McGinn Plans Second Housing Meeting; Still No Word on Fate of Housing Office

Will someone please explain why you would have a meeting on housing policy without your staff that administers the City's housing policies?

Easy: if you're looking to “rethink” how the office of housing can be more effective, it's often helpful to have sessions where people who have to deal with the office are able to freely discuss without any fear of offending existing staff members (and endangering long term relationships).

is this an open meeting? who are the “advocates” and “developers” who are invited to participate? is there a link that you could have included with the article?

We just re-upped the Seattle Housing Levy, which former Housing head Adrienne Quinn had a large part in before she was not re-hired by McGinn. How the Office of Housing is going to head the effort to administer the Levy proceeds if said Office of Housing turns out to be passe will, I guess, be “re-thunk” by McGinn. Sometime. If he's interested.

The OH reso will *not* be adopted Monday. It will be heard in the Housing, Human Services, Health, and Culture Committee Wednesday at 2pm. It is an open meeting. Here is a link, click on “most recent agenda::

http://www.seattle.gov/council/com_assign.htm#h…

There isn't a link to any information on this because it's not public info — McGinn & Co. want to be selective in who they invite. Word from attendees of the first “housing” meeting is it was a joke – no agenda, no understanding from McGinn & Co. about how the office of housing currently operates, and the meeting ended 30 min. early because they were kicked out of their space for a “volunteer coordinator” meeting. The voters of Seattle clearly believe in what OH does as the levy renewal passed by an overwhelming majority, yet McGinn has shown no real interest in the work of the office nor the voters' approval of that work.

The last meeting between the mayor's office and the advocates of both sides was really productive. Let us give a credit to this mayor, he is trying to reach-out as many poeple as possible. And I am sure that his heart is in the right place.

“Really Productive”? How? You employ meaningless phrases as fatuously as the mayor. He makes a show of asking for and listening to input. Then he follows his own ill-conceived agenda. You and others praised him for “cutting city fat.” Others suggested that just saying he was cutting 200 positions was easy and we needed to see how city employees would react and whether he would then follow through. They were right and you were wrong.

He's full of hot air and bad ideas and, though his desperate supporters become louder and shriller in trying to praise his dubious performance, they are being drowned out in a drumbeat of negative appraisals by sober and conscientious citizens.

If you attended, let us know what made it productive. I'm not sure what you mean by advocates “of both sides.” Were there advocates for NO housing attending? The mayor is indeed holding meetings and town halls; despite that, we really don't know where his heart is because he doesn't talk about it.

McGinn might be on to something here. The city directory lists 45 people in that department. That is a lot of payroll to carry year over year and money that could be spent actually building housing.

Are there any results to show the department has been effective in reducing the net number of homeless or increasing affordable housing?
Seems both have been in crisis for as long as can remember.

You can see what the Office of Housing does (or claims to do) here:
http://www.cityofseattle.net/housing/about.htm

There's been no success in reducing the number of homeless people in Seattle. But the Office of Housing isn't tasked to pursue that effort; the Committee to End Homelessness (a King County effort) is. Their blueprint is the Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness in King County. They have made no headway, as more units have been lost than have been gained. They will dispute that but it's true.

As far as people on the street without any kind of shelter, in 2004, the year before the King County 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness started, the unsheltered street count for the counted areas in King County on the One Night Count was 2,216. This year, the counted was 2,759. More areas are counted now, which could allow for some of the increase, but probably not all of it. Seattle's unsheltered count was up from last year.

There are really no commonly-accepted data that anyone can show that homelessness is decreasing. But there are claims. It depends on whether you wish to listen to the claims or actually talk to service providers. The latter will tell you the truth.

Sop complaing, Bring ideas boy!!!

Where is Bill-Block, isn't he dealing with the issue? I may have to call and ask,,,,

Your reply reads like a complaint and is thin on ideas.

I was actually making an observation. It is McGinn's job to bring ideas and make them happen.

My sense is that OH administers the levy funds (receives/scores applications, allocates funds and, most likely, verifies appropriate use of funds), runs the TDR and bonus programs and funds that flow from them (e.g. TDR bank), runs the tax exemptions program. There are other functions, but those seem to be the main ones. I'm shocked that they have 45 employees, so they must do a lot more….

Finding out how it works before you “rethink” might be a good idea.

Here is their 2010 proposed work plan, click on the link at #6 on the agenda:

http://clerk.ci.seattle.wa.us/~scripts/nph-brs….

If you look at the different departments you will see that the biggest group of employees works on weatherizations – funds provided from outside the City – Federal funds, Seattle City Light, Puget Sound Energy, etc…

That's fine to meet with outside folks, but it would be GREAT if McGinn would also meet with HIS staff, as in, the staff of OH to hear their side. What ideas might they have on being more efficient or making changes? They have knowledgeable folks working on all different aspects of housing: rental assistance, Multi-Family housing development, homeownership, operations and maintenance of existing MF dev, etc. It would be great if McGinn started to act like the Mayor, rather than the man running for Mayor.

You say that 45 staff is a lot of staff – the Levy just passed is $20.7M/year and OH's budget is almost $45M/year. On the high end ($100k each) 45 staff would be $4,500,000 or about 10%. OH hasn't added any staff since 2003 and even though the 2009 Levy is almost twice the size as the past levy, no staff were added. Seems like a good thing to me.

Among other things, the OH administers the Seattle Housing Levy which has been renewed every seven years since 1982, in 2009 by the largest margin yet, and in a time of recession. The Housing Levy will build or preserve 1,850 affordable homes and assist over 3,000 families. The Housing Levy money is leveraged 4:1 with State Housing Trust Fund, State Housing Finance Commission, tax credit, Gates Foundation, community development banks and other private funding. My church group got Housing Levy funds 20 years ago and is responsible for reporting annually that we still are using the house for very low income people who need supportive housing. We have another 20 years of annual reports to go before the loan is forgiven. I think you get the picture. Solid administration of our $145 million in the latest funding is important to all of us.

Another example is the City's participation in the Committee on Homelessness, the group that includes all the governments and the service providers moving forward on the 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness. The Mayor is a member, as is the County Executive, the head of Seattle Housing Authority (separate from the City), the Church Council of Greater Seattle and others. The Office of Housing staffs one of the subcommittees, helping to ease the burden on some very small non-profits. I have seen great progress in the areas of awareness and policy, including a bill this year that would have required to Dept. of Corrections to make a plan for housing newly released offenders, instead of “releasing them into homelessness” with $40, no job and nowhere to go. When we started the 10-year Plan, I thought, “good luck with that one,” but the bill moved this year and no one laughed.

The housing community is very grateful for the job the Office of Housing has done to operate, administer and coordinate housing for those in the city who are elderly, unable to work or whose income falls below 30% of the area median, which is about minimum wage. We are lucky to have them.

Bill Rumpf her long-time deputy, is Acting Director and a good candidate for the job. According to the City's website, there are six other acting directors, including the heads of police and City Light.

Sara, you are exactly right, as usual. However, trying to measure progress by counting the number of people sleeping outside is inadequate and assumes a closed system. People are constantly becoming homeless, even as others are housed and get jobs or get on Social Security Disability. The second year of economic disaster surely has to be a factor. Let's add in foreclosures. We know for certain that more families are living in their cars and are accessing food banks. The fact that the King County One-Night County went down this year, by a tiny margin (in Kent) surely can be interpreted as good news that it didn't go up. I hate to say it, but reports that others are moving here because we have a more compassionate system probably adds to our inability to county progress through the One-Night Count. What we know is that when the Seattle Housing Levy or the State Housing Trust Fund participates in creating new low-income housing, it continues to be dedicated to that purpose, whereas many Reagan-era Section 8 projects lasted only 20 years and have been converted to condos or market-rate rentals. It looks like progress to me,

The One Night Count of unsheltered people in King County is still a good measure. In Seattle, it flucutates from year to year; several years ago it went up 15%; a year or so later, then it went down, then it went up…and that continues. If you're going to correct somehow for economic downturns, you must then correct for economic upturns (which happened in the first decade of the millenium). The fact remains: we are not getting anywhere in ending homelessness.

Again, the OH is not tasked with that. However, unless it remains a strong City department and is treated as such by City administration, and Mayor McGinn actually pays attention to his seat on the Governing Board of the Committee to End Homelessness and tells the OH Director to pay attention to the seat on the Interagency Council, and stops the senseless sweeps of greenbelts and pays attention to the pleas of providers to increase shelter, Seattle will not be an active partner in that fight. This city spends more time talking about bike lanes than low-income housing and shelter.