Housing & Human Services Mtg. 03/13/2024

And the March 13th meeting of the Housing and Human Services Committee will now come to order.

I'm Kathy Moore, chair of the committee.

Will the clerk please call the roll?

Council President Nelson.

Council Member Saka.

Here.

Council Member Wu.

Present.

Vice Chair Morales.

Here.

Chair Moore.

Present.

All right.

Four present.

All right, thank you.

So if there's no objection, today's agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, the agenda is adopted.

So thank you, everyone, for being here today for the March 13th meeting of the Housing and Human Services Committee.

On today's agenda, we have three items on the agenda, one of which is for possible vote.

I'll note that Council President Nelson has joined us.

So, first on the agenda, we have the appointment of Nicholas A. Ramirez to the Pacific Hospital Preservation and Development Authority for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Second, we have the Unified Care Team to talk to us about restoring Seattle's public spaces.

And finally, we have a presentation from the Seattle Housing Authority on the work that they do.

So, at this point, we will now open the hybrid public comment period.

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

So, Madam Clerk, how many speakers are signed up today?

We have one in-person speaker and two remote.

Okay, thank you.

So each speaker will have two minutes, and we will start with the in-person speakers.

Clerk, can you please read the public comment instructions?

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

Public comment period is up to 20 minutes.

Speakers will be called in order in which they registered.

Speakers will alternate between sets of in-person and remote speakers until the public comment period has ended.

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

Speakers' mics will be muted if they do not end their comments within the allotted time to allow us to call on the next speaker.

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

The first in-person speaker is Carolyn Malone.

Is this mic on?

Yes, it is.

I'm Carolyn Malone.

On April 5th, 2019, I was approved to move into Chancery Place Apartments.

I was delayed for 12 days because Seattle Police were also allowed to move in and set up secretive surveillance all over this 13-story building.

including my apartment.

Since that time, I've been fighting, complaining, filing complaints to get them out because this is illegal.

And I'm under surveillance because of my activism against police brutality, which is my right.

My door on my apartment is the only one that's broken up, just damaged severely, and it's been that way for more than two months.

On April 30th, I'm supposed to get a new door, but I have these two.

Eviction notices.

One I brought in yesterday.

I received from Puckett and Redfoot on my door, well, hand-delivered yesterday.

The second one yesterday from Boyce Law Firm.

That's double jeopardy, isn't it?

Having two different eviction notices.

One, this one I must reply by March 25th, This one I must reply by March 22nd.

And this is just concerted harassment, a vendetta against me because of my outspokenness and support of my rights, housing rights for seniors and for myself.

And until police are removed, I'm going to keep coming and doing whatever I need to do to stop this vendetta and this harassment.

Has anyone ever heard of two eviction notices from two different law firms?

Thank you very much.

That was our only in-person speaker at this moment.

Up next is remote speakers.

And up first is David Haynes, followed by Julie Rawls.

Hi, David Haynes.

I think we need an independent authority to keep King County Regional Homeless Authority honest about their requirements to keep the service providers honest.

who seem to just generate an embellished amount of data and statistics that's racially driven that lets them off the hook for sometimes subhuman disservices.

And we really need a wholehearted effort to start building out the capacity of shelter and housing because there's too many unnecessary sufferings that are taking place.

And if you really had a unified care team You have to care enough about getting rid of the evil drug pushers who destroy their fellow man for $5 to $20 in drugs and then victimize them.

then you have these people coming along who are looking for more more for profitable wraparound services to embrace some self-destructive repeat offender who gets to gobble up a majority of a whole bunch of money and resources that an innocent houseless person would benefit way more for and would move on to a better path and i really think that council needs to consider a law to start jailing the drug pushers and trespassing all the junkie thieves before they start running interference or before that wraparound like response teams start like ignoring the fact that there's some serious problems with drugs that seems to be used as a wraparound service excuse to like gouge Medicaid to constantly accommodate people's self-destructive behaviors.

But we really need a huge housing build-out and a capacity build-out, not just for re-election apparatuses that hide within the homeless industrial complex, but legitimately.

Thank you very much.

Next caller.

The next commenter, remote commenter, is Julie Rawls.

Please press star six.

Hello?

Hi, can you hear me now?

Yes, we can hear you.

Okay, this is a message for...

everybody but tanya wu knows the background information on the person i'm calling about we have a precious guy who's been living here in kobe terrace for three years now um that i've been trying to ask around um how to get him into housing he's an adult about 40 probably had developmental delays and grew up some kind of troubled background i can't get that much information I've contacted everybody I could think of under the sun, adult services, county, city.

And I did go to the CID public safety committee meeting and we discussed his case and it was very positive, but I didn't get information of all the people who said they would look into this.

I did finally get his date of birth.

I believe I sent it to Tonya and the REACH staff, but I haven't heard anything back.

So I'm bringing it to this committee meeting.

I would say this guy needs an adult group home with other men with activities, some kind of adult sort of supervision, making sure he gets health care, has activities to bring out, you know, what potential he has.

But he is still just sitting there, sometimes soaking through wet on a bench in Kobe Terrace.

So I'm waiting for some answers.

I do have the date of birth.

Finally, I think it's the correct date of birth for him.

But I don't even know what agency deals with group homes for impaired adults who are not behavioral issues that may not have job skills and be able to function independently on their own.

Okay.

So I guess I'll wait to hear from someone.

I know someone from the mayor's office was at the CID meeting.

All right, thank you very much.

Do we have any additional speakers?

That is all of the speakers at this time.

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

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

All right, thank you.

All right, moving to our items of business.

Will the clerk please read the first agenda item into the record?

Agenda item one, appointment of Nicholas A. Ramirez as a member of Pacific Hospital Preservation and Development Authority for a term to December 31st, 2026 for briefing, discussion, and possible vote.

Okay, thank you.

So I'm still seeing the timer.

on the screen.

It looks like we're still waiting for the presenter from item one.

No, he's here.

Nicholas.

Nicholas Ramirez.

Yes, Mr. Ramirez is here.

Okay.

Can you take the timer off the screen?

Okay.

Oh, sorry.

So we do not have the presenter here.

Let me then...

Will you do that, Hannah?

Okay.

Hi, everyone.

We do have one appointment today for the Pacific Hospital Preservation and Development Authority.

His name is Nicholas A. Ramirez, who I will have introduce himself in just a minute.

The Pacific Hospital PDA, their mission is to tirelessly champion equity in health through exemplary stewardship of PHPDA's public resources.

They serve as a community ally, resource conveyor, and change agent to this end.

And I'll turn it over to Nicholas Ramirez to introduce himself and talk about why he wants to serve on the PDA.

Thank you so much for having me here today.

I really appreciate it.

I'm a resident of Seattle.

I'm from Central Washington.

It's an honor to work with the PDH PDA.

a lot of good work that's happening.

I've dedicated my career, my 10-year career at CMAR Community Health Centers to serving the underserved.

That's what we do.

We pride ourselves on serving not only Hispanics and Latinos, but all of the underserved individuals throughout Western Washington and in the city of Seattle.

We have two clinics in South Seattle where we serve approximately 25,000 individuals a year.

We were part of mass COVID testing.

We had lines around the block.

And we have, we're proud to say that we've administered over 500,000 vaccines since the vaccine was rolled out.

But serving the underserved is something that I'm very, very proud of, and something that I will continue to do.

And it's why I want to serve on this committee.

I think that there's a lot of great work that's being done by this committee.

And there's a ton of talented individuals.

that really do great work and that I can learn from and will help me progress throughout my career.

So thank you for the time and I'm looking forward to the opportunity of serving on this committee.

Great, thank you very much.

And I did wanna thank you for your willingness to serve.

And I noted that you had worked or served under the direction of Professor Alia, who was also one of my mentors and an amazing voting rights advocate.

So thank you for that work as well.

I'm wondering if the colleagues had any questions or comments before we move to a vote?

Yes, Council President Nelson.

Mr. Ramirez, I just would like to say thank you very much for stepping up.

I have looked over your materials and we're just very fortunate to have folks that have such extensive experience in nonprofits, especially in complex fields like healthcare, et cetera.

And I noticed that you are a member of the Criminal Justice Honor Society.

I would love to hear more about that at some point, but just thank you very much for stepping up.

Thank you.

Council Member Salka.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And I also, you know, share that sentiment and want to express my gratitude and appreciation for Mr. Ramirez for stepping up to the plate and serving the community in this really important, impactful, profound way.

And, you know, this world depends on leaders and organizers and, you know, people with special skills and abilities like yourself stepping up and, you know, you know, contributing to the greater good.

So kudos to you, thank you.

I do have a question, and this is not directed towards Mr. Ramirez, but this is, you know, part of my ignorance here.

I understand what the role is for, and I think Mr. Ramirez is Highly qualified for this position.

How are these nominations surface to our committee?

Out of these come about like just generally this is more of a question maybe for my colleagues Who have seen these kind of things before or you madam chair?

So I'm gonna turn that over to my chief of staff to answer that question.

I

Thank you, Council Member Saka, for that question.

There are about 13 different boards and commissions that the Housing and Human Services Committee has oversight of, and each appointment of these boards and commissions are appointed by a couple of different authorities.

I can pull up the one specifically for the Pacific Hospital PDA.

All good.

You can share offline as well.

The Pacific Hospital PDA has four seats that are appointed by the mayor's office, one that's appointed by the King County Executive, and four that are appointed by the PHPDA Council.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you.

Any additional questions?

All right.

All right, so seeing no further questions or comments, I now move that the committee recommend confirmation of appointment 2765. Is there a second?

Second.

Second.

Thank you very much.

It has been moved and seconded to recommend confirmation of the appointment.

Are there any final comments before we vote?

Okay, seeing none, will the clerk please call the roll on the recommendation to confirm the appointment?

Council President Nelson?

Aye.

Council Member Saka.

Aye.

Council Member Wu.

Yes.

Vice Chair Morales.

Yes.

Chair Moore.

Yes.

Five in favor, none opposed.

Wonderful.

So the motion carries and the committee recommendation to confirm the appointment of Nicholas Ramirez will be sent to for the Pacific Pacific Hospital Preservation and Development Authority will be sent to the March 19 City Council meeting.

Again, thank you, Mr. Ramirez, for all of the work that you're doing in our community and being willing to take on additional contributions to our community.

I'm really looking forward to the work that you are doing there.

Thank you again.

Thank you.

All right, so moving on to the second item on our agenda, will the clerk please read the second agenda item into the record?

Agenda item two, unified care team briefing for briefing and discussion.

All right, thank you.

So today we have with us the Mayor's Office and the Unified Care Team, just taking their seats now, who will walk us through their As labeled, restoring Seattle's public spaces presentation.

They will walk us through the city's approach to addressing encampments, the UCT team, and the 2023 citywide data.

As a side note, I did have the privilege of going on a District 5 tour with the I think all of the Unified Care Team, and I received an update on the active and recently addressed encampments in the district and was very impressed with the knowledge of the district and the sensitivity of all of the Unified Care Team workers to the needs of the individuals that they are working with in a very difficult job that they do have.

So I would like, and then, excuse me, And then I would encourage committee members to reach out to Director Peters to also schedule a tour with Unified Care Team in your district if you have not done so already and hope that UCT won't be upset with me for encouraging more work.

But anyway, that said, so I am going to have the honor of introducing Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington from the Office of the Mayor.

Allie Peters, Director Beau Bogman, Christina Korpi, and Tom Van Bronckhorst from the Unified Care Team.

So let's proceed with your presentation.

Thank you, Committee Chair Moore.

I may sound a little froggy because I just got over a cold, so bear with me and I'm not talking the majority of the presentation, so that's a good thing.

But grateful for the opportunity, Council Members, to share with you about the work of the Unified Care Team to address the impact of encampments on Seattle's public spaces.

So our agenda's on the screen there.

I'm gonna go redo team introductions just a little bit so you know which person Council Member Moore was talking about, background of the Unified Care Team approach, rules governing that work, a UCT overview, and a 2023 city-wide data overview.

And so we have Allie Peters, UCT Director, Bo, I always mess your last name up.

Boffman.

I knew that.

You did.

No.

Regional manager, Christina Corpy, who oversees all outreach and coordination of beds and AKA superstar.

And then our community liaison, Tom, and I'm not going to try to say your last name, but he is the person in the community that everybody looks to for answers and directions and kind of famous.

And then behind us is some more of our team members who support the work and aren't at the table this time because we didn't want to crowd the table, but very important folks on UCT.

All right.

So background of the unified care team.

But before we do that, we want to make sure that folks look at the city investments in addressing the homelessness crisis in two areas, people and places.

The homelessness system that focuses on helping people experiencing homelessness and bringing them indoors and on a pathway to housing stability is largely overseen by KCRHA.

But our presentation today is going to look at how the city is responding to the impact of the homelessness crisis on our public spaces, namely through the work of the Unified Care Team.

What connects these two bodies of work is the commitment to connect people with opportunities to come inside.

All right, we're going to go over the UCT timeline.

So we understand that in early 2022, when Mayor Harrell took office, we were coming out of the pandemic.

We did not have a database.

So these estimations are off of handy-dandy spreadsheets and counting.

We estimated 1,000 tents and 300-plus RVs on public parks, sidewalks, and streets.

And there was a backlog of 10,000 encampment-related customer service requests that had not been answered.

When the mayor started, he pulled all the cabinet members together and he said, homelessness is everybody's job.

And he asked me to stand up a one Seattle approach to addressing encampments with a focus on responding to constituent concerns and building a data infrastructure.

In 2023, we piloted our neighborhood team model, which was built on some of the early success we saw and lessons we learned in 2022. We worked a lot with Councilmember Strauss for Woodland Park, and that is actually how the model developed.

We started with a timeline of a month or two Resolve Woodland Park.

And what we found out is we didn't have enough beds for people to go.

And so we paused and we convened community members, the council member and outreach and HSD and KCRHA and met every single week in council member Strauss's district.

And what we learned was that if people are involved and they understand what's going on, they'll have the patience to wait.

for things to be resolved.

And so an example of that would be when we were down to about five people, one person was waiting for a tiny home village because they had a pet.

And so we said, outreach said, if we can give this person an extra three days, we can move them into a tiny home village.

And the community was like, that's fine.

Again, they just want to be notified and involved.

So where we're at today is applying those lessons.

We launched all of the neighborhood teams last year, but we're slowly implementing them this year in partnership with all of you.

We also have a full year of data for the first time.

So we have a database and we now have 2023 data that's a year's worth of data that's tracked in the database.

With that data, we look at strategies and efforts that appear to be working as well as those that are not working, which allows us to pivot and make continuous improvements to the way our teams and resources deploy.

So what we're learning, we're learning that consistency in a neighborhood is important.

We're learning that prioritizing high impact sites is resulting in a lower level of public safety incidents.

We're learning that some locations repopulate quickly and frequently.

and that we need to change our approach to determine which strategies are most likely to result in sites remaining clear.

A lot of you have talked to me about seven-day-a-week UCT.

That's one strategy for repopulated sites.

And we're learning ways to improve how we communicate with neighbors about what's happening in the area.

All of this is helping us improve our neighborhood model for greater effectiveness and more results that Mayor Harrell promised to bring when the effort launched two years ago.

A lot of you have heard this slide, but I think it's important for the general public and for us all to be reminded about the rules that govern the UCT work.

And so the UCT work is governed by the MDARs, or the Multi-Departmental Administrative Rules.

The rules govern how we do our work in four primary areas.

The amount of notice required before removing an encampment, the guardrails around when and how we address hazards and obstructions, requirements for offers of shelter prior to a removal, and storing and providing access to personal property removed.

Contrary to some opinion, we follow the MDARs.

We follow them because we believe in them, not because they're rules.

They're not a suggestion, but they're a requirement, and they help us keep our work grounded in the compassionate approach that we believe in.

We want people to come indoors at the same time as we keep spaces clean and accessible for everyone, and the MDARs align with those objectives.

One other area is jurisdictional lines.

We are also limited by those.

Across the city are various sites that are on state property, namely sites alongside and beneath highways that belong to the Washington State Department of Transportation, or WSDOT as we call it.

These sites represent some of the most challenging sites in the city.

and we don't have jurisdictional authority to address these sites.

We have, as you see on the screen, the 2023 stats that a lot of you have seen, and it expressed alarm to some of these statistics.

I will say that the governor, and I think right now, they're talking about how much money they're going to put into the program for this year.

It's for this year, right?

But it's not solidified yet.

And we will be in conversations with the governor and his team around addressing some of the sites that are in Seattle.

So one last set that I want to talk about before I pass it to Ali is the 72 hour parking rule.

This is something that frustrates residents a lot because folks that are living inside their vehicles are only required by law to move every 72 hours.

We don't have enough resources for the number of RVs on Seattle streets.

And we know from our work that RV residents are the most hesitant to accept temporary shelter because they don't want to give up the one asset they have, which is their vehicle.

Safe lots are one solution, but we don't have enough land for safe lots to meet the demand.

And so for RV residents and vehicle residents, permanent housing is the best solution because it gives them a key to a door that unlocks that's permanent, that then allows them to trust that they can give up their vehicle and go inside.

And so...

just wanted to touch on the RV challenge before I pass it to Ali.

But before I do that, I just want to pause, Committee Chair, to see if you want us to keep going or if there's any questions.

Thank you very much.

So I just wanted for the record to reflect that Councilmember Rivera has joined us.

And I guess, are there any questions at this stage?

Okay, Councilmember Rivera.

Thank you, Chair Moore.

Thank you for being here and thank you for letting me join into this presentation.

This is a big challenge in the D4, the RV.

So as much information as we can get and ways that we can strategize to address this, because I do understand this is a challenge.

I understand that folks don't want to accept shelter because they have shelter.

But this is something that's really an issue.

A lot of these vehicles are not necessarily mobile.

And then there are areas where, in many cases, and I'm just going to state this for the record, there's been issues with drugs.

And I know in my district, in Magnuson Park, there's an issue with RVs and there's families living there and children.

And I have heard that there's drug related activity.

So I do want to flag for that for all of us to know and for the record to reflect that this is something that I am very concerned about.

I'm sure I'm not the only one.

And so whatever we can do to be good partners and thought partners on how to manage for this, I really appreciate.

And I also want to just say for the record that I really thank UCT for your partnership, because we've worked on a number of things for the D4.

And you are very responsive, and I very much appreciate that and look forward to the continued partnership.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you.

Any other questions at this time before we move on?

Okay, same.

Madam Chair?

Yes.

Yeah, no, thank you, Deputy Mayor Washington, and thank you, Madam Chair, for being recognized here.

Yeah, I want to echo that sentiment.

Appreciate the partnership here.

This is really, really important work.

Let us get upstream, address some of the root causes, and make sure we have effective response capabilities as well, and you all play a central role in that and bringing that to life, so thank you.

The RV challenge is real, and...

I think RV safe lots are a key component of the broader solution.

We need more of them.

Operations and maintenance costs, as I hear for those, in addition to potentially lack of siting and lack of land, city-owned land.

That's why we need to further explore public-private partnerships, amongst other things, to better bring those to life.

As I understand the operation and maintenance costs for those can be large.

So be looking for ways to better support that need as one important part, expanding RV safe lot opportunities throughout the city as one important, but not the only part of a broader, more comprehensive strategy to address these to your point, including adding more permanent housing.

And so we need a multi-layered approach.

This is urgent, urgent, urgent stuff.

And in my own district and District 1, I've seen, you know, the impact and the effectiveness of some design solutions by SDOT and other city agencies designed to make more beneficial use of certain spaces.

And like along, let's see, Harbor Avenue, and there used to be a fair, like, a non-trivial challenge with certain RVs and the impacts on the community.

And so in any event, I'm looking forward to continuing this work together and making sure we have a broad, comprehensive approach to addressing the homelessness from prevention to response and better connecting people with shelter and services.

Thank you.

Agreed with all comments and looking forward to innovating with you all and being thought partners.

Council Member Rivera.

One last comment is just on the drug issue.

You know, to your point about community and educating community, if that is not true, then that's something that we need to figure out how to track.

And maybe you are tracking it and you can share that information.

But I do want to get community the correct information.

If it's not happening, they should know that, too, because then things are not reported accurately.

And that is, you know, a disservice to everyone as well.

So I wanted to point that out as well.

Thank you.

Yep.

Thanks.

All right.

Thank you.

I don't see any other questions.

We can move on.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Good morning, council members.

I'm gonna talk a little bit about the overview of how the work is done.

And I think the first slide here is the Unified Care Team One Seattle approach.

So this was really exciting coming into this work because prior to Mayor Harrell, a lot of this work was siloed into departments and community and constituents often were very confused and got bounced back and forth.

And so this slide is a really exciting slide to present because it really shows that Unified Care Team brings all at least 11 departments here together and we work together for a single response.

So you can see here that weekly we meet with leaders in all of these departments to ensure so you can see like the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspection.

We work with them closely when there are encampments on private property.

That's not our jurisdiction.

Again, Deputy Mayor Washington talked about that.

We work very closely in helping them understand and working with them.

We have our SPD folks, Alternative Response Team, that are highly trained in de-escalation and keeping our staff safe and ensuring the community is safe while we're out there and addressing those issues.

So the other thing that one never would think about is the library system is our housed constituents are out there often using that for warmth and shelter.

And our team is out there to help ensure that the public can also use it too.

And it's safe and welcoming for them as well.

So this is kind of as a really exciting thing about how unified care team is bringing all of this together.

Quick question.

Yes, go ahead, Council President.

Where is the HOPE team?

Do they still exist?

And where on that pretty picture before is it?

So the HOPE team was developed under the NAV team.

And so the elements of the HOPE team or the values of the HOPE team are still in place like outreach and all of that.

But when we created UCT, we tried to get away from all of the different names like the Purple Bag Program, the HOPE team.

It was just confusing people and just saying, call UCT and we have outreach and all of these other things.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

So this one is really a great way of how to talk about UCT work and language that is helpful communication.

It kind of buckets the work.

So you'll kind of see that the responding to community needs is a lot around our constituent response UCT has improved that process and how we keep them informed.

The coordinating outreach services are very similar.

Council Member Nelson, that's what you were speaking about is our outreach and the coordination through contracted outreach as well.

And talking about how we make spaces clean and accessible.

So that is a lot of our SPU partners in UCT and a lot of our parks and SDOT helping do trash mitigation.

The resolving priority encampments, we'll talk a little bit further here about prioritization and how that happens.

But that is one of the areas that we wanna talk about.

And then restoring public places is around what we call activation.

So very similar to what Council Member Saka was saying is that working with the departments across the city to change maybe a way a site looks or a location looks to make it more welcoming for committee or for community and less inviting for someone to want to camp there or, you know, reside there.

So these are kind of the different ways in different areas and how best to communicate the work we do.

And this is going down a little bit of a layer about how we do the work.

So this slide really kind of shows a work cycle.

So everyone can kind of understand the public can understand how how this works.

So the first box, the community reports, whether it's find it, fix it, we receive emails, we receive emails from you all, however it kind of comes in, we take all that information and really the find it, fix it helps move along into ensuring that we have a site inspection.

That's kind of our first thing is they're sure we understand what's happening there.

Many of the sites we actually already have in our data system, the wonderful system that we have now that Deputy Mayor was talking about.

So we have two customer service representatives that have triaged over 41,000 service requests in 2023. And what that triage means is that they've looked in our system, been able to either get a response to community that, yep, we already aware we're monitoring that site or, hey, We don't have a whole recent inspection.

We will be out there to inspect it.

So two people within three days is our target, and they've met that in 2023. Within three days, over 41,000 service requests, which means constituents heard back immediately within three days of putting in a fine to fix it.

And we've heard you loud and clear that your constituents want more of a personalized response and not just the automatic responses.

So Ali is working right now to add two more customer service folks to when we get kind of the responses from someone who has a site there for a really long time and they're frustrated, they can then go into a deeper layer of explanation and make sure that customer has additional details.

So heard you, and we're working on it.

Thank you.

Thank you, Deputy Mayor.

So from site inspection, there are a couple of things that happen.

The most important is that what's behind the scenes is coordinating the outreach to go out to sites, mitigating the harm for public, so going out and doing trash mitigation, And then planning on with the prioritization score, which we're gonna talk about next, is monitoring until we know that that site will be resolved.

So during these different processes, there are responses that go to community and the constituents.

Again, Deputy Mayor said we're working on kind of personalizing them a little bit more.

But back when Mayor Hill took office, I think Deputy Mayor said 10,000 service requests were not being responded to at all before.

So now that they've gotten some response, we're now kind of doing the next level of being able to make it a little more personal.

So that's kind of that monitoring the site and the things that we do and the community stays, constituents and communities stay updated during that process.

And then we plan for the resolution based on score, the resource availability, and conversations that we have as team leads.

So the next, which leads into this next slide, which is about prioritization.

And so what you see here, what everyone sees is points assigned by different site attributes, as well as two other areas that we use external data to inform us.

The biggest thing I really want to make sure comes across is that this really gives us a starting score for every site.

One of my mottos always, I used to be big in data and performance, is that this number is just the start of a conversation.

So our teams in North and our teams in South meet every two weeks from people on the ground.

We take all the information we hear from constituents, from you all, we take what the field teams see on a daily basis, because we know things change every day, every hour something could change.

And we talk about it and we base it on the score and we talk about with the scores for resolution.

So again, these scores are really just a baseline for us to start a conversation.

It doesn't mean one necessarily is more risk than others and other factors that we may are not necessarily captured in a quantitative manner, so.

And just to remember, because I made a statement in my presentation a couple of weeks ago and someone was upset that I said the loudest voice doesn't receive help first.

It is because just this was built because there are not enough shelter beds.

If there are not enough shelter beds, if there are more people than shelter beds available, then we had to figure out a way to determine which site gets addressed first.

And so that is the genesis, if you want.

Just remember why we created a prioritization system is because more people than beds.

So how do we decide which ones get addressed first in an equitable way and not just based on how many emails we receive or phone calls we receive?

So I just wanted to...

Yes, thank you.

That's very important.

That is resources, of course, has us working with the prioritization and how to allocate our resources we do have.

Sorry, I have a question, and I'll get to you in a moment.

In looking at these, how do you determine what the score or the number is?

So, like I would say, you know, within a school walk zone, to me, would be perhaps a two rather than a one.

So how do you, and are there additional categories that could be added?

So I guess how is this scoring created, and are there opportunities to change it?

Yeah, when this was created, it was based on all the things.

So while you can see that the near children playground is one point, there's also within public school block zone.

So we tried to layer some multiple ideas in there.

This also processes iterative.

So we've had this now and we are in the stage of relooking again and talking through exactly what the definition and are these the right points?

So you bring up a point that we actually are already kind of talking about and going with what does this currently look like now?

in our work and does it need to have some iteration, the next iteration made.

And the data we saw, which I talked about, and you might have it on hand, is actually pointing to 2023 data that we did resolve the most important sites first.

And I don't know if you have it on hand.

You'll be speaking to it later.

Okay, great.

I'll be speaking to it later.

And so, so far the data shows that we did exactly what we set out to do and we're open to, I mean, we've had it for, one full year with data.

And so we would be silly to think that we've arrived.

And we probably, every year at the end of the year, we sit down with the mayor and walk through the year and what worked and what didn't work and recommendations for how to improve.

And we look forward to doing that with you as our committee chair and hearing all of the input from your colleagues.

And we should be getting better every year.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Council President?

So I just wanted to take this opportunity to say I really appreciate the matrix.

I mean, you have to have a rational way of dealing with the, I think you said you inherited 10,000, a backlog of 10,000 complaints.

And so this is, I completely understand the approach and I support it.

I am, what you just said caught my ear, Deputy Mayor, something about there are not enough shelter beds, that you hear our complaints that people aren't seeing enough encampments resolved.

Okay, according to the last Sly response to what's going on with offers of shelter, how many people take it, so this is from April to June, of a total of 1,333 offers extended, only there were 554 offers accepted and then confirmed, of those, confirmed 206. And that comes down to be, according to my math, about 15%.

So when you're talking about there aren't enough shelter beds Are you going off of the offer numbers or are you going on typical acceptance rates, enrollment rates, what?

both, but there are literally not enough shelter beds to house everybody that is living unsheltered right now.

And when you think of a site, so the MDARs require us, if there are 35 people at a site, before we resolve that site, we need to have offered 35 unique beds.

So we can't go on with 20 beds and offer them the 35 people, even though we know statistically that they're gonna turn it down, we have to have 35 beds to offer to 35 people.

So that's part one.

I think part- Is that per Boise?

I don't- It's the MDARs.

We can look and see.

It's been in the MDARs since I've been here for 10 years.

So it's the MDARs.

But you have to have a set amount of beds to match the number of people at a site.

I would also say that Seattle is the only state, and I have Lindsey behind me, my ops manager, who will tell me if I'm wrong, that has an opt-in, is it an opt-in system?

Meaning that people at a site have to, they have the right to not give us their verifiable information.

And so with the offers of shelter acceptance, it's really hard because we don't know if Joe at the site is Joe at the shelter.

So sometimes the name at the site is the kind of just, I don't know, nickname, per se, and we do not require that they give us their identifying information in order to get to the shelter.

But when they get to the shelter in order to enroll, I believe they have to...

Is there some kind of verification process, Christina?

They then can opt in or opt out of entering into HMIS, which would then be how we confirm the referral with the enrollment data.

So the opt in, opt out is a really...

big barrier to understanding how many people from a site actually went into shelter, and then if they don't even have to opt in at a shelter, then you can imagine having to be able to track who went from shelter to permanent housing.

The last thing that I would say is, Even if the acceptance are low, we are required to offer shelter.

We are not required to offer the preferred shelter.

And that is a huge debate amongst many people.

And I'm not going to get into it here because you can't change someone's values through a debate.

But we believe that bringing someone inside from the elements, despite whether it's non-congregant shelter or congregant shelter is better than leaving them outside.

So if we have a congregant shelter offer and someone says, I want a tiny home village, if a tiny home village does not become available by the time the site is resolved, we consider that an offer of shelter and then we can resolve the site.

So I hope, did those three things answer?

Okay.

Thank you.

Council Member Morales.

Thank you.

Well, I was going to ask about that last point that you made, Deputy Mayor, because I know part of the data that you collect is also the reasons why people decline shelter.

Can you review that a little bit, please?

I do not.

So we don't have it here, but if anybody off the top of their head remembers the top reason...

It's like buried.

Usually the top reasons every quarter, and this is included in the slide, is the people who want the tiny homes.

That is the case.

I'm looking at the last report.

I was going to say, that's usually...

And also the other...

Yeah, I do know off the top of my head.

Generally, the other one is that they...

have someone there with their community, whether it's a partner or a friend that they want to be with.

And those require very specific places as well in order to get to two places to go in.

So those are the top two.

Christina, was there any other one that comes?

Those are the main ones I...

And I would say as a supporter of tiny home villages, I would not attach the name.

I think what they're saying is I want a door that closes where I have privacy and I can be by myself.

So that would be permanent housing, a tiny home village.

We have people doing pallet shelters.

I think the message there is I want my own place.

Well, and that's sort of my next question, especially as it relates to this slide, 17, because you did mention, you know, the reason we have this prioritization matrix is because we don't have enough places to send people.

And so my question is, how do we get more?

And whose responsibility is it to do that?

Because this is a longstanding issue, right?

I mean, we declared this an emergency.

Are we going on 10 years now?

And so...

I think there's probably broad agreement that the solution to this, at least in part, is to build more housing, to build more permanent supportive housing, to make sure there's more shelter beds, to make sure that there are more opportunities for the particular kinds of things that people are interested in.

We know what the solutions are.

And so how do we get there and pivot away from this conversation about, you know, the city's responsibility is only to clean sites and it's KCRAJ's responsibility to do everything else.

Um, so I think that has been a challenge and, um, I guess my question is, given that sort of split responsibility, which I think happened in the last administration, all of the work that you're doing is with the intent on slide 14, the approach is to ensure that our streets and sidewalks and spaces are clean.

The approach for us isn't address homelessness by providing the outreach services, we contract out for that.

If we're, I think we've just pulled back some contracts from KCRHA.

I don't know if it's for the outreach specifically, but I would be interested to know what those contracts are.

And if that situation, how do we resolve that situation about actually providing the outreach services?

Or is that just not the responsibility of the city?

Lots of good questions.

I think the top thing you said is, I think if we had unlimited spaces where people wanna go, to your point, Preferred wouldn't be an issue.

We probably could get everybody inside I would say that a couple things and then I'll answer your very specific question about whose job is it and how do we get more affordable housing I I think that what we're dealing with now that we weren't dealing with when we were working on the nav team seven years eight, nine, 10 years ago is the behavioral health crisis and the fentanyl crisis.

And so now permanent supportive housing and shelter and permanent housing actually isn't the solution for everybody that's outside.

We do, the housing first model says someone should not be required to be clean before they receive housing.

We totally agree with that.

But if we want that person to stay housed, we have to couple that with some serious services.

And so the system currently, in my humble opinion, isn't designed to address the mass behavioral health crisis.

I think we're transitioning from a, and don't take this literal, from a what we thought is just a unsheltered crisis to a behavioral health crisis and not enough spaces for people to go.

So I think it would be a fallacy to just build more permanent housing and not build places that address what we see on the streets.

And so to answer your question, it's our job.

So yes, UCT was designed for making sure public spaces are accessible, but we collectively fund KCRHA to address the homelessness system.

And so we can't say not our problem.

It is our problem.

It's our investments.

And so I would say it's the region's job.

When we think about places for people to go, we have the most shelter in Seattle.

I think it's, what's the percentage?

Is it 80% of shelter is in Seattle?

I think it's 80%.

No, just the system shelter-wide.

I think we have 80% of shelter beds in Seattle.

If it's not 80%, it's far the majority, that's a problem.

Because 80% of homelessness issues aren't in Seattle.

And so how do we spread more resources out regionally so that someone who's experiencing homelessness in Kent doesn't have to catch a bus to Seattle, that they can stay in Kent and there's resources there.

And then finally, one thing that Mayor Harreld did that has never been done in my tenure is, He put OH and homelessness under the same deputy mayor.

And that is huge.

I was actually here when deputy mayor Mosley had OH and then I had homelessness and it was very hard to connect the two.

And so what we're working on right now, I'm actually having a retreat with the office of housing and homelessness because they should be tied together.

And so I'll give you one example.

Permanent supportive housing.

Who said what it has to look like?

The rules are this much, but we just keep building the same thing.

Well, what about permanent supportive housing plus?

Or what about permanent supportive housing light?

Or what about permanent supportive housing with an emphasis on behavioral health?

I want to break out of, and I know Director Winkler-Chin is in concert with this.

We've boxed ourselves in, and we need to start saying, who made that rule?

a lot of times we made it.

And so we have to get innovative together and design places that address where people are.

So I hope I answered all your questions.

Yeah, and I totally agree about the scale and the type of issue that we're dealing with now is really different than what we had five, 10 years ago.

The county is working on their crisis care clinics, getting that set up and really expanding our connection to public health is gonna be an important part of that as well.

And there's lots of other reasons why people are homeless, right?

They lost a job, they had a medical bill.

So it isn't just people who are experiencing substance use disorder or mental health crisis that are experiencing homelessness.

There's lots of other folks who are just sort of, you know, dealing with an eviction or dealing with income inequality, and those folks need help, too, so thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Chaka, I'm going to let Council Member Wu ask her question first.

Go ahead, Council Member Wu.

Oh, it's more like a comment, but I've been following UTC and, of course, going into encampments in the last three or four years.

And so I want to echo your comment about, yes, it's a very complex problem.

I've seen people who found housing come back into the encampments because that's where their friends are.

That's where their community is.

And I've also seen in...

times of when there is a resolution of an encampment, people from all over the city who are in-house will show up because they heard that that encampment was getting resolved and are looking for housing, but looking for a very specific type of housing, whether it's hotel rooms, tiny home villages, a lot of people don't want to go to car gate shelters.

And I've seen people who refuse shelter And then once that encampment gets resolved, they come back.

And I think, you know, looking, I think the next step would be is how do we build trust with people?

Because they've been through a broken system.

They've been through, you know, a shelter or a tiny home village, and they came back out.

So how do we build that trust?

How do we get to know them to be able to have them come back inside and have someone partner with them throughout their journey from being...

unsheltered to shelter to finding housing and making sure that they have access to services because I feel like they're two different people who help them when they're unsheltered versus when they're sheltered.

So find that continuity.

And so I also had a well, I guess my question is, When it comes to KCRJ, what is your involvement with them as well as with all the other programs we see outside?

I think I may have asked this before, but could you refresh my memory?

Like when it comes to LEAD and REACH and We Live with Care, what does that entire matrix look like?

So that's the question I did not get to Council Member Morales.

So thank you, Council Member Wu.

Outreach is how you build trust with folks.

And so yesterday down in Bertha Knight, we brought all the outreach providers together that work in the downtown core.

And it was amazing to me. how many people were down there.

And I thought to myself, don't hold me to this.

An outreach conference, like there are so many people out in the field doing this work that don't know, may not know each other or may not have complimentary services or may not know they're working with the same person.

And so we brought the outreach contracts back for two reasons.

One, because KCRHA said that they didn't have the capacity to build out the neighborhood team model outreach at that time, which does not mean it can't go back once they do have capacity to do it.

And we brought it back to do what you talked about, Council Member Wu, which is we need to create a system of outreach that walks, and CEO Jones before their departure said this, it's in their five-year plan, that we need to transition it to make outreach walk with the person from the site all the way through to permanent housing.

And that's how you realize that someone who was permanently housed went back to an encampment.

So there's a lot to do in outreach.

I know Council Member Moore has asked to be deeply involved and Council President Nelson has asked to be deeply involved.

And so this won't be something that we recreate in a bubble and happy to come back and talk about that when we get to that spot.

KCRHA and our involvement, HSD is the contract holder.

And so they hold the contract that has the master service agreement, which we call an MSA.

In that, it outlines what they're responsible to do.

Happy to share that with you, Council Member Wu, to send you the MSA for you to look at.

When you say involvement, is there a specific issue you're trying to figure out in terms of like, I'm trying to understand more what you are trying to assess out when you say involvement with KCRHA?

Because with WSDOT encampments, I think it's usually KCRHA that does the resolution, but with city encampments, it's UTC.

Got it.

And so do you work together when it comes to WSDOT?

Because you mentioned that earlier in your slide deck.

Got it.

Yes.

So KCRHA has a contract with WSDOT for encampments on the right-of-way, and it's, I believe, state.

It's statewide or in a jurisdiction, I think the county, it's not statewide.

And Seattle is a part of that.

So if and when WSDOT decides that they're going to resolve an encampment in Seattle on WSDOT property, KCRHA would be the vehicle in which WSDOT does that.

But it is a contract between KCRHA and the state.

Thank you.

Council Member Salka.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Comment?

And a question.

So I wanna state and emphasize my strong support for better enabling us as a city to make data informed decisions.

And that principle for me applies across the board for every single department and agency.

And I think we have a good opportunity to better collect data which the reasons for these various challenges are complex.

They're multifaceted and nuanced.

Yes, some people experiencing homelessness, for example, are suffering from debilitating mental health, drug dependency challenges, behavioral health issues.

Also, you know, some just...

Many people are one paycheck away from experiencing homelessness.

Some are just down on their luck.

Others, there's many, many reasons.

And so I think this is one area in particular we have a really ripe opportunity to better collect data, to help us make better data-informed decisions.

Because once we collect the data, understand all the sources and all the different dimensions, then we can run analytics capabilities and use services to help us, again, make better informed decisions.

Can monitor trends.

get ahead of trends, plan, better planning, better outcomes.

And yes, I acknowledge there are some notable potential privacy and security challenges with collection of certain data.

But just because that is the case, and just because implementation of certain technologies like analytics capabilities to help us monitor and track that data.

The same issue applies to various technologies.

Doesn't mean we shouldn't use them or adopt them.

Let us have effective safeguards in place to control for that.

But we need strong data collection capabilities to help us, again, make better data-informed decisions.

So against that backdrop, I wanna double-click on a comment you made a moment ago, Deputy Mayor, about this whole opt-in approach that we had, opt-in or opt-out?

Opt-in.

Opt-in, opt-in.

And I'm hearing, it seems to be, Seattle seems to be a unique outlier.

It's a unique feature of our system in Seattle.

So my question is, what is the specific source of that opt-in approach here in Seattle?

Is it a legal requirement?

Is it a specific policy decision at the executive level?

What is the source of that?

Great question.

And it sounds like it's a huge barrier.

So yeah.

State law.

So Washington state is the only state that has an opt-in requirement.

OK.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Okay, Councilmember Rivera, and then I'm gonna ask everyone to hold their questions.

We still have a significant amount to get through.

We might have to bring you back.

That's fine.

Okay, thank you.

Go ahead.

Thank you, Chair.

As you can tell, we're all very interested in this issue.

Well, I wanna make a couple comments and then a question.

First of all, I agree with you, Deputy Mayor.

I'm a big proponent of the tiny house village option.

And I also, and I say and, not but, on purpose, you know, we do need to, as you said, prioritize getting people indoors, whether or not we're able to, you know, the goal is their first choice, but if that's not available, we nevertheless have to get folks indoors.

I agree wholeheartedly, and I feel like it's, I feel it's inhumane to leave people on the street regardless, so we really need to work toward that.

My question is on shelter capacity.

How much is coming online every year?

If you have that information and if not, you know, you can provide it at a different time.

You know, I'm interested in what inroads are we making on the shelter capacity side?

And we know this is not just a city responsibility.

I want to underscore this is a county responsibility.

And every city that participates or every city that's part of the county really needs to be engaged in this because we do know folks are coming here from other cities because there's so many services in Seattle.

That is not a secret.

And so we need to make sure we're engaging with our city partners to make sure that they are fully participating in getting people sheltered.

Yep, so what progress, or the first question, how many come online each year?

Good question, don't know.

Can we get back to that?

I would also say to that question is building a bigger waiting room in the hospital may not necessarily be the solution to the problem.

Throughput, I think, is the solution to the problem.

It's getting the waiting room, the people in there triaged and moved to permanent housing quicker so that the shelter space is open and more people can come in.

So what we have, really, and happy to get you the data later, is a throughput issue.

That is a KCRHA responsibility, but our main focus is leadership stability.

They can't change an entire homelessness system if they don't have a permanent CEO, so we're working on that.

But I don't know, to Councilmember Saka's statement about data, I don't know if we need more shelter.

I don't know if that gets, if the resolve happens, if the system is working the way it's supposed to and people are moving out and there's a standard, HUD has a standard time that people are supposed to be in shelter before they move to permanent housing.

And if we had consistent throughput, we might be able to do the work with the amount of shelter we have now.

And I'll pass it to Ali, if you have anything to add to that, because you're the HMIS queen.

No, I think the Deputy Mayor's accurate.

I think when we speak about permanent supportive housing, it's a concept that it's moving either some directly to that for the supports they need, but also that throughput.

Did that answer your question?

Yes, and then I want to know how much permanent supportive housing we are lacking because obviously that's the goal and that's the hugest part coupled with the services, the wraparound services.

I'm unclear on that throughput piece i'm clear that's the goal i'm not clear what we need to get there and i know that in between is the sheltering piece becomes really important because we don't have permanent supportive housing and i will also say in general about housing we are not building housing fast enough of any kind including permanent supportive housing and i don't have a sense of how many units of permanent supportive housing we're doing yearly, and I know development is down this year.

That's a great question.

I will get you those numbers, and then we can also have a conversation about it at another time, maybe an OH homelessness conversation together.

Thank you.

I would just request that any follow-up information you provide to everybody on the committee and our honorary committee member today.

I'm sure you all are interested, so yes, I will.

Okay, thank you.

And could you just speak a little bit more directly into the microphone?

Thank you.

Some of us talking to me.

No, I'm not talking to you.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

All right.

Um, so actually I think that we are going to move right into, uh, talking about outreach with Christina and just kind of reminding everyone, you know, we started talking about homelessness over in general and we're really kind of focused here back on the unified care team outreach model and and kind of where we're working on in our area.

So I'll turn it to Christina.

Thank you, Ali.

The only thought that I have to add to the shelter conversation is that in the last five years, our shelter system has changed quite a bit as well.

And systems change takes...

too long, but when we started this work, we were working with a lot of basic shelters, which were just overnight shelters.

And our system has changed to be primarily enhanced shelter, which offers case management and housing navigation and behavioral health supports.

And we have added a lot more tiny homes in that process, but it has been over the course of five years that we've made that change.

And I think changes, we continue to see that change is needed.

I just want to say, for the record, it's not tiny homes.

I don't want that to be the magic bullet.

It's a door with a key that belongs to someone.

And so that could be container shelters, modular shelters, tiny homes, and permanent housing.

I just want to keep saying that.

Yes, yes, yeah.

So with that said, I think outreach and the engagement with individuals helps us understand what the needs of the people are and what resources they are looking for and what resources we need most.

So outreach provides a critical role with the Unified Care Team to support those experiencing unsheltered homelessness to connect with services and ultimately to move indoors.

For many years, the city has partnered closely with contracted outreach providers, and we are grateful for the strengths and expertise that they bring to many aspects of the work.

Over the years, through many changes and shifts in the system, we have learned a lot about what the unsheltered community needs most and how outreach can be successful.

Having a consistent presence is key to building the relationships and trust that make outreach most effective.

This was a huge consideration that helped to inform the neighborhood team model that was built into the unified care team last year.

This model is based on having the same people working in the same communities every week, gaining an intimate understanding of what the unique needs are of the people staying there.

This is a critical aspect of a person-centered approach to encampment response.

We need outreach providers who really know the individuals at encampments, whether they're newly unhoused or chronically homeless, what kind of situation they're dealing with, what their short and long-term goals are, and what kind of resources they need.

We want outreach that can stay engaged with folks week over week as we work to bring them indoors and as we also work to resolve encampments and restore public spaces.

So I'm gonna turn it over to Beau to share more about UCT's effort to make spaces clean and accessible.

Thank you, Christina.

So trash mitigation and the work in encampments and public spaces is done by multiple city departments, and coordination is captured through data infrastructure.

Across three departments, the UCT addresses trash in encampments, around RVs, and in public spaces, including sharps and hygiene support.

In 2023, there was a steady decrease in the poundage of debris removed from encampment sites and public spaces, while the number of cleanings increased, potentially attributable attributable to a shift from large cleanups, including sites with significant illegal dumping, to more regular maintenance.

Coordinated trash mitigation efforts help to prevent excessive trash accumulation in public spaces and result in a decrease in the amount of trash that needs to be removed during each cleaning.

I'm going to pass it over to Tom to talk about activating public spaces.

So just a little bit about activation.

It's basically encouraging activities or doing things in spaces that have been resolved, encouraging the public space to be returned to its original intent and improving overall feeling of public safety and community welcoming in those spaces.

So it's trying to bring people back into those spaces.

What makes it a successful activation is number one, community engagement, community involvement.

It's those are the spaces where we can be most effective when the community has an idea, wants to be involved, and that's where active city departments and department representatives on the UCT can be most effective in leaning in and helping them get their projects completed.

And then the other part is keeping that communication open, having regular check-ins so that everybody is sort of held accountable and working through the process.

So what does activation look like?

It's about connecting community with existing programs that the city has to offer, like Adopt-A-Street.

That leverages already funded programs and keeps us from having to ask for more funds for doing specific things that maybe we're already doing.

So it's directing them into these programs and leveraging what we already have got going.

And what this slide shows is the many different departments that are members of the UCT and the services that they provide in doing activation.

Using the one Seattle approach.

It's the collaboration between these departments that really make the activation effective for community members.

It's when all these departments can lean in and do different bits of the work.

And as you can see, there's, I'll just mention a couple.

One of my favorites is the Seattle Police Department, through their crime prevention specialists, has the crime prevention through environmental design, the CPTED.

This is a bonus for the community members who are having issues with public safety concerns or feelings of public safety concerns that we can have.

SPD, SEPTAD experts, come and talk with them or work with them.

And we'll do that in coordination with them and doing other things in their property.

Parks says restoration of green spaces as DOT can works on pedestrian friendly safety improvements amongst many other things that they do to work on the right of way.

And Dawn helps us with community engagement on improving the imputification projects.

So we'll really be relying on them to help us expand out these, our activities.

And I think it's going back to

Yes, thank you, Tom.

If your constituents don't know Tom already, they probably will soon because Tom is across the city working with businesses and communities about the work we do and relaying messages.

So thanks, Tom, for all the work you do.

The next section I want to go over pretty quickly.

Deputy Mayor already talked about neighborhood teams and how that was fully implemented at the end of last year.

And we will be bringing back a lot more information on kind of what our learnings this year are.

But again, just kind of based on a pilot, we know that when a community is informed, involved, and engaged, they're willing to wait and understand the process and kind of the person-centered way we're doing this.

So there's five geographic areas, as you can see on the map, and we will go ahead and go to the next slide.

This is the team, this is our kind of staffing model.

So each neighborhood has the exact same staff.

And we realized that, you know, teams, when they work citywide across multiple different places, it was just harder to track.

So we have a regional manager, so that's Beau here, and Darius and Estat, who is back here, north and south, and they really coordinate everything that's in those three, there's three neighborhoods in north, two in south.

regional coordinator are working with Christina and that's really our outreach.

So not only do they help provide kind of outreach at the times they're there, they are also coordinating with those contracted outreach.

So I think that was one of the questions earlier is like, how do we engage with all the So Christina's team ensures that we are not only with our contracted outreach, but as well as all those other contracted contractor providers that are out there working together.

Our field coordinators are out there.

They're the ones on the ground to see the sites every day.

They do inspections.

They are there at day resolutions.

They often know people too and their locations.

So often when a question is asked, I'll say this street, and they'll be like, oh yeah, this and that and three years ago.

And so it's good information.

Community liaison, of course, is Tom.

Tom is citywide, not neighborhood specific, which is why it pertains to all of you.

We have a contract and outreach through KCRHA, as you mentioned.

And then each team, each neighborhood has a maintenance worker.

So as you can see, when these have the same people every time, we can build relationships, we can understand what's happening, and we know that every neighborhood actually, we can be responsive to what is happening in that neighborhood.

So we know that there are a lot more RVs, spaces for RVs to go in the south, in the southwest areas, which is very different response that we need maybe up north and the northeast where there's more neighborhoods and parks and areas there.

So you'll hear a lot more this year about how that is going.

Really quick, committee chair, time check.

How much longer do we have?

I'd say we have 10, 15 minutes.

Okay, thank you.

I can do it, all right, you'll go through it.

So I wanna share next some highlights of last year and the work that we do.

So this one is really, you can see some of the work in 2023. And again, I wanna highlight that these robust data system that we have that AmeriHell invested in has really allowed when I was back here in the navigation team again, There was no ability to give these numbers and understand the impact we have.

So I'm very impressed by the system that was built.

But you can see really is not only those 41,000 service requests now that are processed by our two folks, 24% decrease in tents from January to December and almost 6 million pounds of debris removed across the city.

and kind of cleaning.

So also with that, we saw a 20% increase in shelter referrals in 2023. Christina is gonna talk a little more in detail about that, but you wanna just kind of highlight for you some of the accomplishments from 2023. I'm gonna turn it to Bo here to talk then a little bit more about trends over the city.

Yeah, so there are multiple city departments that manage the tent and RVs, and myself over Parks and Recreation, Darius Foster over SDOT, Curtis Bright over SPU, and Christina Corpy with HSD.

So the charts you're looking at, they show the UCT's overall positive impact to the city.

And from January to December of 2023, there were a 24% decrease in number of tents, while RVs saw a 51% decrease.

So you'll see an increase in the tent counts from July to September, as well as another increase in December.

We know that warmer months, individuals like to stay outside.

This past December was an increase expectedly from fewer large scheduled resolutions due to holiday staffing.

So right now the UCT is working to ensure the staffing levels allow us to keep that same level of activities throughout the holidays in 2024. We expect that there will be fluctuations in tent counts over time, but we also expect to see that continued progress will bring these numbers down over time.

RV counts, excuse me, the counts of the RVs are those identified at a point in time of inspection, and often with the help of parking enforcement, we know RVs move to other locations.

So with the new data systems in place, we're able to review neighborhood data and understand how UCT can ensure we're being responsive to each neighborhood's individual needs.

Two years ago, this is something that we wouldn't have been able to do.

As a reminder, this data you're looking at is from the 2023 district boundaries.

As an example, we know that many of the RVs are in the Southwest District 1 neighborhood.

In the future, you will see the data in the new boundaries.

As Ali mentioned earlier, each neighborhood has individual characteristics requiring different UCT resources and activities.

We saw the rise in tents in the Northwest neighborhood, which was the rapid growth in the Ballard and Leary Way area, and through the neighborhood pilot with Councilmember Strauss, we were able to engage in a specific approach for this area.

One of the important pieces of bringing tent and RV counts down is outreach and moving people inside.

Christina will talk next about UCT progress in this area.

Thank you, Bo.

We touched on a lot of this earlier, but the referrals that are represented in green here are up by over 1,000 since 2021. That is an 83% increase.

A referral is when somebody says yes to shelter and we have a specific bed available for them.

Shelter enrollments represented in blue here are up by nearly 400. That is a 68% increase over 2021. An enrollment is when an individual completes an intake at the shelter.

The enrollment data is complicated because we are often asked how many of the people who were referred to shelter actually went inside.

Unfortunately, this is not an easy question to answer.

In Washington, it is required for homeless systems to ask participants if they'd like to opt in to sharing their personal identifiers in HMIS, which makes it difficult to match referral data with enrollment data.

Coming out of the pandemic, there were shifts away from basic shelter, as we talked about, and with the city's encampment response becoming more coordinated with the rollout of the unified care team, we have been able to consistently make more referrals to shelter.

Because we are able to make more referrals, we are also seeing an increase in enrollments.

Overall, seeing an increase in both referrals and enrollments means that we are successfully getting more people indoors.

I'm going to pass it back to the Deputy Mayor Washington for some of the other positive data we saw in 2023.

Thank you.

I think we have two more slides and then we're done.

So we made time.

So what you see here, I referenced this a little earlier, is some of the year-end 2023 data.

about public safety metrics associated with encampments.

And so in 2022, there were 116 shots fired.

And in 2023, 69, that's a 41% decrease.

We saw a 16% decrease with fires, and we did see a 7% increase with medical response calls, which we attribute to the fentanyl crisis.

And so we do think that that number is going to either maintain or slightly increase.

And so in closing, I do want to, as you see, there are 2024 priorities that Director Peters and her team are committed to focusing on.

I won't read all of them.

You see the bolded ones there, strengthen neighborhood team models.

That is my number one priority is that all of you can say, and your constituents, we know who our outreach workers are.

we know who our regional manager is, we know who our field coordinators are, and that hopefully people will start to talk to them directly and they don't feel like they have to go to the Find It, Fix It app to give information.

It's a hefty goal, but I think we can do it together because I think the more in-person, on-the-ground approach is the way.

And so we'll evaluate ourselves at the end of the year, Councilmember Saka.

using data, and then set goals for 2025 to just continue to get better.

We will also ensure, like I said, the continuous improvements will go on.

The mayor has committed to being transparent with data.

We're not gonna hide it, good, bad, or ugly.

I think there's no such thing as bad data.

I think the thing that's bad is an unwillingness to move or to try different things when you see that something's not working.

And so thanks to all of my colleagues here and that's the end.

Thank you very much.

We do have a few more questions for you.

So Council Member Wu, did you have questions?

Yes, thank you.

Thank you for all that you do.

I admire your team and all your efforts and evolution of how this team has come to be.

I have two questions.

The first one is staffing and outreach.

So I've noticed that when I have a volunteer group that goes out to encampments, during the day and in the evenings and find out there's two very different groups of people who we encounter because sometimes people do have jobs or they know where they can go during the day to stay warm or get meals and food.

So do you see, do we have staffing in the evenings and weekends and do you see more of an expansion in those areas?

Yes and no question.

I think the behaviors change at night as well.

I've...

seen firsthand, particularly Third Avenue and other places at night.

I would say, and we'll bring this information, the We Deliver Care team, WDC, they are out out of all the city outreach teams, and I would say co-lead.

They're out the latest in the evening than any of the other outreach workers.

And I think that the core issue there is safety.

And so as we...

increase safety in terms of folks to maybe be in their cars, down the street or something like that, then we can increase the hours.

But I think that a lot of the outreach workers themselves don't feel safe being out certain hours of the night.

The We Deliver Care is a unique group of people because they're people with lived experience and their particular skill set is de-escalation.

And so They are trained on how to calm situations.

And so we can talk about how to maybe utilize that approach with the two outreach providers through our outreach RFP.

We might be able to buy more outreach hours for nighttime.

I would love to see that, because I know that resources are hard.

Resources are only available between 8 a.m.

to 5 p.m., but in the evenings, they're not very much there.

And my volunteer team, we constantly are out calling shelters, asking if there's space open, trying to send people.

And so it'd be great to see more outreach engagement staffing in the evenings, especially particularly in the late hours, like 8 or 9 or 10 p.m.

I mean, the other question is, when you say improved communications, I know that when there is an encampment resolution, sometimes there's protests.

And so I've seen that.

Plainclothes officers will be present, but most of the time they don't attend these because they're afraid of interactions during protests or interactions with residents in...

unhoused residents.

So is there a plan going forward on how to mitigate some of that during resolutions?

So we actually do have the ART team.

Some of them are in the back.

They're specialized officers who do go to all encampment resolutions.

And what I would say is, in my experience, the issues are 98% time with the protesters.

and not the actual people that are unhoused at the site.

And so oftentimes the ART officers are there to maintain the crowd so that the folks that are living unsheltered can pack their belongings and move.

And so we do have police that show up to every single encampment removal.

Do you generally not share dates and times of resolutions or...

And that's the reason why.

Yep, because we wanna detract from people organizing and sending protesters out to the sites as much as possible.

Thank you.

Council President Nelson.

Thanks.

So you know already how much I've been focused on substance use disorder treatment and recovery, etc.

Okay, so since I've been in office, I've come to learn from homelessness advocates, including Mark Jones and other people that are steeped in this issue, that addiction is not a cause of homelessness, but rather a result.

And I have no reason not to believe that or agree.

So if that is the case, I've come to look at our inability to resolve encampments as complicity in increasing addiction.

Because if people are in encampments, they are then prey to drug dealing and drug addiction, despair, sex trafficking, et cetera.

So we have a moral responsibility to resolve encampments for that reason alone.

Now, when we talk about outreach, what is it really supposed to do?

Because when I hear you say, you said it earlier, that, you know, we want our outreach providers to stay engaged week after week, and we hear that they meet people where they're at to build trust.

Toward what end?

I mean, because if we're just building trust so that they can stay in these dangerous situations, exactly what is the programmatic goal of our outreach...

And then finally, when you said about that conference in Bertha Knight Landis and all those outreach providers, and we don't even know who they are.

We don't hold those contracts, so we don't know what they're doing and what they're supposed to be doing.

What I know is that when budget time comes around and REACH coordinators come and they yell, stop the sweeps, stop the sweeps, and then they are making it easier to stay in these dangerous environments, Maybe we can take that offline, but I do think that there needs to be an outcome that is articulatable to understand what the investment is actually trying to produce.

Yep.

So on your first point, I would say it goes both ways.

Some people become addicted to drugs because of homelessness, and some people become homeless My lived experience, and I know there are many people that have lived experience, my person has a place to go.

It's my house.

And that person chooses to live unsheltered because they don't want to follow the rules, which is you cannot use drugs in my house.

And so I try to not...

come up with a reason why everybody uses drugs, because it's massive trauma.

And so, yes, some people, because it's so hard to live outside, turn to drugs as a way to self-medicate because they're terrified and they want to just take away the pain.

And some people come to the streets already addicted.

In terms of outreach to what end, that's what we're going to try to fix.

through this RFP.

Outreach's main goal, if done correctly, and there's a lot of agencies that do do it correctly, is to help people reach permanency.

It's super important.

I was an outreach worker for gun violence and high risk youth.

It's because people don't know you.

They won't accept help from you.

That's pretty much the case.

And so outreach is supposed to lower the barriers, make sure the person trusts them so that they can then get them to shelter.

And then once they're in shelter, there's case managers there who build relationships with them to help get them to permanency.

If that person gets between shelter and permanency, if they fall back into homelessness, that outreach worker should be notified and go right back out there to find that person and try to get them right back in.

So it's a critical part in the homelessness response system.

And unfortunately, we've been unable to quantify or qualify what that looks like.

And we will do a better job through this process that you yourself want to be involved in to ensure that we're capturing the data that would display the work in a way that people can understand and see progress.

Thank you.

Council Member Salka.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Deputy Mayor.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us today and sharing this really, really thoughtful and insightful presentation.

Really helpful from my perspective for me to learn more about this really critical work that impacts a lot of people in profound ways.

And I wanted to express my gratitude and appreciation for you all and the work you all do and your respective teams do every day.

in this area and also kind of reaffirm my commitment to looking at this challenge holistically.

The focus of today's briefing coincidentally is more on once people are experiencing homelessness, how do we better take care of them?

Which yes, let us do, but also like I mentioned earlier, we need to acknowledge and have good prevention strategies and programs and interventions as well.

And to make sure people, don't end up experiencing homelessness to begin with.

So, yes, prevention is important, and going upstream is very, very, very important.

But we're not gonna...

root cause only our way out of this.

Nor are we going to upstream only our way out of this either.

We can't just hang our hats on upstream and prevention and slap each other high fives and snap and think that's the end all be all.

It's going to solve all of our challenges.

We need to take better care of our unhoused neighbors once they're experiencing homelessness today.

We need a more compassionate approach that acknowledges their humanity and the basic dignity that everyone deserves.

And so, you know, that's why the work you all do is important as well.

So thank you again for that.

I have a question about, so as we know, there's a pending case before the U.S.

Supreme Court.

The grants pass.

case, I believe, and it's likely to be, a decision is likely to be announced later this year, June sometime.

And it's related to, so there's a Ninth Circuit decision in Boise a number of years ago held, as I understand it, that there is a constitute, like, we must, before cities force people out and have enforced camping bans, they must offer them Shelter, which makes a lot of sense.

Irrespective of whether or not there's a constitutional requirement currently in place, I think we're not bound to that as a city from a policy and priority standpoint.

I think that's the right thing to do and I think we should continue to do that.

But we know also that homelessness is a regional problem.

It's a county problem, it's a state problem, it's a federal problem.

And decisions that we make in Seattle don't just exist in a Seattle-only bubble, despite some people's perceptions of that.

And same thing from some of the neighboring counties and across the state and across the region.

And this is a really complex, thorny challenge.

With the understanding that So the pending ruling could go a number of ways.

As I understand it, it's teed up to be resolved or addressed.

The Supreme Court is likely to address the substantive merits of the case, but they could choose to deflect on procedural grounds and a number of other things.

But two basic options if they rule on the merits is overrule, reverse, or...

or uphold.

And how are we thinking in terms of contingency planning for what the potential impacts of this ruling might be on Seattle and demand or not for this broader challenge?

Have we thought about that in any way?

Are we doing any contingency planning?

Yeah.

How are we thinking about that pending decision?

So that's a great question.

I think you all should have the city attorney sit up here because I don't want to...

in any way mess up the case, but I would say, I think Seattle in general, magically and intentionally, the MDARs are pretty strict.

So I feel good about the rules that we already have in place, but in terms of anything else, I've been told to zip my lips.

But the city attorney is up to date and I've referred a lot of council members.

They will come to your office and walk you through that.

And so I highly recommend, and if you want one of my folks to join, happy to do that too.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Rivera.

Thank you.

So in terms of Washington State and the Op-In, is the city considering talking to the legislature to make any changes?

on the opt-in to make it easier to get the data that we need?

Is that something that's on the table?

Um, haven't discussed it yet.

I think what comes with the data that we didn't have when we had the NAV team is just this ability to see everything clearly and how one thing impacts another.

And so haven't talked, uh, brought it up specifically to the mayor, but we could talk offline.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Um, it's just important to have the ability, right?

I would think in the work that you're doing and to know why we're the only state.

Exactly.

Right.

Exactly.

Right.

So, um, And then on the prioritization, the site prioritization, are these for tents and RVs or just tents?

On the scoring, sorry.

The scoring includes tents, RVs, both.

Because you put the points on there.

And one thing I noticed is community centers aren't specifically called out here.

So I don't know if that's purposeful or if...

Probably the iteration of that.

So I'm going to write that down right now.

Thank you.

And then I just want to make a comment on the regional county piece that both Council Member Stock and I raised earlier is that sound transit is another huge piece of this because we're seeing more folks that are being moved from the street into light rail and that's causing some issues on the light rail.

So how are we, you know, this is another example of we need to work with our partners because we don't want to unintentionally create a problem in another area.

I know a lot of folks are and with the recent shooting in the light rail folks are really afraid to take public transportation and we're encouraging and there's a need because we're growing in population for to encourage people to take public transportation so we want to make sure we're working with our partners so I imagine the city is working with Sound Transit on this but just wanted to call that out as as another entity that really needs to have strong partnership.

And then, just wanna offer, I know Tom, Tom and I know each other, Tom's doing great work And I'm looking forward to the continued partnership.

I will say that you are one person for all of this city.

And so how can we all help with community and constituents in our respective districts and neighborhoods on getting them the information and being a partner in getting that information out to constituents?

Because to the point you made earlier, folks just wanna know if they know that that encampment or that RV Or those on house neighbors that they're worried about or someone is addressing that need they will be patient And so we you know, this is really more of an offer That I'd like to partner to make sure we're getting information out to our constituents.

We definitely need more Tom's Most definitely and I've been asked can we shrink the size of the regions because they're really really large and all of that and cost money and happy to have all of those conversations.

I will brag on Tom and why we need to duplicate his work.

He just was nominated.

What were you nominated for Tom?

In the mic.

It was the Fremont Chamber of Commerce has a community engagement award or some.

Well, congratulations.

I'll be accepting that on behalf of the entire team.

Congratulations, and thank you for that, Deputy Mayor.

I will say that I know resources are limited, so my offer stands on let's work together to make sure that we are also helping get the word out to constituents.

And then in general, broadly, I just want to thank you.

I want to thank the chair.

I'm not part of this committee for allowing me to sit today, and thank you for the great work that you all do.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Council Member Morales, and that will be our last question.

Yeah, thank you.

I really appreciate this conversation.

In the interest of time, I will probably just send questions to follow up.

Thank you.

And I will remember to answer the questions for the whole group.

So we'll collect them all and then send the answers to everyone here.

Thank you.

Well, on behalf of the committee, I do want to thank all of you for being here today.

I know we took your valuable time to be here, but I think that this was a very important discussion.

It's important for us.

It's also important for the city, the citizens of Seattle, I should say the residents of Seattle.

because there's so many questions, it's a complicated issue.

And I just wanna say that, as I said earlier, when I went on that drive through the district, that I was really impressed with the sensitivity, that these are difficult issues.

And the comments were about trying to establish relationships with individuals.

looking, trying to maintain the dignity of each individual that you come into contact with, really trying to create that level of trust, do an assessment about what the need is, and it isn't about, it's a complicated issue, and it's unfortunate that it's so polarizing in our city, but my personal experience is that you are doing the work humanely, And it's not perfect.

And there's a lot of work for improvement.

But as a one Seattle, we can get there.

I'm confident that we can get there.

So thank you very much.

Me too.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, as we transition, Madam Clerk, if you could read agenda item three into the record.

Agenda item three, Seattle Housing Authority briefing for briefing and discussion.

All right, thank you.

So today we have with us Rod Brandon and Lisa Wolters from the Seattle Housing Authority to talk about their work, the services they provide, and their big development projects, which would be Yesler Terrace and Northgate Commons.

Thank you so much.

I know you've been here most of the morning.

I really appreciate your patience.

Okay, thank you.

And we will turn it over to you.

Well, thank you.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Good morning.

A lot of good information.

It was great to sit and listen and reflect as another Houser.

So it was just great to hear that.

My name is Rod Brandon.

I'm the Executive Director for Seattle Housing Authority.

And my name is Lisa Walters.

I'm the Director of Government Relations for the Seattle Housing Authority.

Thank you for having us.

Yeah.

So some of you I know had a chance to meet one-on-one.

It's great.

Some of you I don't.

And looking forward to engaging in more one-on-one conversations about what we do at Seattle Housing Authority and how we serve our mission.

Today, we just want to give you an overview of what we do, how we do it, and then what challenges lie ahead for the Seattle Housing Authority.

As you know, housing is just a very complex situation here in Seattle.

There is just a lot of folks involved in housing.

and each have different roles, and some of those roles support each other, some of them mutually exclusive, and some overlap.

And so hopefully as you get an overview of what Seattle Housing Authority does, you can see and choose to place us in that continuum of housing, and we'll go over that.

Before I get started into the details of it, I just want to share with you our priorities at Seattle Housing Authority this year and probably for the next couple years as our strategic plan is completing itself and unfolding.

We are focused on serving more people.

Our goal is not to stay stagnant.

We want to serve more than we served last year, and we want to continue to serve.

Our arena is the affordable housing and low-income market, and we'll talk about that a little bit today.

We also want to make sure that we serve our residents well.

We don't want to forget about our existing residents and just focus on those new ones that we can bring indoors.

We want to make sure that every single thing we do has a racial and social justice lens to it.

Everything.

From not just policy, but how we go about our work, how we interact with staff, how staff interact with residents.

And so we are continuing to operate in that space and learn how to be an anti-racist organization.

We don't have it down yet, but we're learning that and we are leaning into that space.

We also want to take care of our employees.

Our employees drive us.

They drive how they interact with residents.

And if they're not in a good situation and taken care of in a way that we can support them and their families, then they won't be able to do their job in a way that we're looking forward to doing that.

And then last, we just want to be smart about our fiscal management.

And so as we do all those things, serving more people, you know, serving the ones we have well, race and social justice inside that, taking care of our employees and being sound fiscal managers of that.

So with that, let me jump into it.

We're a big organization.

You may not think about it.

We kind of hide in the background a little bit, but we serve 38,000 individuals in the city of Seattle.

Our jurisdiction is only in the city of Seattle.

There's King County Housing Authority, there's Renton, there's Tacoma, there's others, but our jurisdiction is in the city limits of Seattle.

18,000 families, as you can see.

We're in every single neighborhood in Seattle, from Magnolia to Lake City, down south, central area, every neighborhood.

Hopefully you don't notice that because we want a lot of our properties to blend in to the neighborhood and be consistent to the values that are established there.

We're a huge landlord.

just under 9,000 hard units that we own and or manage.

That's a lot.

That's a big player in the Seattle market.

And then in addition to that, we have a number of just under 12,000 vouchers that folks can use in the private market with private landlords and us as a landlord if they choose to do that.

So we're just a big player in the affordable and low-income housing market.

We serve all kinds.

You can see the statistics on the number of children, folks with disabilities, and seniors.

Thank you, Council, for the levies you have passed in history.

The 1987 levy for our senior housing program is huge for us.

We have over 1,000 hard units just for our seniors who live in those units.

It's a great program, and I appreciate the support we've had over the years for that.

Just a few demographics.

Average income, $13,000.

For the household, 75% of SHA households identify as BIPOC.

That's huge.

And you see why race and social justice is an important element of that.

If we're not in a position to understand that, to get training, to interact, we will not do a good job and interact with those individuals.

We know that.

53 languages spoken.

That's not a mistake.

And that's, think about that.

When we show up for a public hearing sometimes, It's a challenge.

We don't have all 53 there, but you can easily have 10 to 15 languages and folks assisting in that translation as we're trying to deliver complex policies to our residents, right?

So it just takes a lot of time, a lot of patience, and a lot of flexibility as we do that.

And sometimes we get it right and we do it well, and sometimes we don't, and we just have to keep adjusting for that.

53. The dominant language, English, Somali, Vietnamese, I think are the top three languages with our residents.

First, what I was starting to talk about was where our role is.

We are a low-income housing provider, okay?

We're in that middle where you see long-term subsidized housing.

But we see it as a continuum, and we know the role we play.

You've heard today about shelter, transitional housing, a little bit of permanent supportive housing, the services that they need.

See us in the middle.

We do a little bit...

of permanent supportive housing, we support them.

We support them through our vouchers, and that's not a small support.

It is a substantial amount that goes to this region.

We also have some market rate or low-income affordable units under 80% and around 80% in our portfolio as well.

So we have a little bit of a blended low-income and affordable units inside SHA that we manage and own as well, okay?

We have a relationship with you, a long relationship with the City of Seattle.

We want to continue that.

Go ahead to the next one.

Our relationship, we are an independent organization.

We're not a city department.

We work with the city departments because we too have needs, whether it's security, safety, whether it's the encampments near some of our properties, whether it's neighborhood activities, comes to mind, we interact with you on other areas like technology.

So as we try to enhance our residents' knowledge of technology use and application, we work with the Department of IT to support our residents, and that's been going really, really well.

You'll hear about some other services that overlap.

We also have a lot of housing partners.

OK, so nonprofits that are in the community, community based organizations, we work with them and we support them.

And at times they support us on certain things they do.

So we we support them most directly by providing vouchers to them for some of their hard units so they can continue to house folks and make it affordable for them to run their business.

But you can see from the list in front of you the different nonprofits that we work with.

Keep going.

Some of SHA keys.

Clearly, we like development and enjoy providing more housing in the market.

You heard today from Deputy Mayor Washington that it's a supply issue.

We need more housing of all types.

But housing alone, for us, just doesn't do it.

We know that.

So we can do a good job of providing housing, but if we don't think about and provide certain services for those individuals in the house, it won't work.

It won't be sustainable for us.

We know that.

And we don't believe that we will begin to break the cycle of poverty if we're not reaching out to the young adults and young kids and begin to give them some options different educational opportunities, different leadership on development skills and interactions with adults.

So we do that.

I talked to you a little bit about digital equity and some of the things we're doing, technology.

We will continue to do that.

We're reaching into our hard units to make sure Those are wired for internet connectivity and not having folks only just go out to providers and pay for that when they're already on a stretched budget.

So we have a pilot going on right now where we're trying to rewire our buildings and give them free access to Wi-Fi.

Health and human services is critical.

If folks want to remain in our housing, and stay stable, they need to have good health and decent health to do that.

And so, we recognize that and we play a role in connecting them to the services in the community.

We're not a healthcare provider, but we can assess and we can see the symptoms when someone is struggling physically or mentally and begin to engage in that way.

Education and employment are absolutely key.

foundational key for that.

So we have lots of educational programs, partnerships with the Seattle School District to monitor, i.e. support the individual kids who are attending schools.

And then we have our own job employment program inside of SHA.

We call it Job Link.

It's available for all of our residents, and it's just not any job.

It starts with, how do we get you to build a career?

You may not be ready to build a career.

How do we get you to get the skills to get those building blocks to do that?

How do we help you with education opportunities as well?

So we engage with our residents.

The Deputy Mayor was accurate.

You gotta be able to relate and engage with those individuals to connect with them.

Just offer it, put our signed up and have staff there won't do it.

you gotta form a relationship, and you gotta have a trusted relationship.

And when we do that, because we're in those communities, it makes a big difference for getting folks to engage.

So the supportive services are huge.

People would like us to just focus on housing alone.

We can do that, but we have enough experience to know the impact that that is not sustainable over a period of time, so you'll see us doing that.

Some of the partners we have on those services, again, you can see those.

I'll point out just a couple.

Catholic Community Services is great.

They work with us.

They have an after-hours tutoring program for all of our kids, where they can show up and get one-on-one or group tutoring services.

Aging and Disabilities with the City of Seattle, excellent program that we partner with in serving our aging population and our disabled population and connecting them with services.

Sound Mental Health is another one that we are continuing to grow in that space for the needs, in particular, coming out of COVID.

And so, we are spending a lot of resources in that area as well.

I talked briefly about development.

I'm very proud of our recent development of Yesler that is just right up the street here.

Some of you know that.

You've been around this community for a long time and you've seen what Yesler used to look like.

We're proud of that.

Yesler started in 1940. We were the first housing, that was the first public housing authority.

And even more important, it was the first integrated housing authority in the country.

So those roots are strong and dear to us.

But it was failing.

The infrastructure was failing.

The support systems around were failing and we knew we had to redevelop it.

But we were very fortunate in our strategy there that we didn't rush and jump into that.

We started this probably 20, 25 years ago in engaging a community, having conversations, not rushing to just build something and tear something down.

That process involved the citizens in that area.

It involved the residents in there.

And we've talked about things of development ranging from where they would like to see their kitchen window, you know, which facilities they would like to see in their unit, to how they want their community to feel and look, whether it's walkable, whether it's dense or not.

And then, we spent a lot of time with relocation because a lot of folks were attached to Yes Sir Community for a lot of good reasons.

And so, we saw the physicalness that it needed replacing, but you also gotta go deeper and check out how are the people doing and how they're feeling about what they call their home, and they wanted to stay there.

In fact, as we were doing redevelopment, we had folks move five or six times who did not want to relocate off-site as we were doing construction on-site.

And they said, we don't care, but we want to stay here.

Very successful in that redevelopment effort.

Very stressful.

But we went over and aboard, over and above, excuse me, on some of the things we offered, like, you know, regulations say 90 days for relocation notice.

We gave them 18 months.

because we knew they would not be ready in 90 days.

We knew there were a number of reasons.

There was a lot of them that had school-age kids, and so you're not gonna pull them out in the middle of the year, early, late in the summer.

So we just worked the cycle, and worked them, and got them to a place where they were ready to move, because we knew if they moved to where they were happy, that they would stay.

and most of them did stay in the new location.

Some came back.

We offered them an infinite timeline on returning back to Yesler.

We actually gave them a physical certificate that says, you have a right to return anytime you want.

So every single time we do a redevelopment building there, we go back to that original list, we look down who have we contacted, and ask them again.

If we even contact them two or three times, do you want to come back?

Yes, we have another building opening up.

and you're first to have a choice in that.

And so, that thoughtfulness, that engagement, that resident-centric approach has paid off tremendously for us, and you can see how your show looks.

It started with 561 units of affordable housing.

we have over 1300 units of affordable housing on there.

That wasn't a requirement.

The city encouraged us to do more.

They want us to do more with the partnership.

They actually helped pay for some of the infrastructure and thank you for that.

But we went well above what was required to do that.

In addition to the 1300, We have about 3,000 market rate units there as well.

So we like the model of a mixed-income community.

We think there's benefits in a number of ways of that.

If we can try to keep the soul that we had there, great.

And we work on that, and we use the residents to help us stay in tune to that.

But we see the benefits of a mixed income.

We have probably five or six mixed-income communities right now in Seattle.

High Point, New Holly, Rainier Vista, Lake City, and now Yes Sir.

Okay?

We're not done.

Yesler is a great model, and I kid you not, the national attention we get from Yesler is unbelievable.

It's absolutely unbelievable.

We recently, about four years ago, 2019, purchased another piece of property up north.

As Light Rail was making their plans, we bought 8.5 acres up by Northgate Mall to improve the housing there.

Our objective is to, again, involve the community, start at the ground, and make sure that we're touching base with them on the things that they want to see happen there.

see how we can fold that in.

But we're looking at trying to do another Yesler.

You know, increase the density, increase the amount of public housing there, and increase the market rate housing as a new future development.

When you look at that area, it's got a college there, there's an elementary school nearby, there's business and shopping, there's, in addition to the education, there's other employment things, and transportation.

So we think it has all the right infrastructure things, and it just needs to have a lot of community engagement as we start that process.

I know that was fast, but I know you guys have been up here a long time, so I just wanted to give you just a quick overview, and I'm ready to answer questions for you.

And again, we'll also have an opportunity to have one-on-one meetings with you as you guys continue to want to engage with SHA.

Thank you very much.

Oh, gosh, the hands are flying now.

Okay, so Council Member Morales.

Thank you.

I have a few questions, but I do first want to thank you for the remarks you made about the project that you are, the Northgate Commons, you know, access to affordable housing, to neighborhood assets, to a college, to all of the things that you talked about is really important.

To have all of that within walking distance sounds great.

And I think it's important as the land use chair that we work on having that kind of community in as many places in the city as possible, right?

So in lots of places, people should be able to walk to their essential goods and services.

So I appreciate that.

One other comment before I ask my question, which is I do also want to draw the connection between, you mentioned Somali and Vietnamese are the languages most spoken in your properties.

In my district, Lake Washington Apartments is predominantly Somali neighbors.

And the connection to the services that you provide are really important.

So youth education, access to opportunity, the JobLink program you talked about, helping people build careers is also really important, particularly for folks in my district.

So I just want to acknowledge that and thank you for that.

I have a few questions.

I'll try to...

consolidate them, particularly about eviction.

So can you talk a little bit about your eviction rates and what efforts SHA takes to help prevent eviction, particularly how you work with the Aging and Disabilities Services?

And then if you could talk a little bit about If a renter is evicted, we know their housing options are limited.

So what resources are available for renters who have had their subsidy terminated?

And what kind of mental or behavioral health supports might you have to offer some of your tenants?

I know that was a lot.

We can break it down.

No, no, it's great.

First, thank you for the compliments, and thank you for raising the issue of eviction, because we know that's a critical piece of this.

It's very serious on our part.

We know if we evict someone, most likely where they're gonna end up.

They're gonna end up in the conversation that you guys just heard, right?

There's not a lot of safety nets.

And plus, with a mark on them that they were evicted does not make it easier for them to try to find housing.

So that is not something that's taken lightly.

We looked at this a number of years ago, and we continue to look at it every single year.

our eviction rate, contrary to our statistics of over 8,000 hard units, is extremely low.

It's less than 1%.

I don't have the latest statistics in front of me, Council Member Morales, but 2020, 2021, before the pandemic, you know what we did during the pandemic.

So before the pandemic, less than 20 a year.

less than 20 a year.

I, fortunately, was in a different position at SHA at the time.

I was the operations director, so I asked and required that all property managers come through me before they finalize an eviction or start the eviction process of a summons and complaint.

I wanted to know what efforts they have taken before.

I wanted to know if it was behavioral or rent.

I wanted to know how they interacted with them so that we can see and make sure that we did everything we could to try to prevent an eviction.

We can't do it in all cases.

There are some serious behavior issues that occur that threaten the individual, that threaten the community.

We are not set up to handle that.

Behavioral plays a big role in this.

So we started investing more of our dollars, which are coming away from housing, but we had to, more of our dollars into behavioral health to begin to have agencies like Sound Mental Health be on site for us.

because I can't put that responsibilities on property managers to assess and determine when someone is struggling and they need assistance, so they can't.

We'll continue to do that on eviction.

We'll continue to monitor them.

I will tell you they have been increasing.

I don't have the statistics just because there's some great work that was done on the rent assistance program that we had right after the pandemic.

And I think we participated in that and a lot of our residents benefited from that.

But as we continue to see now, folks are falling behind.

and folks are struggling on behavior, and we'll just continue to look at that on a case-by-case basis and know that we're gonna do everything we can to keep them in housing, because we're a houser, and we wanna house people.

Just one final comment, Chair, is I would love to invite you.

I do think we are going to have a meeting set up with you, but I'd love to invite you to comment officially on the housing and affordability element of the comprehensive plan that we're reviewing now, because all of the things you're talking about are related to that.

And behavioral health is not part of land use, but that is also a regional and a national problem, right?

Part of the reason we're experiencing a lot of these crises is because as a country, we haven't invested what we need to invest in behavioral health, and we're seeing the implications of all of that.

You're absolutely right.

You're absolutely right.

Councilmember Morales, you asked about ADS in particular, and we have a very close relationship with ADS and full life care.

We actually provide match for the staff to be in our buildings, and that is integral.

And before we started funding Sound Mental Health, ADS was the primary way that our folks got case management support.

So thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks, Lisa.

Thank you.

Gosh, I lost track.

Who was next?

I was last.

You're last.

Okay.

All right.

I'm going to start at this end.

Council Member Wu.

Thank you.

Two questions, I'll try to make this quick, but I also have affordable housing and wanted to echo the fact that behavioral health is a huge issue, but since we contract with SCIPTA, Seattle Chinatown International District PDA, as our building manager.

I don't know if this comes out of your office or Office of Housing, but they were able to get a grant to allow for a behavioral health counselor as part of their staff to talk to our tenants.

And so, but unfortunately stock is low and not many people are applying.

So we had one for one year and then wasn't able to fill that position.

Is that program part of your portfolio or is that?

No, it's not part of ours.

But you just raised a good point that we just need to continue to invest in that space.

There's a shortage of workers also in that space.

So as other agencies struggle to try to keep their staffing levels high, it's just a bigger, bigger issue that we need to address and probably on a national level to get more people interested.

and to pay people for the difficulties and the challenges of that job demands, so.

Do you see having somebody on staff that going forward as part of helping people with evictions, possibly, is that something you're looking for?

Yeah, thank you for raising that.

No promises, but we're looking at that as a model for us within SHA, okay?

I can't expect a property manager to have that skill set of a social worker and to be able to navigate and deescalate and know when to engage in a certain way.

And if we can't contract those services to SHA, then we're thinking hard do we start to cultivate and develop them inside SHA with the right infrastructure, with the right kind of supervisor who has that skill set, because we don't have that skill set.

I also noticed that does not just pertain within housing, it's also around housing sometimes too.

My second question is, so there are multiple landlord tenant regulations.

Are there any that you are exempt from?

And is there a list we can refer to if there is?

We can get you that information.

I would say, yes, there are some that we are exempt from.

I don't know them all off the top of my head.

We try to monitor them every year, both as they go through the state legislative process and the ones that have come through the city of Seattle.

But I can get you a list of those that we are exempt from.

And I don't know if, Lisa, you know them off the top of your head.

I don't know them all, but for example, when things come before the state legislature, our residents pay 30% of their income, so we always make sure that they are protected in that way so that rent increases.

We just operate in a whole different way, and our goal is always to make sure that our residents' interest is protected there.

But we can get you a full list, Councilmember Wu.

Thank you.

All right, thank you.

Councilmember Saka.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Director Brandon, and the Seattle Housing Authority for the work, this presentation, but more importantly, the impactful work that you all do every day as a houser.

I love that.

And in many material respects, the service provider as well.

And we talked a little bit about kind of what that looks like implementation-wise on your end.

But...

I'll say, you know, I always try to practice an attitude of gratitude.

And, you know, I'm grateful, for example, for the work you all do.

I'm grateful to be able to sit in this council chambers at this dais alongside these esteemed colleagues of mine.

And I appreciate each and every last one of you.

personally, and I'm also mindful of my own sort of transformation and journey.

And for the first nine years of my life, I grew up in and out of the foster care system, mostly in.

Overcame a traumatic and unstable home life, but through the help of effective government programs and services like yours, Section 8 housing, free reduced lunch, All those things.

But again, through the help of effective government programs and services like yours, and through the power of public-private partnerships and philanthropic organizations, and faith-based communities as well, was able to overcome.

And here I am, literally trying to be the king of potholes in Seattle.

And so my...

I'm looking forward to partnering together on a going forward basis.

But as part of that, you're a houser, but you're also an opportunity provider.

And I'm one of the exhibits, one of the many stories of that.

And part of our partnership, and I view my broader role on this council is making sure that more people, more residents of SHA are able to take their place in the council chambers across the state and across the country and take their place at the state legislative houses in Olympia and across the country and take their place at the U.S.

Capitol and the Capitol Rotunda.

So thank you.

That was just a comment.

Thank you.

No questions there.

But I'm looking forward to partnering together.

Likewise.

Likewise.

Would love your insight on some things we're doing.

So thank you.

Thank you for that.

Thank you very much, Council President Nelson.

So you really opened my eyes when you gave me your, presentation a couple days ago and now.

So 38,000 people, individuals, or 18,000 families have homes because of SHA.

Is that...?

That is correct.

That is astounding, and we don't hear very much from you.

Maybe it's because you're a federal entity, and so, therefore, we don't talk about SHA when we're talking about our housing crisis or any of the other providers.

You're sort of an island on your own, which is very...

strange to me, and so I have a question about, does the federal government then increase the amount of your funding as our population increases?

And how does the Office of Housing and how do you stack up against the other housing needs that we have?

Because you mentioned that you also support our permanent supportive housing providers.

And while I'm on that, hold your answer a second.

I just wanted to add, I don't know where the issue or the conversation of eviction is coming up.

If there was a news story or something like that, I don't know about it.

But I do want to remind colleagues that we have had our affordable housing providers come to us concerned about the ones that do rely on rent.

as you do.

The ones that rely on rent, not all of our affordable housing providers, but they're having difficulty collecting rent.

Their buildings are in disrepair.

They're complaining to us about tenants who are threatening to other tenants and behavior issues.

It was one affordable housing provider that really strongly came out in opposition to a proposal to indefinitely extend Seattle's eviction moratorium that was in 2022. I imagine that the issue of eviction is political, but I think that it's also something that a lot of affordable housing providers are struggling with as well.

Anyway, back to my question about population and how it tracks with your funding.

Yes.

Yes, the eviction is just very complicated and multi-layered.

But I do like the passionate approach that we've been taking.

And that's pros and cons in that.

So we're having some folks stay longer in our housing that may have been evicted historically.

And we're having some folks who get evicted just really struggle on where they're gonna go next.

So it's just very complicated.

Our funding sources from the federal government.

So housing and urban development.

They fund public housing across the country.

And so we are competing with the funding allocation that they do across the country.

There's some great benefits we have.

We have a, I'll call it a special status here in Seattle, which is a move to work status.

You'll hear that sometimes, MTW.

That allows us to get funding, a single funding source, and allows us to use those dollars to meet our local needs here in Seattle.

Not every housing authority has that across the country.

There's probably 39 who have this special status to do that, and that is expanding.

some amazing work in this region, and thanks go to our senators, and in particular, Senator Patty Murray.

We have an extension of 10 years of that special status.

It was just granted last week with the new appropriations bill that the federal government passed.

That helps secure a funding source for us, a funding stream for us in the future, a little bit more stable.

But that can change, as you all know, as the president puts his budget forward and as they discuss where housing fits.

Fortunately, housing is closer to the top and has been for a number of years.

So we feel very fortunate that we continue to get decent funding for the job.

Not enough.

You know the supply.

We could build a lot more with a lot more dollars, but our source is different than the city's and different from the Office of Housing funding source.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

Did that fully answer your question, Council Member?

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I had a few questions.

Yeah, I'm just a little bit more interested, if you could elaborate a little bit more on the right to return that you talked about at Yesler Terrace, because I think that that was a, it seemed to be a somewhat novel and very successful model, and I believe you're going to be incorporating that in the Northgate Commons, and it's also an issue that we're, to Council Member Morales' point, is certainly a critical issue in the land use conversations and the displacement strategies.

So if you can shed some light on that.

Yeah, I want to say we stumbled upon that.

But I think the residents wanted some assurances.

They were scared when we were redeveloping Yesler and knowing that they would have to leave their home and look for another one.

They wanted back into that community.

And us just saying, oh, we promise you can come back.

Don't worry.

And you know how staffing changes and things get lost.

So our staff thought of the idea of let's memorialize that with a piece of paper and a certificate that they can take with them and keep it.

And we have our own records.

We know who they are and how to reach them.

But that was really important.

And that symbolic certificate was extremely meaningful.

And yes, we will continue to do that again with Northgate because I see the power of that in the meeting.

And I underestimated at the time as we were making our promises to the residents there.

And was there any private or philanthropic money that was utilized to make that pencil out, or how did you afford to do that?

On the redevelopment or on the...

Relocation.

Well, the relocation and then the right to return.

Right, so on the relocation, there's guidelines, there's federal guidelines that direct us on what rights tenants have when they're going to be relocated or displaced as a result of redevelopment.

So we follow those to a T.

And some of that is, you know, cash payout, some of that is options on the kind of housing that they look for, and making sure that there's no loss from where they are now.

So we follow those federal guidelines.

I think it's a Uniform Relocation Act that we go to.

Philanthropic.

I apologize for not mentioning that in the presentation because we did not do all this by ourselves.

They did show up and they came to the table as well as Seattle University and through their educational program to help us with...

with the schools like Bailey Gasser that's in that catch basement zone.

But philanthropics played a great role with us.

So whether it's with partnership in healthcare, partnership in education, partnership in funding for youth, absolutely critical.

And so they liked the work that we were doing at Yesler.

They saw the vision and bought into it and they wanted to be a part of it.

We have a...

a physical contribution from some of them in partnership with some of the local banks here.

But the steps at Yesler, there's a connectivity between Jackson and going up to the backside of Yesler redevelopment that wasn't there before.

And what we didn't want to do was cut off the community.

with that redevelopment as it got enhanced and more people started coming there and forcing folks to go all the way around 12th and all the way back down Jackson to do their daily shopping and their daily interaction with international districts.

So there's a beautiful stair walkway that cuts right through and allows for folks to do that.

And it's laced with art. um from from residents and the community to enhance that um and it's been really really nice and so as more redevelopment happens in the international district we're hoping that continues to be a nice funnel for individuals who choose to engage thank you councilman morales do you have a question um thank you i um

Love that staircase during the summertime.

I have lunch there fairly often.

I don't have a question.

I just wanted to respond to your question about the right to return.

My, as I recall, and I might have my timing wrong, is the Esler at Hope Six project?

No.

Yes, there's a choice neighborhood grant.

So Hope Six was all the other ones I listed.

And then it's called the evolution of Hope Six.

Hope Seven, maybe?

It could have been, but they call it a choice neighborhood.

So the process, as I understand it, is that there's...

uh right to return sort of evolved in the late 90s as these hope six projects were happening i did my master's thesis on this so i'm a little familiar at least in texas um you know people were getting moved out because the the old housing projects were getting torn down and very often uh there was no record kept of who they were or where they went and so when the new project came in uh it was all new people.

And obviously this contributes to displacement of people who are already struggling.

And so I think as that program evolved, this right to return became part of the solution.

And there are some projects that really benefited and really allowed people to come in and you know, benefit from the investment that was happening rather than getting pushed out.

So I think that's, you know, an important component of this and a really important part of how we address displacement, not just in SHA properties or even affordable housing development, but in all of our projects.

I mean, the reason the Central District is predominantly white now is because we didn't do this.

So I think it's an important...

part of all of, should be an important part of our conversations going forward of how we, how we just make sure that we're addressing displacement.

And this is a really important tool for that.

Yeah, I agree.

I agree.

Well, thank you very much.

That brings us to 12.01.

I was hoping to finish at 12 on the dot, but that's okay.

Anyway, thank you so much for the presentation.

You're welcome.

It was very, very informative, and also for all the work that you do.

You're a profound and critical housing provider in our community and obviously across the country, but I really appreciate the fact that you've reached out to all of us and you're willing to be bring us on board and be transparent.

I do really appreciate that collaboration.

So again, thank you very much for the presentation, your time, and your patience.

Wouldn't do it justice.

So you see Lisa and I up here today as a mouthpiece for SHA, but we just got an incredible team behind us and seriously mission-driven employees who want to be there and want to do a good job on the work that they do.

And so we're real fortunate for that because they make us look really, really good.

Thanks for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Well, that would be nothing further.

That concludes the March 13th meeting of the Housing and Human Services Committee.

The next meeting is scheduled for March 27, 2024. The time is 12.02, and we are now adjourned.

Thank you all very much.