Category: Morning Crank

Addiction, City Council, Courts, Crime, criminal justice, Elections, homelessness, Morning Crank, neighborhoods

Morning Crank: The Council Takes a Closer Look at the “Prolific Offenders” Report

1. Six of the seven District 2 city council candidates participated in a forum at the Georgetown Ballroom last night, and I livetweeted the whole thing. Check out the thread to find out what committee Ari Hoffman wants to chair, when Tammy Morales last called 911, why socialist Henry Dennison won’t answer yes/no questions… and also a lot of information about the candidates’ plans are for addressing homelessness, environmental racism, and how they would counter displacement in South Seattle.

2. City council members Lisa Herbold and Lorena Gonzalez invited leaders of several of the business groups that funded a recent report on so-called “prolific offenders” Wednesday, and raised questions about the methodology behind the report and some of its conclusions.

Mike Stewart, the head of the Ballard Alliance, said he and other business leaders got the idea for the report after they “started to realize that things are changing a lot” for business owners, who he said are dealing with a level of crime they’ve never experienced before. “It feels like  many of the instances of the criminal behavior that happens seems to be coming from many of the same people—so an individual might commit a crime in a business district one day and the next week, they’re back again,” Stewart said.  Erin Goodman, the head of the SODO Business Improvement Area, added, “One individual in our sample is quite simply terrorizing the Ballard business district. … In a single day in 2018, he shoplifted from five stores in a two-hour period, brazenly pushing a shopping cart full of the stolen items from store to store.”

These bookings include charges for failure to appear or comply with terms of release, which made up 41% of the charges in a King County assessment of its “Familiar Faces” program, which deals with a similar population.

The report, “System Failure,” was put together by former mayor Ed Murray’s public safety advisor, Scott Lindsay. It highlights the booking histories of 100 individuals, hand-picked by Lindsay and characterized in the report as “roughly representative of a larger population of individuals who are frequently involved in criminal activity in Seattle’s busiest neighborhoods.” Every person on Lindsay’s list had four or more bookings into King County Jail over a 12-month period and had “indicators” that they were chronically homeless and had a substance use disorder.

The criteria Lindsay used for his list are similar to those used in King County’s Familiar Faces initiative, which, in 2014, identified 1,252 people with four or more annual bookings (94 percent of them with a substance use disorder or behavioral health issue, or both), except that Lindsay chose to zero in specifically on frequent offenders who are homeless, which Familiar Faces does not. Just 58 percent of the people on the 2013 Familiar Faces list had indicators that they were homeless. By hand-picking a list of offenders who are homeless (and by choosing to highlight the stories of mostly people who moved to Seattle from elsewhere), Lindsay’s report feeds into the common, but unsupported, belief that most people who commit property crimes are homeless and that homeless people from across the country come to Seattle to mooch off the city’s generosity.

Support The C Is for Crank
Hey there! Just a quick reminder that this entire site, including the post you’re reading, is supported by generous contributions from readers like you, without which this site would quite literally cease to exist. If you enjoy reading The C Is for Crank and would like to keep it going, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter. For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is my full-time job. Help keep that work sustainable by becoming a supporter now! If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Gonzalez and Herbold pressed the “System Failure” funders on some of the methodology in their report, including the fact that Lindsay determined the number of crimes each person had committed using police reports, complaints, and charging documents, without looking at anything the person said in their own defense or tracking whether they were ultimately found guilty. Goodman, from the SODO BIA, acknowledged that “some of these folks could have gone through the criminal system and been found innocent,” but added, “This is simply a snapshot based on bookings. [Lindsay] clearly states that it does not say how the case was adjudicated.”

Goodman expressed frustration that so many people were let out of jail within hours or days of being arrested; that so few of the people found incompetent to stand trial because of mental illness were subject to involuntary commitment; and that “there was zero accountability in the system for consequences for failure to comply with court-ordered release conditions.” Those conditions, according to the report, included things like appearing at every court date; abstaining from drugs and alcohol; submitting to random drug tests; and going to abstinence-based inpatient or outpatient treatment.

Underfunding services and then complaining that they aren’t working “is like sprinkling a little bit of salt over a giant bowl of soup and then [saying], ‘Oh, salt doesn’t work,'” Public Defender Association director Lisa Daugaard said.

One issue with these kinds of conditions is that there simply isn’t enough available capacity—in other words, funding—for the services that do exist to serve clients with mental health and substance abuse challenges. The Law Enforcement Diversion Program, for example, recently expanded with funding from the recent Trueblood court settlement to provide a vastly expanded suite of services (including mental health care, transitional housing, and intensive case management) to people whose competency to stand trial has been called into question. That funding will serve about 150 people who would not have previously been eligible for the program. But, as Public Defender Association director Lisa Daugaard, who was also at the table, pointed out, there are likely thousands of people who could benefit from similar services, while the total capacity for all such programs is in the hundreds. Underfunding services and then complaining that they aren’t working “is like sprinkling a little bit of salt over a giant bowl of soup and then [saying], ‘Oh, salt doesn’t work,'” Daugaard said. “We are not right-sizing the things that are effective.”

The other, related, issue with expecting people to comply with court conditions is that those conditions are often unreasonable. As long as the underlying issues that are causing someone to shoplift or act aggressively or loiter in the doorway of a business aren’t addressed, telling people to show up to day reporting or abstain from their drug of choice is a losing strategy. It’s little wonder that 100 percent of the people Lindsay chose for his report  failed to comply with the conditions imposed by the court.

Goodman’s frustration is understandable: Her group represents businesses in an area of the city with the highest concentration of people living in RVs, many of them with substance use disorders, untreated mental illness, or both. But there’s little point, experts say, in trying to force people into treatment when they aren’t ready. “If the clients aren’t ready, they aren’t ready, and therein lies the challenge,” Heather Aman, a deputy prosecutor at the city attorney’s office who works with LEAD clients, told me recently. “Anyone who isn’t addressing their substance use or mental health issues has an impact on their community, because there’s not an ability to force individuals to [get help or treatment] until they’re ready. And what do you do with the person that needs to be ready? That’s the million-dollar question.”

Affordability, housing, Morning Crank, Poverty, Renters

Afternoon Crank: Eviction Law More Sweeping Than Previously Reported; Sound Transit Says No Signature Gathering in Federal Way

1. The new state law that creates new protections for tenants at risk of losing their homes to eviction, sponsored by Seattle Rep. Nicole Macri (D-43), goes even further than has been previously reported, including by me. That’s thanks to a little-noticed provision that expands a tenant’s ability to stop an eviction proceeding against her at any point up until five days after a court has issued a judgment in a landlord’s favor—a point that far fewer tenants should ever have to reach, thanks to provisions that give tenants ample opportunities to pay their back rent before a landlord takes an eviction case to court, before the case goes to trial, and even after a judge rules against the tenant.

Here’s what makes the legislation so sweeping. As I reported earlier this week, it extends the period in which tenants can pay overdue rent without facing eviction—and without having to pay any late fees, notice fees, or other one-time charges— from three days to 14. It also extends a tenant’s right to pay their rent along a fee of up to $75 until any point after that 14-day period, up to the point when their landlord files a case against them in King County Superior Court. After a landlord files a case, the tenant still has the opportunity to avoid eviction by paying the landlord back rent, the $75 fee, and any court costs incurred up until that point (which are often elevated by lawyers’ fees for preparing files, showing up in court, and other services that can be avoided if a landlord and tenant reach a settlement). Finally, if the landlord wins the case, the tenant still has up to five days to pay them back, including court costs, before being evicted.

It’s hard to overstate how dramatic the impact of this change could be. Under the current system, none of that happens. Instead, tenants can be kicked out of their homes for failing to pay rent on the fourth day it is late, and there is usually no recourse for a tenant once their landlord has filed an eviction case against them. In fact, as I’ve reported, the judges who hear eviction cases currently have virtually no discretion to set up payment plans or consider mitigating circumstances, such as a tenant who was in the hospital and unable to pay, or who suffered a one-time financial setback but has the money in hand. The new law gives judges more discretion. It also ensures that tenants who need more time to scrape their rent together—by, for example, accessing funds provided through programs like Solid Ground rental assistance program or Home Base, which provides flexible funds for people who need help with back rent—have ample opportunities to do so. For the first time in many years, the scales have tipped back—dramatically—in favor of tenants.

Support The C Is for Crank
Hey there! Just a quick reminder that this entire site, including the post you’re about to read, is supported by generous contributions from readers like you, without which this site would quite literally cease to exist. If you enjoy reading The C Is for Crank and would like to keep it going, please consider becoming a sustaining supporter. For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is my full-time job. Help keep that work sustainable by becoming a supporter now! If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

2. Washington Community Action Network—one of the organizations behind a Seattle Women’s Commission report on evictions in King County, “Losing Home,” that helped lead to the statewide reforms—is trying to gather 10,000 signatures to get an initiative that would provide new protections for tenants on the ballot in Federal Way. If Sound Transit has its way, none of those signatures will be collected at the Federal Way Transit Center, where security guards have told volunteers with the group that they can’t petition near station platforms—that is, in the area where people congregate as they get on and off the bus.

“Obviously, one of the best places to [gather signatures] is going to be the Federal Way Transit Center,” says Xochitl Maykovich, Washington CAN’s political director. “I get that they have concerns around safety and not harassing people, but, I’m sorry, two organizers asking, ‘Hey, do you want to help keep people housed?’—how is that preventing people from getting on the bus?”

On May1, Washington CAN wrote a letter to Sound Transit director Peter Rogoff objecting to the policy, and noting that the “free speech areas” to which their organizers were directed are far away from pedestrian traffic. “The security officer continued to vigilantly watch the two women as if though their presence engaging transit riders with a smile was a potential threat to the station.,” the letter says. “The women found his behavior unnecessarily intimidating and decided it was best to leave the station.”

Sound Transit’s security director, Ken Cummins, responded by sending Maykovich a copy of Sound Transit’s free-speech policy, which says that the agency “may designate appropriate areas at each facility for public communication activities” and can limit the number of people it allows to engage in such activities. “Signature gathering is not authorized on bus or train platforms or within 15 feet of entrances, stairwells, elevators, escalators, ticket vending machines or within 15 feet of the trackway,” Cummins wrote. “Signature gathers may not use any tables or chairs in their activity and signature gathers may not block a person’s access to transit in any manner.” (Washington CAN’s two signature gatherers did not have tables or chairs).

After several followup letters to Sound Transit received no response, Maykovich wrote, “I take the lack of any response as meaning that I need to involve our attorney,” Maykovich wrote. “I will also note that I am incredibly disappointed in the lack of dialogue on this issue, especially given that this is a publicly run institution that is definitely getting a good chunk of my tax dollars.”

Sound Transit spokeswoman Rachelle Cunningham confirmed that the agency “did receive the letter from Washington Community Action Network, and our legal counsel is currently reviewing it, as well as the policy.”
Maykovich says her organization has not faced similar pushback when collecting signatures at RapidRide bus station platforms in the past, despite Metro’s similar free-speech policy.
The Federal Way initiative would institute a Good Cause Eviction Ordinance, similar to Seattle’s Just Cause Eviction law, in the city, prohibiting arbitrary evictions and limiting the reasons for which a landlord can terminate a tenant’s lease. In Federal Way, about 29 percent of the households that sought eviction prevention assistance from the Housing Justice Project were single women with children, compared to just 10 percent in Seattle.
Addiction, City Council, homelessness, housing, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: Durkan Talks Up Aggressive Encampment Removal Strategy in North Seattle
Support The C Is for Crank
Hey there! Just a quick reminder that this entire site, including the post you’re about to read, is supported by generous contributions from readers like you, without which this site would quite literally cease to exist. If you enjoy reading The C Is for Crank and would like to keep it going, please consider . For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week.

This site is my full-time job. Help keep that work sustainable by becoming a supporter now! If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Neighborhoods director Andres Mantilla, Mayor Jenny Durkan, and North Precinct Captain Eric Sano.

1. If you’re concerned about homelessness and think that Governor Jay Inslee has been a bit too distracted by electric cars or solar panels or running a quixotic campaign for president to pay the issue proper attention, wait until you meet your governor pro tem, Lieutenant Gov. Cyrus Habib. Habib,  who is otherwise best known for breaking ties in the state Senate, serves as governor when Inslee is out of the state. Last Friday, when Inslee “visiting with his friends and family in Iowa,” Habib delivered a coruscating keynote (“on behalf of all 7 million residents of Washington State,” he joked) at the 40th anniversary fundraiser for the Downtown Emergency Services Center.

First, Habib dismissed the notion, popular among “some of our most vocal neighbors here in Seattle,” that it matters where homeless people in the city originally came from (even though, as he noted, more than 80 percent of the people surveyed as part of last year’s one-night homeless count said their last address before becoming homeless was in King County. “My parents came from Tehran. I was born in Baltimore. This city is full of people whose last known residence was not in King County,” Habib said. “How is what you’re saying any different from the intolerance that the president shows to asylum seekers? How can you say that about Trump, and then turn around and blame someone for coming from Wichita out of desperation? It makes no sense.”

According to the Navigation Team’s weekly reports, the team removed 39 encampments in the last month. Of those, 34 were deemed “hazardous” or an “obstruction,” and were therefore exempt from the requirements that would ordinarily apply to encampment removals, including the offer of an alternative place to sleep, notification requirements, and an opportunity to access services before being forced to move along.

Similarly, Habib said, people often dismiss their neighbors experiencing homelessness by saying they’re “all drug addicts”—another dehumanizing distinction that puts people with the disease of addiction outside the bounds of what “upstanding citizens” should have to care about. “I truly think that for most people, this comes from a place of fear,” said Habib, who is blind—fear that if things don’t go according to plan, the person condemning and othering homeless people might end up homeless one day herself.

“You know, there was a time before about three generations ago when, if you were blind, there was a good chance that you would be homeless and begging. I think about, what if everyone were blind? But what if everyone were suffering from a substance abuse disorder? Surely the way to approach and to encounter that person is not with less empathy. It’s certainly not to put them on a prison island somewhere.”

2. I had Habib’s words about fear in my head as I sat down on the bleachers at District 5 city council member Debora Juarez’s “public safety town hall” at the Bitter Lake Community Center Monday night—fearing, myself, that the meeting would turn into a reprise of the awful Ballard town hall last year, where an angry mob shouted obscenities at a panel assembled to discuss the proposed employee hours tax last year. The mood was reassuringly polite and respectful, but the questions—aimed at a panel that included Juarez, Mayor Jenny Durkan, assistant SPD chief Eric Greening, and SPD North Precinct Captain Eric Sano—were based on the same misconceptions Habib referred to in his remarks on Friday: Why can’t police just remove all unsheltered homeless people from their locations without notice or due process? Why can’t the city hire 300 more police officers immediately? What can be done with people who refuse to go into shelter or treatment?

Durkan made clear that one of the top priorities for her administration, when it comes to responding to neighborhood complaints about encampments, is to remove encampments in parks and other places where the city has deemed them to be inherent obstructions, and to ensure that they don’t return. If the city determines that an encampment represents an obstruction or immediate hazard, the Navigation Team, which conducts the removals, is not required to provide outreach, referrals to shelter or services, or any prior notice before removing people’s tents and other belongings from a location.

“This city is full of people whose last known residence was not in King County,” Habib said. “How is what you’re saying any different from the intolerance that the president shows to asylum seekers? How can you say that about Trump, and then turn around and blame someone for coming from Wichita out of desperation?”

Durkan said the city is using a new strategy called “clean and hold,” in which “we move the encampment out [and] we hold it so that people don’t return. … You will start seeing that happen in more places in the city.”

Later, in response to a question about how the city’s Navigation Team will ensure that camps they remove don’t come back, Durkan elaborated. “There are some encampments or single tents that, if they’re obstructions to the roadway, they can be cleared immediately, and when you call, they will be treated differently than encampments” whose residents must receive a minimum of 72 hours’ notice before the city can start hauling away tents and belongings. In practice, the Navigation Team gives the residents of encampments deemed to be “hazardous” or “obstructions” 30 minutes’ notice before clearing them out, although they are not required to do so.

Second, Durkan said, the Navigation Team, whose budget the city nearly doubled last year, is being aggressive about posting notices in places with persistent encampments and patrolling those areas to make sure people don’t come back. “If you look on the waterfront and at Sixth and James, there are a couple of locations where what we’ve done is, once we clear it, if we post [no camping signs] then… as people start to set up, we say, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t set up here. Can we help you get some services?” Durkan said.  

According to the Navigation Team’s weekly reports, the team removed 39 encampments in the last month. Of those, 34 were deemed to be “hazardous” or an “obstruction,” and were therefore exempt from the requirements that would ordinarily apply to encampment removals, which are outlined in detail here.

City Council, City Hall, housing, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: Forgiving and Forgetting In Ballard, Renting In Seattle

1. After watching the King County Young Democrats’ three-hour candidate forum online last Sunday, I was struck by the response of the candidates in the most crowded race so far—District 6, where 11 candidates are running to replace retiring incumbent Mike O’Brien—to a question about the organized mob that shut down what was supposed to be a community discussion last year in Ballard. Moderator LaKecia Farmer, who is black, recalled her visceral reaction when watching hundreds of white Northwest Seattle residents screaming down a panel made up primarily of women of color, silencing council members and moderators by screaming “FUCK YOU!” “BULLSHIT!” and “RESIGN NOW!” before suggesting that the city, for example, “round up” homeless people in “a highly publicized event.”

How quickly we forget (or perhaps the candidates didn’t watch the footage in the first place.) All four invited candidates—Heidi Wills, Jay Fathi, Dan Strauss, and Melissa Hall—responded to Farmer’s question with variations on the statement, “I would listen more,” ignoring, perhaps, the fact that it’s hard to listen when several hundred people are screaming “O-PEN MIC! O-PEN MIC!” in your face.

Support The C Is for Crank
If you enjoyed reading this post, and would like to support my work on an ongoing basis, please consider supporting me by becoming a monthly donor on Patreon or PayPal.  For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is my full-time job, and it’s funded entirely by generous contributions from readers like you. If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

Fathi, a doctor, compared the crowd in Ballard to a patient seeking advice from a physician, whose job is primarily to listen and take the patient seriously before suggesting a course of action. Strauss said that after council members listen, they need to “follow up” with action; nobody likes getting yelled at, the lifelong District 6 resident added, but “I can tell you that Ballardites have been yelling at me my whole life. When I was a referee in middle school, I got yelled off the field by grown adults, and I can tell you I earned their endorsement yesterday.” Hall said the “problem is that we haven’t painted that hopeful vision of the future that these people can get on board with,” then pivoted to the need for walkable cities and an anecdote about an argument she once had over a chicken coop. And Wills, who is swiftly positioning herself as the candidate for angry neighbors who were frustrated that O’Brien didn’t support crackdowns on homeless residents, said she would open an office in the district and staff it at least one day a week, so that it’s easier for constituents “to have face time with the person who represents them in city hall.” (Although most district city council members have regular “office hours” in their districts, they typically hold them in public places, such as libraries and community centers, due to the cost of office space.) No word on how Wills, or any of the other candidates to replace O’Brien, would respond if constituents showed up and started screaming “NOOOOOOO!” in their faces or screamed “NOT TRUE!” when they tried to establish a baseline of basic facts.

2. On Wednesday, Mayor Jenny Durkan sent out a press release touting the city’s new “Renting in Seattle” portal, an online one-stop shop for people who rent (and the landlords who rent to them) to learn about landlord-tenant laws, periodic trainings, and tenant protections in Seattle. In her press release, Durkan announced that that the city’s Department of Construction and Inspections had, “after deep consultation across departments, and with community… identified the need for a dedicated, centralized resource” for tenants and landlords.

Perhaps it’s an indication of how the relationship between the mayor and council has deteriorated that multiple council sources immediately reached out to remind The C Is for Crank of the fact that the tenant portal is not actually “new”—it has actually been around in some form since last year, and was originally a council initiative, born in a Statement of Legislative Intent during the 2016 budget process, long before Durkan was in office. That SLI, which set a March 31, 2017 due date, directed SDCI to “develop a proposal, with resource needs identified, to launch a public facing tenant landlord resource center, in coordination with the Office of Housing (OH), the Department of Neighborhoods (DON), the Human Services Department (HSD), the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs (OIRA), and the Customer Service Bureau.” The work on the tenant portal continued through the rest of 2017 and 2018, and the portal has been up in its current form since March.

In addition to the new portal, Durkan announced that the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections would be  “administering more than $600,000 in grants to community partners who provide assistance to renters such as education, counseling, and legal services for eviction defense.” (SDCI spokeswoman Wendy Shark says the grants will be announced “in the coming weeks.”) The reason the grants are being allocated by SDCI, rather than HSD, is because of a budget action last year by city council member Mike O’Brien, who moved the $600,000 allocation from HSD to SDCI after HSD ignored the council’s 2017 directive to spend the money on grants to community-based groups that do proactive outreach to tenants at risk of eviction. As I reported last year, the money allocated to the grants in 2018 “was inexplicably spent expanding a hotline tenants can call when they need help, rather than letting tenants know that the hotline and other resources exist.”

According to Shark, “Managing tenant grants in SDCI where both the program and rental regulation enforcement are housed means a closer working partnership with service providers and better outcomes for renters.”

City Hall, Elections, homelessness, housing, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank

Morning Crank: Perverse Incentives
FEMA tent in New Orleans via Wikimedia Commons

1. Interim Human Services Department director Jason Johnson looked visibly shaken at a meeting of the city council’s special committee on homelessness and housing affordability this past Monday, hours after Mayor Jenny Durkan announced that she was pulling his nomination to serve as permanent director. Johnson’s inability to secure council approval came up only once during the meeting—committee chair Sally Bagshaw mentioned briefly that “I know that today is a tough day in particular”—but the fact that he is serving without council approval will almost certainly be a factor in his relationship with the council at least through the next council election.

Although Durkan has the authority to keep Johnson on as an interim director indefinitely, council member Lorena González said this week that he will need to answer some of the questions that were raised during his appointment process about the culture at HSD and the relationship between management and employees. (A recent survey of HSD staff found that employees, especially those in the homelessness division, felt unappreciated, unheard, and out of the loop).

“Regardless of what [interim Human Services Department director Jason Johnson’s] title is, whether he’s permanent or interim, I think he has a responsibility to address the concerns that are being expressed by the people that we ask to do this hard work day in and day out.” —Council member Lorena González

“Regardless of what his title is, whether he’s permanent or interim, I think he has a responsibility to address the concerns that are being expressed by the people that we ask to do this hard work day in and day out in HSD,”  González told me. “The HSD director serves at the pleasure of the mayor. The mayor is his direct supervisor. And as a council member, it’s my expectation that the mayor provide Jason with the direction and the support he needs to be able to address some of the reasonable, legitimate concerns that I heard from HSD employees about the culture” of the department.

2. The subject of Monday’s meeting was how the city measures “success” among homeless service providers and when and how HSD will provide publicly accessible information about its performance metrics and how well providers are meeting them. As council member Teresa Mosqueda noted, the council has been requesting a “dashboard” showing which programs are working and which are underperforming. Johnson noted that while the city has been “laser-focused” on “exits from homelessness”—a term that refers to the number of exits from programs that get logged in King County’s homeless tracking system—”there is also debate about whether that is the right metric to pay attention to,” or whether returns to homelessness—a term that refers to people who leave the homelessness system in King County and then reenter the homelessness system in King County—is a better measure.

Support The C Is for Crank
If you like the work I’m doing here, and would like to support this page financially, please support me by becoming a monthly donor on Patreon or PayPal.  For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses.  If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

However, members of a second panel, which included representatives from Family Works, Solid Ground, and the Public Defender Association, pointed out that the “returns to homelessness” metric is incomplete, and may actually discourage providers from accurately reporting information about those they serve. “When we look at returns to homelessness, I think it’s an important metric to look at, but we also have to keep in mind that it is an inaccurate number, because it only includes people that are coming back into homelessness that then go into another program” in King County, Solid Ground’s Shannon Rae said. “Folks that returned to the street and [are] not actually accessing other services… don’t show up” in the system—that is, the city may be counting them as “successes” when they have simply given up on trying to use local services. Additionally, a lot of the folks who Solid Ground serves end up homeless in neighboring counties, “so we’re not capturing all the returns to homelessness,” Rae said. On the flip side, she said, service providers get dinged by the new performance metrics—which determine whether agencies receive full funding or have a portion of their funding withheld by the city—when families decide to move in with other people, go into transitional housing, or do something else that’s “best for them” but doesn’t count in the system as an “exit to permanent housing.”

Lisa Daugaard, director of the Public Defender Association, added that the current measures of “success” create a perverse incentive for providers to serve people who are the easiest to serve, because clients who are the hardest to house—for example, chronically homeless men with severe addiction and criminal records related to that addiction—are also, by definition, the ones who are the least likely to result in “success” by the city’s measures. (They also tend to rank lowest on the county’s “vulnerability index,” putting them at the back of the line for housing and services.)

Instead of rewarding providers who manage to get the most difficult-to-serve people into better living situations, the city penalizes and rewards providers on the basis of how many bodies they get into permanent housing, without regard for the difficulty of housing certain populations, and no matter how much impact they have on neighborhoods, property crime rates, and the kind of general “disorder” that was highlighted (sensationalistically and misleadingly) in KOMO’s viral “Seattle Is Dying” report. As a result, Daugaard said, service providers end up “run[ning] away from the most difficult folks out there” for fear of getting dinged. “We should flip that on its head.” That, in fact, is one of the key recommendations homelessness consultant Barb Poppe made in 2016, when she advised the city of Seattle to “[p]rioritize for housing interventions those families and individuals who have the longest histories of homelessness and highest housing barriers” even if they don’t score highest on the vulnerability index.

The city did not put this recommendation into practice, and continues to penalize human service providers for falling short on five measures, which include exits to housing and returns to homelessness. This year, 20 of 46 service providers with HSD contracts failed to meet HSD’s standards and had 12 percent of their funding temporarily withheld by the city. “Financial incentives in contracts to do hard and important work should be true incentives rather than penalties,” Daugaard said Tuesday. “This really was one of the important national realizations in No Child Left Behind”—the George W. Bush-era law that withheld funding from schools that failed to meet testing-based performance standards—”that taking money away from  an institution that’s struggling to do hard work is generally not the best way to improve their ability to do that work.”

3. The question of how to measure success was on my mind when I watched a District 6 city council candidate forum held by the activist group Speak Out Seattle on Tuesday night. The questions for this forum, which featured ten of the candidates running for the Northwest Seattle’s seat, were similar to those at previous SOS forums—written, generally speaking, in a way that implied that homelessness is a choice caused primarily by the decision to become addicted to illegal drugs, and that the most effective solutions to homelessness tend to involve some kind of involuntary commitment. (One question at a recent SOS forum, written by an audience member and read verbatim by KIRO Radio’s Mike Lewis, was: “How do you plan to get the drug-using free campers off the streets? Will you enforce current ordinances about vagrancy, littering, public urination, [and] public drug use?”) Such questions can provoke interesting discussions if candidates are willing to pivot (as council member Lisa Herbold did, skillfully, at SOS’s forum in District 1); but sometimes they’re just the wrong questions.

A good case in point was a question at Tuesday’s forum, about whether the candidates would support erecting “FEMA-style tents or other emergency-type shelters to get people out of their vehicles”—which, practically speaking, would mean leaving their cars or RVs behind.

The assumption behind this question, as well as the city’s outreach to people living in vehicles, is that rational people will give up their last asset for a mat on the ground. The reason this is the wrong framing is not only because this isn’t what rational people will do—given the choice, most people would prefer the autonomy and relative dignity of sleeping in their own vehicle—but because people living in their vehicles consistently say that they don’t want to give them up to move into a shelter. When outreach workers (or policy makers, or candidates for office) offer a mat on the ground in a large group tent as an “alternative” to vehicular living, they’re actively insulting people living in their cars by ignoring their wishes. This is dehumanizing, and if you don’t care about that, it also doesn’t work. People experiencing homelessness, like people who are housed, do things for reasons, and when we listen to those reasons, we can craft solutions that actually help.

Creating safe lots for people living in their cars is a much better option than taking people’s cars away and relocating them into camps, because it respects people’s stated wishes and doesn’t require them to give up their last remaining asset, which happens to double as their home. (Someone living in their car could, theoretically, stay in a shelter as long as they make sure to return to their car and move it every 72 hours, but it’s pretty hard to justify adding another poverty chore to the long list faced by people existing on the margins of society, just because we don’t think people should sleep in cars.) And there’s another reason safe lots make more sense than FEMA tents, too: People living in vehicles tend to need fewer services than chronically homeless folks or those who run a circuit from treatment to shelter to jail. Given limited resources, it makes little sense to pour millions into “wraparound services”—another popular buzzword among the candidates at Tuesday’s District 6 forum—for people who really just need some help paying rent.

City Council, City Hall, Density, Development, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Taxes

Morning Crank: “It Is Little Wonder that Many Good People Won’t Consider Public Service.”

 

1. Learn to trust the Crank: After I reported last week that the nomination of Jason Johnson, Mayor Jenny Durkan’s pick to head the Human Services Department, was on the rocks, Durkan withdrew his name from consideration, trashing the city council in a bitter and harshly worded statement for holding up the nomination with a “never-ending confirmation process.” Durkan’s office also confirmed that they would not submit a new nominee for consideration; instead, Durkan plans to keep Johnson on as an unappointed interim director “through at least next year,” according to Durkan’s spokeswoman Chelsea Kellogg.

Durkan appointed Johnson as interim director in May 2018, and did not forward his name to the city council for permanent appointment until New Year’s Eve. As a result, Johnson served for nearly seven and a half months before Durkan officially nominated him to the position. Since then, however, Durkan has emphasized the urgency of moving his nomination through as quickly as possible.

“The Council’s failure to follow its own procedures or give Jason a fair confirmation process has been harmful to the work of the Human Services Department, impaired our effort to respond to the homelessness crisis and has been deeply unfair to a person that has served this city tirelessly on one of the toughest issues facing our city, region and country,” Durkan said in the statement. “It is little wonder that many good people won’t consider public service.”

“City Council has done something remarkable: nothing. The City Council’s inaction has done a disservice to Jason, to Human Services Department employees, and to the ability of the City to focus on the crisis of homelessness.” — Statement from Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office announcing her decision to pull Jason Johnson’s nomination as head of the Human Services Department

Durkan (later echoed by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce) placed the blame for the length of the nomination process squarely on council member Kshama Sawant, who advocated for a new nomination process and refused to bring Johnson up for a hearing  in her human services committee. That may have been true initially, but once Johnson’s nomination was moved to a new committee, Sally Bagshaw’s Special Committee on Homelessness, it became increasingly clear that he didn’t have the votes to win confirmation. (In her statement, Durkan said that no one on the council except Sawant had “expressed publicly or to Mayor Durkan that they are opposed to Jason.” Last week, two Durkan staffers asked me to tell them which council members had expressed concerns to me about Johnson.)  

Council members raised questions in Johnson’s first confirmation hearing, on March 28, about low morale among HSD staff, particularly in the homelessness division, which he attributed to the fact that the agency is in the middle of a time of “instability” and “immense change,” including the new mayoral administration. (The fact that the city and county are planning to merge their homelessness programs into a single regional agency is also causing heartburn in the department). Some HSD employees and members of the Seattle Silence Breakers have also raised concerns about Johnson’s commitment to race and social justice, an issue that also came up at his confirmation hearing.

Council members were unavailable Monday to talk about Durkan’s decision to pull Johnson’s name from consideration. If Johnson does remain in his position through next year, he will be working with a much different council; all seven district council positions are on the ballot this year, and four incumbents are not seeking reelection.

Support The C Is for Crank
If you like the work I’m doing here, and would like to support this page financially, please support me by becoming a monthly donor on Patreon or PayPal.  For just $5, $10, or $20 a month (or whatever you can give), you can help keep this site going, and help me continue to dedicate the many hours it takes to bring you stories like this one every week. This site is funded entirely by contributions from readers, which pay for the time I put into reporting and writing for this blog and on social media, as well as reporting-related and office expenses.  If you don’t wish to become a monthly contributor, you can always make a one-time donation via PayPal, Venmo (Erica-Barnett-7) or by mailing your contribution to P.O. Box 14328, Seattle, WA 98104. Thank you for reading, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

2. On Monday, the council appointed its newest member to replace Rob Johnson, who resigned his District 4 (northeast Seattle) council seat seven months before the end of his term:  Abel Pacheco, currently the strategic engagement director at a University of Washington STEM program. Pacheco, who has sought a position on the council twice before (once in 2015, when he ran for the seat Johnson won, and once in 2017, when he sought appointment to a different council seat), was one of ten candidates running for the permanent District 4 position but has committed to dropping out of that race. Pacheco will chair the council’s land use and zoning committee, which will take up legislation that would make it easier to build accessory dwelling units, as well as a proposal to upzone University Way Northeast, which Johnson stripped from the Mandatory Housing Ability plan adopted last month.

3. Also Monday, the council voted to move the $219 million Libraries for All levy proposal—amended to include additional library hours, programs for kids, and outreach workers for homeless youth—to the August ballot Monday. But even before the levy plan hit the mayor’s desk, anti-tax newspaper pundits were spinning the numbers to represent the new levy as a shocking increase over 2012’s $123 million proposal. The Seattle Times reported that the original levy proposal, at $213 million, represented a “73 percent increase” over the levy adopted in 2012. On Monday, the Seattle P-I’s Joel Connelly inflated that amount to a “doubling” of the levy, a claim that would be inaccurate even if inflation and population growth did not exist, as $219 million is not twice as much as $123 million.

But inflation and population growth do exist. Since 2012, the city has grown by more than 100,000 residents, and the value of a median house has more than doubled, from $361,000 to $726,000 last year. As a result, the actual levy that’s being proposed this year—that is, the number of cents levied per $1,000 of property value—is lower than it was in the initial year of the 2012 levy.  That plan raised property taxes by 15 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value in 2013. (The actual assessment needed to raise $123 million went down in successive years as property values spiked.) The new plan raises taxes just over 12 cents per $1,000 in 2020—an amount that will also decline if property values continue their skyward trajectory.

Don’t expect to see accurate representations of property taxes in the Seattle Times or PI, though. Instead, get ready for three more months of misleading figures and tirades against “tax fatigue,” all capped off with a Times editorial urging a “no” vote on the levy in July.