Tag: shelter

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Proposed Changes to Wilson’s Shelter Plan Include Shelter-Free “Buffer” Zones, Mandatory Security

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmembers Maritza Rivera and Joy Hollingsworth proposed amendments to Mayor Katie Wilson’s ambitious shelter proposal that would mandate 24-hour security and buffer zones around parks, schools, and child care centers where large new “transitional encampments,” a term that primarily refers to tiny house villages, won’t be allowed. (Seattle has had a few actual temporary encampments, but Wilson’s plan centers around tiny house villages rather than tents).

Last month, Wilson introduced a legislative package that would make it easier to site and build larger tiny house villages. The council’s land use committee is considering the part of her proposal that increases the maximum “shelter census” from 100 to 150 people in most areas, plus a potential 250-person shelter somewhere in the city.

Hollingsworth sponsored the amendments that would impose security mandates and no-shelter zones because Rivera isn’t on the land use committee.

The first of the two Rivera-Hollingsworth amendments, which would both apply to shelters that serve more than 100 people would require the presence of “identifiable security personnel” on site 24 hours a day. The second would prohibit new tiny house villages within  750 feet of all child care centers, schools, and playgrounds, and within 500 feet of most city parks. (Small “pocket parks” under 2 acres would be exempt).

It’s unclear how much of the city would be automatically off-limits under this expansive prohibition. Using an online GIS map creator, I drew a 750-foot radius around every public school in the city as well as a couple dozen child care facilities in a large swath of Hollingsworth’s district. (Child care facilities in private homes don’t count as child care facilities under city code, according to a council staffer.)

Not indicated on the map are the park buffer zones, which would extend 500 feet in each direction from midsize or larger park, and park playgrounds, which would be subject to the 750-foot buffer zone.

Under the amendment, sober shelters and those “that are exclusively for families with children” would be allowed inside the buffer zones. The council expressed its “intent,” in legislation that released funds for Wilson’s initial shelter push, for two of the new shelters to be limited to families with children and one to people in recovery from addiction.

The proposed changes were just two of seven proposed amendments to the original bill, sponsored by Councilmember Dionne Foster.  Another amendment, from Councilmember Dan Strauss, would require tiny house providers to separate the new, larger villages into fenced-off “neighborhoods” whose residents would be physically restricted from entering each other’s area.

A fourth, from Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck, would require the new, larger villages to have at least two shelter staff on site 24 hours a day. Other amendments would require good neighbor agreements and public safety plans and request a 1-to-15 staff-to-resident ratios for shelters serving people with high-acuity behavioral health conditions..

Rivera, speaking in favor of her proposal to establish no-shelter zones, said she was trying to protect children from dangerous people who might live at the new tiny house villages. “We know that for shelters that are not sober … there might be drug dealing and other public safety issues, and we don’t want near that near children,” Rivera said. Then, conflating unmanaged encampments with managed shelter, she continued, “I know we’ve had issues with encampments at our major parks.”

Rivera also attempted to link tiny house villages to a recent gunfire incident near a press conference Mayor Wilson held to announce new education and child care investments. “Everybody knows by now that there was a shooting and shots were fired … right into the Yesler Community Center,” Rivera said. “So I’m not saying shots are going to be fired outside of these sanctioned shelters. But again, we cannot say that there won’t be drug dealing outside of these shelters or attempting to be done outside of these shelters, and so we need to make sure that we’re keeping our kids safe.”

Hollingsworth and Rivera introduced their security and buffer zone amendments at the last minute, so the only copies consisted of physical printouts in council chambers. The committee didn’t vote on Tuesday; they’ll meet at least one more time next week before pushing the bill forward to a full council vote.

City Council, Courts, homelessness, King County, Mayor Wilson

City Pays $750,000 In SPD Discrimination Suit, Council Queues Up Questions on Mayor’s Shelter Plan, King County Employees Push Back on In-Office Mandate
King County’s beautiful Brutalist Administration Building, closed since the pandemic. Photo by Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

1. The city of Seattle finalized a settlement last week with Seattle police officer Denise “Cookie” Bouldin, a longtime officer who sued the department in 2023, alleging gender and racial discrimination. Bouldin will receive $750,000 in an agreement that also requires her not to sue the city again over the same claims.

SPD has settled a number of discrimination lawsuits in recent years, for amounts ranging from around $200,000 (paid to SPD sergeant John O’Neil, who was himself the subject of multiple discrimination complaints) to $3 million (paid to police captain Deanna Nollette, who claimed former chief Adrian Diaz discriminated and retaliated against her by demoting her and moving her to overnight duty after she alleged discrimination.

Bouldin, best known for her chess club for students in Rainier Beach, claimed in her lawsuit that her fellow officers and SPD officials subjected her to “race and gender discrimination on a daily basis that had “been ongoing and continuous throughout her entire career.” Among other allegations, Bouldin said SPD staff refused to give her a parking pass, mishandled her personal property, and retaliated against her when she complained about officers who allowed their dogs to “roam around” SPD’s south precinct.

The size of the settlement is unclear. Bouldin’s attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.

The City Attorney’s office would not say how much the settlement was for. In the initial tort claim that preceded the lawsuit, Bouldin sought $10 million from the city, according to media reports.

In a statement, City Attorney Erika Evans said Bouldin “is a pioneer at the Seattle Police Department who has been a beloved and deeply trusted presence in our community for decades. The City is thankful this case was able to resolve.”

2. The city council is poised to consider legislation that would make it easier for the city to site and build tiny house villages, but the three bills—sent down by Mayor Katie Wilson without prior conversation with council members or staff—will likely face scrutiny.

Two of the proposals—one that would provide about $5 million in funding for future tiny house villages, and another that would allow the city itself to lease and prepare land for shelters—do not have committee assignments yet. The other, which would increase the maximum size of tiny house villages from 100 people to as many as 250, is sponsored by Councilmember Dionne Foster and will be heard in Councilmember Eddie Lin’s land use committee.

It isn’t the cost of the proposal itself that’s currently raising eyebrows on the council: Most of the funding would come out of this year’s budget, which already includes money for shelter that can be used to build out the first set of 500 beds Wilson wants to add before the World Cup games in June.

Instead, councilmembers are raising questions about the size of the potential shelters (there’s a big difference between 25 to 50 tiny house units and hundreds), the fact that Wilson seems committed to tiny houses, specifically (Jon Grant, her chief homelessness advisor, worked at the city’s main tiny house village provider, the Low Income Housing Institute, immediately before joining Wilson’s office), and the level of services the new shelters will be able to provide for an average cost of $28,000, which is less than existing shelters that provide 24/7 on-site staff and wraparound support for chronically homeless people.

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Behind the scenes, councilmembers have grumbled that Wilson didn’t work with them before dropping her legislation in an announcement that only Rob Saka, whose district includes SoDo and other areas with a large number of unsanctioned encampments and RVs, attended.

3. By June, most King County employees will be required to work from physical offices three days a week, and many employees are pushing back. (Seattle also has varying in-office mandates that we’ve covered extensively.) Editor’s note: This sentence has been corrected to reflect that June, not March 30, is the general deadline for Return To Office. According to the county executive’s office, different departments are implementing the new mandate on different timelines.

In a recent internal newsletter, King County Executive Girmay Zahilay expressed his “commitment to building a Better Government includes listening to staff and empowering you to identify challenges and bring forward solutions” [emphasis in original]. Some county employees, taking him at his word, used the newsletter as a forum to express their frustration with the mandate.

King County covers more than 2,100 square miles, and many King County staffers do not live in or near Seattle, where the county’s central office space is located. Several noted that their jobs require them to go to far-flung locations; forcing them to commute to an office downtown will mean sitting in a cubicle and attending meetings remotely instead, they argued.

A number of staffers said the return-to-office mandate takes away valuable family and leisure time, contributes to stress and demoralization, and costs real money. “As a blanket and rigid policy, it disproportionately harms parents and caregivers who must secure new, costly childcare to cover mandated office days,” one staffer wrote. “It places the greatest strain on lower-wage workers and especially single working parents. The mandate forces parents to spend less time with their children, so they can sit in a cubicle alone with a headset, taking the same Teams calls they would at home. It forces employees to budget for new expenses (childcare, gas, parking, etc.) in a burgeoning recession when gas, groceries, and utility prices are on the rise.”

“Many staff moved to more affordable housing when positions were fully remote. That is how many of us are surviving,” another staffer wrote. “The long-term effects of this lowered productivity will negatively impact the work we do and the providers we support.”

Several staffers raised concerns about crowding in the county’s downtown office spaces, including King Street Center and the Chinook Building. The county scaled back on office space during the pandemic, and is now scrambling to find places for workers to sit. One staffer from the Department of Public Defense said staffers will now be forced to conduct client interviews from offices where three desks have been crammed into spaces built for one, compromising confidentiality in the name of “boots on the ground” and office camaraderie.

Asked about the employees’ concerns, Zahilay spokeswoman Callie Craighead said the executive wasn’t taking a “one-size-fits-all approach” and has, for example, allowed employees to meet their return-to-office requirements by working from county offices outside downtown Seattle. “Departments are currently developing plans to meet the three-day in-office expectation while continuing to preserve telework flexibility where possible,” Craighead said. “This includes coordinating in-office schedules and using existing space creatively.”

Responding to concerns about new expenses and the need for work-life balance, Craighead said, “The Executive recognizes that employees are balancing many considerations, including commute times and family responsibilities. As the father of a newborn and a toddler, he understands firsthand how important flexibility is for working families. His goal is to strike a thoughtful balance between maintaining the flexibility we value and strengthening in-person collaboration so the County can continue delivering strong results for residents.”

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Wilson’s “Path to 500” New Shelter Beds: $17.5 Million, With First Units Opening In April
The Wilson Administration’s ambitious schedule for opening up 500 new shelter beds.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Monday, the Seattle City Council got its first, partial look at Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to build 500 new shelter units by the end of May, and 1,000 before 2027. The mayor’s office is waiting until later this month to announce the sites they’ve identified for the first few new tiny house villages, so the briefing was mostly an opportunity for the council to ask questions about the proposal—including how much new money it will require, how the mayor’s office plans to get buy-in from neighborhood residents, and why the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), which manages the region’s shelter contracts, has been effectively cut out of the proposal.

The biggest news to come out of the briefing was the total estimated price tag for the first 500 units. According to city Budget Director Aly Pennucci, the mayor’s office has identified about $17.5 million to pay for the first 500 units. That number includes$4.8 million Wilson’s team previously identified from an underutilized Community Development Block Grant revolving loan  ($3.3 million) and unused funds from a downtown development fee program dating back to the 1980s ($1.5 million), plus shelter funding from the city’s 2026 budget that hasn’t been spent yet. The average annual operating cost for each new shelter unit, according to Pennucci, will be around $28,000 for each new shelterbed.

That number is be lower than the cost of tiny house villages that feature the range of services, including case management, meals, and 24/7 on-site staff, that Wilson said would be among distinguishing features of the new shelters. For instance, the city allocated $5.9 million to the Low Income Housing Institute to add about 100 new tiny houses last year.

According to the mayor’s office, the $28,000 figure assumes that some shelters will cost less than the ones serving “high-acuity” clients, while some will cost more. In addition, some that are located on publicly owned land may end up paying essentially no rent, if the city can work out a deal with the owners.

At the same time, the legislation would allow the city to lease land at market rate, opening up more potential sites at a higher cost.

“We know that without services, these shelters are not successful, [and] because the people who cause the most disorder and have the highest impact on our community are people who have high needs and high acuity, we know we need 24/7 staffing,” Wilson’s chief of staff Kate Kreuzer said. “We want case management. We want integrated behavioral health support, so that when people come inside, they have the services they need, and then that is getting them on a pathway to housing.”

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In addition to a bill that would allocate the $4.8 million, Wilson’s office sent legislation to the council that would allow the city’s Human Service Department to select shelter providers directly and allow the department of Finance and Administrative Services to lease the property for new shelters itself. If it’s approved, this streamlined procedure would sidestep the KCRHA and bypass the usual 9- to-12-month process for siting shelters, which includes a competitive bidding process and requires providers to negotiate their own leases, permitting, and site preparation.

Nicole Vallestero-Soper, Wilson’s director of policy and innovation, said the first shelters could open as soon as next month. Wilson’s land use bills will likely go through Councilmember Eddie Lin’s land use committee, and the financing will probably go through Dan Strauss’ budget committee.

Councilmember Bob Kettle, seeming to conflate “housing first” with tiny house villages, said he supported the idea of “housing first” if it was a “photo finish with wraparound services” that would not include the kind of “actions that really allow [unsheltered people] to not be ready” to come inside. (Wilson’s plan is more “shelter-first” than “housing first,” in that it consists mostly of new shelter, not rapid rehousing for chronically homeless individuals).

“I really think that the services piece is key, and then setting [people] up for success is the encouragement piece, as opposed to making it easier to stay outside, for example, because there’s a lot of service-resistant folks,” Kettle said. Service providers generally reject the notion that unsheltered people are “service-resistant” or that people live outdoors because it’s “easy,” arguing that there are valid reasons people avoid shelter and services that have failed before, such as shelters that prohibit pets and programs that kick people out for failing to maintain sobriety.

As we reported earlier this month, Wilson’s office did not preview the shelter proposal for the council or secure support in advance, which has been the practice with previous administrations. According to Lin’s office, he has outstanding questions about how the Wilson administration plans to rapidly scale up shelter, how the mayor’s office will measure success, and what role the city will play in engaging with the people living near new shelter sites.

Mayor Wilson, Seattle Nice

Mayor Katie Wilson: “If We Turned Off the Cameras, It Would Become More Difficult to Solve Many Crimes”

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Nice went in-depth with Mayor Katie Wilson this week, in a packed interview about her first six weeks in office. Supporters who have been disappointed by her lack of decisive action on police surveillance cameras will definitely want to tune in, as will those who are interested in how she plans to add 1,000 units of shelter by the end of this year.

This must-listen interview is full of newsworthy moments, including Wilson’s confirmation that the city’s approach to encampments has not changed since last year, when her pro-sweeps predecessor Bruce Harrell was in office.

Wilson recently paused an encampment removal in Ballard so that five people living there could get into housing—an achievement Wilson mentioned in her State of the City speech this week. But that outcome isn’t one the city can easily replicate—a permanent supportive housing provider, DESC, had just opened a new building nearby and had a few vacant spaces, which won’t be the situation during future sweeps. And very little of this type of housing is in the development pipeline.

Wilson acknowledged that it’s “absolutely true that this is not something that we are going to be able to repeat again and again and again, and that is really because of the lack of availability of emergency housing and shelter with services that match people’s needs.” Which, she said, “is precisely why a very, very high priority for my administration is working to open up new emergency housing and shelter, and we have aggressive goals for that this year.

In the meantime, Wilson added, “we’re not going to be able to make earth-shattering changes to the way that the Unified Care Team operates.”

Wilson also confirmed that the city is continuing to use the “encampment scoring system” Harrell implemented shortly after taking office—a fairly inflexible rubric that doesn’t account for conditions at individual encampments, such as whether the people living there are at the top of a wait list for housing.

We also pressed the mayor on her equivocal comments about police surveillance cameras, which police claim are necessary to solve crimes, including homicides. On the campaign trail, Wilson strongly suggested she opposed this kind of always-on police surveillance, and would not support installing new cameras in the two additional neighborhoods where they’ve been approved.

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During our conversation, though, Wilson repeated talking points from the Seattle Police Department about clearance rates and crime, arguing that cameras have helped police solve more crimes than before the cameras were installed.

The cameras, Wilson noted, only cover 1 percent of the city where about 20 percent of crime occurs (a talking point that may be familiar to Seattle Nice listeners, since Sandeep used it to justify the cameras during our conversation with City Councilmember Dionne Foster two weeks ago). Wilson said she still has concerns “around the potential misuse of our CCTV camera cameras and the possibility that that data could get into the wrong hands and be abused to target vulnerable populations,” but she’s weighing that against what she sees as compelling evidence that the cameras help solve crimes and may even prevent racial profiling.

“I think it is fair to say that if we turned off the cameras, it would become more difficult to solve many crimes, including some violent crimes and homicides, and some might not get solved,” Wilson told us.

We also talked about the conflict between funding shelter and funding housing at a time of federal budget cuts and local budget deficits; Wilson’s citywide renter survey; and how she plans to tackle “open-air drug markets” in neighborhoods like Little Saigon.

homelessness, land use, Mayor Harrell, zoning

At Most, 11 Percent of Encampment Residents End Up Sheltered After Sweeps; City Could Bring Back Neighborhood Corner Stores

1. The city’s Unified Care Team, which removes homeless encampments and informs their displaced residents about open shelter beds, “extended a total of 1,830 offers of shelter” between July and September 2023, converting 587 of those offers into “referrals” to specific shelters, according to a report released earlier this month. Of those referrals, according to the report, only 209 people, or just over 11 percent of the people who received shelter “offers,” actually showed up at a shelter and stayed for at least one night. (This number, the report notes, could be a slight undercount due to incomplete data.)

This means that almost nine in ten people the UCT contacted prior to encampment sweeps did not end up in any form of shelter—a decline from the UCT’s previous report, which showed a 15 percent shelter enrollment rate. The UCT (which includes the Human Services Department’s team of outreach workers) does not make contact with everyone at an encampment, so the official numbers don’t include people who move elsewhere before a sweep or don’t engage with city workers for other reasons, such as a lack of outreach or because they know they don’t want to move into congregate shelter.

The city’s “One Seattle Homelessness Action Plan” website includes the UCT’s offer and referral numbers, but not the much lower number of people who actually ended up in shelter.

The numbers show some geographic differences, and includes some of the reasons people gave for declining the UCT’s offers of shelter. The highest shelter acceptance and enrollment rates were in Northwest Seattle, and the lowest were in West Seattle and the center city, which includes downtown and Capitol Hill. In West Seattle, just 4 percent of people who received shelter offers ended up going to shelter (largely because only 11 percent accepted these offers), while just 8 percent ended up in shelter in central Seattle. Mayor Bruce Harrell has focused a huge amount of attention on “reopening” downtown Seattle, which has included swiftly removing encampments or tents that pop up in the area.

When asked why they didn’t accept a shelter offer, most people told the UCT they didn’t want the specific bed they were being offered. Often, the data indicates, this was because they were only offered an “enhanced shelter bed”—a term that encompasses group shelters that are open 24 hours and offer services—rather than permanent housing or a spot in a tiny house village. Others said they wanted to stay with their partners, family members, or pets; didn’t want to relinquish the car or RV where they were living; or didn’t find the shelter location acceptable. The UCT does not offer transportation to shelter, which may be far away from the communities where unsheltered people live.

The UCT is required to produce quarterly reports on their work under a statement of legislative intent imposed by the City Council in 2022. The council imposed a similar requirement for next year as part of its 2024 budget.

2. As Josh reported in his column last week, Seattle doesn’t have a program to activate or site corner retail in residential areas—yet.

According to Office of Planning Construction and Development director Nathan Torgelson, OPCD is “considering allowing corner stores in [neighborhood residential] zones as part of the Comprehensive Plan Update process.” Torgelson is referring to the city’s Environmental Impact Statement Scoping Report, released last November, which outlined potential policy and zoning changes that should be studied in advance of considering alternatives for Seattle’s 2024 Comprehensive Plan update. The comp plan is a document that guides future growth across the city over a 20-year time span; the plan undergoes a “major” update every eight years.

On its final pages, the 29-page scoping document says that in order to “support City goals such as allowing more people to walk or bike to everyday needs,” the city could consider “Allowing more flexibility for commercial uses such as more retail on arterial streets, home businesses, and corner stores in certain areas” and “Combining the multifamily and mixed-use/commercial designations on the Comprehensive Plan’s Future Land Use Map categories to reflect that commercial space may be reasonable in a wider variety of areas.”

As we’ve reported, the release date for the EIS has been pushed back repeatedly, so there’s no word yet about any substantive corner store proposal.

As Josh noted, Spokane’s planning department identified 95 spaces, including in residential areas, that could be converted to retail. This fall, Vancouver, BC’s planning department surveyed the public in a proactive corner store push to “gather feedback on how residents feel about corner stores and potential opportunities for expanding uses, locations, and building types.”

—Erica C. Barnett, Josh Feit

homelessness

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

By Erica C. Barnett

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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