Tag: Human Services Department

City Council, homelessness, human services, Mayor Harrell

As List of Finalists for KCRHA Director Comes Together, Council Raises Questions About Agency’s Future
A breakdown of the KCRHA’s budget, which could face additional cuts this year.

Erica C. Barnett

The future of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority came under scrutiny during a council meeting on Wednesday, just two days before a selection committee is scheduled to get its first look at a list of finalists to head up the embattled agency.

One name that may be on that list is that of KCRHA interim director Darrell Powell. Powell, the former chief financial officer for United Way of King County and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s pick for the interim role. Powell has reportedly applied for the permanent position, which has been vacant since the last CEO, Marc Dones, resigned last year. He replaced Helen Howell, who became interim CEO last May, in January.

The company that’s leading the search for a new CEO, Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group (NPAG), has narrowed the list down to about a dozen candidates, whose names have not been made public, and will present the list to a search committee for further narrowing on Friday. The search process has been slow and opaque; NPAG only got around to posting a job description in January, eight months after Dones announced their resignation, and the search committee was reportedly uninspired by an early list of potential candidates.

If Powell—who did not respond to a request for an interview—became the permanent director, Harrell would have a long-term ally at the very top of an agency whose work he has frequently criticized and whose authority he recently reduced, by removing the KCRHA’s authority over encampment outreach and homelessness prevention and returning those contracts to the city’s Human Services Department.

The city council, including many of its six new members, appears to agree with Harrell about the need to claw back control over the KCRHA, which receives a little less than half its funding from the city. During a presentation by Powell and KCRHA staffer Jeff Simms on Wednesday, council members expressed support for Harrell’s decision to take over KCRHA’s outreach and prevention contracts and suggested the primary problem with the agency is that its governing structure is too confusing and unaccountable.

Specifically, council members said the KCRHA has too many boards—”three, plural?” Councilmember Rob Saka confirmed with Simms—and that one solution might be eliminating the implementation board, which is made up of unelected homelessness experts. “When you reference plural, rather than singular, I think therein lies the problem,” Saka said.

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Council President Sara Nelson also criticized the implementation board and suggested that as “non-elected people,” they had little incentive to spend city funding wisely.

“These are non-elected people, who are not accountable to their constituents for resources, that are making the budget, and then the governing committee is expected to basically essentially rubber stamp so that the providers—very important—can get paid,” Nelson said. “And so that really does need to be cleaned up. And that’ll be quite a process and that can only take place in the interlocal agreement,” which established the authority and created its governing structure.

Nelson wasn’t on the council at the time, but there was actually a huge debate over the two-board structure when the council was helping to craft the interlocal agreement; the original plan, proposed by city and county leaders, was to set up a public development authority governed by an 11-member board of homelessness experts, overseen by a separate “steering committee” made up of elected officials.

Through compromises over time, elected officials gradually secured some direct control over the authority, eventually landing on a structure in which co-equal governing and implementation boards, made up of elected officials and people with policy expertise and experience, respectively, make decisions about the KCRHA and adopt its budget. The implementation board is made up of 13 experts on various aspects of the homelessness system, including people with direct experience of homelessness. The third board, which oversees the local continuum of care, is required by federal law and serves as a subcommittee to the implementation board.

“We are looking at the this being up for renewal at the end of the year, and I think we all want it to work, but we have to be honest about where it didn’t work and how we’re going to make it work going forward. When we look at what’s happening on the street, we don’t see any improvement. We only see things getting worse.”—Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore

The original justification for leaving most decisions in the hands of experts, rather than elected officials, was that they would be less influenced by prevailing political winds—less inclined, for instance, to make major budget changes based on voter complaints about encampments or media reports suggesting the agency is in disarray. (Like this column by Danny Westneat questioning the wisdom of the regional approach, which two councilmembers cited during Wednesday’s meeting.)

The KCRHA’s interlocal agreement expires at the end of this year, a date human services committee chair Cathy Moore called a “juncture” for the agency. “We are looking at the this being up for renewal at the end of the year, and I think we all want it to work, but we have to be honest about where it didn’t work and how we’re going to make it work going forward,” Moore said. “When we look at what’s happening on the street, we don’t see any improvement. We only see things getting worse.”

Simms pointed out that the agreement (and thus KCRHA) will continue automatically unless the city decides to unilaterally withdraw from the authority. If that happened, it would effectively end the agency and trigger the return of all homelessness contracts back to the government entities that oversaw them before 2020, including the city.

Before the KCRHA was created, homelessness contracts were under a division of the Human Services Department called Homelessness Strategy and Investments, which was subsequently (and messily) disbanded. HSD recently created a new homelessness division with its own director, suggesting a potential return to the old model.

It’s unclear how this would be an improvement (one reason for the whole “regional approach” concept in the first place was that it would consolidate city and county contracts under one authority) but a number of current elected officials seem to believe it might be—egged on, perhaps, by the mayor’s office, which has been bearish on the KCRHA since Harrell took office.

On Wednesday, several council members expressed the view that suburban cities need to “step up” and contribute financially to the regional authority so that Seattle can reduce its contribution; Saka, previously an attorney for Meta, likened Seattle’s initial heavy investment to a round of “seed funding” that would eventually lead to greater investments from other cities and a “draw down” in investments from Seattle.

This is a baked-in issue with the regional approach—why would a suburban city that disagrees with KCRHA’s progressive approach to homelessness give money to the authority when they could be spending it on encampment sweeps?—but suburban contributions were never going to make up a huge chunk of the KCRHA’s budget anyway, since their budgets are so much smaller than either Seattle or King County.

Although the council will soon be making major decisions about the KCRHA’s budget—which could face cuts this year to help close an estimated $230 million budget gap—it’s clear they still have a steep learning curve. (The meeting was one in a series of City 101-style briefings that have filled the council’s schedule since six new members took office in January).

After Simms told councilmembers that there is currently about one housing unit available for every 34 homeless people “nominated” for housing, for instance, Nelson suggested that “part of the problem is the demand, because people aren’t moving on from permanent supportive housing, perhaps because they don’t have the supports to be able to do so” from the agencies that provide their case management, she said. Permanent supportive housing, Simms pointed out, is a specialized housing type set aside for people with severe, usually lifelong, disabilities; “permanent” is a key part of the concept, and people aren’t expected to “move on.”

Other council members appeared unaware that people don’t generally flock to an encampment once they hear it’s being removed; that KCRHA gets people into housing, not just shelter; that the city’s Unified Care Team holds near-monopoly access to tiny house villages; and that the KCRHA doesn’t decide how to spend the city’s money, but administers a list of contracts that remains largely unchanged since the city was in charge of them.

homelessness, Mayor Harrell, Uncategorized

Seattle Will Take Over Homelessness Outreach and Prevention, Raising Questions About Regional Approach
Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington and staffers discuss the city’s homelessness programs last week.

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Bruce Harrell’s Human Services Department told the King County Regional Homelessness Authority that it is taking control over contracts for outreach and homelessness prevention, clawing back a total of about $11.7 million from the regional authority. HSD director Tanya Kim informed the KCRHA of the decision in a letter last week.

Programs to prevent homelessness—for example, by helping people pay their rent—will move back to the city this summer, Kim wrote. “This shift aligns with HSD’s role in leading upstream housing and community stability efforts, while RHA continues leading the emergency homelessness response system.”

Outreach programs will follow at the beginning of next year, as part of “an effort to carefully examine how outreach investments align to the evolving needs of the city and ensure effective use of City funding in meeting desired outcomes.”

According to mayoral spokesman Jamie Housen, KCRHA informed the city in April that “due to their focus on Partnership for Zero, the system re-bid, outreach coordination for the state’s Right-of-Way Safety Initiative, and implementation of their Five Year Plan, they did not have capacity to fulfill the outreach, coordination, and referral roles” the city council outlined in a budget amendment in 2023.

Last week, deputy mayor Tiffany Washington, who oversees homelessness, touted the UCT’s transition to a “neighborhood team”-based model last year, with discrete groups of city workers doing outreach, trash removal, parking enforcement, and encampment removals in five different geographic areas. During that briefing, Washington presented a slide that showed outreach as a joint responsibility of the city and KCRHA.

Alison Eisinger, director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, said the Harrell Administration’s “unilateral decision” to take over two areas of the homelessness response system “fractures our homeless service system deeply and ill serves people who are homeless.” Separating outreach from the rest of the system is “not effective,” Eisinger continued, and “undermines the necessary regionalism Mayor Harrell and other Seattle officials say they are committed to.

“It’s not legitimate for Seattle to insist it can pick and choose which system functions it wishes to politicize and control  and withdraw millions from the regional entity it helped to create, and then cry about other jurisdictions needing to do their part, any more than it’s legitimate for Des Moines, Federal Way, Kenmore, and Burien to block and delay housing and shelter and then claim they support regionalism.”

Harrell has expressed increasingly open skepticism about the KCRHA and its ability to forge a “regional approach to homelessness,” given the fact that many cities in King County have not “bought in” by helping to pay for agency operations and are actually passing laws to prevent housing and shelter in their cities.

A spokesperson for the KCRHA said the agency has “been made aware of the upcoming changes to the City’s funding of KCRHA. We’re working to understand likely impacts on our provider community, unhoused neighbors, and how we address the homelessness crisis in King County.”

The KCRHA oversees two broad categories of outreach—geographically based outreach, in which outreach workers focus on a specific area, and population-based outreach, which focuses on different population groups (such as veterans or families with children) throughout the region. The KCRHA’s privately funded in-house outreach and case management program, Partnership for Zero, shut down last year.

REACH, a longtime outreach provider that has moved toward a geographic model in collaboration with the Unified Care Team, will see $2.4 million in contracts move back to the city. REACH director Chloe Gale told PubliCola, “We’ve spent the last year designing the model,” Gale said, and “I think this is the year that we’re really going to see if we can we produce some better results to move people inside and also maximize resources when there are not places for people to go inside.”

Housen said that by bringing outreach back to HSD, the city will be able to identify “the most appropriate and efficient ways to meet neighborhood outreach needs across the city, in conjunction with the budget exercises currently underway to optimize funding and ensure effective services.”

The city shut down HSD’s Homelessness Strategy and Investments division, which Deputy Mayor Washington previously headed, as part of the protracted transfer of all homelessness contracts to KCRHA in 2021. From the beginning, the city resisted giving up control of outreach contracts—arguing  that city’s own outreach staffers, now part of the UCT, needed direct access to outreach workers with groups like the Chief Seattle Club and REACH. Washington was the deputy mayor overseeing homelessness for Jenny Durkan while that debate was going on.

According to Housen, “HSD will be assessing whether current staff can effectively administer outreach contracts and determine if additional supports are needed.”

PubliCola first reported the decision, and posted Kim’s letter, on X earlier this afternoon.

homelessness, human services, The C Is for Crank

Winter Shelters Must Be Accessible, Not Just Open

By Erica C. Barnett

The first major cold snap of the winter offered a preview of how the King County Regional Homelessness Authority will respond when the temperature dips to dangerous levels, and an illustration of how a fractured homelessness response system still leaves unsheltered people out in the cold.

First, some very good news: KCRHA is using a completely new set of standards for deciding when to open emergency shelters in cold weather, abandoning the city of Seattle’s old standard for one that more accurately reflects the kind of weather conditions that put homeless people’s lives at risk. (This is the first full winter in which KCRHA will be in charge of emergency shelter; last year’s winter response was a chaotic combination of city and KCRHA oversight).

Under the previous standard, the city was only required to open at least one emergency shelter (a “Tier 2” response) when forecasted temperatures were 25 degrees or lower for multiple days, or when more than an inch of snow accumulated on the ground. Under the new standards, KCRHA will open at least one shelter, and provide emergency funding to homeless service providers for survival gear, any time the forecasted high temperature is 40 degrees or less for three consecutive days, the daily low temperature is 35 or less for three consecutive days, or there is more than two inches of snow or rain on the ground.

Fixing the region’s cold-weather shelter response will require an acknowledgement from KCRHA and the city that one of the primary reasons people don’t go to shelter is that shelter is unavailable and inaccessible to people living unsheltered in most areas of the city.

KCRHA has similarly adjusted the next activation level, Tier 3, to reflect the less-harsh but still dangerous weather conditions typical to longer periods of cold and snow in Seattle. In a Tier 3 activation, the county and city coordinate to open more shelters and daytime warming centers, and work to coordinate storage of belongings and transportation to shelter for people who can’t get there by bus. The city’s old standard required a snow accumulation of 6 inches or more, in addition to multiple days of 25-degree temperatures, to trigger a Tier 3 response; the new rules lower that standard to 30 degrees or less for a single day, or snow or rain accumulation of more than four inches.

According to KCRHA spokeswoman Anne Martens, between 20 and 40 people have used the city’s cold-weather shelter, at Compass Center in Pioneer Square, every night since Compass opened up extra capacity. That’s more people than typically show up in a Tier 2 (lower-level) winter emergency —an indication that “outreach is working,” Martens said—but it still represents a tiny fraction of the thousands of people sleeping outside in King County.

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And therein lies some less-great news: Because the region’s official emergency winter response consists primarily of opening shelters in the downtown Seattle area, a majority of the city’s homeless population will inevitably be unable to access those shelters. This is still true with a more extensive Tier 3 response, which last year included more shelters downtown, two shelters in Lake City, and a tiny West Seattle shelter whose operator did not agree to be included on the city’s map and was overwhelmed by the influx of people seeking shelter.

A spokesman for the Human Services Department said that the city’s HOPE Team, which does outreach at encampments, is providing information about the Compass shelter along with cold-weather supplies such as gloves and hand warmers, but said HSD has not gotten any requests for help with transportation. Last year, the city handed out bus tickets that were largely useless because many routes had shut down due to icy conditions, and offered vouchers for Lyft rides, which were similarly underutilized. The city also provided a handful of vans to pick people up and take them to shelters, but that effort was stymied by a lack of commercially licensed drivers and icy conditions.

Fixing the region’s cold-weather shelter response will require better coordination between agencies (looking at you, Seattle Public Library) but it will also require an acknowledgement from KCRHA and the city that one of the primary reasons people don’t go to shelter is that shelter is unavailable and inaccessible to people living unsheltered in most areas of the city. Telling homeless people to get on the bus and go downtown has never been an effective way to provide access to emergency shelter, and the worse conditions are, the less viable this approach becomes. An effective emergency shelter response requires shelters people can access, not just shelters that are open.

Crime, homelessness, Morning Fizz

City Attorney Filing, But Also Diverting, More Cases; City’s Shelter Enrollment Rate Remains Low
City Attorney Ann Davison

 

1. City Attorney Ann Davison’s office released a detailed report this week confirming what PubliCola reported earlier this month: In the first six months of 2022, her office has filed charges in only about half of the criminal cases it has considered, declining to pursue charges at a rate similar to that of her predecessor, Pete Holmes. Between 2017 and 2019, Holmes’ decline rate ranged from just over 40 percent to just under 60 percent, only slightly lower than Davison’s.

Between January and June, the city attorney’s office declined about 51 percent of cases. That number includes cases from a backlog left after Holmes left office, which resulted from a combination of failure to file cases prior to the pandemic and an increase in unfiled cases in 2021, when the Seattle Municipal Court was not operating at full capacity due to the pandemic.

Excluding those cases, Davison’s decline rate was lower (46 percent between January and March and 41 percent between April and June), but without more details about what cases the office considered from the backlog, or what cases came in between April and June, it’s hard to draw long-term conclusions from that comparison.

Digging into the numbers in the report, the rate of domestic violence cases that the office declined has risen steadily over the years, and remains high under Davison (over 60 percent) so far; one reason for this, according to the report, is that domestic violence victims often don’t want to file charges against their abusers. Assault, property destruction, and harassment topped the list of domestic violence cases where no charges were filed.

The report shows that Davison’s office has resolved cases using diversionary programs, such as community court, mental health court, and the Public Defender Association’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, at least as often as her predecessors, diverting hundreds of theft, assault, trespassing, and other cases to therapeutic courts or social services.

Davison’s office did file charges in a much higher percentage of new non-domestic violence and non-traffic criminal offenses (those committed in 2022) than Holmes—around half in the first quarter of this year and 37 percent in the second quarter. If that trend continues, it will mean that Davison is choosing to pursue charges against more people accused of crimes like assault, theft, and trespassing, which are often crimes of poverty.

 

Ann Davison portrait

Perhaps most interestingly, the report shows that Davison’s office has resolved cases using diversionary programs, such as community court, mental health court, and the Public Defender Association’s Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, at least as often as her predecessors, diverting hundreds of theft, assault, trespassing, and other cases to therapeutic courts or social services. Overall, Davison referred about 750 cases to community court, more than 600 to LEAD, and about 180 to mental health court.

Earlier this year, Davison sought, and received, authority to deny access to community court for the 100 or so people on her “high utilizer” list, which includes people with more than 12 cases (not charges) in the past five years. The city attorney’s office really is treating this population differently: In contrast to their overall approach, the office has filed charges in 82 percent of cases involving this group, a decline rate of just 18 percent.

2. The latest quarterly report from the Seattle Human Services Department on the work of the Homelessness Outreach and Provider Ecosystem (HOPE) Team shows an uptick in the number of people who received referrals to shelter from the HOPE Team and actually enrolled in shelter, meaning that they showed up and stayed for at least one night. The HOPE Team does outreach at encampments, primarily the city’s regularly updated list of encampments it plans to sweep.

Between April and June, 173 people went to shelter based on a HOPE team referral, amounting to 41 percent of the total number of people who received at least one referral. (Overall, the team made 458 referrals, including multiple referrals for some individuals). Put another way, that means about 58 people went to shelter on HOPE team referrals every month last quarter. The numbers are approximate, because some people who enroll in shelter choose to remain anonymous, making them harder to track.

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Those numbers, while they represent a slight improvement, continue to reveal that the majority of shelter referrals don’t result in shelter enrollments (and shelter, of course, isn’t housing)—people are getting referral slips but aren’t using them. This can happen for a variety of reasons: Leaving an encampment for shelter can involve a long trek across town, along with tough decisions, such as whether to leave an established street community or abandon a pet.

Notably, the second quarter of this year also included the removal of a large encampment at Woodland Park, which Mayor Bruce Harrell identified early on as one of the top priorities for his administration. As we reported at the time, the city asked the Low-Income Housing Institute to set aside dozens of spots in tiny-house villages—a desirable, semi-private shelter type that has a very high enrollment rate—for people living in the park. Out of 89 shelter referrals at Woodland Park, 60 were to tiny house villages.

The city also made a special effort to ensure that people forced to leave during the high-profile removal, offering direct transportation to shelters for everyone who received a referral, which likely boosted the overall enrollment rate. PubliCola has asked HSD how many of the 173 enrollments between April and June came from Woodland Park and will update this post when we hear back.

homelessness, human services

Shelter Enrollments from City Referrals, Already Under 50%, Dropped In First Months of 2022

Chart showing HOPE team shelter enrollment rates over timeBy Erica C. Barnett

A review of six months of data from the HOPE Team—the team of Seattle Human Services Department staffers who do outreach and offer shelter to people living at encampments the city is about to remove—shows that only around 36.5 percent of people who received shelter referrals from the HOPE Team actually showed up to that shelter and stayed there overnight. This number represents a 23 percent reduction in referrals from the 47.7 percent enrollment figure HSD reported in March.

The enrollment rate for the first two months of 2022—in winter, a time when people are typically most likely to move indoors—was even lower, just 33 percent. That means that out of every 100 people the HOPE team referred to shelter, fewer than a third actually showed up and stayed the night.

HSD provided its data in response to a records request from PubliCola.

A spokesman for the Human Services Department said the numbers they provided are lower than the true enrollment rate, because about a quarter of people who use homeless services have opted out of he the county’s Homeless Management Information System, which means that their identities are anonymous and can’t be tracked. For example, one shelter whose residents came exclusively from HSD referrals, Rosie’s tiny house village in the University District, had an official enrollment rate of just 52 percent, even though all 36 units were full.

However, the numbers HSD provided, which represent data from September 2021 through February 2022, are directly comparable to the 48 percent figure HSD itself reported for 2021. Both PubliCola’s numbers and HSD’s earlier report represent a straightforward comparison of referrals to confirmed enrollments, without factoring in people who have opted out of the county’s tracking system. For this reason, the more recent numbers—both the 36.5 percent enrollment rate for the last four months of 2021 and the 33 percent enrollment rate for early 2022—represent an apples to apples comparison to HSD’s own published figures.

The HOPE Team has exclusive access to about 800 shelter beds, or about a third of all shelter beds in the city; those beds can only be filled by the HOPE Team, which leads to a shortage of beds for other providers trying to find beds for clients who are actively seeking shelter, as opposed to those who happen to be in the path of an upcoming sweep. Between September 2021 and March 2022, the HOPE Team made 533 referrals to 20 shelters, including the now-closed Executive Pacific Hotel. Of those 533 referrals, just 195 resulted in someone staying at a shelter overnight.

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Within the numbers, patterns emerge. In general, tiny house villages—private mini-shelters that are among the most desirable forms of shelter currently available in King County—had a much higher enrollment rate than congregate shelters: Three of the four highest-performing shelters on the HOPE Team’s list were tiny house villages. (I’ve excluded the unspecified category “enhanced shelter,” which accounts for 32 referrals and 10 enrollments, and any shelter that had fewer than 10 referrals over six months from this list.)

However, all three tiny house villages that had higher-than-average enrollments had one thing in common: They all opened during the six-month period the data encompasses. Friendship Heights, a tiny house village on Aurora that had the highest enrollment rate at 59 percent, opened last December; Rosie’s Village in the University District, with a 42 percent enrollment rate, opened last November; and the Interbay Tiny House Village, with a 47 percent enrollment rate, expanded to add 30 new units in November.

Similarly, the Benu Community Home—a men’s shelter with dorm-style rooms in the Central District—opened in November and had an enrollment rate of 50 percent.

As we reported in March, shelter referrals and enrollments went up in 2021 because hundreds of new permanent housing and shelter beds came online all at once, adding new supply to the shelter system that was immediately filled by people being removed from high-priority encampments. A separate report from City Council’s central staff revealed that nonprofit service providers requested shelter for their clients four times more often than the city provided a referral, meaning that the vast majority of people seeking shelter were unable to find it.

At the other end of the spectrum, the shelters with very low enrollment rates had a few things in common: Three of the four are basic shelters or “enhanced” shelters that offer services but little privacy. The other is Lakefront Community House—an enhanced shelter with single and double rooms in a former drug treatment center run by the Low-Income Housing Institute in North Seattle. Continue reading “Shelter Enrollments from City Referrals, Already Under 50%, Dropped In First Months of 2022” →

City Council, homelessness, human services

City Asks Homelessness Authority to Require Nonprofits to Participate in Sweeps
Tents and other items on the ground during a recent encampment sweep at City Hall
The city put up signs announcing this encampment across from city hall would be removed at 6am, giving residents less than two hours’ notice.

By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s Human Services Department has asked the King County Regional Homelessness Authority to modify its contracts with  outreach providers (including the city’s largest outreach provider, REACH) to require them to show up and offer services to unsheltered people up to the day their encampments are swept.

REACH does not have a strict policy against showing up before encampment sweeps; instead, they make decisions on a case by case basis, REACH director Chloe Gale said. In 2019, the group decided to withdraw from the Navigation Team, a group of police and city outreach workers that used to be in charge of encampment removals, because of concerns about their ability to build trust with clients while appearing to participate in sweeps.

UPDATE: On Friday, a spokeswoman for the KCHRA told PubliCola the authority “confirmed with the City that we are not making any contract modifications.”

In a message to council members, the department said that its HOPE Team—a group of city staffers that connects people whose encampments are about to be swept to beds in shelters to which the HOPE Team has exclusive access—is “often the only entity on site that’s willing to make shelter offers and connections during the posting period (i.e., the time between a site being posted and the time of the removal).”

A spokesman for Mayor Bruce Harrell said the mayor “support[s] providers offering outreach and service connections to encampments before the day of removal.”

UPDATE: On Friday, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington and KCRHA CEO Marc Dones said in an email to homeless service providers that “despite what you might have seen in [PubliCola’s] recent article” (the one you are currently reading), “KCRHA has not received any requests from the City of Seattle that would change our shared approach to outreach responsibilities.” The Human Services Department confirmed its request for contract changes, provided the request to PubliCola in full, and explained the intent of the request in more detail in an email, and PubliCola stands by our reporting.

REACH and other outreach providers’ “choice to withhold support is believed to be counterproductive to supporting those experiencing unsheltered homelessness,” HSD wrote. “We have asked KCRHA to modify their contracts in a way that uses the City’s funding to support our target population throughout the entire process rather than just a portion of it.”

In recent years, the city has largely abandoned the previous practice of providing 72 hours’ notice before it removes an encampment, a timeline that gave encampment residents time to move into shelter or relocate their tents. Instead, the city designates encampments as “obstructions,” a broad term that can be applied to any tent in any public space, and removes them with little or no advance notice.

This is not the first time the city has attempted to include a requirement to participate in sweeps in its contracts with outreach providers; former mayor Jenny Durkan made a similar attempt last year, but ultimately backed down after some nonprofits said they would refuse to sign contracts that included this stipulation.

Outreach providers’ “choice to withhold support is believed to be counterproductive to supporting those experiencing unsheltered homelessness,” HSD wrote. “While the funding for these contracts continues to come from the City of Seattle, the oversight of contracts, and the ability to modify those contracts, now live with KCRHA. We have asked KCRHA to modify their contracts in a way that uses the City’s funding to support our target population throughout the entire process rather than just a portion of it.”

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Responding to questions about the city’s request during the council’s homelessness committee meeting Wednesday, KCRHA director Marc Dones said the authority had not “entered into any conversations at this point around modifying contracts with providers. What we are discussing at this point is working to support humane responses to folks that are at our prioritized encampments”—that is, encampments the city prioritizes for removal.

HSD spokeswoman Stasha Espinoza said HSD “has yet to request RHA’s assistance with making outreach available on the day of a removal, and that in for now, “HSD has asked their System Navigators”—the HOPE Team’s outreach workers—”to make offers of shelter prior to and during a removal. This includes transportation to a shelter if such services are requested.” Continue reading “City Asks Homelessness Authority to Require Nonprofits to Participate in Sweeps” →