#RegionalApproach
Seattle and King County elected officials are right: we desperately need a regional, collaborative, and coordinated response to the homelessness emergency facing our area. We all see the result of a combination of underfunding human infrastructure, inadequate housing supply and diversity for all income levels, institutional racism, and widening economic inequality. It is a travesty that families are living in cars. It is a travesty that people living with untreated mental illness are sleeping in doorways. It is a travesty that our region has continued to spin wheels rather than make the big investments and systemic change to reverse this crisis.
Personally, I have long been a fan of a regional approach to this issue. The concept that any city can “go it alone” on all things is, in my view, patently false. The City of Seattle can and does do big things, but at the end of the day, there is only so much money that our city can raise, and it is nowhere near enough to meet the need in capital and operations costs to reduce the amount of our neighbors living outdoors to effectively zero. So, in 2018 while working for Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, I was excited when I learned that Mayor Jenny Durkan, Executive Dow Constantine, and Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus were creating One Table, and that CM Mosqueda would be part of this group.
Representing her office, I confess that I was elated in early meetings to find so many people in agreement on some of the basic tenets of how we could move systemic change. Not only looking at the symptom (homelessness), but also a thirst to identify upstream approaches to address racial inequities in access to housing and jobs, zoning that contributes to increasing costs of housing, land use decisions that discourage or disallow supportive housing and emergency services – we had deep and tough discussions about what steps could and must be taken to effectively reduce homelessness in King County.
Also inspiring: it wasn’t just politicians and aides. Business groups, philanthropic organizations, healthcare providers, Labor Unions, people with lived experience, frontline workers, and more, were all working collaboratively to find where we had alignment. To use a phrase repeated by my friend Councilmember Sally Bagshaw, we wanted to move boulders, not pebbles.
There was also the concurrent extensive engagement with stakeholders by Marc Dones and their team, which culminated in the National Innovation Services report, and the recommendation to form a regional agency with an arm’s length from politics, focused on transformational change to our homelessness response. Leading with strategies that are proven to work, creating flexibility for prevention, and joining the County and City teams so they were working together in a streamlined fashion all make sense.
It is with this frame of reference that I confess myself disappointed with what the Regional Policy Committee has presented as an alternative to plan unveiled by Mayor Durkan and Executive Constantine in September. This new proposal as presented to the Seattle City Council is a bad deal – it’s bad for taxpayers, it’s bad for businesses, it’s bad for neighborhoods, and it’s bad for our community members living outdoors or facing housing instability.
A Bad Deal for Taxpayers
With an initial budget of $132 million, the City of Seattle is expected to contribute $75 million to this new proposed agency, with King County funding the remaining $57 million. As of now, no other city in King County will directly contribute. As reported by Sydney Brownstone in the Seattle Times, other cities in King County feel this is fine because “their constituents also fund King County’s budget.” While this may be true, so does Seattle.
When looking specifically at funding sources, it appears most likely that King County’s contribution will come from revenue generated by property taxes. This issue was indirectly raised during the Employee Hours Tax discussion in 2018, with Councilmember Bagshaw pointing to a memo I wrote to highlight the disparity in homelessness response funding on a proportional basis in light of the Chamber’s McKinsey Report being released to the public. Notably, while Seattle makes up about 1/3 of King County’s population, our city makes up just over 40% of King County’s assessed value. One can readily infer that Seattle residents and businesses will be picking up 40% of that $57 million from the County. Or, as stated during public comment by Shaun Van Eyk of Protec17, this proposal has the City of Seattle footing nearly 75% of the bill, while City representatives may well be limited to 25% of the Board.
A Bad Deal for Businesses
During the EHT discussions, there was also the question raised as to what the “right” percentage of the city’s budget should come from businesses vs. residents. While we did not have the time or data to incorporate all taxes collected in the City of Seattle, we were able to get to a rough estimate that businesses pay about half of all taxes collected in the city. This is in large part due to Seattle having a Business & Occupation Tax. While we’re not alone in King County (Bellevue, Renton, Lake Forest Park, and a few other municipalities also have a B&O tax), ours is the highest rate with one of the lowest thresholds (the lowest for a city with a population of 50,000 or more).
With the assertion from suburban cities that they never should be expected to implement or increase taxes to pay for homelessness response, the effect is that Seattle businesses – both large and small – will further subsidize and be disadvantaged under this proposal as presented. Expecting such a large contribution from Seattle without any meaningful contribution directly from other cities means our B&O dollars that could be going toward economic development, transportation infrastructure, and more, instead will be backfilling federal cuts and an unwillingness to reach any sort of tax parity or equity from other cities.
A Bad Deal for Seattle Neighborhoods
All residents deserve to feel safe in their communities. Regardless of whether you believe fears of unsanctioned encampments are justified, the fear exists. The best way to alleviate that fear is to eliminate the need for unsanctioned encampments through evidence-based strategies.
The Third Door Coalition has pointed out time and again that we know what works to solve chronic homelessness – Permanent Supportive Housing. By rejecting a requirement for evidence-based solutions, and including so-called sub-area rules allowing jurisdictions to determine for themselves how they will spend Seattle’s tax dollars, this plan is a recipe for a continuation of cities busing people living outdoors to Seattle, increasing the number of unsanctioned encampments while continuing to lag in making the much-needed investments in supportive housing and emergency rental assistance, among other programs. This has been borne out as recently as this past February when Federal Way, instead of opening civic buildings for emergency shelter purposes, gave bus tickets ostensibly to send folks without shelter to Seattle and Tacoma, exacerbating our already overwhelming crises.
Bellevue City Councilmember John Stokes has derided our city, stating that we have had and “inability…over a substantial time period to actually deal with this issue in a productive way…” This is quite the statement given Bellevue’s ongoing struggles to open emergency shelter, and is wrong. It completely ignores the wildly successful efforts of programs funded through the Seattle Housing Levy. The fact is Seattle is doing an amazing job for those that we can help. The regional failure has instead been fueled in large part by a lack of adequate funding.
A Bad Deal for our Community Members Experiencing Homelessness
During the last One Table meeting, Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus gave remarks, and in those embraced programs that force people seeking help to perform manual labor without pay in order to get that help – be it food or shelter. The most polite way I can describe this is draconian.
That this proposal does not require programs funded to be evidence-based or data-driven is troubling. That it is designed to specifically allow politicians without subject matter expertise to overrule experts is dangerous. A system that takes Seattle dollars and is designed to make life harder for some of the most vulnerable in our county, that puts politics ahead of smart policy, is a system designed to fail those it claims to want to help.
Seattle voters flatly rejected this approach this past November, electing – in most cases by wide margins – candidates who embraced Housing First, rejected criminalization of extreme poverty, and advocated for investing in human infrastructure that benefits all residents in our community. This proposal flips the script, and instead gives extra power to municipalities who refuse to pay directly, and who have routinely exhibited a distrust of evidence-based policies. If Seattle were to join in this current proposal, it will effectively endorse using our tax dollars to fund policies that are rooted in fear, proven to be ineffective by data, and will harm people living outdoors.
We should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The result of that approach too often means detrimental results for the most vulnerable in our communities. The unfortunate reality, however, is that this proposal fails to live up to being “good.”
I applaud Mayor Durkan and Councilmember Bagshaw for their work to move toward a coordinated, regional approach to reducing homelessness. Having worked with Councilmember Bagshaw on these issues for years, I know her to be tireless in her dedication to getting people out of tents into homes.
But this proposal raises too many concerns to be adopted as-is. This is not the direction the City has been working on for years, and is not the direction voters have made clear they want our city to go. Not only does this proposal inject more politics into homelessness, it does so with values not shared by our city while using our tax dollars to fund overly-harsh approaches.
Whether this proposal can be fixed remains to be seen. I know many of the people working on this in our city, and they are some of the best and brightest I have had the pleasure of working with. For the sake of our communities, I hope they can turn this into a regional plan that is a better deal for everyone involved. We deserve no less.
But time is short. If the City Council is unable to make the amendments necessary to protect the residents, businesses, and values of our city before the final vote on Monday, then this proposal should be voted down. The alternative would be nothing short of an abdication of the responsibility of our elected officials to put best practices first, and to exhibit the accountability Seattle voters expect.