Category: homelessness

Burien Prepares to Hire Controversial Nonprofit that Distributed Unsheltered People’s Personal Information to Police and Private Business Owner

Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon and City Attorney Garmon Newsom II

By Erica C. Barnett

The city of Burien is preparing to sign a contract with The More We Love, a group run by Kirkland mortgage broker Kristine Moreland with the help of Eastside sales executive Chris Wee, to help enforce its new ban on sleeping in public spaces. The group offers what it has described as private “sweeps” at a price of $515 for each unsheltered person removed from a site. “Discussions with The More We Love remain ongoing and a contract will be established once terms are reached by both parties,” Burien spokeswoman Emily Inlow-Hood said.

As we’ve reported, in 2020, the state Department of Financial Institutions found Moreland violated the state Consumer Lending Act by coordinating high-interest loans to unlicensed brokers, and levied tens of thousands of dollars in fines, most of which she has failed to pay. Last month, according to King County District Court records, Bank of America sued Moreland for failing to pay credit card bills totaling more than $33,000.

Meanwhile, court records indicate that a former Bellevue resident with the same name as Moreland’s business partner, Christopher C. Wee, pled guilty last month to two counts of misdemeanor assault stemming from a road-rage incident in which Wee shoved a 65-year-old man to the ground and broke his hip. In the plea deal, Wee agree to pay more than $33,000 in restitution and attend anger-management classes.

Wee did not respond to a phone call or an email sent to The More We Love seeking information about the road-rage incident. The information in court records, including a police report, is consistent with publicly available information about Wee’s age, most recent previous address, and physical description. Public records indicate that Wee currently lives in Kirkland. PubliCola was unable to find another Christopher C. Wee in Bellevue or Kirkland using public court, property, and licensing records, in publicly available residential databases, or on social media.

According to court documents, Wee repeatedly “brake-checked” a driver who had honked for him to go at a green light, followed him to a Bellevue Hilton parking lot, and attacked both the 65-year-old driver and his son, pushing or punching the son and shoving the father to the ground. In his victim statement, the older man said he had to undergo two hip surgeries after the attack and lost an estimated $42,500 in wages during the seven months he was unable to work, plus three months when he could only work part-time.

Moreland shared spreadsheets containing private medical and personal information about more than 80 of her unsheltered “clients” with a city council member, two police officials, and a real estate investor who paid Moreland’s group to remove an encampment on his property. This represents a stark departure from widely used best practices designed to protect the privacy of people who share information with homeless service providers.

These incidents, while they are not directly related to The More We Love’s activities in Burien, seem relevant as Burien decides whether to sign a contract with the group to provide outreach to vulnerable unsheltered people and remove the encampments where they are living.

In addition to these potential concerns, PubliCola has learned that Moreland shared a three-page spreadsheet containing private medical and personal information about more than 80 of her unsheltered “clients” with a city council member, two police officials, and a real estate investor who paid Moreland’s group to remove an encampment on his property. This represents a stark departure from widely used best practices designed to protect the privacy of people who share information with homeless service providers.

The spreadsheets, which PubliCola obtained through a records request, include people’s full names, birthdates, contact information, health insurance status, criminal histories, and information about their apparent physical and mental health conditions, such as pregnancy, addiction, and mental illness. They also include information about what services individuals have accessed, The More We Love’s assessment of their overall situation (typically: “Drugs”), and the specific places they plan to go after the encampment where they are living is removed.

Many of the notes include disparaging editorial comments about established local homelessness programs, such as Co-LEAD; the names and phone numbers of unsheltered people’s purported relatives; and comments like “READY TO GO [to detox].”

“DETOX Immediately. UPDATE 7/10 did not want detox today will keep trying. At moms house currently,” one note reads. “Reach/Lead havent provided any meaningful services that would change anything – Wants help in 2-3 months, close to Richard,” another says. REACH is an outreach provider and LEAD is a program that diverts people from the criminal legal system and has a limited quantity of hotel-based shelter for people throughout the King County region.

In two cases, Moreland (or another person filling out the spreadsheet) uses anti-trans language to describe transgender women, calling each woman a “male that identifies as female.”

According to the spreadsheet, the most common identified destination for these “intakes” is detox, a three-to-five-day program that does not include housing, shelter, or long-term treatment for addiction. Other destinations include Union Gospel Mission’s inpatient treatment, an explicitly Christian program that includes mandatory Bible study. Moreland is a longtime UGM volunteer.

The council has never discussed the details of the potential contract publicly, although it appears to have been the subject of a lengthy executive session that delayed the start of the council’s October 2 meeting by almost an hour.

Moreland shared the spreadsheet with Burien City Councilmember Stephanie Mora, Burien police chief Ted Boe, Burien police sergeant Henry McLauchlan, and Jeff Rakow of Snowball Investment, a real estate company that owns a Grocery Outlet property and paid The More We Love to remove an encampment nearby.

Homeless service nonprofits generally do not share people’s personal information with public officials, much less private property owners, without the informed consent of individual clients, and generally only do so under explicit information-sharing agreements that are meant to benefit their clients—for example, by letting police and prosecutors know they’re participating in a diversion program like LEAD, which works to reduce people’s involvement in the criminal justice system.

For example, LEAD and REACH, which have been working with encampment residents in Burien all year, authorize case managers “to share information on an as-needed basis with a specified group of partner organizations and entities,” according to Purpose Dignity Action co-director Lisa Daugaard, whose organization runs LEAD. “We have been able to reach agreements in which prosecutors and police aren’t blindsided or misled, and get good information illuminating the underlying causes behind challenging behaviors; and in turn, they agree to ensure that no one regrets sharing this kind of sensitive information,” Daugaard said.

It’s unclear if Moreland, who did not respond to a request for comment, received consent from any of the people on her lists to share their private information with officials or private individuals. A public records request did not turn up any communications about the spreadsheets beyond an email to the Burien officials and Rakow in which Moreland wrote, “As promised here is our updated spreadsheet including all intakes to date. Just in the last three days we have placed 7. Hoping two more go by end of the day. Thank you!”

It’s also unclear who else has received the spreadsheet or similar information from Moreland, since public disclosure requests only deal with public officials’ communications.

“Information-sharing between social workers and enforcement entities can happen constructively—but only with the clear permission of clients/participants, based on their trust in case managers and the hard-won reputation of the program on the street; and only in the context of very specific agreements about how that information can be used,” Daugaard. Without that framework, Daugaard continued, “very quickly, individuals feel burned that they shared sensitive information and it was in some way used to their detriment” and the system breaks down.

At least one Burien Police Department officer is currently under investigation for allegedly harassing or attacking people living unsheltered in the city. The Bellevue Police Department confirmed that they are conducting the investigation and denied our records request seeking more information because the investigation is still ongoing.

Burien spokeswoman Inlow-Hood said the the Burien Police Department, which is staffed by the King County Sheriff’s Office, “will enforce” the city’s new ban on “camping” outdoors between 7 pm and 6 am   A spokesman for King County Executive Dow Constantine was more equivocal, saying that no decision has been made about enforcement. It’s unclear whether, and to what extent, The More We Love might be involved or on site when the police department removes encampments.

At least one Burien Police Department officer is currently under investigation for allegedly harassing or attacking people living unsheltered in the city. The Bellevue Police Department confirmed that they are conducting the investigation and denied our records request seeking more information because the investigation is still ongoing.

The city council has asked for a briefing from staff on any potential contract with the More We Love, which just registered as a business in April, but city manager Adolfo Bailon can sign any contract under $50,000 without council approval and is reportedly preparing to do so.

“The City Council asked for an opportunity to discuss the contract and it will be brought to Council in a future meeting,” Inlow-Hood said.

The council has never discussed the details of the potential contract publicly, although it appears to have been the subject of a lengthy executive session that delayed the start of the council’s October 2 meeting by almost an hour.  City officials are legally prohibited from talking to any outside parties about executive sessions, and PubliCola did not speak to any council members about the subject of this executive session.

Under state law, cities can hold closed executive sessions to “review negotiations on the performance of publicly bid contracts when public knowledge regarding such consideration would cause a likelihood of increased costs.” We have asked Inlow-Hood to explain the justification for any executive sessions on The More We Love’s potential contract, since it is not up for bid.

As PubliCola reported in August, Moreland failed to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines she owes for violating the state Consumer Lending Act in 2020. According to the state, Moreland facilitated “short-term, high-cost loans” with an unlicensed lender for at least four home buyers, then immediately turned around and refinanced the loans through the company she worked for, pocketing the commission. According to Department of Financial Institutions records, Moreland has consistently failed to make payments on the loans, despite agreeing to multiple payment plans.

Moreland has repeatedly claimed that her group (previously called the MORELove Project and more explicitly affiliated with Union Gospel Mission) has been more successful than any established organization at housing and providing treatment for people living unsheltered in Burien. However,  case managers and individual volunteers who have worked with Burien’s homeless population for years dispute this, noting that the homeless population in Burien has not diminished and includes roughly the same group of people as it did when the city of Burien first removed several dozen people from an encampment next to City Hall and the downtown Burien library in March. There are no year-round nightly shelters in Burien.

Most of Moreland’s “housing” placements, local advocates and service providers Burien say, have consisted of short-term motel stays and rides to detox, including one man who had to take two buses back to Burien after the “housing” he was expecting turned out to be a detox center outside Olympia.

Homeless service contracts typically include, at minimum, a detailed budget, performance standards, reporting requirements, and compliance with a number of minimum standards including minimum insurance and non-discrimination policies. It’s unclear which of these items will be in any future contract between Moreland’s group and Burien.

Burien Makes “Camping” Ban Worse, Auderer Now on Red-Light Camera Duty, Harrell Order Subtly Improves New Drug Law

1. On Monday night, the Burien City Council expanded the number of hours per day in which being unsheltered will soon be illegal, changing the daily deadline for homeless people to be off the streets from 10 pm to 7 pm. The change, an amendment to the sleeping ban the council passed just one week earlier, bans people from “living on” public property between 7 in the evening and 6 in the morning.

During Monday’s meeting, Burien City Attorney Garmon Newsom II said the city decided to make the adjustment after learning that many shelters “begin making their decisions” about who to admit around 4:30 in the afternoon; by 10pm, most are closed and “it would be too late” to take people there. By starting the ban earlier in the evening, the city seems to believe it can plausibly say shelter was “available” and that people refused to accept it, making it legal for police to remove or arrest unsheltered people from the streets.

Signs of camping, according to the ordinance, include “bedding, cots, sleeping bags, tents or other temporary shelters, personal belongings storage, and cooking equipment use or storage.”

During the meeting, Newsom inaccurately claimed the new proposal actually increases “the amount of time they are able to camp” by allowing “camping” between 7 pm and 6 am; in fact, it does the opposite, making it illegal to be unsheltered in public spaces between those hours. Councilmember Cydney Moore, who opposed the underlying ordinance, tried to correct the record, prompting a brief back and forth with Newsom that Mayor Sofia Aragon cut off, saying Moore should limit her comments to “these technical changes.”

The council’s agenda also suggests proponents were confused about what the amendment does. According to the bill description, it “clarifies, consistent with the council’s previously stated intent, that there will be no camping outside of the hours stated in the ordinance. At this time, the proposed amendment would change the start time for camping from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.” In reality, it changes the start time when “camping” is illegal.

Before voting for the change, deputy mayor Kevin Schilling said the King County Sheriff’s office had signed off on the change. A spokesman for King County Executive Dow Constantine told PubliCola Tuesday that the county still has not made a decision about whether and how to enforce the law.

2. Daniel Auderer, the Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president caught on body-worn video joking with guild president Mike Solan about the killing of 23-year-old student Jaahnavi Kandula by another police officer, Kevin Dave, has been reassigned to review red-light camera footage and sign traffic tickets, PubliCola has learned.

Only a handful of officers are assigned to red-light camera duty at a time. Often, these officers are near retirement or, like Auderer, have been removed from patrol duty because of a complaint or other problem with their performance.

Auderer’s comments came to light when the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which is considering criminal charges against Dave, released the video to PubliCola and a reporter for the Seattle Times in response to records requests.

The Community Police Commission has called on Police Chief Adrian Diaz to put Auderer on leave without pay until the OPA complaint is resolved.

The changes are subtle—so subtle PubliCola didn’t notice them when we wrote about the executive order last week. The order reinstates language saying officers “will” determine the level of threat and make reasonable efforts to divert people from arrest when possible, and restores language Nelson deleted saying that officers should not arrest a person “absent articulable facts and circumstances warranting such action.”

3. In his executive order order clarifying how SPD should implement a new law criminalizing public drug use last week, Mayor Bruce Harrell mostly restated the language in the underlying bill, which says police should try to divert people to social service programs that will help them address their drug use instead of resorting immediately to arrests. But the EO includes a couple of subtle tweaks that could undo changes Councilmember Sara Nelson inserted at the last minute to give officers extra discretion to make arrests.

The changes are subtle—so subtle PubliCola didn’t notice them when we wrote about the executive order last week. They’re about the words “will” and “may.” In her amendments, Nelson changed language stating that officers “will” determine whether a person poses a threat of harm to self or others, and language stating that officers “will make reasonable efforts to” use diversion rather than arrest to say that officers “may” do both things, making each decision completely discretionary.

Harrell’s executive order reinstates language saying officers “will” determine the level of threat and make reasonable efforts to divert people from arrest when possible, and restores language Nelson deleted saying that officers should not arrest a person “absent articulable facts and circumstances warranting such action.”

Mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen told PubliCola, “As was discussed extensively during Council debate, the legislative branch cannot direct the actions of executive branch employees through legislation. Mayor Harrell has made it clear that under this bill he wants officers to conduct a threat of harm assessment and that diversion is the preferred outcome rather than further criminal legal system engagement.”

Under the language Nelson added to the bill, there would be little recourse if officers decided, using their broad discretion, to arrest every person using drugs in public without determining if they posed a threat, and no legal reason for officers to try to get people into diversion programs instead of arresting them.  By changing both words back to “will”—in the implementing executive order, if not the legislation—Harrell strengthened the bill (which, we feel obligated to add, still does not require diversion or fund any new diversion programs).

Reports: Homelessness Authority Must Improve Accounting, Monitoring, and Transparency

By Erica C. Barnett

Two recent reviews of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s financial and other internal policies—a monitoring report by the King County Department of Community and Human Services and a financial audit by the State Auditor’s Office—found that the agency made a number of financial errors in its first year of operations. Among other errors, the KCRHA overstated its revenues, failed to inform grant recipients of the federal requirements attached to funding, and spent grant dollars in ways that were inconsistent with their intended purpose.

“The Authority did not have effective internal controls in place to ensure accurate and reliable financial reporting,” the state audit found.

State auditors also discovered that the KCRHA failed to list many of the federal requirements when awarding grants to 11 homeless service providers, which could put those providers at risk of being out of compliance with federal rules and potentially “spending the funds for unallowable purposes.”

Additionally, accounting errors led the agency to end last year with a negative balance—or overspend—of $17 million. Bill Reichert, the agency’s interim chief financial officer, told PubliCola the agency didn’t bill its funders, which are Seattle and King County, on time for some expenses, resulting in a temporary negative balance—something the county’s monitoring report noted as well, saying the KCRHA had failed to meet the county’s deadlines to submit invoices, which led to late payments.

“This was a startup. There was a lot of learning going on, and standing up processes, and things didn’t get reconciled as soon as they should have,” Reichert said. “It’s not likely to occur again, because we’ve taken a number of steps to shore up training in our systems and processes.”

KCRHA interim CEO Helen Howell said the agency “is committed to a full assessment of KCRHA, and these audits and reviews are an important step to help us improve. We are clarifying what needs to change to get this agency fully on track.”

In a separate, emailed statement, Reichert said the authority “is working hard to ensure we understand the current state of the agency’s financial operations, identifying any gaps in oversight, process and practice so we can implement a set of targeted solutions.”

The county report also highlighted the KCRHA’s consistent late payments to homeless service providers, who reported having to “float” their budgets for 2022 by depleting reserves, a challenge for smaller organizations without significant cushions to fall back on when the homelessness authority failed to pay them on time.

“KCRHA was not able to execute contracts in a timely manner,” the report noted. The agency had only signed about half of its 2023 contracts by the end of April, the monitors found, “which place[d the] burden on contracting agencies to shoulder the financial burden of operations without incoming revenue.”

In a statement to PubliCola, KCRHA interim CEO Helen Howell said the agency “is committed to a full assessment of KCRHA, and these audits and reviews are an important step to help us improve. … We are clarifying what needs to change to get this agency fully on track.” The agency, Howell continued, is “making progress, and we will continue to push ourselves to be better.” Howell became interim CEO after former CEO Marc Dones resigned in May; the agency is currently looking for a permanent CEO.

As we reported when the agency was first staffing up, many experienced grants and contracts specialists at Seattle’s Homeless Strategy and Investment division sought agreements with the KCRHA to transfer their existing jobs to the new agency, but Dones wanted to hire their own team, and told HSI staff they would have to re-apply for their jobs—which most declined to do. As a result, there was a significant loss of institutional knowledge about how to administer homelessness contracts at the new agency, contributing to an already steep learning curve for the new authority.

In its response to the state audit, the authority wrote that it “has already taken significant steps to implement many of the necessary components in our contracting year for 2023. We have been actively involved in recruiting experienced personnel and providing on-job trainings to strengthen our contract and grant management and compliance monitoring.”

The county’s report also raised concerns about the KCRHA’s governing structure, monitoring practices, transparency, and communication with the nonprofit agencies that it pays to provide outreach, shelter, and other services.

The KCRHA’s Continuum of Care board, which came under fire earlier this year after a board member shouted down a colleague’s objections to the proposed appointment of a repeat sex offender, often lacked a quorum and didn’t get enough information from KCRHA to make decisions or recommendations about complex decisions, like the agency’s annual federal funding requests, the report found.

As PubliCola reported, the KCRHA ran a bit of a coup on the CoC board earlier this year, recruiting new members to the stakeholder group that oversees the CoC and holding an unusual “convening” to adopt a new charter and a new slate of members for the board. (Ordinarily, CoC “convenings” are day-long events that include panels and discussion sessions; this year’s meeting was focused on these two votes.) The agency is supposed to hold two major meetings a year, but has failed to do so, according to the report.

The report also raises concerns about the KCRHA’s compliance with the state Open Public Meetings Act, noting that information about meetings often isn’t available in a timely or transparent fashion, and says the agency doesn’t have a consistent way of communicating with service providers or stakeholders about important decisions, like changes to Coordinated Entry—the system for accessing services, shelter, and housing. The KCRHA got rid of a committee that met quarterly, in public, to discuss Coordinated Entry, and “[a]s a result, subsequent changes to CE processes were made with little notice to, or input from, providers and other stakeholders.”

Although the report praises KCRHA for its “innovative” data collection strategies, including an annual count of the region’s homeless population that was based on state data and a separate qualitative survey of people experiencing homelessness, the monitors note that it remains “[u]nclear how KCRHA uses data/metrics to monitor evaluate program performance (other than for funding decisions) and to evaluate system performance.”

Last week, the KCRHA posted a response on its website to the state and county reports; a federal audit will also be released later this month.

Former KCRHA Leader Now Sees “Significant Issues” With Medicaid Funding for Homelessness; Lived Experience Coalition Weighs In on Report on Hotel Program It Ran

1. The city of Seattle has amended its $60,000 contract with former King County Homelessness Authority CEO Marc Dones, who was supposed to spend the latter half of this year coming up with ways to maximize the use of Medicaid funding for homelessness programs.

The latest iteration of the contract directs Dones to come up with “recommendations with respect to the local federal unsheltered initiative “All Inside” … [including] considerations for the local initiative’s statement of work, actionable workplan and performance plan,” in addition to the work Dones has already done on Medicaid. In an email on August 7 titled “Landscape to Date,” Dones concluded that there were several “significant” but “solvable” challenges to billing Medicaid for homeless services.

All Inside is a Biden Administration program that provides technical assistance to cities, including Seattle; it does not include additional funding for housing or services.

The pivot is particularly striking given Dones’ previous advocacy for using Medicaid Foundational Community Supports funds to pay for Partnership for Zero—a privately funded effort to end unsheltered homelessness downtown that folded, after housing 230 people, this month. Dones was so bullish on the program that they predicted it would pay for at least 85 percent of Partnership for Zero’s services by next year, brushing aside concerns from homeless service providers and elected officials that the program is complex, highly restrictive, and expensive to administer.

Providers raised every one of the issues Dones identified as part of their contract with the city when the KCRHA tied the future of Partnership for Zero to Medicaid funding earlier this year, but were largely ignored. 

In their latest update, Dones identified “four significant issues” with using Medicaid to fund homeless services. First, Dones wrote, agencies often have to spend a lot of time and staff resources documenting and administering programs in order to get reimbursed. Second, Dones wrote, agencies have to spend a lot of time “chasing” clients to collect billable hours, creating a “significant gap in what is called the ‘billable units of service’ and requir[ing] agencies to fund activities that are related to enrolled clients with no path to reimbursement.”

The third issue Dones identified is that FCS is not a reliable source of funds for behavioral health services. And the fourth was that Medicaid reimburses agencies slowly and often rejects claims for minor or technical reasons, making it hard for providers without large cash reserves to use it as a reliable source of funding.

Providers raised every one of these issues when the KCRHA tied the future of Partnership for Zero to Medicaid funding earlier this year, but were largely ignored.

Dones has completed approximately half of their 240-hour contract, according to a schedule of “deliverables” included in the contract document. So far, Dones has produced a timeline and scope of work, a 600-word email describing the “landscape to date,” a 450-word email containing a “Draft Assessment” of All Inside, and a list of five stakeholders to talk to about various topics, including the “intersection of public transit and homelessness,” “intersection of organized crime and encampments,” and “pro social public space activation to prevent encampments.”

2. The final version of a report documenting what went wrong with a hotel program run by the Lived Experience Coalition reaches substantially the same conclusions as an early draft PubliCola covered back in August, but does include a number of notes contributed by the LEC, which has blamed budget missteps that led to the collapse of the program primarily on its then-fiscal sponsor, Building Changes, and the KCRHA.

As we reported last month, the report, by independent consultant Courtney Noble, concluded that the LEC was in over its head when it accepted $1 million in federal funding to run the hotel-based shelter program, which was the advocacy group’s first such contract. Noble also reported that other factors, including a lack of transparency from Building Changes and a hostile relationship with the KCRHA and Dones, contributed to the program’s failure.

In footnotes to the report, the LEC said the audit itself should go through a racial equity analysis “due to the fact that the audit was conducted by a single individual of a particular racial background and socioeconomic class” who may have unconscious bias. Additionally, the LEC objected to the consultant’s suggestion that conflict between “personalities”—at a minimum, Dones, LEC director LaMont Green, and Building Changes director Daniel Zavala—contributed to the collapse of the hotel program.  

The final report now emphasizes systemic issues and removes references to the LEC’s initial proposal, which included hot meals, mass shelter, and supplies in addition to the hotel rooms that were the core of the LEC’s final contract. It also softens suggestions that the Lived Experience Coalition should participate in the regional Homelessness Management Information, a central clearinghouse for information about people who interact with the homelessness system, in order to access federal Emergency Food and Shelter Program funds in the future.

The LEC has said that gathering the kind of data required to participate in HMIS would re-traumatize their clients; additionally, according to the final report, they “believed that KCRHA leadership was retributive, and wanted to punish them for stepping out of their advocacy lane to run the hoteling program. LEC maintained that they were still not a direct service provider, and believed that participating in HMIS would strengthen KCRHA’s argument that they were.”

In footnotes to the report, the LEC said the audit itself should go through a racial equity analysis “due to the fact that the audit was conducted by a single individual of a particular racial background and socioeconomic class” who may have unconscious bias. Additionally, the LEC objected to the consultant’s suggestion that conflict between “personalities”—at a minimum, Dones, LEC director LaMont Green, and Building Changes director Daniel Zavala—contributed to the collapse of the hotel program.

It has historically an issue when poor white, black, brown, and indigenous people come together to speak truth and organize to urgently improve failing systems resulting in the dehumanization, pain, suffering, and early death of our unhoused neighbors that the systems do not want to be accountable and then turn to tactics such as defunding, gaslighting, and mischaracterizing their work,” the LEC wrote.

Finally, the LEC said it’s inaccurate to call the hotel program a failure. “The program did not fail, it served over 400 people during a time period when we saw record deaths among those experiencing homelessness,” the group’s final footnote says.

Burien Council Bans Sleeping Outside at Night, Still Has No Plan to Address Homelessness

Burien City Council members Kevin Schilling, Sofia Aragon, and Jimmy Matta

By Erica C. Barnett

The Burien City Council voted Monday night to ban unsheltered people from sleeping in public spaces between 10pm and 6am, after failing for more than six months to create any shelter or other legal place for a group of several dozen people to sleep.

The vote broke down along the same lines as every previous vote on the encampment, with a four-member majority (Stephanie Mora, Kevin Schilling, Jimmy Matta, and Sofia Aragon) voting to adopt the ban, which is modeled after a similar sleeping ban in Bellevue.

Burien police, who are King County Sheriff’s Office employees, would be in charge of enforcing the ban. A spokesman for King County Executive Dow Constantine told PubliCola, “the county will be reviewing the legislation with our legal team to understand any potential impact to policies or procedures, and will be discussing next steps soon.” Earlier this year, the county decided not to help the city remove unsheltered people from another city-owned property.

“It’s not compassionate to force people to disperse to even more dangerous areas where their caseworkers can’t find them. And it is so painful to witness our council considering this right as the weather turns particularly nasty, knowing that it will keep getting worse.”—Burien Councilmember Cydney Moore

Unlike Bellevue, however, Burien has no year-round shelters that are open to all people, so the sleeping ban puts the city in a dubious legal position. Under a Ninth Circuit federal ruling called Martin v. Boise, cities can’t sweep encampments unless shelter is available. Other cities, including Seattle, have interpreted this ruling broadly, offering shelter that may not be appropriate or viable or proclaiming that a tent or group of tents are “obstructing” public space and removing them without notice or an offer of shelter. A King County Superior Court judge ruled recently that this broad use of Seattle’s police power is unconstitutional, and the case is under appeal.

Councilmember Cydney Moore, who voted against the ban, said prohibiting unsheltered people from sleeping at night won’t “get anybody off the streets” or solve homelessness in Burien. “It’s not compassionate to force people to disperse to even more dangerous areas where their caseworkers can’t find them. And it is so painful to witness our council considering this right as the weather turns particularly nasty, knowing that it will keep getting worse.”

The city has made no apparent progress on finding temporary places for people to live. City manager Adolfo Bailon said an offer of $1 million and 35 Pallet shelters from King County was insufficient to pay for a new shelter location, and that the city would need to find at least another $200,000 to make the offer pencil out.

The county offered the money to Burien earlier this year, along with garage space that would allow a Toyota dealer who is currently leasing a city-owned lot for his overflow inventory to store his cars so that the city could use the space for temporary shelter. After the council majority rejected this offer in July, council members and City Manager Adolfo Bailon have floated a number of non-viable locations for the shelter, including a contaminated site owned by the Port of Seattle that the Port has said is uninhabitable.

Last month, Bailon raised the possibility of moving the encampment to an empty lot next to a county library, businesses, and public housing in Boulevard Park, a lower-income, largely Latino neighborhood. Last week, councilmember Hugo Garcia pointed out that the original justification for displacing the encampment was that it was next to a library, homes, and businesses in wealthier, whiter downtown Burien. “This reeks of white supremacy,” Garcia said.

Mora immediately moved to censure Garcia, but her motion failed for lack of a second; she made the same motion last night, and it failed again. In a thread on X (formerly Twitter), Councilmember Sarah Moore, the third member of the anti-sleeping ban minority, said Garcia was not accusing any of his council colleagues, specifically, of being a white supremacist, as Mora suggested. “I applaud his courage for naming what he saw and I hope we can collectively engage in challenging conversations like this productively,” Moore wrote.

At last night’s meeting, Moore also proposed having a public discussion about a proposal, which Bailon said last night is moving forward, to pay a group called The More We Love to remove encampments from public spaces. The group, run by a Kirkland mortgage broker named Kristine Moreland, offers “sweeps” at $515 a person and was recently paid to remove the encampment in Burien from a spot next to the Burien Grocery Outlet. Although Moreland claimed to have “housed” a huge number of the people living in the encampment, the encampment has actually moved to another location in the middle of a busy intersection. The city currently contracts with REACH, an established outreach group.

City Attorney Davison Files Brief Demanding Right to Sweep Encampments Without Offering Shelter

By Erica C. Barnett

City attorney Ann Davison announced Monday that the city has filed an amicus brief asking the US Supreme Court to overturn a Ninth Circuit District Court ruling that restricted the ability of Grants Pass, a city in southwestern Oregon, to criminalize sleeping in public places. In a statement, Davison said Johnson v. Grants Pass “strips local authority from a complex problem” and denies “local autonomy” to cities like Seattle.

Under a separate Ninth Circuit ruling called Martin v. Boise, cities are not allowed to remove homeless people from public places in most circumstances unless there is shelter available. In the Grants Pass ruling, a panel of three Ninth Circuit judges agreed with lower courts that the city’s anti-camping ordinance, which imposed fines and criminal penalties for sleeping in public and banned homeless people from using items like blankets, cardboard boxes, and pillows, is unconstitutional.

The brief—which was also joined by the National League of Cities, the North Dakota League of Cities, Colorado Springs, San Diego, and about a dozen other cities across the country—argues that by restricting cities’ authority to ban sleeping in public, Martin and Johnson “compel local governments to choose between providing shelter or surrendering public lands to encampments that harm local communities.”

The city of Seattle, in other words, is arguing that Seattle should be able to sweep homeless people without the city having to “choose” to provide them places to go.

Additionally, they are arguing that calling unsheltered people “involuntarily homeless” grants a special status on people who are, in reality, engaging in a voluntary behavior by sleeping outdoors, much as an alcoholic who is caught being drunk in public has chosen to drink of his own volition. (This is from a real Supreme Court case from 1968, whose conclusions many modern addiction experts would probably dispute).

Seattle has its own ban on sleeping in public that allows sweeps in two general situations. In some cases, the city gives people living in an encampment 72 hours’ notice that they have to leave the area, then offers shelter to the people who remain. This, in theory, meets the requirements of Martin—even though, as many advocates for unsheltered people have pointed out, the city’s “offer” may be for shelter that is across town, requires a person to abandon their spouse or partner, or is inappropriate for a person’s behavioral or physical health conditions.*

Many people decline to “accept” these untenable shelter offers, which has caused city to suggest the real problem is people “refusing” shelter, rather than a lack of appropriate shelter and housing. “A 2021 study in Seattle found that offers of shelter were declined 52% of the time,” the brief notes, echoing these perennial claims. “Undoubtedly, sleeping outdoors can afford more freedom and autonomy than congregate sleeping arrangements. But this also shows that, at least for some people sometimes, personal decisions and preferences can play a role in whether someone continues to be unsheltered.”

The brief even suggests that rules banning encampments are like city zoning laws that prohibit certain uses in residential areas, citing a 1974 Supreme Court ruling (on frat houses, of all things) that allowed to establish “zones where family values, youth values, and the blessings of quiet seclusion and clean air make the area a sanctuary for people.” Unsheltered people, according to the brief, “directly undermine these legitimate aims and turn zoning schemes into hollow promises.”

In recent years, it’s become common for the city to exploit a loophole in the rules governing encampment sweeps to remove people and throw away belongings, such as tents and survival gear, without notice. In these case, the justification is that any person or object occupying a public space, including remote areas of public parks, constitutes an “obstruction” to the public’s use or potential use of that space. Earlier this year, a King County Superior Court judge ruled this interpretation of the city’s rules unconstitutional on privacy grounds; Davison immediately appealed that case, and the sweeps continue.

The city’s argument, as expressed in the brief, is a muddle of conflicting perspectives. The brief argues that requiring cities to choose between sweeps and shelter for every homeless person is an unconstitutional imposition; cities already spend hundreds of millions of dollars on homelessness, but the problem is only getting worse, which shows that spending money isn’t going to fix the problem. Since that’s the case, the brief continues, cities should be allowed to sweep encampments using whatever criteria they deem necessary, because encampments “monopolize common spaces like parks and sidewalks” and create “enormous volumes of garbage, human waste, and other health hazards like used needles.”

“A town that is not allowed to keep its sidewalks clear and parks open is not really a town at all. It is just a cluster of people living close together,” the brief concludes.

The brief even suggests that rules banning encampments are like city zoning laws that prohibit certain uses in residential areas, citing a 1974 Supreme Court ruling (on frat houses, of all things) that said cities could establish “zones where family values, youth values, and the blessings of quiet seclusion and clean air make the area a sanctuary for people.” Unsheltered people, according to the brief, “directly undermine these legitimate aims and turn zoning schemes into hollow promises.”

“A town that is not allowed to keep its sidewalks clear and parks open is not really a town at all. It is just a cluster of people living close together,” the brief concludes.

If the Supreme Court takes up the case, it could overturn rules specific to the Ninth District that make it harder for cities to simply sweep homeless people from public places. But even if Seattle wins the right to sweep people with impunity, it won’t change a basic reality: Homeless people don’t stop existing—and needing to sleep, eat, discard trash, and use the restroom— just because cities pass bans on sleeping and deny them access to resources, like trash cans and indoor plumbing, that the rest of us take for granted.

*Other programs exist that do route people to appropriate shelter, services, and housing, but these involve extensive outreach and engagement, and are generally separate from the city’s encampment removals.

Burien Outdoor Sleeping Ban Moves Forward Despite Lack of Places for People to Go

By Erica C. Barnett

The Burien City Council moved forward Monday night on legislation that will ban sleeping outdoors at night throughout the city, putting the bill on the “consent agenda,” which does not require public debate, for next week. The bill, supported by four of the council’s seven members, targets a few dozen people living unsheltered in the city of 60,000.

For months, the city has swept this group of people from location after location, forcing them from their original spot outside the building that houses Burien City Hall and the downtown Burien library to other pieces of public property such as planting strips. (Current city law, which will be overturned by the sleeping ban, prohibits sleeping in public parks but allows homeless people to rest on other public property.) The encampment is currently perched in what amounts to a traffic circle in the middle of two busy intersections

During public comment, supporters of the ban blamed the same small group of homeless people for everything from child sex trafficking to the presence of drugs in Burien to “gangs,” describing them variously as rapists, “junkies,” “tweakers,” and people who “don’t want help.”

A resident of the encampment, who said he became homeless after losing his job, told the council that if he didn’t have the encampment, he would have to go back to sleeping in alleys, yards, garages, and on public transit.  “I think it’s better for us to be in a park where you can see us,” he said. “Why not keep the camp? Why take it away? I also sleep on the train, and when I sleep on the train, I don’t get good sleep, and I make bad decisions the next day.”

As for what would happen once the ordinance passed, Councilmember Stephanie Mora said she hoped Burien’s unsheltered population would see that it was “inconvenient” to sleep outdoors in Burien and hopefully “find somewhere else to camp.”

During the debate over the legislation, the bill’s chief sponsor, Stephanie Mora, responded to a public commenter who asked council members to consider what they would do if they became homeless. “Well, I can tell you what I did do when I was newly pregnant,” Mora said. “I was a teen mom, I became homeless, and unfortunately, I was kicked out of my house. And I went to a local church, and I told the church members what had happened and those church members helped me out. It wasn’t the government that helped me out, it was people.”

As for what would happen once the ordinance passed, Mora said she hoped Burien’s unsheltered population would see that it was “inconvenient” to sleep outdoors in Burien and hopefully “find somewhere else to camp.”

A US 9th District Court ruling called Martin v. Boise bars cities and other jurisdictions from sweeping encampments unless there is “available” shelter, a loophole cities like Seattle have pushed to the limit. But there is no year-round overnight shelter for single men, who make up most of the encampment residents, in Burien, and the council has not come up with any viable proposal to locate a new shelter in the city. The latest proposal—a vacant lot in the low-income neighborhood of Boulevard Park—would be directly next to a library, like the original encampment.

Councilmember Hugo Garcia said it “reeks of white supremacy” to move the encampment from a library in a wealthier white neighborhood to a low-income Black and brown one, prompting Mora to immediately demand a vote to censure Garcia for his “very racist remark.” After some heated back and forth between opponents and proponents of the proposal, the council passed the sleeping ban on a predictable 4-3 vote, with Councilmembers Cydney Moore, Sarah Moore, and Garcia voting no.

Mora, notably, has proposed turning Burien’s outreach contracts over to a new group whose leader, Kristine Moreland, is a longtime volunteer with Union Gospel Mission with no experience providing direct services for governments. Until recently, Moreland advertised “sweeps” at a cost of $515 a head; she claims to have “housed” many of the encampment residents, but opponents of the sleeping ban noted Monday night that the same people are still sleeping outdoors in Burien.

Burien’s sleeping ban is modeled on a near-identical law in Bellevue—a city that, unlike Burien, does have an overnight men’s shelter. Once it passes, likely next week, the ban will go into effect on November 1.

The Burien police department, which is run by the King County Sheriff’s Office, would be responsible for enforcing the ban. A spokesman for King County Executive Dow Constantine said it would be premature to say whether he would instruct the sheriff’s office to enforce the law; earlier this year, the county decided not to help the city remove unsheltered people from a city-owned property that the city leased to a private company, ostensibly for a dog park, in order to evict the homeless people who moved there after the initial City Hall sweep.

Partnership for Zero, the Homelessness Authority’s Marquee Plan to End Homelessness Downtown, Will End After Housing 230 People

Regional Homelessness Authority CEO Marc Dones speaks at a press conference about the new public-private "Partnership for Zero" Thursday

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s Partnership for Zero program—a heavily hyped public-private partnership aimed at ending unsheltered homelessness in downtown Seattle—is ending, PubliCola has learned. About 35 “systems advocates”—formerly homeless people KCRHA hired to do outreach and case management for people living unsheltered downtown—will be laid off. Their union, PROTEC17, was informed of the decision to end the program Monday evening, and the staff were informed this morning, KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens confirmed.

“We are winding down the Partnership for Zero pilot program, and we will be applying the lessons we learned to the system as a whole,” Martens said Monday. The positive lessons, she said, included the fact that the “emergency management approach and style is effective at building cooperation” and that having a centralized access point for all private housing resources is better than requiring every individuals service provider locate housing on an ad hoc basis.

The KCRHA posted an official update on the end of the program Tuesday afternoon.

Martens said the KCRHA would be posting 11 new jobs in the areas of “housing navigation and stability and housing acquisition” internally, and that system navigators will be encouraged to apply. Many of these employees are recently homeless, and some were hired only a few months ago.

“The dissolution of this program is beyond disappointing — it is life-changing for all of the employees who’ve dedicated their careers to making a difference, and it is disruptive and unsettling to our neighbors in the unhoused community,” said Karen Estevenin, executive director of Professional and Technical Employees 17 (PROTEC17), which represents the systems advocates. “This unfortunate decision underscores the importance of fully funding and supporting direct service public programs that do not rely on continually fluctuating donors and donations.”

“One of the challenges is when people are spread out and mobile across downtown, it’s much more difficult than focusing on one defined encampment that’s in a place.” —KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens

In a joint statement to PubliCola, Mayor Bruce Harrell and King County Executive Constantine called the news “a disappointing end result” to the pilot program, “for the Authority, their workers, philanthropists, and, most importantly, people living on the street unhoused downtown.” The two executives said they will be “meeting with program leaders and the financial supporters of this effort to better understand lessons learned and how best to move forward,” adding, “This experience provides further confirmation of the need for the comprehensive review we launched of the organization’s governance structure, oversight, and accountability systems.”

Although the program used one-time funding, the KCRHA had planned to fund it with Medicaid reimbursement through a program called Foundational Community Supports, including the funds in the agency’s budget for 2025. Officials as well as experts familiar with FCS were skeptical about relying on the complex federal program to fund the downtown initiative, and a report, commissioned by the KCRHA but never released, outlined the challenges KCRHA would face if it tried to tap the funding directly. Martens acknowledged that the Medicaid funding, which former CEO Marc Dones confidently predicted would pay for 85 percent of the program by next year, “has not come to pass.”

Additionally, Martens said, the agency learned that “there are challenges in having an administrative agency run direct service” instead of contracting nonprofit partners to do the work, the standard approach in King County. With Partnership for Zero, the KCRHA was essentially running a parallel service system that duplicated, and in some ways competed with, the existing system of nonprofit providers that already do similar work; REACH, for example, lost a number of skilled outreach workers to better-paying positions as systems advocates.

Another lesson, Martens said, was that focusing on a large geographic area like downtown Seattle was less effective than working to house people in specific, identifiable encampments. “One of the challenges is when people are spread out and mobile across downtown, it’s much more difficult than focusing on one defined encampment that’s in a place,” Martens said. This past summer, the KCRHA divided the Partnership for Zero area into five discrete “zones” in an effort to break down the downtown region into smaller sub-areas, but this move did not solve for the fact that people can, and do, move around.

Other challenges, Martens said, “involve coordination across systems—when you’re looking at the public health system and the behavioral health system,” for example, “we need full systems coordination, not just project by project.”

As part of Partnership for Zero, the KCRHA established a “Housing Command Center,” using technical assistance from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, to meet daily and coordinate housing for individual clients. The KCRHA referred to the HCC as an “incident command center” that would respond to downtown homelessness the same way local emergency operations centers respond to major events like protests and extreme weather. The HCC stopped meeting regularly earlier this year, but the agency will continue to deploy the approach for emergencies and “system-wide challenges” that require coordination across many different partners, Martens said.

Martens said the authority is now working to narrow its focus, under interim CEO Helen Howell, to “focus on system administration” and spending money on existing contracts more effectively—for example, by making sure providers get paid on time, an issue that came up earlier this year and still has not been completely resolved.

Launched with a high-profile press event in 2022, the program never produced the kind of results the agency and its then-director Dones promised. Under the original five-phase plan, the agency was supposed to have reduced the number of people living unsheltered downtown to “functional zero” in “as little as 12 months”; in reality, since the program launched 19 months ago, it has housed just 230 people, from a “by-name list” of people living downtown that totaled nearly 1,000. Many of those 230 are using temporary vouchers that will expire after their initial one-year lease.

The end of Partnership for Zero coincides with the pending release of three separate audits into the program—one federal, one state, and one by King County—which reportedly reveal significant dysfunction within the program and the agency as a whole. KCRHA director Helen Howell has scheduled meetings with members of the agency’s boards to discuss the audit results later this week.

We Are In, the organization that coordinated the private funding for Partnership for Zero, told PubliCola in a statement that the program “successfully moved more than 230 individuals in over 210 households living unsheltered into permanent housing, developed a comprehensive data infrastructure for identifying individuals experiencing homelessness and their unique needs, and built trusting relationships with unhoused neighbors, setting them on the path toward stable housing.”

We Are In, the statement continued, is “committed to ensuring that the learning from Partnership for Zero is applied to create sustainable systems change and to continue working with government partners to design and implement the next phase of this critical work.”

We Are In did not identify what “the next phase” would look like, nor did it identify what the group had learned, specifically, while the program was in effect.

When the project launched, its funders said it would serve as an example of what the agency could accomplish by being innovative and experimental in its approach, starting in downtown Seattle, where many of the city’s largest businesses are located.

By building a “by-name list” focused on a certain geographic area, hiring people with lived experience to do most of the work typically done by established nonprofits, and placing most people in regular, market-rate housing through incentives and agreements with private landlords, the new approach would “build infrastructure and add capacity to the system in order to deliver comprehensive services and housing or shelter for those experiencing unsheltered homelessness in target areas, helping to revitalize our communities and providing all residents an opportunity to thrive,” according to We Are In’s 2022 Partnership for Zero press release.

Alison Eisinger, the director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, said the successes Partnership for Zero managed to achieve illustrate the need for more resources to help people get and remain housed; the collective contribution from private groups and companies worked out to about $11 million. “While it was ill-conceived for the RHA … to attempt to create its own service provider team, we and others welcomed additional resources and focus to walk with people experiencing unsheltered homelessness to help them secure homes quickly,” Eisinger said. “That’s what our whole system desperately needs: more housing resources, more focused and urgent attention to get people housed.”

The fact that Partnership for Zero was an experimental pilot that did not include sustained resources, Eisinger added, “reveals weaknesses of the philanthropic model as a driver of service delivery. We need to focus on getting the significant and sustained additional public dollars that every honest analysis demonstrates is necessary. Period.”

Three of the four original co-directors of the program told PubliCola they received little guidance from the agency about how to stand up the Partnership for Zero program and were under tremendous pressure to hire people quickly and start collecting a list of names right away. “There was this big push to just hire people based on having lived experience, and not requiring any sort of formal work experience or even work history at all,” said Dawn Shepard, a former (and now current) staffer for the outreach agency REACH who was featured prominently in media reports touting the KCRHA’s approach to downtown homelessness.

“They said, ‘We’re just going to train you from the ground up,’ and we didn’t have the capacity for that. We’re trying to stand up a new program and we’re making commitments that there’s no way in hell we’re going to be able to meet.” The “philosophy” KCRHA promoted, Shepard said,  “was ‘overpromise and underdeliver,’ and at REACH, “it’s the opposite. You never are supposed to be further damaging to clients by promising them stuff you can’t provide.”

PubliCola spoke with Shepard and two other former co-directors for a planned story we planned to write about the system navigators earlier this year.

Former KCRHA CEO Marc Dones and Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell

According to one of those former co-directors, Elijah Wood, he was hired after just one interview, a process the agency replicated when hiring the system advocates.  “We had virtually no onboarding and were told, ‘You need to have the entire workforce by May, which gave us two months to hire 36 people,” Wood said.

“The biggest red flag, from the beginning, was the amount of work that we were expected stand up with very little support,” a third former co-director, Joe Conniff, said. “We were very disenfranchised as directors.” One of the results of this “chaotic” rush, the former co-directors noted, was the new system advocates, many of them recently out of homelessness or trying to maintain their sobriety, were thrust into risky or traumatic situations, including places where people were actively using and dealing drugs, without adequate training on safety and strategies to protect their own mental health.

PubliCola was the first to report on the Partnership for Zero in February 2022, when the system advocates were known as “peer navigators” and the plan was to have each navigator follow a client “longitudinally” through the entire housing process, from living on the street to signing a lease. At the time, philanthropic donors and business leaders were enthusiastic about the idea, which would take some of the work already being done by many nonprofit agencies and hand it to KCRHA employees whose primary qualification was prior experience being homeless.

On Tuesday, the Downtown Seattle Association sent PubliCola a statement calling Partnership for Zero “the right approach that was executed in all the wrong ways. The effort lacked sound management, oversight and focus.

“If the KCRHA wants to be recognized as the leading entity on the region’s response to homelessness, it must effectively execute a strategy to reduce homelessness in downtown Seattle, the area of the region with the highest concentration of individuals experiencing homelessness,” the DSA statement continued. “It’s unacceptable for the region’s homelessness response agency and local government to have no plan for the area with the most significant homelessness crisis. If the KCRHA isn’t up to the task, the city and county should assume responsibility and immediately and stand up a plan for downtown Seattle.”

When Partnership for Zero launched in 2022, DSA director Jon Scholes said the program “takes [the response to homelessness downtown] to a different scale, and brings in the housing resources that [existing] outreach teams, for the most part, haven’t had, or have had a limited supply of.”

But those existing outreach agencies expressed skepticism about the plan from the start, noting that housing people experiencing chronic street homelessness requires more than a personal history of homelessness (which, many leaders noted, most of their employees have) but practical experience doing the complex, often grueling work of case management and housing placement, which requires navigating many byzantine systems.

Additionally, providers pointed out, the new KCRHA staff would make significantly more as government employees than nonprofit agencies are able to pay, producing a brain drain from an industry that already struggles to retain qualified staff.

The Partnership for Zero program evolved significantly over time, once it became increasingly clear that the original plan to have one person navigate a group of clients through every aspect of the homelessness and housing system was unrealistic. The program was first revamped to allow people to specialize in certain parts of the housing process—making sure people made it to court hearings, for example, or working with landlords to convince them that someone will be a responsible tenant.

According to former co-director Conniff, it was clear from the beginning that they were being asked to do too much. “We were having to wear all these hats, while simultaneously having to deal with an oppressive structure and a system that felt very biased.”

More recently, the system advocates placed more than 120 clients in hotels run by the Lived Experience Coalition, which ran out of money for the hotels back in April, forcing the state to step in and help the KCRHA move people elsewhere.

System advocates were also required, over time, to fill a number of emerging needs that weren’t directly related to its original purpose. Instead of doing outreach broadly, for instance, system advocates focused on specific encampments within the downtown “catchment” area that raised concerns and objections from nearby residents and businesses, a process that sometimes required the team to displace large groups of people they had never worked with before, Wood said. Just before Thanksgiving, for example, the Housing Command Center directed his team to “resolve” an encampment along Alaskan Way that was the source of a number of complaints, despite the fact that they had never done outreach to the site.

Wood, who went on administrative leave in late 2022 and was subsequently fired, said he was frustrated by the emphasis on resolving high-profile encampments instead of everyone experiencing homelessness downtown. “There was no strategy for people who were outside of encampments, so we were cleaning up encampments and doing nothing for the people who [were] just sleeping outside,” Wood said.

KCRHA is funded primarily by the city of Seattle and King County. In their joint statement, Executive Constantine and Mayor Harrell said they were committed to helping KCRHA succeed. “We need an effective regional approach to make sustainable, permanent progress addressing homelessness,” they said. “We believe for that approach to be successful, KCRHA must be a working part of the solution.”

Another Heated Debate Over Role of Lived Experience Coalition, Business-Backed Campaigns Form for Council Elections

1. A Wednesday meeting of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s implementation board erupted into a dispute over the role of the Lived Experience Coalition within the agency’s ombuds office, after implementation board members Ben Maritz, an affordable housing developer, and Sara Rankin, the LEC’s designated board representative, questioned the agency’s decision to end an agreement in which the LEC itself helped run the oversight office.

PubliCola reported on the KCRHA’s decision to terminate an agreement that gave the LEC—a group of homeless and formerly homeless advocates who also ran a hotel-based shelter program that ran out of money earlier this year—unusual power over the ombuds office, which is part of the KCRHA. The ombuds office, whose responsibilities were described in the original interlocal agreement that set up the KCRHA in 2019, responds to and investigates questions and complaints from service providers, clients, and KCRHA employees.

Maritz asked chief ombudsperson Katara Jordan why the KCRHA was icing out the LEC, given the importance of including the perspectives of people with lived experience in the ombuds office. “Setting aside the personalities in the organizations, do we not want people with lived experience to have some direct oversight in this organization, specifically on individual cases, which our organization could easily misinterpret or get things wrong on?” Maritz asked.

“Now, do you honestly believe that a joint office with the LEC, an organization that has no oversight and has caused irreparable harm to people with lived experience in this community, would actually provide independence, accountability, or neutrality, for the ombuds office? I just feel like every time I come before this board, we have to litigate this issue.”—KCRHA chief ombudsperson Katara Jordan

Jordan—who already responded to the same questions back in June—said it was “offensive” to suggest that the office didn’t care about people with lived experience, and called the ongoing focus on including the LEC in agency operations, as opposed to people with lived experience more broadly, a kind of insidious “tokenization.” Rankin made her question or comment thriough an internal messaging system that was not visible on the video or Webex livestream.

“Now, do you honestly believe that a joint office with the LEC, an organization that has no oversight and has caused irreparable harm to people with lived experience in this community, would actually provide independence, accountability, or neutrality, for the ombuds office?” Jordan asked. “I just feel like every time I come before this board, we have to litigate this issue.”

“My team has thought really hard about how we’re going to continue to engage people with lived experience,” Jordan continued. “So please, whether it’s you, Sara Rankin, or you, Benjamin, please do not in any way, shape, or form imply that we don’t care about people with lived experience.”

After board members Juanita Spotted Elk and John Chelminiak tried to lower the tension in the virtual room—” it’s just time to put this discussion aside and continue with the operation of an excellent ombuds office,” Chelminiak said—Rankin, who is white, chided Jordan, who is Black, for turning the conversation into a “volatile” one.

“If we can’t have discussions about independence and accountability on the implementation board about the KCHRA and the different parts of the KCHRA, without it exploding into into ad hominem attacks, I think it’s problematic,” Rankin said. “I think the tenor of this conversation became very unfortunate. … I also don’t think it’s appropriate for any of us to resort to personal attacks, or emotional attacks, on any group or individual or to question the intentions or the commitment of anyone.”

2. After helping to push council candidates Rob Saka (District 1, West Seattle) and Maritza Rivera (District 4, northeast Seattle) through the primary, business and real estate interests appear to be readying similar campaigns in every other council district. Since the primary, when “Elliott Bay Neighbors” and “University Neighbors” spent a combined $130,000 on efforts that included nearly identical mailers broadly assailing the City Council, four more similarly named groups with the same mailing address and treasurer have popped up in other districts, including Greenwood (District 5), Ballard (District 6), and downtown (District 7).

So far, only the Downtown Neighbors committee has explicitly identified the candidate it’s supporting: Bob Kettle, running against incumbent Andrew Lewis. The business-backed candidates in the other races are Cathy Moore in District 5 (running against Christiana ObeySumner for the open seat) and Pete Hanning in District 6 (challenging incumbent Dan Strauss).

Notably, the only part of the city for which there is no obvious “Neighbors” campaign so far is Southeast Seattle, where Chinatown/International District activist Tanya Woo is challenging incumbent Tammy Morales. There is also a “Seattle Neighbors” committee that does not specify a council district but shares a donor, private equity firm co-founder T.J. McGill, with the original two “Neighbors’ groups.

The top donors to Elliott Bay and Downtown Neighbors include Costco co-founder Jim Sinegal, real estate developer and 2020 Trump supporter George Petrie, Dunn Lumber, and a number of other local real-estate and business interests.

Unlike candidates, independent expenditure campaigns can spend unlimited money to influence the outcome of Seattle’s local elections.

The Five-Year Plan for Homelessness Was Based Largely on 180 Interviews. Experts Say They Were Deeply Flawed.

Source: KCRHA Five-Year Plan

By Erica C. Barnett

In 2022, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority did away with the longstanding, but flawed, practice of physically counting people experiencing homelessness on a single night. By replacing the physical “point in time” count with a statistical model based on Department of Commerce Data, combined with interviews with people recruited through the broad-ranging social networks that exist among unsheltered people, the KCRHA hoped to produce a more accurate picture of homelessness in King County.

The interviews, which contributed to the KCRHA’s estimate of more than 53,000 people experiencing homelessness in King County, also served a second, arguably more impactful, purpose: They formed the basis for an overarching plan that will guide the authority’s use of public dollars for the next five years. The Five-Year Plan, which includes recommendations for specific temporary housing types (and initially came with a $12 billion price tag), was based largely on 180 of these interviews, which researchers used to “identify specific temporary and permanent housing models directly from the voices of people living unsheltered, interpreted in partnership with people with lived experience,” according to the final five-year plan.

PubliCola has obtained the transcripts of more than 80 of these interviews, which took place in the early spring of 2022, through a records request. The interviews range from terse questions and answer sessions to lengthy, discursive conversations in which interviewers abandon the Q&A format to offer opinions, give advice, and tell people they can help them access services—something qualitative researchers are generally cautioned not to do. We also consulted two experts on qualitative research to learn more about how interviews like the ones KCRHA oversaw can best be used, and to learn some best practices for the kind of evaluation the KCRHA was attempting to do.

Additionally, PubliCola talked to an experienced data analyst at the KCRHA, who explained how the project worked. Initially, the interviews (which former KCRHA CEO Marc Dones called “oral histories”) were the sole focus of the research project, which the KCRHA titled “Understanding Unsheltered Homelessness.” Later on, after the Department of Housing and Urban Development rejected the KCRHA’s request to skip the point-in-time count altogether, Dones decided to “combine efforts between doing the Point in Time Count and this qualitative data collection,” Owen Kajfasz, the KCRHA’s acting chief community officer, said. “So we really merged two projects into one data collection.”

Some of the earliest interviews, which took place in South King County, didn’t include the proper consent forms or had transcripts that couldn’t be traced back to interview subjects. And overall, the interviews ended up oversampling straight white men, and undersampling women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people, forcing researchers to go back and add some incomplete interviews to the pool to correct the imbalance.

To conduct the interviews, KCRHA recruited members of the Lived Experience Coalition, a group that advocates for the inclusion of people with personal experience being homeless in policy and decision-making processes. (KCRHA staff also conducted some of the interviews.) Most interviewers received a two-part training led by Dones, who served as the “primary investigator,” or lead researcher, on the project. Those who couldn’t make the training or came on board later were instructed to read the training documents, which included a list of 31 questions, before starting work.

LEC members also held all three seats on the advisory board that oversaw the project, and later made up a majority of the team that “coded” the interviews in order to translate them into a set of recommendations for the five-year plan. As we’ve reported, the KCRHA has recently tried to distance itself from the LEC, but at the time—early 2022—the group was deeply integrated into the agency’s operations.

Although the researchers conducted more than 500 interviews, they ended up using just 180 transcripts. Some of the earliest interviews, which took place in South King County, didn’t include the proper consent forms or had transcripts that couldn’t be traced back to interview subjects. Overall, the interviews ended up oversampling straight white men, and undersampling women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people, forcing researchers to go back and add some incomplete interviews to the pool to correct the imbalance—overrepresenting marginalized groups because they are the least served by the current shelter and service system..

“This wasn’t a perfect process,” Kajfasz acknowledged. “We did have more of those [interviews] that we couldn’t use than I was anticipating.”

Once the interviews were complete, a group of LEC members and KCRHA staff, aided by technical assistance from a Washington, D.C.-based firm called the Cloudburst Group, read transcripts of the interviews and “coded” them to correspond with different shelter and housing types, using the codes “to identify specific temporary and permanent housing models directly from the voices of people living unsheltered, interpreted in partnership with people with lived experience,” according to the Five-Year Plan. Although the final plan no longer includes specific dollar figure or specific numeric recommendations (eliminating, for example, a chart that suggested building no new tiny house villages ), it still represents a proposal that would, if implemented, reverse many longstanding policies and invest heavily in new approaches, like many more permanent parking spaces for people living in RVs and cars across the city.

The interview transcripts show many interviewers engaged in patient, compassionate attempts to elicit clear responses from people who were often discursive, rambling, and hard to follow. Interviewers from the Lived Experience Coalition used their own experiences to guide conversations and make their interview subjects comfortable—a key reason for including people with lived experience in data collection.

In one such conversation, the interviewer expresses concern and empathy when the person they’re talking to describes a series of traumatic situations, while still keeping the overall conversation on track. “I’m sorry you experienced that in such a tragic way. Thank you for just being vulnerable and open and sharing that because it’ll give me a glimpse of who you are and what you’ve been through,” the interviewer says, then moves on to the next question.

Researchers who use qualitative methods say it’s important to allow the conversation to flow and to use the questions as a guide rather than reading them word by word.

“In a qualitative interview, so much depends on the amount of trust and empathy that the interviewer can show,” said New York University School of Social Work professor Dr. Deborah Padgett, an expert on qualitative research who has written several books on the subject. “If you’re there in a trusting way, and you’re there as a researcher as opposed to a case worker or outreach worker or more official person, it gives you some legitimacy.”

Dr. Tyler Kincaid, a research assistant professor at Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of New Mexico who has led qualitative research about people experiencing homelessness, said qualitative interviews can’t be scripted to the extent that an ordinary survey can. “There’s an art to making the participant comfortable enough to respond, to keep the conversation going,” Kincaid said, and going “off script” is just  part of the process. “If you have, say, 10 semi-structured questions, hopefully there’s followup questions and side questions and things within those ten standard questions on a piece of paper to help to bring out more information,” Kincaid said.

But the transcripts also revealed troubling practices. In the transcripts, interviewers often cut people off, talk at length about themselves, or offer unsolicited advice. Several times, interviewers suggest they or someone else at the interview site can directly connect people with services, such as housing vouchers or a workaround for King County’s hated 211 system, or jump in with answers before the person has had time to respond.

The experts we spoke to said it’s important for researchers not to involve themselves in people’s lives or promise things they can’t deliver. Kajfasz said researchers were told that the point of the research was data collection, not problem-solving, but “folks with lived experience, when they know they have a solution for somebody, they offer it.” Some interview locations had housing navigators or other services on site, Kajfasz added.

In one transcript, an interviewer offers their opinion about the man’s substance use, saying that with drugs, “when you wake up in the morning, you hate yourself.” “I don’t ever hate myself,” the man retorts. After a tangent about the concerns police have raised about encampment fires, the second interviewer tells the man he should join the military. “You can still do it. You’re young enough. You understand?”

In many cases, interviewers suggested answers to their own questions before people had a chance to speak. In one representative transcript, an interviewer repeatedly appears to cut their subject, a Native American man, off—suggesting, for example, that the reason the man is homeless is because he “prefer[s] to be in the woods” and doesn’t “want to be acclimated in society.” Although the man says “yeah” in response to both those statements, he objects when the interviewer continues, “You don’t want an apartment.” “Well, I do eventually,” he says.

Later in the transcript, a second interviewer offers their opinion about the man’s substance use, calling it “impressive” that “it’s just Everclear now” and adding, “you’ll wean yourself off that soon enough,” prompting the man to say he isn’t so sure. With drugs, the second interviewer continues, “when you wake up in the morning, you hate yourself.” “I don’t ever hate myself,” the man retorts. After a tangent about the concerns police have raised about encampment fires, the second interviewer tells the man he should join the military. “You can still do it. You’re young enough. You understand?”

In another transcript, the interviewer suggests that their subject, a Latino man who appears to struggle with English, find work as a day laborer—a stereotypical job for Spanish-speaking immigrants. None of the interviews PubliCola reviewed were conducted in a language other than English; Kajfasz said the KCRHA offered “language services,” but that “the majority of folks, even if English was not their first language, were choosing English.”

Padgett says that while good qualitative research requires an interviewer to be patient, “take a lot of time,” and build trust and empathy, interviewers should never weigh in with their own opinions or advice.  “If you’re giving opinions about what they’re saying, you’re taking up valuable space in the conversation—and they may not want that level of pity,” Padgett said. “When I’m training people, the idea is to be empathic. In the moment, you might say, ‘I’m really sorry that happened to you,’ but [you shouldn’t] go down the rabbit hole of ‘tell me more about your trauma.'”

In an interview that appeared to cross this line, an interviewer jumped in when the man he was interviewing, whose race is not identified in the transcript, said he was probably homeless because he’d been in the foster care and prison systems. “Now you know that’s not true,” the interviewer said. The conversation continued:

Interviewer: You can’t tell me that, because you’re here for a reason. You got kids. We went through the pandemic. You got sick two times, you just said. Hell to the no, ain’t nobody in their life ever in my face will ever say that. Not while I’m standing there. I’m sorry. That just hurt. That just touched me.

Subject: No, I, I—

Interviewer: Don’t ever say that shit again to me.

Subject: My apologies. I will not say that again.

Speaker 2: To anybody, because I want you to know, that’s something that’s instilled in you and that you’re going to instill every person that come through your life, especially your children. Because my kids, they already know like I’m their ride or die. They tell people, you don’t know my mama when they tell them, oh you know how your mom- No. You don’t know my mom. So, it’s a different generation. When we got to teach that generation, there is something to live for. You’re not here for nothing. You what I’m saying? I don’t know where we went off of. Let’s see. Where did you go to school?

Padgett, who looked over the interview questions before we spoke, said the questions themselves were “pretty good, but it’s qualitative, so what’s good on paper only comes out as good if the interviewer does it well so there’s a lot more onus put on the interviewer” to keep things on track. The KCRHA did not provide its training materials, but Padgett said she usually has trainees do mock interviews, then supervises them and provides feedback on their methods throughout a project so they can adjust and improve.

In addition to asking leading questions and interrupting, a number of transcripts include interviewers skipping past questions, making assumptions about people’s gender identity or sexual orientation, and speaking excessively about themselves. In one transcript, an interviewer provides a detailed roster of their own family members’ birthdays; in another, the interviewer tries to recruit the person they’re interviewing to join the Lived Experience Coalition and the KCRHA’s Vehicle Residency Policy Group.

“It’s not about the interviewer,” Padgett said. “You should think of yourself as wearing a hat that says ‘researcher’ on it, and if you take that hat off and become a comrade of lived experience, then you’re losing what qualitative [research] does best, which is having some distance but also empathy. It’s a juggling act.”

“You really don’t want to make some sort of big, generalized governmental or programmatic decisions just based off qualitative research.” —Dr. Tyler Kincaid, University of New Mexico

Once the interviews were complete, another team of researchers, which included several members of the LEC, translated them into housing types, using specific keywords and concepts that people brought up during their conversations to create a roster of shelter types that might be appropriate. People who are using drugs but want to get sober might end up in a box titled “recovery housing,” while those with medical problems might end up in another box labeled “medical respite.” Many of the 180 interviews were with people living in their vehicles or RVs, who often ended up in separate boxes for safe parking and RV safe lots.

“It wasn’t directly, ‘hey, I need medical respite,’ so these people get medical respite, or ‘hey, I need RV parking,’ so this person gets RV parking. It was looking at all of these types of challenges folks are facing,” Kajfasz said. “And for some of those, we’re having to take pieces of information across the interview.” People who were employed but couldn’t afford rent, for example, suggested a need for more housing with supported employment services, while people struggling to stay sober suggested a need for sober housing.

At a glance, some of these solutions can seem overly determinative—some people who want to quit drinking or using other drugs might do better living independently than moving into group recovery housing, for example. Others, like RV parking lots, are widely viewed as short-term solutions, not permanent homes. Although these may seem like minor issues—shouldn’t people trying to avoid drugs and alcohol jump at an opportunity for a room in sober living, even if they would prefer a private apartment?—they translate into real policy choices, and ultimately into real money.

The initial version of the Five-Year Plan called for nearly 4,000 medical respite beds ($2.7 billion over five years); 2,570 units of recovery housing ($1.8 billion); and nearly 5,000 permanent parking spots for passenger vehicles and RVs ($192 million). The specific numbers and dollar figures may have been excised from the final plan, but the mix of shelter, or “temporary housing,” types—based on an “analysis of PIT interviews and input of the Lived Experience Commission advisory group,” according to an internal memo—remains the same, so it seems important to get it right.

“You really don’t want to make some sort of big, generalized governmental or programmatic decisions just based off qualitative research,” Kincaid, from the University of New Mexico, said. For example, he said, it would “so difficult to [use] any sort of qualitative research” as the basis for investing in one type of shelter over another, unless people consistently identified a specific type of shelter they wanted.

Padgett, from NYU, said she believes strongly that “well-done, rigorous qualitative research can play a strong and scientifically valid role, but it’s all in how you handle the information so that you’re not coming to conclusions with no basis in the data.”

In a memo from September 2022, consultants from the Cloudburst Group summarized some of the lessons the LEC and KCRHA learned from the Understanding Unsheltered Homelessness project. Among their conclusions: If the KCRHA does another series of interviews in the future, researchers need to identify the intent of the project before starting interviews, and trainers should emphasize the need to ask questions consistently, “as well as allowing participants to speak and not be interrupted.”

The way the researchers recruited participants—by identifying an initial “wave” of subjects who recruited new people through their social networks—was flawed and contributed to an interview pool that was disproportionately made up of straight, white men.

Finally, the memo noted, it was hard to interpret some interviews because they included multiple people (interviewers as well as people who approached and started talking during interviews; in the future, the memo says, the protocol for interviews “should establish that these are individual interviews.”

Kajfasz said that without Dones’ “significant expertise” in the area of qualitative research, the KCRHA isn’t planning to do an interview project of similar size and scope any time in the near future. Nor will in-person interviews form the basis for the next point-in-time count, which the KCRHA must conduct next year. The KCRHA is “currently conferring with HUD about what the next PIT count” will involve, Kajfasz said, but it probably will never look like last year’s count again. “Never do I ever want to do the point-in-time count and large-scale qualitative interviewing together,” Kajfasz said.