Tag: KCRHA five-year plan

Responding to Feedback, Skepticism, Homelessness Agency Proposes Modest Changes to Ambitious Five-Year Plan

 

The KCRHA has an ambitious plan to fund and reform the homelessness system over the next five years.

By Erica C. Barnett

After an initial draft of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s Five-Year Plan prompted skeptical responses from local leaders—who questioned the proposal’s multibillion-dollar price tag and ambitious timeline for addressing issues the region has been struggling with for decades—the agency is considering a slate of revisions that aim to address some, but not all, of those concerns. The Five-Year Plan is the document that will guide KCRHA’s budgeting and policy decisions for the next five years.

The staff report, which recommends a total of 78 technical changes, substantive policy updates, and new strategies, will be the basis for the final, revised Five-Year Plan that the KCRHA’s implementation board is set to adopt in April. A subcommittee of that board has agreed to let the agency move forward with all the “technical” changes (including some that are arguably substantive, such as folding in tiny house villages with other types of congregate shelter instead of singling them out for zero funding—more on that in a moment) and plans to focus on the 24 substantive policy changes during its weekly meetings over the coming month.

The draft plan proposes that the region spend $10 billion or more over five years to create more than 18,000 new temporary spaces for people to live, including 7,100 new shelter beds, 3,800 medical respite beds for people with acute health-care needs, 4,700 new safe parking spaces for people living in RVs or their cars, and 2,600 beds for people who need support with addiction recovery. The plan estimates that RV and vehicle parking lots alone will cost almost $200 million over five years.

“The costs associated with this Plan, particularly those identified for increasing housing supply, clearly far exceed any currently available funding in the region,” Bellevue City Manager Brad Miyake wrote in a letter responding to the initial plan. “Further, housing development is beyond the scope of KCRHA’s mission and relies on other housing providers.”

Others objected to what they called an unrealistic timeline. Each strategy in the five-year plan includes a 24-month “action plan,” and many of these action plans call for quick resolution of problems that have persisted for years—establishing a system where anyone can see real-time shelter availability across the region, convincing suburban cities in every part of the county to sign on as funders of the regional homelessness system, and requiring all service providers to pay “liveable wages,” to name a few examples.

One recurring piece of feedback KCRHA staff didn’t include in their is skepticism about the number of “safe parking” spaces the plan would fund—more than 3,100 spaces for passenger vehicles and 1,600 for RVs. Siting even a handful of spaces for RVs has been a nearly insurmountable challenge, and most existing “safe parking” lots for cars are hosted by churches and other private organizations on a temporary basis, each hosting no more than a handful of cars at a time.

Some suburban leaders objected to the plan’s emphasis on non-congregate shelter—an umbrella term for shelter where people sleep semi-privately, instead of sleeping in large rooms—over traditional congregate shelter, which is the most common form of shelter on the Eastside and in South King County. The current plan calls for phasing out all congregate shelters; meanwhile, Bellevue’s long-planned (and much delayed) Eastgate men’s shelter will have its grand opening later this year.

“The Eastside is not seeing a decrease in demand for congregate shelter,” Kirkland City Manager Kurt Triplett wrote in his letter responding to the plan. “Additional temporary housing models would need to come online to address existing need as congregate shelter is phased out. The Plan needs specific strategies for how this shift happens.”

Congregations for the Homeless, which runs Bellevue’s existing men’s shelter, also objected to the plan’s emphasis on non-congregate shelter, noting that the methodology KCRHA used to come up with the plan relies heavily on 180 interviews with people experiencing homelessness that did not directly ask people what kind of shelter they preferred. Instead, the interviews relied on questions like “During this time, what things or people have been helpful to you?” and “What has your experience been like accessing [various types of] services?”

Alexis Mercedes Rinck, KCRHA’s sub-regional planning and equitable engagement director, said the authority has heard cities’ feedback about the need to “maintain the existing spaces that we have,” including congregate shelter, and will be “taking that into account, looking at the local context of very recent local investment into some newer facilities that have been built and are coming online,” like the Bellevue men’s shelter, while focusing on “non-congregate options” in the future.

Those non-congregate options will now include tiny house villages, after persistent lobbying from the Low-Income Housing Institute, which runs most of the tiny house villages in the region. LIHI and other proponents of tiny houses—small, individual shelters clustered in “villages” of several dozen—have objected vociferously to the fact that the Five-Year Plan calls for no new funding for tiny houses, using the same set of 180 interviews to determine that people experiencing homelessness prefer other options.

“Anecdotally, we repeatedly hear from outreach workers that nine out of ten of unsheltered people tell them their first choice is a tiny house,” Lee wrote. “This raises a big question about the plan’s methodology. We understand that to determine the relative needs for different temporary housing models, KCRHA used a sample of 180 individuals, selected from 1000 interviews they conducted during the 2022 point in time count. That means KCRHA based the entire 5-Year Plan for the 53,754 individuals they estimate may become homeless in each of the next five years on one sample of 180 individuals.”

The inclusion of tiny houses with all other types of congregate shelter doesn’t mean KCRHA will actually pay for more of them, though. This year, the agency is re-bidding all of its homeless service provider contracts; according to agency spokeswoman Anne Martens, “we will be doing [requests for proposals] for non-congregate shelter, of which some of those may be tiny houses.”

One recurring piece of feedback KCRHA staff didn’t directly integrate into their revisions is fairly widespread skepticism about the number of “safe parking” spaces the plan would fund on an ongoing basis—a total of more than 3,100 parking spaces for passenger vehicles and 1,600 spaces for RVs. Siting even a handful of spaces for RVs has been a nearly insurmountable challenge, and most existing “safe parking” lots for cars are hosted by churches and other private organizations on a temporary basis, each hosting no more than a handful of cars at a time.

Although the Five-Year Plan categorizes car and RV residency as a type of “temporary housing,” the US Department of Housing and Urban Development classifies it as a type of unsheltered homelessness. In any case, Congregations for the Homeless interim director Steve McGraw wrote, “it is rarely the therapeutic or healthy option—either for the individual or the community. Safe Parking has a place in our tool box of temporary ‘housing’ options, but it should be the last choice to serve people … especially in a time of finite resources, even more so when there are better temporary housing options worthy of funding.”

The inclusion of tiny houses with all other types of congregate shelter doesn’t mean KCRHA will actually pay for more of them, though. This year, the agency is re-bidding all of its homeless service provider contracts; according to agency spokeswoman Anne Martens, “we will be doing [requests for proposals] for non-congregate shelter, of which some of those may be tiny houses.”

One area where there appears to be some general agreement among critics, board members, and the agency itself is that the region’s current approach to winter (and other severe-weather) shelter—a panicked annual rush to open ad hoc shelters in locations that change from season to season—isn’t working. “We know that this on-and-off-again system is really just not working for anybody,” Rinck said. The question is what to do about it.

Some advocates suggested opening winter-only shelters every year, as the city of Seattle did until 2021, instead of “activating” emergency shelters when the weather hits a certain threshold. KCRHA’s proposed changes call for incorporating funds for severe weather shelter into existing contracts and moving toward a “seasonal” rather than ad hoc system; it also includes a new “technical” (but actually substantive) change that would require the agency to ensure adequate staffing at severe weather shelters even when the agency itself shuts down, like the two-week holiday closure that coincided with a major winter storm last December.

However, Rinck noted that even with those changes, the region’s severe weather system will face challenges. “It tends to be in severe weather instances that folks who traditionally don’t come inside, [those with] really complex behavioral health needs and high-acuity folks, will come inside,” Rinck said, and many winter shelters are run by volunteers who “just aren’t trained to be able to meet [their] needs.” This year, Seattle’s main winter shelter, Compass Housing Alliance, decided not to seek a renewal of its contract with KCRHA, a major gap in service that needs attention this year, before the KCRHA can start working on loftier goals like a coordinated regional winter shelter system. 

During recent meetings about the draft five-year plan, KCRHA implementation board members have repeatedly expressed skepticism about the scale and ambition of the plan, worrying that it proposes too many unfunded plans, too fast, and with too little prioritization to represent a real plan that can be implemented in the next five years. Ben Maritz, an affordable housing developer and Bruce Harrell appointee, summarized this perspective at a recent committee meeting. “I  think that the focus needs to shift to what can we do to move people inside as quickly as possible and given that the major barrier to doing that is the availability of emergency housing or shelter, the focus of the plan really should be on trying to stand that up.”

The next virtual-only meeting of the system planning committee will be Tuesday, March 23, from 3 to 5pm; information about how to watch the meeting will be available at some point this week on the KCRHA’s website, where you can also view some (but not, at the time of this publication, the most recent) previous committee meetings.

 

Oversight Board Questions Price Tag, Exclusion of Tiny Houses from Homeless Agency’s Five-Year Plan

The five-year plan includes no new spending on tiny house villages.

By Erica C. Barnett

Members of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority’s governing board, including Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Council homelessness committee chair Andrew Lewis, expressed concerns over the scale and scope of the agency’s draft Five-Year Plan to address homelessness, which calls for 18,000 new shelter beds and parking spots for people living in their vehicles—and an annual price tag in the billions. Currently, the city of Seattle and King County are the authority’s only funders.

We dug into the details of the draft plan on Tuesday.

Harrell, who declined to fund any of the KCRHA’s requests for new programs in last year’s city budget, said he didn’t “see a route to achieve” the full five-year plan, which includes $8.4 billion in capital costs and between $1.7 and $3.4 billion in annual operations and maintenance costs. “That’s almost another city [budget],” he said. Instead, Harrell said, the authority should figure out what it can do with incremental increases of 5 or 10 percent a year and come back with a plan that focuses on responding to the immediate need for emergency shelter. “Maybe it’s there and maybe I’m just not seeing it, but I just want a little more meat there.”

In response to concerns from elected officials, KCRHA CEO Marc Dones the reason the plan zeroes out tiny houses is that “the modeling calls for fewer modular shelters than we currently have—it’s just math.”

Lewis echoed Harrell’s comments, saying he’d like to see a “price tag that is more within existing norms that can be nimble, responsive, and bring the kind of response we’re hearing from the public that they want to see … like hotel/motel acquisition, tiny homes, and pallet shelters that can be scaled with urgency and scaled more achievably within existing resources to mitigate those most significant encampments that are rightly causing significant community consternation.”

While the city declined to fund the KCRHA’s budget requests last year, they did pay for new emergency shelters and tiny houses, a type of shelter Dones has singled out for criticism for years. The agency’s five-year plan includes additional funding for every existing shelter type except tiny house villages, which are featured in a chart showing “$0” across the board.

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In response to questions from Seattle Councilmember Lisa Herbold, who noted that the five-year plan actually shows a 55-bed reduction in tiny house village spots, Dones said the reason the plan zeroes out tiny houses is that “the modeling calls for fewer modular shelters than we currently have—it’s just math.” As we reported last week, the KCRHA determined how much of each type of shelter the region needs based largely on interviews with 180 people experiencing homelessness about their needs; they did not ask any questions about specific shelter types. Dones said even though the plan shows an overall reduction in tiny houses, “we would not look to pull funding out of the existing THV stock or what has been funded in order to make the numbers and the math” match up with actual shelters on the ground.

The governing board isn’t scheduled to meet again until April, when they’re supposed to vote to approve the five-year plan. King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci and Herbold both questioned this timeline, saying they’d like an opportunity to review the final version and discuss it again publicly before voting to approve it. The authority is up against an 18-month deadline to approve the plan, which was originally supposed to be out last fall. The board— whose job is to sign off on the plan as approved by a separate implementation board, not to amend it—agreed to tentatively add one additional meeting in May to take a final vote on the plan.