By Erica C. Barnett
In a Seattle Nice episode that’s already earning raves like “Depressing!” and “God damn it!,” we discussed the past, present, and future of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, an agency established with the lofty goal of rebuilding the region’s homelessness system from the ground up.
The KCRHA, which came out of discussions in the late 2010s about the need for a (say it with me) “regional approach to homelessness,” was supposed to bring King County and its 39 cities together and reach a consensus on the most effective approach to homelessness, then rebid the entire homelessness system to fund only the most effective programs, using money that would come not just from the city and county but other King County cities where homelessness is rampant, including the ones that have historically opposed homeless services inside their borders.
Things didn’t pan out that way. Early missteps, resistance from suburban leaders, and the failure of a heavily hyped public-private partnership that focused the agency’s attention on downtown Seattle (about as far from “regional” as you can get) set the KCRHA back in its early years, and the promised “total system rebid” never materialized.
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Now, the agency is essentially an administrative body responsible for administering existing contracts and taking on political blame (and legal risks) when something goes wrong. And its staff, including the CEO, answer directly to politicians pursuing their own parochial interests, leaving the agency vulnerable to unilateral decisions by elected officials—like when Mayor Bruce Harrell began clawing back control over homeless services, starting with outreach and homelessness prevention.
With the news last week that the KCRHA is threatening to cut one-fifth of its staff if they don’t get $4.7 million this year to increase their administrative budget, the agency’s future feels more tenuous than at any point in its brief history. (It doesn’t help that the threatened cuts are tanking morale that was already low, or that the infighting between the agency’s top leaders has become an open secret).
So will the KCRHA end up being a short-lived experiment, like the Seattle Monorail Project? Or is it, as some have argued, too big to fail? Sandeep and I discuss all that and more on this week’s show.
Nobody wants to acknowledge that King County regional homeless authority was sabotaged by the transgender Christmas party employees who got to decide the fate of who was hired and what the policies would be. Creating a racist affirmative action infraction of deviant perverted misinterpretations of Diversity Equity and Inclusion priority hires who got to decide the fate of who was hired and what the bottom of the barrel priority policy was going to be based on skin color, orientation and repeat offender priorities racistly discriminating against innocent White Houseless citizens subhuman mistreating while putting untrustworthy unqualified scorn lived experiences and government and nonprofit untrustworthy corruptions to just transfer millions of dollars to evil racist non profit executives giving themselves $250 k subhuman mistreating homeless while je ny Durkan who also exempted drug pusher from jail sabotaging police reform created King County regional homeless authority to hide the conflicts of interest between council Democrats and Non profits donating and financing activists organizer’s union leaders paid as lobbyists to broker deals between council oversight watering down integrity for re election support and endorsement while racist within KCRHA Continue messing it up purposely sabotaging the efforts as if that’s the only way they gonna have.a.job not solving what they exacerbating justify FIRING HIRING BETTER LEADERS
I was a member of the board in the early years of the KCRHA. I was one of the three members with lived homelessness experience. From the start, I knew the suburban leaders were not willing to make any of the changes we suggested as they were entrenched in their old, traditional and racist beliefs that had not worked in the past. I am deeply saddened and concerned that the original ideas to end homelessness that were suggested by director Marc Dones have been lost and discarded. Marc did not fail the KCRHA, the KCHRA and the city of Seattle leadership failed him and by extension, failed us.
Stop with the racist talk, in King County there are a large number of leaders and dept heads who are not white that failed the homeless so put that card back in the deck. Like anything ran by people who have no real experience and no real oversight on the money, the money they got was wasted and spent on things that were not crucial, you can’t blame everything on white people.
Interesting discussion about KCRHA. Here’s my perspective FWIW: There are a few elephants in the room, which don’t get discussed openly by the mayor or KCRHA. But first, the CoC board is running much better than it was 2 years ago. The new co-chairs have reached a pretty functional relationship with KCRHA staff. CoC is an odd component, because it is federal HUD money that has to (by law) be administrated by a CoC Board, and cannot simply be directly controlled by the mayor or by the KCRHA governing board. But it’s $70M out of the $200M total KCRHA budget, so it’s a significant chunk.
The whole discussion you two have about KCRHA being somehow “independent” of the politicians never made any sense to me. It’s city and county money, so the mayor and the county executive are responsible, the more directly the better. I thought the original idea was to get the city and county money to be administrated in harmony, and avoid conflicting or redundant programs. The “independent” idea led to too little control by the responsible parties. It’s convenient for the mayor to do relentless sweeps (um, “removals”) when neighbors complain, and then point the press to Ms. Kinnison for the tough questions.
So the first elephant is this separation of authority and responsibility. It never works out well to not have these joined at the hip.
So, the mayor controls the sweeps, and what little outreach precedes them, while KCRHA controls funding for the actual shelters and everything else (permanent supportive housing, food banks, rapid rehousing programs, the homeless database, coordinated entry, point in time count, case management services, tiny house & tent city sanctioned camps, etc). For example, sweeps in Ballard happen so frequently now that the unhoused folks are quite invisible; no big camps are left. The neighbors are happy; they think folks have moved into shelters, but there are still 300 people living there on the streets (we have data).
The second elephant is that the 2024 point in time count found 16,000 homeless people in King County, but there are only about 5000 shelter beds. So, when we “remediate” visible homeless camps, there really isn’t any place to put folks. The shelters are 95% full all the time. No homeless guy can walk up to a shelter and ask for a bed tonight. It just doesn’t work like that. So, folks get pushed around the neighborhoods and really don’t get offered reasonable shelter. Folks don’t really move quickly through the shelter system into permanent housing, because there isn’t really much available low-income housing.
The third elephant is that since we don’t do much outreach, we have some of the 5000 sheltered folks in the database, but we really have no working knowledge about the other 10,000 on the streets.
We’re not addressing the problem seriously because doing so would upset the voters, etc. As the feds reduce social service spending this year, this will all blow up in our face. I’ve been working on this for 4 ½ years now and this is what I see. I’ll go hide in the basement now.
Very good analysis of what follows from wrong policies and ignorant theories about how to effectively end homelessness. When you remove the voices of those with lived experience of homelessness you get partisan politically biased policies that have never worked.
Um, isn’t “no working knowledge” a little strong? The first time I showered at the Urban Rest Stop, I had to fill out a form for someone to enter into the Homeless Information System or some such. I get the impression that that’s been practised a bit less assiduously over the years, so maybe that system has gotten woefully out of date, but it’s not like it can’t be re-created, and forms and data entry just aren’t that expensive. Lessee, 10,000 forms… I had to create a contacts database once, maybe 600 entries, and it took me 4.5 days. These are like those in that they include names (harder to type than just numbers). So that’s 75 days at minimum wage, oh, that’s more than I expected, $12,456, but still not big money.
I’m also skeptical about 10,000. The KCRHA has been invested in bogus counts its whole lifespan. Before it came along, the total number, including shelters, was about 10,000, and I don’t know of convincing evidence that unsheltered homelessness is twice as big now, although of course that might be the case.
Have “King County and its 39 cities” figured out that the solution to homelessness is more housing, all kinds, not just luxe apartments and teardowns converted to mansions? How much have they spent admiring the problem?
Same problem in California. Big budgets with little accomplished.