Tonight, the Seattle Housing Authority is kicking off the first of five public meetings on its proposal to radically change the way it charges rent for tenants deemed “work-able.” Rather than requiring residents to pay 30 percent of their income, as SHA has done for years, the organization wants to implement a sharply escalating rent schedule. In six years, tenants would pay $970 a month for a three-bedroom, according to details about the “Stepping Forward” proposal on SHA’s website.
SHA executive director Andrew Lofton says this is the best way the agency could think of to raise revenues in order to help more people. The extra money would be used to pay for job evaluation and training for its residents, with an eye to getting them higher paying jobs that would allow them to move out of public housing. Then others could move in.
There’s no question about the need for SHA to serve more people. The agency’s waiting list for public housing runs to 9,000, according to Lofton. The agency also administers the Section 8 program, which provides vouchers for private housing. Twenty-four thousand people are on that waiting list. But is this the best way to help those people? Critics think not.
“No other housing authority in the country has implemented a policy like Stepping Forward,” says a press release issued today by the Tenants Union, which is supporting a group of unhappy SHA residents who are holding a rally before a second public meeting tomorrow. The release also warns that the plan “will ultimately lead to evictions and displace SHA’s most marginalized residents.”
Deputy Mayor Hyeok Kim is scheduled to appear at the rally. Her boss, Ed Murray, has already written a three-page letter outlining his objection to the plan, which he wrote would have a “disproportionate impact on women and families of color, in particular immigrant and refugee families.” SHA is counting on its residents finding better-paying jobs, but the mayor questions how realistic that is given that 69 percent of the households that would be affected are headed by people whose primary language is not English.
Of course it’s not just non-English speakers that might have trouble paying vastly higher rents. Another planned speaker is Sylvia Sabon, who works two-part-time receptionist jobs while raising a grandchild, according to an interview with KIRO TV. She earns about $12-a-hour.
Asked during a phone interview today about these concerns, Lofton says that’s he’s confident that the partners SHA has chosen to work with—including the community college system and the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County—”will come up with ways that will be most effective to serve this population.” But he’s vague about what those ways could be, referring me to those those organizations.
One can’t help thinking that SHA is engaging in wishful thinking, hoping without precedent or concrete strategies that their plan will work. And what if it doesn’t? What if residents can’t, in fact, find the higher-paying jobs they need to afford the new rents? While Lofton says that SHA will develop a “hardship policy” for exceptional cases, he concedes that some tenants may be forced out. Those people, he rationalizes, would be no worse off than the thousands of people now on the waiting list.
Perhaps, but at a time of rampant gentrification [see our Boomtown Brawls cover story], the eviction of more people due to escalating rents, and from housing that’s supposed to be the city’s safety net, seems alarming.
The ultimate decision on the proposal rests with the SHA’s board of commissioners. No date has yet been set for the vote.
