Tag: innovation advisory council

Affordability, campaign finance, City Council, Elections, Featured, Mayor Durkan, Transit

Confirming the Chamber’s Colossal Loss, the “Innovative Affordable Portal” That Suggested Low-Income Bus Passes for My Nonexistent Kids, and More

1. Seattle council member-elect Alex Pedersen, whose campaign received about $70,000 in independent backing from the Seattle Metro Chamber’s Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy PAC, has reportedly made his first hire—neighborhood activist and longtime anti-density crusader Toby Thaler. Thaler, a fixture on the Fremont Neighborhood Council, was a leader of SCALE, a group that spent two years appealing the Mandatory Housing Affordability on the grounds that increased density in the city’s urban villages would destroy neighborhood character, trample the neighborhood plans of the ’90s, and harm the environment.

Thaler has also argued against density on the grounds that development only benefits wealthy interests. Neither Thaler nor Pedersen returned emails seeking confirmation and comment.

The hire confirms the sheer magnitude of CASE’s defeat in the November 5 election. Not only did all but one other Chamber-backed candidate lose to a more progressive opponent (Debora Juarez, an incumbent whose opponent was a firebrand conservative, was the highly unusual exception), the one winner they backed, Pedersen, is more likely to align with the dread socialist Sawant on anti-development measures like impact fees than to vote the Chamber’s interests.

Pedersen is also opposed to the downtown streetcar, which CASE supports, referred to the Housing Affordability and Livability Agenda as a “backroom deal for real estate developer upzones,” and opposed the most recent Sound Transit ballot measure on the grounds that the “biggest businesses” should pay their “fair share.” Sound familiar?

2. Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office sent out a press release Thursday touting a new “Affordable Seattle” portal that will “Help Residents Easily Determine If They Qualify for City of Seattle Discount Programs.” (Believe it or not, that’s less wordy than a typical Durkan press release subject line). The portal, which replaces a website Durkan rolled out in 2018 in at the same URL, is the first project to come out of the mayor’s much-touted Innovation Advisory Council, a group of local tech leaders brought together the summer before last to suggest tech- and data-based approaches to addressing problems such as homelessness and traffic.

I went to the portal (created by Expedia), plugged in my income (above the qualifying income for any assistance programs other than homeownership help), my household size (one) and a Southeast Seattle ZIP code and pressed the button marked “find services.”

My children can’t take advantage of free bus fare because they don’t exist. I’m not low-income and I don’t own a car, so I don’t qualify for the low-income RPZ program, which isn’t available where I live anyway. And even if I did qualify for Comcast’s low-income discount (I don’t), the company doesn’t serve the ZIP code that I provided at the beginning of my search.

The next page, titled “Your Program Eligibility,” suggested I might be interested in four programs: A low-income restricted parking zone permit for my car; college assistance for the graduating high-school seniors in my household; a low-income Internet assistance program from Comcast; and the ORCA Opportunity program, which is open to middle- and high-school students as well as certain public housing residents. When I entered an income of $120,000 a year, I got the same results.

As a household of one, my children can’t take advantage of free bus fare because they don’t exist. I’m not low-income and I don’t own a car, so I don’t qualify for the low-income RPZ program. If I had qualified, additional links provided on internal pages inside the portal (one of which is broken) would have reminded me that the permits are limited to specific areas, and that my neighborhood is not among them. And even if I did qualify for Comcast’s low-income discount (I don’t), the company doesn’t serve the ZIP code that I provided at the beginning of my search.

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I asked mayoral spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower why this portal—the very first deliverable from the IAC since it was announced to great fanfare well over a year ago—produced such unhelpful results.

Hightower says the system is programmed to tell everyone about all four of the programs recommended to me on the grounds that they might be eligible, and that it’s up to users to then follow the links to read more about the eligibility requirements for each individual program. Put a different way, it sounds like Expedia didn’t include income-based exclusions from certain programs, didn’t account for people who live alone (about 40 percent of all Seattle residents, as of the most recent American Community Survey), and didn’t bother linking services to the ZIP codes, much less street addresses, where they are actually available. They also don’t ask if users own a car, although several of the potential benefits are linked to car ownership. Continue reading “Confirming the Chamber’s Colossal Loss, the “Innovative Affordable Portal” That Suggested Low-Income Bus Passes for My Nonexistent Kids, and More” →

Equity, gender, homelessness, human services, Mayor Durkan, Morning Crank, Tech

Morning Crank: An Even Bigger Table

1. At the inaugural meeting of her “innovation advisory council”—a group of local tech leaders brought together to suggest tech- and data-based approaches to addressing problems such as homelessness and traffic—Mayor Jenny Durkan lavished praise on Seattle’s tech community, calling them “some of the most brilliant talent anywhere,” and noted that there has already been “an outpouring of interest” among other tech leaders in joining the group. “As big as this table is, it’s going to get bigger,” Durkan said, before leaving leaving the group to their discussion about how to help the city address its most vexing issues.

Yesterday meeting was mostly introductory—officials from the city’s human services and transportation departments gave presentations and answered questions from the group, which included representatives from Amazon, Expedia, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and Tableau—but it still revealed some of the challenges this very large group will face in coming up with “innovative” solutions. The first is precisely what Durkan highlighted—the “table” already includes dozens of people, with more, apparently, to come; One Table, the last “table” effort in which Durkan was involved, met a few times, fizzled for a while, and then came back with a tepid set of recommendations for addressing the root causes of homelessness that could be summarized, basically, as “build more housing, and also treatment.” Without a targeted mission in mind—say, creating a new system to give the city’s Navigation Team instant access to a list of available shelter beds so they don’t have to call around when removing people from encampments—it’s easy to see this council meeting a few times, releasing a list of half-conceived ideas, and disbanding without any commitment to spend more time and, importantly, money on actually implementing their own suggestions. Michael Schutzler, head of the Washington Technology Industry Association, alluded to this concern, noting that “we can’t boil the ocean.”

The other issue that was immediately apparent yesterday was the fact that the advisory council would have benefited from the inclusion of someone who works full-time on homelessness and can quickly get other members up to speed on basic facts about the issue. Like many such councils, members come to the table with varying levels of baseline knowledge; nonetheless, it was somewhat jarring to hear Steve McChesney, VP of global marketing for F5, say, “I don’t understand, personally, what the behaviors are leading up to” homelessness. The city and county have done numerous studies, surveys, and presentations on the causes of homelessness, and “behavior” (such as having a substance use disorder) falls far behind high housing costs on the list of the root causes of homelessness.

The group will hold two more meetings to come up with a list of ideas, which will then be narrowed down for further discussion. City council president Bruce Harrell suggested that future meetings might not be open to the public or the press, and should include a “strong facilitator,” noting that the negotiations that got the city a $15 minimum wage didn’t happen in the public eye.

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2. One data point that jumped out at me from the city’s latest report on race and gender equity in city employment was the fact that the overwhelming majority of city employees who took advantage of paid parental leave last year—73 percent—were men. (Meanwhile, 64 percent of those who took family leave, which is provided for employees to care for children and other family members, were women.) These numbers can be accounted for, in part, by what the report calls the “very imbalanced” nature of the city’s workforce: Just 38.6 percent of the city’s workers are women, so if men and women took parental leave at equal rates, you would expect men to make up about 61 percent of those taking parental leave. However, men have not historically been the ones taking parental leave, and even assuming that they do so at the same rate as women doesn’t account for the entire gender divide.

So what’s going on here? A deeper look at the numbers reveals that the departments where men are far more likely than women to take time off for a new baby are also the ones that are most heavily dominated by men—City Light (where 78 percent of those taking parental leave since a new 12-week leave policy went into effect were men, and men make up 70 percent of the workforce), Police (where 88 percent of leave-takers were men, and men make up 72 percent of the workforce), and Fire (where 94 percent of leave-takers were men, and men make up 88 percent of the workforce). Deborah Jaquith, a spokeswoman for the city’s human resources department, says, “We can’t say specifically why there’s a higher proportion of male PPL takers, but you can see how that figure isn’t so surprising in the context of the city’s overall gender imbalances and the imbalances in these departments specifically.”

Some additional theories: Perhaps men in mostly male environments feel that they are unlikely to suffer workplace penalties for taking time off; after all, everyone else is doing it. Conversely, perhaps women in those environments are less likely to take time off precisely because they fear they will be penalized for pregnancy and childbirth in a male-dominated environment. The data don’t say, and the report does not include a survey to find out the specific stories behind the demographics.

As for the fact that women are far more likely than men to take time off to take their kids to the doctor, stay home when a child is sick, or take care of an ailing family member?  Well, women have always borne most of the burden of household responsibilities, and—despite progress in other areas, such as men’s increasing willingness to take paternal leave, which is an important advance toward gender progress—they’re still doing so today.