpful to get the city and county even working better together than they have already.

I think it's really important though that this, whatever this entity is, is given some authority.

My experience over many, many years and going back to like the first 10-year plan on homelessness, I thought we made some really great decisions there.

We had similar people at the table.

We had government.

We had philanthropy.

non-profit leaders.

We made recommendations and then through a process of going through, to be honest with you, city council, county councils, others, they got watered down.

So the authority wasn't really there.

So if we're going to attempt this again, let's set it up the way you want to set it up, but let's make sure they have the authority to make some really clear decisions without a whole lot of interference.

That's just being really blunt.

The other thing is, What was addressed in this report as far as client need I think is really important and I love the fact that they really talked to consumers.

I think though what Daniel mentioned the folks that DESC and Plymouth are providing housing for the severely chronically homeless people with major behavioral health issues, they're not going to talk with somebody, answer a survey.

We get people into housing and they're not talking to us for the first few weeks, you know.

So I'm not sure I want to delve in deeper to make sure we have what the needs of those folks are.

And as Daniel mentioned, those needs are services.

And what happens time and time again is that a client, a resident of ours, will be with a mental health agency in the community.

And that mental health agency is getting funded to provide mental health services, but once they live with us, we're really providing those services.

They're still coming in and helping, but we have folks 24-7.

And we're using other service dollars from the city and the county.

And so I think it's really important as we look at behavioral health especially, even when we're dealing about, talking about the opioid crisis and others, that those dollars really are attached to housing.

And that brings me to my last point I want to make is, I think it's smart to not have the housing capital dollars tied into this new entity.

I think if some of you have been around for a long time, many years ago when housing and services was connected, we separated into two different departments because it's a little bit of two different beasts there.

And the expertise in housing development and knowing how to spend that money wisely and leverage that money is really important to stay separate.

But we want to make sure that, especially around permanent supportive housing, that if this entity is going to have the dollars around support services and operations, that it is tied to those housing dollars.

And that should be a priority.

Because those folks are the most costly on our streets, costing other systems money.

We have capacity among our agencies to do even more.

This last round, we were awarded a project.

We're very grateful.

We have another site sitting there.

So as Councilmember Sawant and others have mentioned, it is a resource issue too.

We have other projects we can start building right now if the dollars were there.

So we don't want to forget about that.

But tying those service dollars to the housing, especially for long-term chronic folks, is really important.

Thanks.

Thank you very much.

Chair Mosqueda?

Oh, very quick.

Yes.

Just a follow-up to that point.

So Paul, are you saying that, I hear you saying that the service dollars should be tied to the housing dollars, permit supportive housing dollars should be tied to the capital.

housing dollars.

But are you also making a comment one way or another of whether or not that function should be part of the regional entity?

Yeah, I think you'll evaluate that.

I think it's good standalone.

Because I think on the capital side, we're talking about family homelessness, individuals.

We're also talking about up to 60% of median, right?

So we're talking about workforce housing.

I think it works really well together.

And I think the Office of Housing, for instance, and the county folks do an excellent job of figuring that out.

I think the question I get asked sometimes when I'm doing a project from those capital folks is, so where are you getting the service and operating dollars from?

And I'll be getting it from the other departments within the city and the county, but we want to make sure as this entity now goes towards the emergency services and the homeless crisis, that there's, that relationship is still there and it's set aside for that.

Thank you.

Let's go try to get all the way through and then we can get some more questions in.

Okay.

Alice and Isinger with the Seattle King County Coalition on Homelessness, and of course, we are not a direct provider of services.

Our member organizations are.

And I support some of the comments and analysis that both Daniel and Paul have just shared.

I really do appreciate that the approach here is to list 10 actions that are indeed integrated.

I think it raises the question and our first set of difficult conversations to really think through.

First of all, stress testing those 10 actions based on an honest assessment of where we are now in this community.

and what positive and negative processes have brought us to this point.

And I think talking about sequencing and implementation are crucial.

I agree with Councilmember Mosqueda that there is an important role for elected officials to play in playing a part in identifying what the implementation is going to be.

Similarly, I think that the collective voices of both people with direct lived experience of homelessness, frontline staff, and advocates really needs to be core to that implementation conversation and to date that hasn't been indicated.

I think one of the tough conversations this community is overdue for is to really talk about what accountability is and what it means.

That has been suggested, actually, by both Mark Jones and the work that his team put together, as well as by the comments that a number of council members have raised.

We are, I believe, something like about 200 supportive homes a year, permanent supportive homes a year, are being funded and created newly in this community.

And I think that Los Angeles has committed to a minimum of 1,000 new permanent supportive homes a year each year for the next 10 years as their starting point.

I think that we have to get very concrete about what those numbers need to be in this community and about the length of time it will take us to get to that point, to secure the resources and the public will and the sustained political commitment.

And I also want to just underscore one more time that these actions do not themselves constitute a plan.

So that is another body of work that really is next before all of us.

You know, there are in this community many individuals and many organizations that have long been committed through multiple processes to doing their best work and to collaborating.

I want to just share one final short example of how even the best of intentions can sometimes have unintended consequences for the people experiencing homelessness and for the systems that are being funded and promoted.

Just as we should not require people to share personal information many, many times over and measure things like how many times someone has gotten an ID card, we should question how it is that people's IDs are lost frequently, including in sweeps that are funded by public dollars.

But we should also not require that people have a clarity card to pee.

And that is actually one of the things that is happening in this community, in our hygiene centers, in part as a result of a desire to centralize and consolidate and track.

So we should be able to question honestly and to come up with better solutions immediately in the course of what we are doing now as we set a course for the future.

Thank you.

Thank you, Allison.

Welcome, Colleen.

Thank you for being here.

Well, good afternoon, everyone.

My name is Colleen Echo-Hawk.

I'm the executive director at Chief Seattle Club.

I'm very grateful to be here, and I just wanted to share something that happened to me on the day before Thanksgiving, when everything was shutting down.

All of our human service agencies were taking a break for the holiday.

I happened to walk out the door.

It was around 5.30 in the evening.

Most of our case managers were gone, and I saw a grandma and a two-year-old.

I'm sorry, a six-year-old.

And I could not resist them.

I said, hey, what's going on?

What's happening?

I found out that they were going to be sleeping outside that night.

They had been sleeping outside for two months.

And I'm very happy to say within about an hour and a half, they were on their way to shelter in an Uber.

And I just bring that forward because One of the things that happened in 2017 was HSD did the new RFP for all the homelessness dollars in the city of Seattle.

At that point in 2018, we saw many native agencies receive a tremendous amount of funding for us, about $3 million.

And that money has made a huge difference.

In 2018, we think about, well, the numbers are coming forward right now, but it should be about, two times amount of Native people were housed in 2018 than were housed in 2017. I bring that forward because that was a hard, hard change.

There's a lot of excitement and worry about that.

But what we've seen is clear results, where we've seen the disproportionality of people of color who have been largely marginalized in the system who are becoming housed.

And that's because there are people of color who are making some of the decisions now.

And I want to just remind us all that change is hard, but that I believe that the change that is proposed today is necessary and is going to be excellent and good, ultimately, for our community.

Is it a perfect plan?

Is it a perfect recommendation?

No.

But do we have the ability to be agile and quick and change?

Yes!

This is a community that knows how to take care of our people if given the opportunity.

So I am here to recommend that we go ahead on these changes as quick as possible, and act like this truly is a crisis, and that this truly is an emergency.

This plan does an excellent job of addressing the race inequity that is inherent with our relatives who are experiencing homelessness.

And I believe that our relatives, our families, our babies, our children deserve every action that we can possibly take, even if it is hard, even if it is difficult, even if it requires tremendous system change.

I'll also remind us that many of these systems are inherently racist.

And it takes courage and bravery to move past these racist systems to see good change on the other side.

So thank you for listening.

Thank you for inviting Native people to be represented at this table.

And I look forward to supporting this plan that Mark and his team have put together so well.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Colleen.

Welcome, Sean.

Thank you, and good afternoon, Council.

Sean VanEyk with Professional and Technical Employees Local 17. We represent a large, a large number of employees at HSD here in the city of Seattle, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today.

I just have two points that I want to make, and I'll be brief.

One is I want to urge the council as we move forward with these considerations to engage stakeholders, including labor and the people on the ground that are actually doing this work.

I appreciate all the effort that went into Mark's research, but I would urge continued engagement with those folks so that there can be real-time changes made impact both the community they're trying to serve and the members that are providing the service.

And I would also urge council to continue to apply RSJ lensing to this process as we move forward.

It's not a set it and forget it situation.

It's a situation that needs continued observation and tweaking as we move forward.

So again, thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you Sean and thanks to your members welcome Chloe.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for having us and including our feedback in this process My name is Chloe Gale.

I'm the co-director of the reach program We provide a lot of street outreach in this region as well as a lot of the criminal justice diversion systems and I'm going to double, quadruple, I think like sextuple, if that's a word, down on the need just to continue to keep the conversation going in terms of the need for resources and housing and that laser focus.

Ironically, we provide outreach.

We don't really provide housing, but that is what I would like this community to continue to fund because what we see for people on the street is they need places to go, period.

And ironically, I also think that while we're talking about creating a more efficient system, and we had some great conversation about why the problems with staff funding have created severe inefficiency as we have more and more workforce turnover and we need to attend to that in terms of resources.

I just want to acknowledge it's incredibly expensive to have a bottleneck and have hundreds and thousands of people trying to force their way through a tiny, tiny portal into two small resources.

So that is incredibly expensive and inefficient as well.

The other thing, a couple more points.

One is I just really want to call out how much I loved the centering of the voice of the customer in this work.

I love the methodology of this project, and I hope that it will continue and grow stronger.

I think we've said a little bit about it is really a challenge sometimes to include some of our most vulnerable communities in that work and that conversation, people with severe behavioral health issues, and our staff, and continue to include all of our providers.

I just want to make sure that this process is inclusive of those voices.

And then my last two points, one is, we spoke a lot, there was a lot of talk about innovation, which was exciting, and I just want to acknowledge that Seattle is a central ground zero for innovation in terms of this work.

And thank you for coming and speaking to that about, you know, LA also has come up here to learn about our work.

So continuing to notice and bring forward the excellent programs that we have and bring them to scale.

And finally, just because our work is really centered on the criminal legal system involvement and the racist institutions that actually are causing our homeless crisis to persist, I just want to make sure that criminal legal interface in this system is called out, particularly around how it affects communities of color and people with behavioral health conditions who are ending up really in inhumane conditions.

Wow, thank you all so very much.

I think it's a disservice to all of us that we don't have more time today, and I think that this hopefully is the beginning of the conversation of including all of you throughout this process.

I know many of you have had a chance to talk to Mark and his team as this report was being generated, but what I hear from you is a hunger to make sure that you're at the table to develop a true plan, taking the recommendations and putting them into action, I think is what we've heard from you.

Are there any other questions or comments

But I do I just wanted to acknowledge all of you at the table.

We've had many times and opportunities to work together I love the fact that you are again here cohesive and we're all talking about the same thing which is people have to have a home in order to get better and I appreciated My colleagues bringing up the fact that the McKinsey report was important, the Eco Northwest report that Vulcan did, same thing.

Looking at the numbers of housing units that we need, way exceed what we can do.

Seattle alone, it's going to take that three-county, four-county approach to really focus on that.

I think as we're going forward, I just want us to be able to say at the same time, yes, all of these ideas are good and we need to bring our partners together to say more housing across the city, across the county, across three counties and four counties.

That's going to mean help from the state as well.

Excellent.

Was there a comment down this way?

I'll just summarize a few of the things that I've heard from you.

Number one is that we've made some investments and we really need to scale up.

In order to scale up, we need revenue.

In order to create stability, we need those dollars to be invested into capital projects so that there can be permanent stability, i.e. housing for folks.

You want us to take the resolutions and actually turn it into a plan, which is something that I know us, the co-chairs have been talking about with our council members.

We really want to create a path forward that includes our key partners like you so that we all have a sense of the next steps and the role in which council will have a part in that.

You want us to act with urgency and really center those experiencing homelessness and those who've been subject to the racism in our existing systems so that we continue to actually create policy change that will be meaningful and lasting by listening to their lived experience and your lived experience and the lived experience of the providers on the ground level.

You want to stay engaged in this process and to have us focus on resources, getting significant resources and putting those into the capital housing projects so that we can create stability and a light at the end of the tunnel.

We are also very hungry for us to really have this concrete conversation around revenue, around creating the dollars that we need, around the intersectionality between healthcare, the criminal justice system, and economic instability.

Again, I'll just emphasize, I want you all to have a role in this as we move forward.

So we'll be bringing to you all on council and to you in community the chance to engage with us as we think about a resolution to implement some of the recommendations that we made.

And whoever said it, it is not a grab bag.

We want all of these items consecutively.

I thank you all for your time.

I know how incredibly busy you are every day trying to house folks and keep folks from falling into homelessness.

So it's an honor to have you here with us today.

Thank you for the time that you put into the research for this report.

And again, this is just the beginning of a conversation.

Our next select committee will be, I believe, chaired by Council Member Sawant and more information coming on that soon.

On behalf of our co-chairs and the council, thank you all for your incredible work.

So much more work to do.

Thank you.

This meeting is adjourned.