Community Economic Development Committee 1/24/20

We're ready?

Okay.

Good afternoon.

The January 24th, 2020 meeting of the Seattle City Council's Community Economic Development Committee will come to order.

It is 2.02 p.m.

I'm Tammy Morales, Chair of the Community Economic Development Committee, and joining me are Council Members Lewis, Peterson, and Juarez.

Sorry, guys.

If there is no objection, well, there is no prior agenda.

We will not adopt a prior agenda, right?

Okay, let's move on.

Thank you for attending our first Community Economic Development Committee.

I want to set this committee up and let everybody know what I hope to do this year.

What I'd really like to do is to answer the question, what is community wealth and how do we build it?

I'm working previously as I did in the South End as a community organizer.

I know that there's a need to make our communities more vibrant, and that means developing assets in such a way that wealth stays in our communities.

It's about focusing on democratizing wealth and resources so that we create resilient local economies.

And we want to ensure that young and old, artists, caregivers, and working class families get to share in the city's prosperity too.

So strategically what I think that means is that we have to be laser focused on stopping displacement, finding a pathway for workforce development for underemployed folks, and including our young people, and supporting community ownership of assets.

So several issues come up for me as I think about the kind of discussions I'd like to have in this committee.

How do we maximize the percentage of jobs in our local economy that exist in locally owned independent businesses?

How do we maximize the diversity of our businesses so that our economy is self-reliant and resilient and it's not just service jobs that we have here?

How do we prioritize spreading and replicating local business models that have outstanding labor and environmental practices?

And how do we identify tools that support community stewardship of land and that can really stop the displacement that's occurring in our city?

So these are the kinds of questions I hope to talk about in this committee throughout the course of the year and move us toward the kind of structural changes that can really start to build community wealth.

And I'm looking forward to hearing from community members, from our departments, and from central staff over the year as we dive deep into how we can achieve this goal.

So I'm going to open it for public comment.

Do we have public comment?

No.

Okay.

Very well.

In that case, I would like to ask our first presenters to come up from the Office of Arts and Culture.

We're going to move on to our items of business.

And just so the committee members know, for the rest of the afternoon, what I want to do is hear presentations from our four departments.

about their 2020 work plans.

And then I've asked each director or the appropriate staff member to join us for a 20-minute discussion after that.

So we'll hear about their priorities, and if we have questions about departmental things, that'll be the time to ask.

And then I'd like to have a brief discussion about the broader community wealth building issue.

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

Office of Arts and Culture, Arts, Overview and Discussion of the 2020 Work Plan, Briefing and Discussion.

Hello, Randy.

If we could ask everyone to introduce themselves before we get started, please.

Yes, we brought a large contingent today.

My name is Randy Engstrom.

I'm the Director of the Office of Arts and Culture.

Erica Lindsey, Communications Manager.

Make sure you're speaking right into the mic so we can hear you.

Thank you.

Calandra Childers, Deputy Director.

Tina LaPadula, the Arts Education Project Manager.

Matthew Richter, Cultural Space Liaison.

Diana Falchuk, Creative Strategies Initiative Manager, a shared position with Office for Civil Rights.

And I'm Alex Rose.

I'm the Creative Economy Advocate, also a shared position with the Office of Film and Music.

Great.

Thank you all for being here.

Thank you for letting us be the very first presentation at the very first meeting of the Community Economic Development Committee.

And I have to say, as we gathered as staff to think about what we wanted to present, we really appreciated the frame of community wealth building, because I think that we envision most of our work being towards that end.

And I think we'll go through that with the staff who actually do that work day to day.

And also, I think we're really excited to have a lot of our partner departments here in the room.

We have shared projects or shared staff with every other group on this committee.

And I think we share our values around diversifying who benefits from our economy and preventing displacement.

I think those are shared priorities across all of our agencies.

So, shout out to my colleagues in the room.

So I'll just give a little bit of background about the office and I'll sort of, and then Erica and I will sort of tag team an introduction to the work plan and then we'll just go through sort of area by area what we're doing.

We'll stay within our allocated time.

Here's a photograph from the Mayor's Arts Awards circa 2018. a bunch of lovely people working hard for you in local government to foster arts and culture and to really view that as a way to accomplish large civic priorities.

We were chartered as a department in 1971 as a Seattle Arts Commission by 34-year-old Mayor Wes Ullman on the precipice of the largest layoff in Boeing's history when they went from 100,000 employees to 40,000.

Somebody asked Wes Ullman why you would charter an arts commission on the heels of the greatest recession in our city's history, and he said, because we have to give people hope.

And I think that that is something that we still hold as a North Star.

We still think that creativity, art, self-expression, and community organizing is a powerful way to pursue solutions to the challenges that face us in a myriad of areas, whether it's around young people, affordability, or living wages.

Do you wanna go to the next slide?

We do that work today, I'll say, before we talk about our statement of racial equity, through a variety of programs.

We'll detail them, but we focus on cultural investments through a variety of strategies.

We focus on investing in our young people.

We have an entire program around space affordability.

We are now in partnership with economic development, very focused on growing an inclusive creative economy for our region.

And we're very focused as a department on racial equity and social justice, both as a through line of all the work that we do and also as a standalone program within our department.

As Randy mentioned, we have a pretty big commitment to racial equity and social justice.

When I first started the office in 2015, we had reached a tipping point, I would say, where it was not just a handful of people who were passionate about the work and also change team potlucks, but it was really the entire office looking at how the initiative really was part of their everyday work.

And in that, Diana Falchuk and Kathy Shea, who's also in our office, worked with our intern Peyton Bordley, and she actually interviewed everyone in the arts office about their work, but also what was important to them, what did racial equity mean to them.

And from those interviews, we have our commitment to racial equity.

It was a beautiful thing that Peyton put together, and I, as a communications person, said, that's great, but if it's going to have an impact, it has to be not just for our office and not just for our staff.

So we went in 2016 and published it, both on American for the Arts and also in Grantmakers in the Arts.

And that actually, I would say, spurred a national, regional, and local conversation that hadn't been the way it had in the past.

Everyone talked about racial equity and social justice as something nice to have, but no one really knew what it meant, and no one really knew how to judge whether or not you were doing a good job.

I would say with this statement that we put out, we were putting ourselves on that stage.

We were putting ourselves out there saying, this is so important to us.

We are making a commitment.

And that's not just words, but it's also throughout our entire program.

So what does that look like?

And for us, I think throughout this presentation, you will see it is deep seated in everything we do, but we're also at that point where a lot of other people are, which is what are the metrics?

What are the measures?

And so those are some of the pieces that we're working really hard on right now.

And I'll just add to the, for the commitment to racial equity, that this was sort of co-signed and supported by the Seattle Arts Commission, a 16-member advisory body that's been with our office for almost 50 years, since we were chartered in 71, and now is also part of the commitment that the Seattle Music Commission has, as they also support our shared work with the Office of Film and Music and Economic Development.

So those two citizen advisory groups who are volunteers of the community are really important in also embedding this work throughout community.

So what are we doing in 2020?

This is, for some of you, probably the first time you'll walk through what all of the work that we do is.

And also, we do want to do this through the lens of community wealth building.

But at a high level, you're going to hear about our cultural investments.

That is the multiple grant funding programs that we run that invest directly in community.

That is the 1% for Art program.

In 1973, we started the second 1% for Art public art program in the country and have increasingly tried to bring an equity focus and a community-centered investment strategy to that work.

and cultural facilities.

We are proud to be the stewards and partners of the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute and Arts at King Street Station, two of our cultural venues where we prioritize and center the work of artists of color.

We also have had a longstanding commitment to young people, and this says creative youth development, which is one part of our office, but really, youth arts is the broad umbrella.

That includes arts education, creative youth development, and career-connected learning, each of which you'll hear about today.

One way that we invest in opportunity is investing in our young people so they're prepared to navigate the economy of today, but more importantly, of tomorrow.

Another area of our focus is around cultural space affordability.

We are the only local arts agency in America that has a cultural space affordability program.

You'll hear about the CAP report, the structure for stability, and a lot of the policy-centered work that is aimed to create long-term affordability in the city.

Our partnership with OED and OFM around the inclusive creative industries work.

Fundamentally, we're asking the question of how do we grow our creative industries while reducing disparities in our creative economy.

It is also captured in this handy dandy report that will be out in a week.

And finally, you know, I think the through line of everything that we do is around racial equity and social justice.

And it's about centering community in the solution building that we're trying to bring to life.

And so we'll talk a little bit about some of that work that Diana and others in the office are leading.

And then we'll have questions.

There's our roadmap for the next 15 minutes.

All right, so I'll get started talking about how we're building community wealth through our cultural investments.

So as Randy said, we do that through our grant-making programs, through our public art program, and then we also have two facilities, the Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute and our brand new facility, Arts at King Street Station.

With our grant-making programs, we've been investing in the community for nearly 50 years.

Next year, we'll be celebrating our 50th anniversary.

And over that period of time, we've invested over $50 million into individual artists, cultural groups, and community groups that are doing creative work out in the community that's available for the public.

You may know this, but the way that we select who receives those grants is through a peer panel review process.

So it's not actually us as staff members who make those selections.

We facilitate and convene these community groups that actually make the recommendations.

So it's knowing that it's really important who is at the decision-making table.

We have really focused on that in the last several years through our racial equity lens and ensuring that the people who are actually in the decision-making roles are the people who can most benefit from these funds.

And I'm really proud to say that in 2019, 92% of our panelists were people of color.

So that's been a pretty dramatic shift over the last probably decade in who is actually at the decision-making table.

Specific to building community wealth, I thought that the Cultural Facilities Fund would probably be very much of interest to this group.

And shout out to Matt Richter, who led a racial equity toolkit on this program several years ago that led to a pretty dramatic change in how we go about the funding program.

So now this fund specifically creates greater access to those who have been inequitably excluded from owning, managing, and leasing property.

And so we have that really explicit focus on how we are distributing funds into the community.

And in the last couple of years, we've made major investments in Earl's Cuts in the Central District, Chief Seattle Club, Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center, the James and Janie Washington Cultural Center, among many others.

We also build community investment through our public art program by engaging with the folks who actually live in the communities in which new public art projects are being created through capital projects.

There's lots of projects going on at any one time, but I thought that the suite of projects that we have going on right now with Seattle Public Utilities in Ballard would be of particular interest.

It's with their new, but it's the Ship Canal Water Quality Project.

And so this is a massive infrastructure project that's happening in that area.

It's building a huge new water tank underground.

And we have a whole art plan that's developing art that will be available above ground for people to experience.

There's both temporary projects and permanent projects.

But what's really interesting among many of these projects is that we have a whole suite of indigenous artists that have been engaged.

So Ryan Feddersen is doing some really interesting temporary projects right now that are actually these rain medallions.

So you can't see them on the sidewalk until it rains.

The last week, you've probably been able to see them quite a bit, but they actually show up when it rains, and they're these beautiful little medallions around the neighborhood.

We're also working with, let's see, Jeffrey Vareggie at the Ballard Pump Station, Preston Singletary, and David Franklin, among others.

We've also had several major installations unveiled earlier this year at the Denny Substation in partnership with Seattle City Light.

And I think all of you had the chance to select artwork for your offices in the last couple of weeks from our Portable Works collection.

So if you haven't, let us know and we'll help get that over to you.

The Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute has been a centerpiece of the community in the Central District for six decades, and we're really proud to help steward what's happening in that space right now and ensure that it continues to be a place where the Black and African American community can gather.

So that is a continuing work there.

And then Arts at King Street Station is our newest space, and it is envisioned as a place where we can actually present work by and from people of color.

We have a community engagement group that actually selects all of the work that happens there.

It's an application process, so anybody can come in and say, I'd like to present my work.

That's reviewed by the community group, and then we're able to help facilitate that happening there.

So Tina Lapadula will be talking about our youth investments.

Thank you.

So what better way to invest in our communities than in the youth in our communities?

Our youth arts team is overseen by Ashraf Hasham, and our team is made up of folks like me overseeing school day initiatives, most especially the Creative Advantage, which is a citywide collective impact initiative that was started about eight years ago.

We're in the seventh year of implementation.

And that is an initiative where, for the first time seven years ago, we did a survey of what is going on in Seattle Public Schools as it relates to arts education.

And what we found out was that race, family income, and home language are the greatest predictors of whether or not your family or your student will be able to attain an arts education in our system.

And that's not right.

The initiative really works hand in hand with Seattle Public Schools and ensures that every school pathway by pathway gets money to support arts partnerships and helps schools plan for how they're going to use their money through a racial equity lens.

So we look at racial equity data school to school, and we talk about where there's gaps and how we can fix those gaps.

And we talk about where there's gaps in the health system and how we can address those.

It's been wildly successful.

By next year, we will be in every single Seattle public school, and we've been rolling out the neighborhoods with the most need first.

But every school will be a Creative Advantage school next year.

We also focus on out-of-school time work, which is really creative youth development work that my friend Christy Wu oversees.

That's through our youth arts grant for out-of-school time for middle and high school students, and for summer and other things.

And we also address...

the work of my colleague Alex Rose, which is about career-connected learning, so going from like sort of high school to college and creative careers in the arts, and how important that is.

So we're trying to address every aspect of an age of young people in Seattle.

This year, for the first time, we got a massive grant from the Vulcan, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, to attend to what students were asking for most, which is ways to celebrate and showcase what they're doing in the arts.

So we're spearheading three regional arts festivals.

The first one is kicking off February 6th, and it's going to be at Chief Sealth High School, but it's open to all the schools in that pathway.

So it's elementary, middle, and high schools.

in that pathway will be performing and exhibiting their work with a huge free family meal with a new SPS chef who's making amazing Latin American food and East African food.

And we're hiring interns from a set of high schoolers to run all the shows and we're paying them to do it.

That'll be the first one.

The second one's at Rainier Beach High School and the third one's gonna be at Franklin.

We're excited to talk to young people and work with young people educate them about the gaps in their own education, and to ask critical questions about how they can ask for more, and that's been working.

Thank you.

I mentioned Matthew Richter, our cultural space liaison.

He's going to walk you through what we have planned for 2020 in the land of cultural space.

Thanks.

Randy mentioned that we're the first city in the United States to invest in a body of work around cultural space, affordability, displacement, and to invest in a staff position.

And as such, there's not a roadmap moving the work forward.

And so we've really sought to source these ideas and these initiatives from community, from the folks who are on the front lines facing these pressures, that being the country's fastest growing large city, has created the folks who are feeling the disproportionate push of those pressures.

We know that they push on more vulnerable communities, on low-income communities, communities of color, and arts communities, harder than the world at large.

One of the first projects to roll out of the body of work was the Arts and Cultural Districts Program.

It was launched at the very end of 2014, beginning of 2015. We have rolled out about a district per year.

There are four districts in the five years that the program has existed.

That is the Capitol Hill Arts District, the Historic Central Area Arts and Cultural District, the Columbia Hillman Arts District, the Uptown Arts and Cultural Coalition, and in process now, and they have been public about community engagement down in Georgetown.

I feel like we can say it out loud, we've been working with Georgetown.

for almost the last year.

It is about a year-long process to establish a district.

There have been about twice as many neighborhoods that have been interested in the program as have been designated in the end.

It's not right for every neighborhood, and so it's intentional that we sort of slow walk the neighborhoods through the process.

They're all also focused on very specific elements of cultural retention in the neighborhoods.

The Capitol Hill Arts District is very specifically about organizational displacement in the Pike Plain neighborhood.

Historic Central Area District is about strengthening and reconnecting black cultural heritage in the neighborhood.

The Uptown District is about supporting the creation of arts workforce housing.

Columbia-Hillman is about guiding the development of the connective tissue between those two neighborhoods, utilizing tools from the CAP report and elsewhere.

And the Georgetown District is about focusing on Georgetown as the neighborhood where things get made.

It's the generative arts district where the work happens.

The next phase of this work is interesting as well.

We've worked with consultant Vivian Phillips, who is former chair of the Arts Commission, to develop a new idea that we're calling the Chamber of Culture.

The Chamber of Culture is what happens when citywide, the leadership of all the districts sit at a table and establish a platform of priorities that impact culturally rich, culturally dense neighborhoods, and what is shared between those, and what can they advocate for and move forward when we aggregate that energy at one table.

And that's work that's in progress now.

There's a report that we'll be publishing later this quarter.

The CAP report is a report that we published in 2017. CAP is the 30 Ideas for the Creation, Activation, and Preservation of Cultural Space.

We brought together our 30 best ideas and to date have moved 14 of those ideas forward.

Without going into the weeds too far on this, a couple of the favorites.

We changed how we designate art galleries in the land use code.

They had been considered assembly spaces, which made it difficult, if not impossible, to put one into an older building.

We now designate them as mercantile spaces, so it's more analogous to putting a shoe store into a retail space than putting a dance club into a retail space.

It makes it possible to put art galleries into older buildings for the first time.

We created an arts permit liaison that we co-funded at SDCI, and that person stewards and shepherds projects that are cultural space related through that difficult-to-manage permitting process.

The heightened density bonuses that we've created, both as parts of rezones and as parts of a new incentive zoning program, seek to incentivize the creation of affordable cultural space in new projects.

Two of the larger projects to come out of that report are listed there as well.

The first is the Build Artspace Equitably or BASE cohort.

This is a project we've developed in partnership with the Equitable Development Initiative in the planning office.

It is a cohort learning project where this is our second year running it.

It seeks to create more equitable participation in the development of Seattle.

It's a cohort that is made up of half folks from the cultural development community, from the arts and cultural world, and half folks from the commercial real estate development community.

It's exclusively people of color.

This is the second time that we've run the program.

It's monthly sessions that explore ideas around building capital stacks for projects and also storytelling around projects and design and engineering and site acquisition and creating those connections between the cultural world and the real estate development world.

It culminates in a cultural space conference called Square Feet Seattle that we run annually and that'll be coming up in November of 2020. That was idea number two, was certify people in the CAP report.

Idea number 23, I believe, was create a mission-driven, independent, cultural real estate development entity.

And that idea was so rich and ran so deep that we commissioned a whole nother report about it called the Structure for Stability.

The Structure for Stability recommended that very report.

But I've thumbed through repeatedly.

Excellent.

Good to know.

You found all the typos.

The organization that it recommends, we're calling the Cultural Space Agency, which is an intentional name, because who's not a NASA nerd?

But also, the organization seeks to transfer power to community in a way that creates agency over their future in real estate, agency over their control of and their presence in the current development wave.

We talk a lot about equitable equity in this work, about creating ownership stakes in a way that, in real property, in a way that centers the needs of vulnerable and disadvantaged communities.

The creation of the Space Agency is now a major priority for the body of work around cultural space, and involves interdepartmental work with the Equitable Development Initiative, the Office of Economic Development, the Housing Office, and other departments.

It gets its own presentation, I'm sure, at some point, and I won't go too deep onto the Space Agency here, but there's incremental progress being made on that idea each week.

This project that you see on the screen now is a new project for the office called Tiny Cultural Spaces.

There's a type of property that the city owns called snippets.

They are typically small, unbuildably small, and weirdly shaped pieces of property.

We have funded an organization called Sawhorse Revolution.

and through a competitive process have identified an organization called Estelita's Library that is a social justice bookstore and library.

We are building them this tiny structure.

This is about 350 square feet.

It is going to sit on a snippet of property that FAS has dedicated to the purpose.

We are leasing it to them for a dollar a year.

We are granting them the structure itself, so they will own the structure.

They will have the site control of the property for five years.

And in the third year, should the project be going well, this is the pilot, this is the first time we're doing it, we will explore the seeding of that property to the organization itself.

And so when we talk about wealth building and community, this is a significant asset.

It's something that is currently a drag on city resources.

We mow it, we pull the garbage off of it as people leave it there.

It is, as I say, unbuildable.

And to a small community nonprofit organization, it is a trajectory changing impact and asset.

Thank you.

Much of our last year was spent in deep partnership and community listening around the creative economy and the needs of our creative industries.

And Alex Rose has been a shared staff with OFM for a number of years and now sits in our office but continues to be a shared staff and continues to lead our work.

And I hate to be that person, but we're running a little bit behind, so.

All right.

Just a note to say I'm very excited to be part of this collaborative work around the creative economy.

Randy mentioned the report that will be published next week, which will have a lot of the details that I could go into.

But I do want to say we have prioritized centering the community voice in helping us to establish our work plan and establish our roadmap.

and particularly centering communities of color in our outreach.

We spoke with nearly 1,000 people through focus groups, interviews, surveys, and mixer events, networking events last year to really surface some of the common themes around how the city can better support an equitable creative economy.

Some of the things that I want to touch on related to building community wealth have to do with building social capital.

I don't want to forget about other kinds of capital besides dollars.

So social capital is really important to us as it relates to young people and their workforce development, so mentorship and things like that, as well as getting folks within the creative economy networked with each other.

folks who are looking for work, finding work by meeting other people outside of maybe the circles that they run with already.

We also are committed to aligning and maximizing our resources.

Randy mentioned the Seattle Arts Commission and the Seattle Music Commission as two advisory bodies that we work with.

So again, social capital, right?

We wanna leverage the networks that they bring, the knowledge that they have, intellectual capital, as a way to advance this work and continue the collaboration.

And finally, Diana will talk a little bit about our racial equity work in building community wealth.

Thank you.

So I'm going to talk about a specific project that's part of our Creative Strategies Initiative, which is a partnership between Arts and Office for Civil Rights that's now many years going.

And this particular iteration is about three years old.

The project is called The Shape of Trust, and it brings in SDHR as an additional partner on the project.

It's really designed to look at how we can build an institutional culture here at the city that is rooted in relationships and that has an awareness of how to navigate power dynamics, dynamics of power based on oppression and power based on hierarchy.

and how that internal culture and the practices related to it affect our relationship with community and the kind of decision making we do when it comes to building policies and programs and engaging community.

I'm speeding up a little bit for the sake of time, but I think that, you know, what we learn from this project related to community wealth building and building resilient economies, local economies, is that what we do here, how we do our work together, is what we do with community gets modeled out and how we relate to community.

And that building a culture that is rooted in relationship and trust internally is exactly the way that we behave and the way we perceive community.

And so we get to start here.

This work comes out of many years of organizing for workforce equity and is in deep partnership with the workforce equity team at SDHR.

And the organizing by people of color, particularly women of color, and transgender folks, folks experiencing heterosexism and ageism within our workforce, and ableism as well, who have organized for changes to our culture and to practices.

Phase one of the project was working with playwright Sarah Porkalob to develop and performed three times last June a performance based on real stories from our workforce that told those stories of both oppression and resilience.

We have a video of that, and we're using that video as one part of a multi-part immersive community of practice cohort.

that will launch in March and run through June for supervisors, managers, and people who advise on HR matters.

So we can really begin to shift culture here internally within the city.

We are assessing it comprehensively.

We're working with several national partners on an assessment, and we'll be putting out a report on that, and then also publishing the video along with a curriculum guide so that other institutions like us can have access to those same resources.

Thanks.

That sounds amazing, and I'm definitely interested in hearing more about that as you learn more.

I think with 11, 12, 13,000 city employees, it's really important that we make sure our workforce understands how important a racial equity lens is so that they can go out into our community and do that work on our behalf in a just way as well.

So thank you for sharing that.

So that was what we prepared.

I know we ran a little long.

We're still figuring out the contours of the new committee.

But if you have a few minutes for questions, that's fine.

If you'd rather, yeah.

Go ahead.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Director Engstrom, thank you so much for coming down here and with your entire team.

I don't so much have a question, I just want to state broadly the great appreciation that I have for your office.

I had the great privilege of attending first Thursday this month on Thursday, January 9th.

to see the last night of that gallery that was in place, which was a very powerful experience, and we had a great conversation during that time as well.

And I really appreciate it.

I'm going to try to make it to first Thursday.

And for my fellow members on the committee, if you haven't had an opportunity yet to go down to that new space at King Street Station and experience a first Thursday gallery there, it is quite a great experience.

And it was really good to go down there.

I had the privilege of marching with my friend, Ashraf Hisham, who's the youth arts manager in your department, a good friend of mine.

And I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the work that you do and really look forward to working with you on this committee.

And thank you so much for the presentation.

Appreciate it.

Anyone else?

Well, thank you all so much.

And we look forward to having more conversation with you.

Thank you.

I'll be back whenever you're ready to bring us all back up.

Very good.

Okay, we will move on to the second item.

Lakeisha, will you please read the next item into the record?

Actual Development Initiative, EDI, Overview and Discussion of the 2020 Work Plan, Briefing and Discussion.

Okay.

What do we have?

Uba will be back in a minute.

Very good.

Yes.

Yes.

Sorry, Debra.

OK.

Are you all ready?

Do you need to wait for Uba?

A minute?

She'll be back in just a second, unless you want to start.

We can start.

Go ahead.

OK.

If you would introduce yourselves, please, and I'll let her do that when she gets here.

I'm Asafa, Director, Office of Planning and Community Development.

Michael Blumson, Office of Planning and Community Development, Equitable Development Team.

Is the green light on, Michael?

Yes.

Okay.

You might need to just get a little closer to the mic.

Sure.

All right, and we are also joined by...

Council members, thank you for having us here for this presentation and a very important conversation.

And for the new council members, welcome.

Again, Sam Asafa, Director of Office of Planning and Community Development.

What we want to do is just walk you through quickly, initially, about what OPCB is, especially for the benefit of the new council members.

And then I'll walk you through the structure, but then focus on our key work priorities for 2020, especially around the equitable development initiative and then the link between that and community wealth building, which is a topic of today's discussion.

I'm sorry to interrupt from the beginning, but if I could ask you to just sort of breeze through the organizational chart.

Sure.

Save us a little time.

I'll actually jump to the next one.

OPCD is structured.

It's a new department, about four years currently.

So it's structured around administration, as you see the organizational chart.

and five divisions.

And out of the five, the first two that you see on the left are sort of the key functions of the department, primarily around long-range planning, community planning, urban design, zoning, land use policies, which we'll talk about the importance of that around community wealth building.

And then a new division that was created as part of the equitable development initiative is an equitable development division which the team is led by UBA and we'll talk about that.

And then we have the Planning Commission and Design Commission that is housed in the OPCD.

Next slide.

So this, it's divided into three sections.

The planning section is a primary function.

The budget that you see on the slide also includes this year one time $15 million from the Mercer Mega Block that the mayor put in her budget to specifically address some of the topical issues that we'll be discussing today.

Next.

2020 work plan.

This is, I'm not going to go through the list, but I just want to highlight a few of them that are relevant to our conversation as well.

Next.

A comprehensive plan update this year will be initiating the next updates to the comprehensive plan.

Every five to eight years, we are required to update the comprehensive plan.

So any policy issues around race, social justice, equity issues are discussed as part of this.

And then we'll look to what policies we need to put in place at the comprehensive plan level.

So that discussion will take place for the next three years, actually.

The mayor has initiated the industrial lands discussion this year.

So there's a robust process that has been initiated and her primary directive in terms of the principles that we need to address as we look at the entirety of our industrially zoned land and maritime is to have sort of middle wage, family wage jobs as the primary focus in advancing that.

So if and when land use policies come into place, it has to be through that filter.

How do we maintain the existing workforce that we have today?

About 105,000 people are employed.

in our industrial lands, that's almost 20% of our jobs.

But not only maintain that, but how do we prepare the city for the change that is coming, that is here today in terms of the economy, and we'll talk about that.

and what the future is in 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, and what do we need to do from the levers that we have, including potentially through land use, to make sure that we target our resources and levers to address the future of employment, focusing on those middle wage and family wage jobs.

Next.

Equitable development initiatives, of course, we'll talk more about that as we move forward.

Next.

So this equitable development initiative was initiated because of the last comprehensive plan update in 2016, equity and racial justice, and looking at our city policies around around land and how we use our land through that lens led to the analysis of what we have and what do we need to know around race and social justice issues from land use perspective.

The comprehensive plan identified that as an important tool and issue that then had led us to prepare an equitable development plan and initiative and financial strategy bringing that 50,000 foot level policy that was incorporated in the comp plan down to the ground and actually start implementing it next.

So, and that whole analysis was grounded on the history of decisions that were made 40, 50, 60 years ago around land use, and the map that you see on the screen is a redlining map for Seattle.

This is not different from many cities around the country, metropolitan areas.

These were established in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, not only by private entities and banks, but actually supported by federal government policies as well as local government policies.

The reason I'm pointing that out is some of the issues that we're dealing with today, and specific to community wealth, is directly linked for the most part to that.

And we'll talk about that as we get to the roundtable.

that that is an important component from a land use perspective and from where we sit.

And that helped inform also our policies that we've developed over the last few years.

Next.

And on that basis in 2016, we actually did sort of quantifiable analysis of where we are today in terms of issues of displacement risk as well as lack of access to opportunity for people who live in Seattle.

Not surprising me, so this is kind of a heat map, the map on the left, the reddish colors or yellow points to areas that have significant displacement risk in the city.

On the right, the map shows where lack of access to opportunity for education, job access, transit, And the darker, browner color actually implies that there's lack of access in those areas.

And incidentally, but not surprisingly, these maps actually match the maps from the 1920s and 30s in terms of redlining.

So there's a link and those are the backbone that we're dealing with today and the issues that we have been addressing.

Next slide.

I think we should point out though that when you look at the map that you showed us before, the first one, that was before the north end was annexed.

It doesn't line up with the low opportunity high displacement of this map, the equity one.

That's an old one.

It doesn't include the whole north end.

No, it doesn't.

It doesn't.

But this map does.

Your equity analysis, the low opportunity, high displacement includes the north end.

Exactly.

And the analysis, yes.

I'm just saying that we had to line those up, so just wanted to make sure that's clear for the viewing public.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So I mentioned the equitable development initiative program came out of a plan that was produced soon right at the end of the last comprehensive plan updates to identify key priorities, how we become intentional in addressing and mitigating displacement.

also creating wealth in areas that have been affected the most and how we distribute the growth that the region is experiencing so that it is inclusive for people of color and others who were left behind.

Next.

And now I'll sort of, this has been established about four, almost three and a half years ago, three years ago within OPCD.

It is a multi-departmental effort, so we put together a team from Office of Economic Development, Arts, Office of Housing, as part of the team that has been developing this new initiative over the last three years, and we'll talk about some of the results and outcomes and what the work program is moving forward.

With that, I'll ask Guba to sort of walk us through sort of the nuts and bolts of this program.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sam.

You have to get real close.

Yeah, thank you, Sam.

So, again, these are the six equity drivers that are designed to be deployed together in order to make the equitable development outcomes.

And OPCD being the kind of leading on the collaborative planning with all these departments plus the community.

I would like to add also the equitable development has the dual purpose of mitigating displacement and increasing access to opportunity.

And it's really important to also like build on the local cultural assets of those communities.

And I like saying that it was born out of like a very strong inside outside strategy and having a very strong organized voice within those communities that were impacted by displacement and growth.

And then, so a lot of times when we talk about equitable development, people just go into the transactional funding piece, but it's more than that.

There's the programs and policies and the coordination, but also a monitoring program that is designed to provide public with the information of how Seattle is doing in achieving the equitable development outcomes.

plus providing community stakeholders with the data that they really need to also organize and move their projects and programs forward.

And then recently, also using that data to provide information for both the city and using it for the racial equity toolkit that we're going to be partnering with both the Department of Neighborhoods and Office of Civil Rights.

And it's just two types of indicators.

Again, the community indicators showing us if we are really making progress towards reducing racial disparities.

And then also looking at where displacement is happening so that we can figure out how we deploy our resources to those areas that have heightened displacement risk.

And we're doing this in two phases, being led by our demographer, Diana.

And we are in the process of finalizing phase one report, hopefully by the end of March, and starting the phase two report, which we are hoping that we're going to have something in the end of June, July.

And those, sorry about the indicators and the...

For phase one and two, will they be available in the report?

Yes, and then we can also open to the experts who are working on that coming and presenting to this committee once it's ready.

So, oh yeah.

So, and then the fund itself, which is targeting place-based community-driven strategies started with the first initial $16 million that just actually the cell finalized last month.

And then we have an annual 430,000 community development block grant.

And the one from last year, we were able to partner with our partners at Office of Economic Development.

We just moved the money.

Actually, they did all the heavy lift on the work on their TI, and they're going to talk about that.

And then the $5 million a year that started last year from the short-term rental, and then this one time $15 million for this year that we are working on putting together the structure of how we're going to deploy it.

And again, you know, Sam shared those maps, one from 1930s and one from like four years ago, which hasn't changed much.

So, and the key principle of the Equitable Development Fund is addressing historic and market inequities.

through investing in community-driven projects from the most marginalized communities that have been impacted the most.

We have two different categories that we fund, what we call both Shovel Ready and Shovel Hungry projects, where we do community capacity development for groups who are visioning projects and supporting them, and just using the EDI fund as a catalyst to move community vision for brick and mortar projects.

And then project development that includes anything from pre-development all the way to site control, but capping our capital investment at a million dollars.

And we have realized in the last two and a half years and capping it at a million dollars does not even buy you a house in some areas of the city of Seattle.

So that also has been a barrier and a challenge for some of the projects to move forward there and site control needs.

This, the projects that right now we are supporting as a team, the initial five projects that were the catalyst of the EDI fund, we did an RFP process in partnership with those communities in 2018, and we were able to bring 10 projects into the pipeline that has mixed, mixed different projects.

We had like childcare projects, to mixed use projects, to projects that were just trying right now to like, and small businesses are being displaced.

We really wanna do something about it in the immigrant communities.

How can the EDI fund help us with that?

And then in 2019, we were able to bring another 12 projects into the pipeline.

With a total of about $21 million, 25 projects, $21 million deployed so far.

You have a question?

Go ahead.

So the theme of the EDI projects, is it addressing something after it's happening or is it preventing or prohibiting displacement generally?

So the foundational aspect of the program is actually it's community initiated.

We don't, and so, and there's some criterias developed, and it ranges from capacity building to actual projects that are proposed by community groups that come from those geographic areas that the map that I showed has a risk of displacement, and they range in from building a community center, childcare, to a good amount of capacity building to get them ready to be able to actually develop or own their own properties, whatever that program that they propose might be.

but they're almost always initiated by...

So it's mixed, right?

Building community capacity for self-determination where, you know, and Rainier Beach Action Coalition is a group in Rainier Beach that participated, for example, on the neighborhood plan and they had some goals and outcomes in that neighborhood plan where they're right now, like, utilizing the EDI fund to actualize those programs around economic development, for example.

And then there's projects that what I call shovel hungry, because a lot of times we go to that, like, let's just invest in a building, this is the efficient way to go.

But what about groups like Lake City, that's just hungry to start visioning a project that benefits their community.

So it's that spectrum from like, you know, in build capacity for self determination to like, groups that are just actually starting construction.

You know, so and coming in for the non-residential portion of that and leveraging other departments like Office of Housing doing their affordable housing, like for example, the Chief Seattle Club.

Thank you.

Thank you guys.

I remember when we first got, when we first sold that property and then how there was all these projects that came up in 18 and 19 and how you went through the six equity drivers, right?

And so a lot of people, I was just in community two nights ago up in the North End and they were asking about this fund again and we were talking about what the priorities are.

So a lot of community members don't understand that we have the equity drivers here, but how they were weighted.

Do you think you could just talk a little bit about how, when people were applying for this money, Because some people didn't get it and they were not happy, but we said come back for that second round.

And then how each of these categories were weighted for that community project.

It can just be brief.

Sure.

Go for it.

Sure.

So the community drivers are one of the primary sort of focus of the scoring criteria that we use for the determining the funding.

And that's part of that is really to help projects think about the multiple avenues in which community development happens and to avoid getting stuck in a single lane of kind of function.

So, you know, Yes, affordable housing is important as much as possible, but also how does it contribute to community wealth building, right?

And so having the, requiring the multi-equity drivers is one of the ways that we try to get project proposals to really look at the community that they're serving and the different needs they are and say, how are you thinking about the community as a comprehensive, people and not just as the functional lane that your organization is used to working in.

And I think by putting these organizations through the paces, that really made them better organizations.

I really appreciate it.

That was like a wonderful byproduct of this whole process of the ones that didn't get money understood where they were vulnerable and where they had to beef up.

Correct?

Exactly, you're absolutely right.

So part of the process for us in this structure is to engage those communities before they submit the RFP.

So there's a lot of work that we go out and staff goes out and works with community to get them ready to apply.

And then most importantly, post application and award, we go back to them and actually walk them through what worked, what didn't work.

And that is part of the sort of the big part of the work is really building that capacity, but through the experience that we went through this process.

Yeah, I wanna add one more thing around, you know, the criteria and how it's weight, making sure that, you know, they meet at least three of the equity drivers.

We got about 37 application in 2018, 35 in 2019, and we had, you know, around $5.5 million.

So also the direction that we gave the review committee was give us a balance of shovel-ready and shovel-hungry projects, give us a balance of project types, make sure that we get a balance of, and geographical.

So you don't just give us a bunch of projects in South East Seattle, for example, right?

And that sometimes there's projects which have really good proposals and things like that, but just recognizing we also have limited resources to move, right?

And then just continue to work with these groups.

around, you know, real estate training programs or, you know, and just like giving them feedback and things like that and just recognizing that it's a competitive process.

Not everybody is also going to get funded.

We have just a few minutes left and we haven't got to the work plan yet.

Sure, so we're highlighting a few of our partners projects just as a way to sort of start helping frame what we mean when we're talking about equitable development projects because Reframing things and thinking about them from the perspective of what communities and community organizations are trying to do sort of helps change the way that we think about what a project is supposed to accomplish.

And so, you know, we're highlighting sort of one of our recent projects that just came in last year was the Duwamish Longhouse.

how we and they and their application talked about community wealth being not just dollars and cents, but also a conversation about history and culture and the cultural assets and how we're trying to do that.

So they're a great example.

The Daybreak Star is another great example.

And, you know, the displacement for the Native American community goes back well before redlining, right?

It's sort of fundamental to the history of Seattle.

you know, how we think about what assets mean as a community is a very different conversation than just solely talking about the racial wealth gap.

And Uba talked a little bit about the work in Rainier Beach around the food cultures and the asset that is the food cultures and how do we use the assets and the cultures that are there to create living wage jobs that can actually start to affect the disparity of jobs and income that is in Southeast Seattle compared to other parts of the city.

I took that picture of the farm stand, by the way.

I'm just saying.

It's a good one.

The Black and Tan Hall is another example of sort of a new and extremely interesting community-led project centered around investors within a neighborhood coming together to create an ownership opportunity that actually will generate wealth.

And it's also an area where One of the things that's interesting to us, I think, is that we learn with our partners about how to structure the program.

And so this is an example where they said, you know, where a for-profit can we apply?

And we were like, oh, I never thought about this before.

We were, you know, focused on 501c3s.

And we said, OK, well, maybe there's a way that we can start thinking about how to change our criteria for for profits that are focused on community wealth building to be able to do it if they can demonstrate sort of an extraordinary level of community connection that sort of says, yes, this is about creating wealth, but it's about creating wealth for the residents for the purpose of reducing displacement, right?

And so we don't want to take the ability to create wealth off the table by having everybody have to be a nonprofit.

We want to be able to somehow find a way to creatively work with those organizations and when they have creative ideas, figure out how our program can adapt to be able to support those when they're valid.

The Midtown Plaza Liberty Bank, we're highlighting this one as also an example of what happens when community-based organizations can control their own development process.

And so, you know, this is an example of, you know, Africatown and Black Community Impact Alliance using the development process to help provide education for the community about what development means, what gentrification and displacement means, what the opportunities are in creating community land trust and the tools and strategies that are out there.

And so not only do you get a great building and soon to be two great buildings, but you also get all of this other conversation and community around the organizing that needs to happen for those strategies to be successful in the long term.

And then the last ones we have are both what Uba sort of referred to as shovel-hungry.

So one is the African Business Alliance, which is really strategies around how do we help African, black, and Muslim women create small businesses and expand them, and what does it look like to have the capacity and backbone support to even start a conversation with a group that diverse around what a shared goal would be.

And similarly, that's kind of the conversation that's going on in Lake City Collective.

How do we support even the visioning to be able to come up with a project and be able to partner through the length of time that it would take for a community to have that?

And how do we as a program commit to being a partner for that to make sure that they have the stability to do that work?

And quickly, this is the 2020 EDI work plan, figuring out a criteria to deploy the $15 million from this year, finalizing a permanent advisory board with recruitment.

We've been working with an interim advisory board, coordinating with the strategic investment fund, which is different from the $15 million with our partners in other departments, and then figuring out when we're going to start a 2020 EDI fund cycle for those people that never got of funded or people who are new and sometimes you just get all those Unicom projects, finalizing the EDI monitoring, at least the phase one report.

And then while we're doing all that, providing contract management and technical assistance for all the 25 projects and working with them to come up with a sustainability plan and supporting our comprehensive plan team around the racial equity analysis for the next major comp plan.

It's not a lot.

Slacking.

Wow.

Amazing.

Thank you.

Any final questions from the committee members?

Okay.

That was fantastic.

Thank you so much.

We will see you again in a moment.

Okay.

Where are we?

Item three.

We'll move on to the third agenda item.

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

Seattle Office for Civil Rights, OCR, SOCR, overview and discussion of the 2020 work plan, briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

Hello, everyone.

We're running a little behind.

Sorry about that.

If you will introduce yourselves quickly and then we can get started.

I'm the policy manager at the Seattle office for civil rights.

Director of the Seattle office for civil rights.

like Jen, Civil Rights Enforcement Manager.

Thank you.

Go ahead and get started.

Thank you so much for inviting us to present to your committee.

We're excited to be here at your first meeting.

So we are going to go over our vision, mission, and values, talk about our strategic plan, its goals, and how that is connected to and what our role is in building community power, trust, and wealth.

And so Latrice Burra, who is our operations manager and also holds a lot of the history of our organization, is going to talk a little bit about our process here.

So the next few slides is about our mission and vision and our values.

And I want to say I've been with the office a little, just under 12 years, and we had a mission statement that only spoke to the civil rights work in our office and what we didn't have was a mission and vision and value statement that spoke to the entire work of our office.

And so in 2018, we began a deep process in internally within our office to help us come up with our vision, mission, and value statements.

And it took us several months, many discussions, many tears, many a lot for our office to really get to what the heart of our work is and what our values are.

And, you know, we were really excited when we finally got through this.

Those of us who've been there a long time, we were excited that we had this product and it was something that we all did together.

And it spoke to the values of our entire office and not just the civil rights, which is important, but so is the rest of our work.

With that, we had our values that we came up with, and they really are North Star.

And it's what we use to develop our strategic plan, our three-year strategic plan, and these values is what we continue to look at as we developed our work plan for the year and the years to come forth.

And we always look at this and try to figure out how is our work making us accountable to the values that we have.

And so it's really, for me, I can speak personally for me, it's really, really important to me that we have these values and that we look for these.

Oh, yeah, go ahead.

Yes, please.

I just want to thank you so much because you're the only second organization that I've seen on paper on your mission statement that adds colonization.

I don't think people have, I mean, I know it's become a trendy, you know, politically correct word, but for the native community and the effects of colonization and what the trauma that it's created, the displacement, and to recognize it as a real piece of how we put the city back together I just want to thank you for that.

There's only two organizations that have done that, and you're the second one.

So I want to thank you for that.

Thank you.

That was part of what we wanted to discuss in all of our sessions that we had.

That was really important to call that out, because it's true.

So as we go on with our slides here, we will talk more about our values and how they're part of our strategic plan.

Thank you.

And so, and Council Member Juarez, you can rest assured that every single word in our values, our mission, and our vision received a huge amount of discussion and process.

And so it was extremely intentional.

And thank you for noticing that.

Thank you.

So these are the overarching goals for our three-year strategic plan.

We're going to walk through them fairly quickly.

We know we're short on time.

The first one, institutional culture shift.

So that goal is to guide and support the city of Seattle to center race in policymaking, power sharing, and developing accountable community relationships and racially just practices.

To do that, our focus really on this one is internal to the city of Seattle, so to our employees and our leadership.

And we know that we have to get our own house in order before we can really have the credibility and the standing to work authentically in community And so that's where this part of our strategic plan is focused.

So these are some of the ways in which we do that.

Directors Forum is a peer forum for cabinet members to work on advancing racial equity in their departments.

We also hold and host the RSGI Summit for organizers, community folks within our city departments who are working on racial equity Shape of Trust was beautifully articulated in the Office of Arts and Culture presentation.

Another thing I would mention here, because it's fairly recent, it didn't make it into the plan at that time, is we were recently approved to have our racial equity lab included in the Innovation Advisory Council's set of five projects that they'll be working on this year.

And that is a multi-layered platform that will help fortify racial equity work and organizing in city government.

It will provide many different types of tools for decision makers, stakeholders, and policy makers to use so that they can center race and all other forms of oppression in making their decisions.

And one of the aspects of those is an equity index.

So that will be a very interactive tool that will use multiple data sets.

So we're excited about that.

We're excited to be among those selected to work with some of our high-powered tech companies in the coming year.

And then we provide technical expertise throughout city departments through RSGI training.

Our team, the RSGI team also supports the racial equity toolkits that are conducted throughout city departments.

They support caucusing and affinity groups, and we hold the gender justice work of the city and the expertise for that.

So we provide technical assistance and training, coaching and support to leadership and departments.

throughout the city in that area.

Another area that we're focused on for the next few years is workforce equity to ensure that SOCR is a workplace where individuals can thrive, that addresses structural issues through transparent and honest communication, and where we are in accountable relationships with each other and the communities most impacted by structural and institutional racism.

Again, this is an internal focus for us.

Moving forward, we know that in many ways we must, we have an obligation to model those behaviors and practices that we aim to support other departments in.

as far as centering race and leading with racial equity and social justice.

So over the past few years and going forward, we've used multiple strategies, including healing circles and supporting professional development in a way that is much more intentional than we've had in the past.

And then as far as making institutional change and leading with that, We're looking at ways in our department to address and create criteria for providing merit pay.

Our change team charter is the one that has served as the model for the rest of the city and all departments and so we are now in a process of updating and revising that.

There has been quite a bit of culture change already in our city since it was first developed and so we're looking to again push the envelope and and adjust that and and have a new model for the city.

And then internal communications and committing ourselves to examining internalized racial oppression and how it impacts all of our work and practices.

Our third major strategic goal is increasing housing access and to ensure that all people, especially those impacted by racism and discrimination in housing, which manifests as displacement and homelessness, are sheltered safely and affordably in a way that meets their needs.

Next slide.

And there are three major areas in which we address housing access.

And we really try to look at this through a holistic lens.

While we know that our civil rights enforcement provides critical relief, it is on an individual level.

So while we have that strategy to provide individual relief for folks who are experiencing discrimination accessing housing, We also ensure that we're looking at big picture strategy and institutional change through policy developments, a lot of which we partner with other, well, all of which we partner with other departments.

As you heard earlier from Sam and Uma and Michael, we are a strong partner in the equitable development initiative and their anti-displacement work group, which I'll get into a little bit later.

and supporting Office of Housing in developing Community Preference Guidelines.

We spent a lot of our RSI team with helping other departments on our racial equity toolkits that address housing access and further housing access.

Our fourth goal is related to criminal justice.

Our goal is to reduce the harms of the current criminal legal model by increasing institutional understanding, ensuring community support before proposing new policies, and investing in practices that offer a path towards replacing the current system.

And like our other goals, we have a few different strategies and ways that we're trying to reach this goal.

I'll go into more depth if we have time later on our collaborative grant-making process that is currently being implemented to Invest in alternatives community-based alternatives the current criminal legal system and address the harms that the criminal legal system has caused we're still implementing the recommendations from the Rancho work group still working towards getting the city to reach its goal and seeing zero youth incarceration and And our big struggle and our value on our criminal legal team is trying to determine how we can be accountable to those who have been most impacted by the criminal legal system who are also those most impacted by racism and discrimination.

How we share information with them around current policy proposals that the city may be putting forth, build their analysis, and bring them into policy decision-making processes and taking leadership from them when we need to interrupt system patterns that contribute to harm.

And our goal five is advancing civil rights.

One of the things that we have made this major shift in the last couple of years, especially under our mission and vision and values, is really how do we actually shift the way that we do our work?

From shifting from just working on individual complaints coming into the door, focusing on more proactive strategies and more systemic issues that really impact communities of color and other communities.

But goal five is around centering race in the development of new laws and advance racial equity through the implementation of current civil rights laws using proactive enforcement and community partnerships.

And we also do this to work to reduce barriers to access and promote self-determination.

And so one of the things that we've been doing as a team is really thinking about what are those goals and what are those strategies to really address the advancement of civil rights.

And in terms of policy development, we've really focused more on how do we engage community as being part of the solution making?

How do we engage community in coming up with ideas about how to really advance civil rights to ensure that everyone is protected with the least harm done?

In terms of civil rights implementation, one of the areas that we've been looking at, and it's been a really a journey for us, is really thinking beyond this traditional notion of investigating complaints to being more proactive.

Being more proactive strategies through our testing program, being more proactive in terms of educating communities around civil rights protections, which council provided us a position last year for.

And also really integrating restorative practices and also council also provided us a position to really think about and explore how are ways that we can provide not just one option when people come to our door or come to our office, but a menu of options, giving opportunities to thinking about how do we actually address conflict in our communities, whether it's on an individual level or on a community basis, and really how do we actually facilitate those conversations to really encourage people to come fully and truthfully together In terms of community impact, we're really looking at how do we actually shift the needle.

How do we actually shift the way that we do our work to think more strategically and more proactively to thinking about more than just the civil rights protections being the floor, but beyond that.

Really bringing the community to the table and thinking about enforcement around our community and being more community centered.

So our team gave quite a bit of thought.

We appreciated your questions on how our work is leading to building community wealth.

And because our office is not specifically focused on economic development, for example, or job creation, we wanted to look deeply into the goals that we have and our approach, which I think is probably coming through in all of the ways that we've described our work.

And what we believe is that all of our values and our principles guide our work and lead to the building of community power and wealth in multiple ways.

And so, for example, you've heard us talk about sharing decision-making and planning power with community.

And specifically, we look to do that with organized anti-racist communities of color to ensure that we are bringing that perspective to the table, and especially to tables where we are at and they are not.

Ensure engagement with communities most impacted by institutional racism.

And I wanted to note here that our office supports, as probably you all know, four commissions.

We support the Seattle Human Rights Commission, the Women's Commission, the Commission for People with Disabilities, and the LGBTQ Commission.

Those commissions, you know, we are the staff support and also policy support for, and they are a critical part of our ability to establish that bridge between the communities and constituencies that they represent and our office.

And so one of the things that we have been working on and will continue to do so in the coming years is really looking to see how do we strengthen those connections and our support.

And so that we're also very grateful that in the 2020 budget, we were provided a second commission liaison position that will allow us to have one commission liaison for each two commissions.

So we strongly believe that will help our level of support.

We have about three minutes left.

Okay.

All right, so I think our connection to community power and wealth has been touched on pretty much throughout our presentation, so I'm going to move on to these specific examples.

Yeah, in one minute.

The collaborative grant-making group was launched in January, and it was to distribute funds that were the result of organizing by the Budget for Justice Coalition and EPIC.

And the main goal of that funding process is to invest in community-based alternatives to the criminal legal system and to address the harms of the current system and the reason why this is a unique model, unlike other distributing models throughout the city, is that the community members who are gathered together in a collective and they're there from the start and they are the ones that are developing the theory of change.

So what is the big impact that this money is going to make?

And it's a $1 million investment.

And then they will be creating the request for proposals and then making the funding decisions.

So it's really shifting power back to community members to and kind of making decision making amongst the collective.

And there's one thing I wanted to say that I, the big tenants that we learned, or I learned from the People's Institute is that people are poor not because they lack programs and services, but because they lack power.

And so in all of our kind of community shifting, or I guess cultural shifting practices, we're really thinking about like how to distribute power and not just thinking about can we invest in programs and services, but even in the creation of determining which program and services get funded, how is power being shifted?

Thank you for that reminder.

And also, in terms of alternative enforcement, one of the things that we have really focused on, and part of it has come from our RET process that we learned from last year, was like, what was it that community needed from us?

Like, what was it that community wanted from us when they had a complaint or when they felt like they were being discriminated?

And one of the things that was very clear were they wanted options.

They wanted the opportunity to not just say I have a complaint and I want to know whether the finding is, whether there's cause or no cause, but really that participatory process of really restorative approach of really addressing how we can address discrimination issues.

And when we talk about alternative enforcement, I also want to just call out that It's really expanding from a responsive model, which is mostly what most people see as investigations and mediation, but being more proactive in our work, being more advocacy through our testing program, and then also developing what we call a restorative model to be able to bring community to the table when these conversations are necessary.

And to be honest, a lot of these housing access strategies were beautifully highlighted by our partners in the EDI initiative.

And so I think you have heard a lot from them.

The only thing I would add is that the community preference policy that we're working on with the Office of Housing is another innovative strategy to address displacement and increase housing access for those who have been left out of that opportunity.

Thank you.

Any questions from folks before we?

Just really briefly, I just want to thank everyone for their presentation.

As someone who served on the Seattle Human Rights Commission a while ago, and I know Council Member Rouse more recently served on the Seattle Human Rights Commission, I have a lot of respect and admiration for the department.

Sorry, for the Office of Civil Rights, and I look forward to working with you through this committee.

So thank you.

And I just do want to acknowledge that we are operating in a particular kind of structure that is some might say a white supremacist structure here where there's, you know, an agenda and timekeeping and all of this.

And so I want to thank you for your indulgence as we try to move through this.

And also to thank you for your acknowledgement that community needs to be at the table.

We want this to be an overview.

We do have a special meeting planned, which I'll talk about afterward, where we will have community members at the table to share their thoughts about how city is impacting their ability to do their work.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, so we are going to move on to the fourth agenda item.

Lakeisha, please read the record, into the record.

Office of Economic Development, OED, overview and discussion of the 2020 work plan, briefing and discussion.

Thank you.

And so we have the presenters from the Office of Economic Development coming.

Hello, everyone.

If you will, once you get settled in, introduce yourselves.

Please make sure you're speaking pretty darn close to the mic.

Give us your name and your department.

I think this is on.

Is it on?

If the light is green, can you see the green light there?

Bobby Lee, I'm the Director of Office of Economic Development.

Teresa Barreiros, I manage the Only in Seattle Neighborhood Business District team.

I'm Carl Stickle.

I lead the key industry team.

Good afternoon.

I'm Nancy Yamamoto.

I'm the director of workforce development on the team.

I'm Pedro Gomez, and I lead the small business development team.

Great.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

Go ahead and start.

I'm going to have to excuse Carl because of the recent shooting.

We have a project that we need to work on and Carl is going to be happy.

He's been called in to do a specific task, so if you don't mind.

Thank you.

Yes.

Thank you, Carl.

Sorry about that.

Yeah.

Thank you.

So before we start, what I would do is I, having been a former elected official myself, I go through a lot of presentations, and I remember how difficult it is to go through a lot of presentations.

And so what I'm going to do is just really highlight, and if you have questions, then we can kind of dive in.

with more specifics.

What I'm going to do is kind of pass this out.

And this kind of summarizes our structure and our sort of programming, core programs, and also the amount in terms of budget investments that you're making on various core services.

Instead of going into all the details, do you mind driving a little bit?

On every single slide, what I'm going to do is summarize, but if you catch something, just chime in and then we can just dive in at that point.

But the economy here in Seattle is what I call a binary economy.

What that basically means is that we have a lot of low-wage jobs, little middle-wage jobs, and a lot of high-wage jobs.

But in general, if you want to build an inclusive economy, what you want is more of a bell curve.

A lot of middle-wage jobs and a little bit at both ends.

So we have a binary economy that is creating inequities in the city.

And so this is the sort of the problem statement.

And so my department's job is to illustrate this problem and invest in programs to build more of a bell curve over time.

And so if you want to move forward, and in general, I'll fly through this, the economy is booming on average.

We are growing at twice as rate in terms of job growth than the national average.

And it's because, and the reason why is because Seattle has certain industry characteristics that has truly benefited from the transition from service economy to knowledge-based economy.

It has certain characteristics here in Seattle that are unique.

And so during this transition between service economy and knowledge economy, Seattle really benefited from this transition.

But again, as a result, if you go to the next slide.

But, so this is from 2011, and if you can keep your eyes on this.

In general, on the left side are low wage jobs.

and the high-wage jobs are on the right side.

2001. Yeah, this is 2001. And then I'm going to flip over to 2019 and you can see the change.

If you want to go back just one more time and just kind of show you the change.

And what you see is a lot of growth in low-wage jobs and a lot of growth in high-wage jobs, but not that much growth in the middle-wage jobs.

So this illustrates the problem statement that I'm proposing here.

And then the next slide, I'm flying through this here, is that you can see from a retail jobs, which grew at a rapid rate, and a software job, you see the inequity in terms of pay.

But these are the sectors that are growing the fastest in Seattle.

And people of color and underserved communities are in the service sector economy.

And so that is why even the overall economy is growing, poverty is growing at the same time.

Okay, and by race, of course, you can see the distinction, and I know all of you know this, but by race, you can see this growing inequity.

We'll fly through this here.

And the next one, in general, so the question is how do you then rebuild the middle wage jobs?

And so we have a modeling, we have a strategy in place, we call it economic gardening model.

We won't have time to go into it today, but different departments own a different part of this sector.

And so these are part of our core strategies and they're of course outlined in this.

in what we call a rainbow here.

So, there are different parts of this that plays a role in these, in our economic development, economic gardening model.

Next slide.

So, at a really high level, so our small business team, which Pedro is the manager of that team, we do an array of services.

But from stabilizing small businesses, permitting, streamlining, helping small business get through the bureaucracy, we have a group called CBAT.

If you have any small business that gives you a call with problems, let us know.

We'll put them through this process.

It's a multi-agency problem-solving team.

And of course, if there's like the ballot fire, for example, that recently happened, we would case manage those type of catastrophic events as well.

Next slide.

Oh, sorry.

Bobby, can you define microbusiness?

It would be usually less than five.

You want to take this one?

Sure.

It depends on who's asking, right?

For the sake of the stabilization fund.

For the stabilization fund, for example, we use CDBG money, so it has to be five or less employees.

Interesting.

But in general, it's one to 50 employees, but we don't have a super clear definition.

Okay.

It depends on the color of the money, often, that defines this thing.

Okay, good to know.

Thank you.

And next, and I know Chair Morales, you know this program very well, ONI in Seattle has been around for a long time, is really a place-based economic development strategy, which is, in our opinion, one of the most powerful ways of building wealth for underserved communities, is when we build capacity at a local level.

and to make neighborhoods thrive by making commercial corridors thrive.

And the commercial corridors are truly an economic garden in which small businesses grow and scale.

And often these small businesses are from communities of color.

And so we have different areas on our photo.

And this is the investments that you all, because it's your decision, it's your program, we just execute.

These are the programs, areas that we invest in.

And the yellow areas are what we call equity districts.

And so down the road, and I'm sorry the slide doesn't show the map very well, but you can see how the money is distributed.

And down the road we probably should dig in a little bit more, but this is a great program that we think makes a real difference at the neighborhood level around supporting small businesses.

And the key industry team, right now a big major project that you'll hear about soon to get you ready is the industrial land.

So there's multiple stakeholders, that we're engaged in, in terms of industrial land.

Again, in terms of building middle-wage jobs for underserved population, industrial lands can play a key role.

And so that's a policy discussion that we're going with, with multiple stakeholders at different neighborhoods.

You'll get an update on this issue down the road.

And also, we do a little bit of recruitment on the EV, the electrical vehicle.

So we actually visited a company in San Francisco called Proterra.

with the mayor and looking for ways to electrify this, grow that electric vehicle sort of cluster within Seattle.

And then there's Mercer property that we helped through the Mercer property negotiation.

That's really economic development play because we're trying to support the biotech industry.

And the workforce development team, of course, when you think about workforce, you're really talking about one word, and that is training.

And how do you provide more training opportunities for underserved population to become more self-sufficient?

So Nancy's department handles execution of your investments around workforce development.

And then we have office film and music, every economic development department that I manage.

And I just moved here last April and I was a director of economic development for Portland.

They also have film permit concierge services just like here.

Seattle's program is much more advanced.

Not only do they provide a central place for dealing with permitting process, but they also have programs that comes along with it.

And this is one of the few cities where we also have staff capacity around nightlife economic development.

Just a little high level to answer some of the questions that you posed to get ready for this presentation.

Really, moving forward, I think place-based strategy is one of the areas that we should really look at and use that as a model to help empower communities to drive their own economic development strategies.

And so only in Seattle is the infrastructure for that.

But I think there's more opportunities to help advance that.

sort of economic development philosophy.

And stabilization fund, a lot of small businesses, micro-businesses, at no fault of their own, often hit barriers.

And just one little help that we can provide can go a long ways for intergenerational wealth, and so that's an area that we'd like to focus on.

And the third bullet is expanding technical assistance for our small businesses, particularly owned by people of color and immigrant population.

And then we also, one of the things that we have learned here in Seattle and most cities is that we do census tracking for individuals, but we actually don't have that much data around small businesses.

So one of the things that Pedro wants to lead on is doing a similar thing like census except for targeting small businesses so we have good data.

And the one last thing here is that I put in place is recession planning.

In the last city council, we had a full engagement with my department around recession planning.

And if we want to do something around this space, dislocated workers program is probably an area that we should talk about.

So I'll leave it there, and then I think that's it.

So we just flew through it.

Nicely done.

Very good.

Were you all going to present or are you here as backup?

If you have questions, then we'll...

Are there questions?

Go for it.

Thanks for joining us.

Thank you.

So the theme of my questions are related to how do we prevent economic displacement?

Some of the programs we're putting into place are sort of after the fact and trying to compensate for something that's already happened.

Sometimes it's city policy that can cause or add fuel to the fire for the displacement.

Does your stabilization fund for small businesses, for example, help when You know, there's a major SDOT project on a street for a year, and people are having trouble accessing the business.

Do you help with that?

Do you want to try that one?

Yeah.

So, this was our pilot program.

So, it was the first time we were trying it out, and absolutely businesses that were going through some type of construction impact were able to apply for this program.

So, it does cover those as well.

But, you know, it was a pilot program, so there were several, a lot of things that we learned, lessons learned from this first one.

And we're going to make some adjustments for 2020's stabilization fund, which is going to include, I think the biggest thing is going to be changing the amounts, allowing for different types, smaller amounts.

There's some businesses that just $5,000, $10,000 is going to go a really long way for them versus what we did last year, which was just a set amount.

of 25K for each business, but absolutely businesses that are dealing with construction impacts qualify for that.

And one point to note, because this is an issue here in the state of Washington, not just in Seattle, is that your constitution prevents the cities from making direct investments.

So what we're talking about, Pedro, what he had to do is use federal dollars to provide this program.

And so we can't use general funds.

But CDBG money, there's not a whole lot to work with.

So we're using a small amount of money to make this program work.

And if I could add one last thing with the stabilization fund, in addition to receiving the money, what we're doing is we're also doing an assessment of the business to determine what are the overall needs that the business needs, has in order to not get to that point again.

So for example, We pair them also with an accountant to make sure that the business has the financial literacy that they need to know how to invest that money that they get.

We pair them with a lease specialist to make sure that their leases, because that sometimes pushes businesses out when they've signed a contract that they don't understand.

So we have a lease specialist that'll sit down with them and look at their lease so in the future they can negotiate a better lease.

So we try to offer a wraparound service so it's not just a one-touch.

I'm glad you mentioned the lease support.

On the Ave in my district, there was a study done by Peter Steinberg showing 65% of the businesses owned by women are people of color, and they're signing these long-term leases.

I mean, all the businesses along the Ave have this challenge of signing these long-term leases, and they're triple net leases, and the taxes and insurance and the common area maintenance are passed straight through to them.

It's like, so they're getting this impact.

They can't just increase prices to make up for these additional costs, some of which are coming from the city.

In fact, today we proposed to the mayor's office that we should create a program that proactively help small business owners before they sign the lease understand all the steps and all the additional responsibilities and costs that they will have to incur over time.

And so that's an important part of preventing people from getting into a situation that will cause huge negative impact economically.

And it all needs to be translated into languages that our small businesses speak.

Thank you for your presentation.

I'm going to invite our other agencies back up so we can have a brief conversation together about the question of building community wealth.

Thank you for making your way up.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Oh, you need to read something into this.

My staff is gesturing that they want to talk to me.

I'm worried I'm going to deny a quorum, though, if I walk out of the room.

Do you want to go ahead while we're settling in?

You're still kind of here if you're just standing there.

Sure, here.

I'll leave this as insurance that I'll be right back.

And I think we should still be on your driver's license.

OK.

Lakeisha, will you read the final item into the record?

OED, arts, EDI, and OCR, a conversation around building community wealth, briefing and discussion.

Okay, thank you.

So thank you all for being here today and sharing what your priorities are for the year and for staying a little extra to have this broader conversation.

I wanted the opportunity for all of the departments that are in this committee to have a chance to talk together about what we mean when we talk about building community wealth.

And I think the committee members can benefit, too, from having this kind of cross-conversation so that we begin the year all on the same page.

And I want to say that we excuse Councilmember Juarez.

She's had a family emergency.

So let's begin.

I'm just going to throw a couple questions out and let you.

let you have a conversation.

What are ways that you can collaborate as departments to build community wealth?

Sorry, we had, oh, we reorganized the questions and now I'm confused.

Do you know of any specific tools that could build, support building community wealth?

And what can get in the way or what does get in the way of you doing the work that you think you could do?

Or if you know of small businesses, community members, folks who are participating in the equitable development initiative or trying to?

who maybe we would invite to the special committee to talk about, you know, how policy impacts their work.

Are there things that kind of get in the way of us really being able to do this?

Right.

There's multiple issues.

How about if I start a little bit on workforce development and then we can talk about wealth creation through your program and then creative economy.

areas and be covered that way.

Let me highlight sort of a problem statement as to why we have this real big challenge around displacement and lack of equitable economic growth.

So the population has grown 20% in the last eight years.

Job occupation growth has grown 25% in the last eight years.

But the folks who benefited from the job growth are not local people.

It's people, talent that you have to recruit from outside to come in that drove up the growth curve that created housing values to go up.

And frankly, just a really tough place to be at if you're only making $40,000 a year.

So the population growth is contributing to the inequity in Seattle.

But the reason why population is growing is because local folks are not prepared to get, be able to obtain those jobs that are growing, knowledge jobs.

So the number one thing we can do to prevent future growth as the economy continues to evolve is investing in education and workforce training for our local people so they can benefit from the economic growth and not be left behind.

So from that standpoint, one of the things that ARPS and other departments we're working on is acknowledging that the economy is evolving, We want to stay ahead of the curve this time instead of reacting because by that time it's just too late.

So the creative economy has grown significantly here in Seattle.

The job growth has grown up 25 percent.

But on top of that, the creative economy has grown twice as fast as the average growth of the other occupations.

So this is a unique sector that are growing extremely fast in Seattle, and we just want to make sure local folks can obtain those good jobs, and especially from underserved communities.

Randy, you want to take it from there?

Yeah, can you give an example of what some of the creative jobs are that we're talking about here?

Sure.

I mean, I think what we know from the study that OED did at the, during 2018, early 2019, was there's really two areas of those jobs.

There's an enormous amount of performing arts, nonprofit, independent contractor, gig worker jobs that aren't compensated at a very competitive rate relative to the rest of the country.

And then there's a number of creative jobs in the tech sector, streaming, publishing, digital production, gaming, that pay really well.

Actually, the best jobs in the country are in Seattle, and the highest number of them, and they're dramatically overrepresented by white men.

So how do we create more paths to those jobs for more of the people who live in this city?

To Bobby's point, we have a robust economy in Seattle today that most of the folks who lived here weren't able to benefit from.

And so folks from other places had to move here to fill the jobs and the economy that we have.

How do we prepare the folks that live here, and particularly the young people and young people of color that live here, to benefit from the economy that's growing?

And I think there's an additional part of it that we at Arts & Culture feel a particular responsibility to, which is also about those independent musicians and actors and performers and dancers.

How do we create a culture of reverence and value around the work of our creative community and better compensate them for their time?

Because regardless of what our opinions might be, the jobs that aren't going to be automated, the jobs that aren't going to be replaced by artificial intelligence and the rise of 5G technology are creative, empathy-driven, storytelling jobs.

And so we have to value them at a living wage.

We have to prepare people for the jobs that are increasingly, that are a living wage.

And I think from closing it on both of those angles is how we can grow prosperity in the community.

I have a follow-up question, Madam Chair.

This is related to both Randy and Bobby's comments just now.

To what extent do we work as an Office of Economic Development, I mean for that matter Office of Arts and Culture, in kind of aligning our perceptions of the future demand and like the creative economy, or for that matter, any economic field, and our level of interaction with the University of Washington, which is one of the biggest, because to Randy's point, one of the most prescient things that Randy just said is that we produce a lot of great jobs for people that don't live here to the extent that we, I agree that the gap is how do we develop and give opportunities to our local workforce to fill the demand for the jobs companies and communities are creating here.

University of Washington, great incubator for, I mean, a university is created to develop and train workforce.

So I just wonder to what extent our efforts are integrated with the programmatic offerings of the University of Washington and how much collaboration there is.

Yeah, so the simplest way to explain from an education and workforce development standpoint is in the knowledge economy, we promoted STEM.

In the next economy, what we have to promote is more the creative side, which is STEAM, where you have the A, the art part of it.

So it's not that technology is going to go away.

It's just that technology is simply tools.

for the creative mind in the next economy because of AI and other new tools that are coming in place.

So what we're working on, in our world we call it a cluster strategy, and a lot of my friends don't like that word.

But the creative cluster strategy is where we work not just with government partners, but with schools, with education system in general, community college, higher ed, but also industries.

and then collectively build one plan around how to get it more inclusive and scale over time.

And so we cannot build this strategy without higher education.

And I would just add that after OED did their report, we partnered with the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance to do a follow-up report that was about specifically exploring the intersection of racial equity in the creative economy, which is what sort of led to all the outreach we did last summer.

Because why do we have this disparity where we have sort of two different economies that are driven by the creative sector?

So I think UW has to be a partner in that.

And I, you know, you asked the question of what gets in the way.

And I think having been in this job for over seven years, I think it's just the siloed nature of government where I don't think it's even intentional or malicious.

I think we all, work really hard with our head down in the lane that we're in and people may not realize where there's opportunities to collaborate.

I think looking at the departments around this table, I'm really, I think we've done a pretty good job of trying to open that aperture.

In particular, I'm thinking about the EDI subcabinet that everyone on this table is a part of.

where we're trying to look together at how to hold up each other's work.

So just because we're doing an effective program with the Evans School, what does that mean for the six other departments that are probably doing a capstone project with the Evans School?

And what about the Foster School?

So I think it's a great question.

I do respect the cluster approach that Bobby's taken, that it's trying to bring all those attendant partners to the table so that we're collectively trying to set a target for our success.

I wanted to add, I know you have a question around what tools might be available, and just to sort of reiterate the racial equity lab that our office will be developing, UW is going to be one of the partners that we work with, and we do see it becoming a really critical tool for all kinds of analyses for decision makers that would have an impact on all of these programs.

So I want to add to the other conversation around wealth and community wealth.

So jobs are important and the right types of jobs are critical.

There's a land use component as well.

So that's what I alluded to in my earlier presentation.

And why some of the maps that we looked at, especially the historic maps, have relevance today.

If you haven't read The Color of Law, I really strongly encourage you to read that.

Richard Rothstein, who's done probably some of the most research around the history of zoning, very specifically government-sanctioned both federal and local governments' policies from 20s, 30s, the FHA, to local policies.

very deliberately designed to actually segregate primarily African Americans in terms of land.

So some of the good examples are Levittown in New York where the FHA asked Levitt to develop 17,000 units of housing with very, very low tax credits from the federal government.

But the federal government's requirement at that time was that by covenants, they cannot, no African Americans could participate in the program.

They can't be residents or owners of that.

This is a federal government in the 20s and 30s.

Combine that with some of the redlining map that I showed that was done, some of it by banks, in some cases our own Seattle and many other cities land use zoning from the 20s and 30s had created that segregation.

If you look at Rothstein's and a number of other research, you will see today African Americans have income is around 60% of white Americans on average.

Their wealth is less than 10% of those of white.

So if you assume that everybody works, have equal income, you'd assume they're 60% income of white Americans, their wealth should be close to 60%, but it's not.

And Rothstein makes a direct link between why that is the case and how lack of ownership of homes was a critical contributor, if not the most, to that change today.

So Levittown White people moved to Levittown, owned properties, and over time, those properties were built by very low tax loans, appreciated over time.

Their kids inherited those, and the housing appreciated over time and continuously.

And land is a critical component of building wealth, whether you use it for commercial or residential.

So he makes the link.

That is an important impediment.

And so when I talk about some of the things that we need to look at geographically, it is really tied to land use policies.

And part of the success so far, very incremental, of this equitable development initiative is really some of it is tied to ownership in or whether it's land acquisition or the businesses that these communities try to have ownership for is a critical step in really addressing that issue.

And Uba can talk about some examples of very real world in the last two years that relates to that kind of ownership.

Yeah, and I'm glad that Sam brought up the issue of one of the only ways to build wealth has been through home ownership, but there's also like other barriers we see in communities like my community, for example, even though we have a working class community right now that are professionals, they have other kind of barriers around, for example, needing a Sharia compliant way of getting home ownership access and things like that.

So, and then like redefining what a balance sheet means, right?

We have two organizations that we are supporting through the Acrobat Development Initiative right now, for example, that they are the spectrum of where like they wouldn't even touch an interest.

And I was very impressed with a particular organization called the CHAM Community by the, future light rail station in Graham Street where they were really able to really raise, somebody earlier talked about social capital, but raise money from the community because they couldn't go to the bank and were able to buy five properties just from 3,000 families that included kids.

And EDI was just the last kind of funding last year that was able to like, first of all, like we look at balance sheet from like, you know, how the banks define it, but redefining that and looking at other vehicles of community ownership and things like that.

The other thing I wanted to bring up about the barriers is also like we talked about government being siloed, but government has some strengths and things that we can really move, but what about partnership with community?

What about partnership with philanthropy?

An example is through, for example, partnering with Seattle Foundation and the Communities of Opportunity to figure out how we can, and Office of Economic Development, especially with Ken Takahashi and Heidi Hall, around commercial affordability and how, as a government, maybe we're limited, but a community development finance institution can make that happen.

And how do we really partner with those groups?

And we've been able with the EDI and continue to partner with groups like the Seattle Foundation to figure out how we can solve that issue.

And then the other piece about tool that I've been like really looking at right now is the Boston Ujima Project, which is a community investment vehicle that is solving some of these issues.

One of the things that I have heard about for years now is the issue of the ground floor development, right?

So we have all these projects that might have Office of Housing money ready to go, but we don't have a way to finance the ground floor.

And because of the prohibition on gifting public funds for a particular business or apparently any commercial anything, these projects are shovel ready but can't move forward.

And so that's my understanding is, you know, how do we dig into this question and really start to find the tools that will allow us, and maybe it's, you know, trying to partner with philanthropy with, I know there's a funders collaborative conversation happening about, trying to answer this question, but I think that it's really important for us to figure that piece out.

And if it's not that, if there's some other tool that will allow us to start to steward or allow community to steward their own land ownership, you know, that's the conversation I'd like for us to continue having is how do we start moving in the direction of identifying some of those tools and then really figuring out how do we make it happen?

I agree with you, and that was one of the challenges in terms of our state law or other barriers.

Some of the success with this multiple department over the EDI lesson is actually asking that question.

Because we communicate and coordinate our resources, we have been able to fund and tee up projects like the Ethiopian Community Center or the Filipino Community Center who we worked with in terms of building capacity so that they are ready to apply for Office of Housing funding, but Office of Housing cannot pay for the ground floor.

So we tee them up and line up, you know, connect the dots with our coordination so that they are ready for Office of Housing, and Office of Housing is at the table as well.

And those are kind of successful, you know, two projects that address that.

The mayor has been exploring this and asking us to explore these issues, and we mentioned the strategic land investment idea that is specifically trying to address those kinds of issues.

Can we have office of housing fund funds housing only?

EDI funds the ground floor only.

Can we look at new tools that really is flexible, agile, so that you have, as a pilot, that then you can address mixed income and mixed use developments that could also leverage other funding, including the private sector.

So those are the kinds of things that are really exciting to look at this year and next year, in addition to our focus on industrial lands, to really connect a lot of the dots.

I'm going to put Bobby and Randy on the spot and say, like, the TI program that your office piloted is innovative.

Maybe talking a little bit about that.

And then the PDA.

Right.

We'll end it up with PDA.

So before I moved to Seattle, I was a sponsor of the Affordable Commercial Space Program in Portland.

And what we did is we purchased land, build a building, sell the building, master lease back the first floor, and then build out the gray shell, the warm shell, and the TI based on the businesses that could be moving in.

And we were targeting African American owned businesses that were displaced from a neighborhood that traditionally were African American.

It's called the Alberta Commons Project.

It's in North and Northeast Portland.

So government played a role in paying for TI, provide operating funds, capital working dollars, 10-year lease with five additional years for additional lease because wealth creation takes time.

You can't do it in two years.

It takes 10 years.

And then we provide working capital, 10-year lease, and then we use a community process to determine who's best qualified for those space.

So it's not just a random process.

It's a community process by the neighborhood and the African-American community.

Here we're prevented from doing that because of the state law.

But there might be a way to use Randy's vision around PDA model to master lease some spaces.

So I'll turn it over to Randy.

I hear a theme of perhaps talking to our intergovernmental relations departments.

I think the contours of public development authorities are really complicated, and we've been with our shoulder to this wheel for over two years trying to build, refine, and clarify the idea.

at a high level, the idea that there can be an intermediary, a well-capitalized, mission-driven intermediary that can stand between the forces of the real estate market and the needs of community and be an arbiter and broker between the two is clearly a demonstrable need.

And I think we started from a place of our bias towards sort of cultural space and cultural use, and then being on the EDI subcabinet, we looked at a lot of these small businesses, really community-centric small businesses, At the same time, the Economic Development Office started talking about commercial affordability.

And whether the mechanism for that capitalization is funding or impact investing or philanthropy or some combination, we know that if we can pull a capital stack together and we can go to the Office of Housing and say, Emily, what building needs a ground floor tenant?

Who are three partners from the EDI pool who fit that neighborhood's character and identity?

What's one cultural user that could sort of bring the whole project together?

Like, that kind of thinking, I think, is well within our reach.

And when you were saying, you know, what are some of the things that limit us, I think we are, by nature, as government, a very risk-averse entity, as we should be with taxpayer dollars.

But I worry that if we only use the tools that we've been using to get to where we are now, we are only going to tweak the status quo slowly over time.

And what I've seen in seven years in this job is the affordability crisis just explode and definitely left with a feeling like we don't have adequate tools to respond.

And we can't as the Arts Office respond alone, we need to do that in partnership with the other folks around this table.

And so whether it's Strategic Acquisition Fund, whether it's Seattle Promise, whether it's Commercial Affordability or Tenant Improvement Projects, we need to really be thoughtful about bringing a number of those things to bear and then actually putting them into the world in some way, shape, or form.

I think part of what we need to do is rally around a couple of projects where we could say we're gonna put the pieces together and see if this works.

And if it does, maybe we can scale something like that.

Madam Chair, so I have to actually go because I have another commitment, unfortunately.

Since we're not voting on anything, I don't think it'll make a difference.

But I, like in terms of quorum or what have you.

But I do just want to say this is a really great discussion.

What a great first meeting of this committee.

And thanks everybody for coming.

And I look forward to continuing to meet individually.

and with Council Member Morales as we go along and develop a work plan for the year and just really appreciate the discussion.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

See you first Thursday.

Yeah, first Thursday.

So yeah, we have come up on our time.

I want to give everybody an opportunity for a last comment or question if you have anything else you want to add.

looking forward, and thank you for the platform.

I think we're hungry for this, so this is great.

Yeah, I'm really excited to have all of you here, to have your passion and your commitment and your deep work in community reflected in the things that you have identified as priorities and the things that you've already accomplished, so thank you.

As I said, before we adjourn, quickly, I do want to say again that We will be having a special meeting on February 6th at 5 p.m.

We're having it in the evening so that we can invite community to come and participate.

We have not identified exactly who the presenters will be, but if you have thoughts, please get in touch with our office.

And then our regularly scheduled meeting for February.

has been rescheduled to February 20th at 930 because of the President's Day holiday.

Our next committee meeting got bumped.

So, and both of those meetings will be here in council chambers.

So, hearing no further business, we are adjourned.

Thank you all so much.