After a turbulent and acrimonious two years on the Seattle City Light-owned lot off NE Northlake Way, just north of Ivar’s, the Northlake Tiny House Village will be emptied and de-commissioned as of December 31.
In a letter addressed to Sharon Lee, the executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI, the city-recognized managers of the village), and delivered to the village and the Northlake Community Advisory Council (on which I serve), Adrienne Easter, Manager of Homeless Investments for the City of Seattle Human Services Department (HSD), wrote that the “The City of Seattle will not be renewing the contract for Northlake Village in 2020 and will end the contract for Northlake Village per the current contract date of December 31, 2019.”
Before I go any further, I want to be clear: by “turbulent and acrimonious”, I am referring only to relationship between the city, LIHI and the village. The village and its residents have resided with peace and respect in the Wallingford community throughout. The closest businesses to the village, Dunn Lumber and Ivar’s, have both been supportive of the village, and I’ve heard nothing but positive reactions about Wallingford residents’ interactions with the villagers (sometimes called “Nickelodeons”).
The decision comes after months of deadlock between HSD and LIHI on one side, and Nickelsville and the village residents on the other. For the past several months, the residents of the community, led by the Nickelsville staff, have padlocked the gates and refused LIHI staff entry to the village, and have declined repeated requests from HSD staff to visit the village.
When originally chartered by HSD, the tiny house village that now resides at Northlake (previously Ballard) was to be operated by LIHI and managed by Nickelsville, a small non-profit staffed by activists and veterans of the battles around homeless encampments that began under Mayor Greg Nickels. Within that, the village was to follow a “self-management” model, electing staff (e.g., Head of Security, Community Relations) from the residents. Camp residents were required to attend weekly camp meetings at which votes on key decisions were held and to abide by a no drugs, no alcohol, no violence on premises policy.
Nickelsville, a 501(c)3, has only one part-time paid staff member and three volunteer staff members. While it nominally has a board, in the two years I have worked with them and witnessed the escalations and battles they’ve waged with the city and with LIHI, I have never heard any mention of board involvement or guidance. LIHI is a much larger organization, which owns and/or manages over 2,200 housing units at 60 sites in six counties, as well as the Urban Rest Stop hygiene facilities.
One bone of contention between the organizations has been “bars”, the temporary or permanent ejection of residents for rule infractions. Nickelsville advocated for a resident-led process that allowed for the village to eject people immediately for rule-breaking infractions. LIHI and HSD were concerned that residents may have been ejected for improper reasons, and were being put out on the street without shelter, sometimes late at night.
Honestly, though, this is just one tiny drop in the bucket of their disagreements. Both organizations have been trading charges and counter-charges for as long as I have been involved. Nickelsville has accused LIHI case managers of misconduct. LIHI has accused Nickelsville of refusal to allow exterminators to enter to perform bedbug control. Nickelsville has accused LIHI of failure to provide promised hygiene supplies. LIHI has accused Nickelsville of ejecting residents for political reasons.
Back and forth it has gone, until finally, on March 29, 2019, LIHI delivered a letter informing all involved that, with HSD’s blessing, it was severing its relationship with Nickelsville and would operate the Northlake village without their involvement. Nickelsville staff were ordered to turn over all documents and equipment related to the village and to vacate the premises.
It’s unclear what LIHI thought the response to this would be, but needless to say, it didn’t go over well. Nickelsville staff, on-site and close to the residents, supported and encouraged the residents in resisting Nickelsville’s removal from management. The residents padlocked the gate and issued angry declarations, insisting that LIHI staff was not allowed on-site at the village they were chartered by the city to operate.
For months, this deadlock held. Despite having its staff barred from the village itself, LIHI continued to deliver basic supplies, paid for utilities (from funding provided by HSD) and offered to coordinate bedbug extermination. For the earlier period of the dispute, LIHI continued to provide case management services, offering to help residents find permanent housing, employment and other necessities. However, after several angry confrontations with residents, LIHI’s case manager, Will Uhlig, refused to return (although he continued to work with a small number of residents offsite). Will was himself a replacement for Shelby Henkel, who was made unwelcome by the residents last year.
Finally, at the September 2019 meeting of Northlake Villages Community Advisory Council (CAC), HSD made clear that if LIHI and HSD were not allowed to come onsite to the village and talk directly to the residents by October 7, they should expect the village to be closed. Nickelsville and the villagers stock response was that they would meet with HSD but not with LIHI present, and only at a third location, not the village itself.
The village residents said at that meeting that a vote was scheduled for the following Monday to decide whether to allow HSD and LIHI to come on-site, but by this Tuesday, October 29th, they had still not relented, and HSD dropped the axe.
Northlake terminationIn crafting the letter, HSD frames the decision as a termination of their contract with LIHI, noting that “per the original performance improvement plan, Northlake Village is out of compliance and needed to correct the following items required by contract…”, but also makes clear that the failure of LIHI to meet contractual obligations was “due to Nickelsville’s interference”.
On Tuesday night, LIHI, HSD, Nickelsville, the CAC and village residents met at the monthly public CAC meeting, held in the library of the John Stanford School. Summarizing a letter that she had delivered earlier that day, Adrienne Easter reported
We’ve made the decision that we will not be moved forward with the contract in 2020 for Northlake. And what that means is that the city will be working with LIHI in the next couple of weeks…we have scheduled where we’re going to come out the village, on Monday, November 4th at 1:30 PM, and that will be city staff to answer any questions for residents and housing options and next steps, and we will be working with LIHI on next steps so we can make sure that the residents in the village have those next steps.
Asked by Nickelsville’s Marvin Futrell why this determination had come, when at the last CAC meeting they had been told that further deliberations were possible, Adrienne responded:
There has been no change. We informed people that we needed to have access to the village to meet with people inside the village as one of the pieces for the performance improvement plan, we were not allowed in the village, and we were very clear at the last two CAC meetings that one of the outcomes could be not moving forward with the village, and so that was the outcome.
Adrienne went on to clarify that all services, including utilities, delivery of hygiene and other supplies, bedbug extermination, etc, would continue through December 31, administered by LIHI.
The letter had been delivered prior to the meeting, so Nickelsville and the villagers were not surprised by announcement, but many residents were visibly shaken, angry and tearful. One resident asked if this meant they would be sent to “regular homeless shelters without our things” and others asked about what this meant for people with pets. Alex, an unemployed resident of Northlake described how he was “considered by the state to be an able bodied adult, so I don’t qualify for anything, how am I supposed to afford housing?”
Adrienne responded
You would be working with case managers, we will have case managers for all people in the village, working on what you identify as wanting for housing, which we want to be doing at all times in the villages, and which is one of the primary reasons that this happened with this village, and why we’re out of compliance, is because we don’t have the ability to have LIHI have case managers in there, full-time, moving people towards permanent housing.
Adrienne’s comment highlights one of the fundamental disconnects between HSD and Nickelsville: the purpose of the village. According to HSD, the village is meant to serve as temporary housing while residents work towards and are assisted in finding permanent housing. HSD has set a goal for their tiny house villages of 40% annual exit rate to permanent housing. The other tiny house villages (including those operated by LIHI) have achieved 30%.
Northlake, on the other hand, is stuck at around 10% exit rate to permanent housing, and Nickelsville and residents have resisted case worker attempts to move them on.
This is a difficult issue, and one that all parties have danced around from the beginning. In some ways, Northlake Village is a victim of its own success. They have managed to create community and to provide a (relatively) comfortable place to live for their residents. One resident at Tuesday’s meeting described how it was the best place he had lived in 15 years of being homeless. Another described how she had arrived traumatized, anxious and scared, but had “slowly emerged from my tiny house, made friends and met beautiful souls.”
Why would someone want to leave a community with support and purpose in a free (tiny) home in Wallingford, just to move to Section 8 housing in south Seattle?
On the other hand, if nobody leaves, all the other people in tents, waiting for a spot to open up where they can find time to heal have to keep waiting.
And all of this against the backdrop of a city dealing with skyrocketing homelessness, residential neighborhoods bristling at the encroachments of unsanctioned tent encampments, theft, drug abuse, public defecation, and all the human indignity that comes with these.
And I want to say that I recognize that, if you don’t have a job, you can’t afford a place to live. And if you can’t afford a place to live, a tent may be your only option. And if you wake up in a tent and have to defecate, public defecation may be your only option. It doesn’t make it acceptable for the neighborhood, it doesn’t make it any less disgusting, but I also don’t know what I would do differently if it were me waking up in a tent by I-5, and there were no public restrooms available.
I know that this is a bit of a tangent, because the Northlake Village has been precisely the obverse of the unsanctioned camps we see by I-5. It has been a respectful, clean and safe neighbor, which is exactly why its dissolution, and the dispersal of its residents into “other options” is such a tragedy.
So where does all this leave us?
Over the next two months, HSD and LIHI will work to empty the Northlake Village. It is unlikely to be successful by its deadline, because the case managers LIHI will deploy to manage the transition are deeply distrusted by the residents, and because the residents don’t want to leave.
So what happens on December 31, if there are still villagers there, holding out? When this question was put to Adrienne, she talked around it:
We will have information on timelines for you, we’re still working with LIHI on that, we want to make sure people in the village have that information, so we will be working…our next steps will be the Monday meeting so we can talk with people in the village about housing and moving people into alternative shelter, but by December 31 Northlake will be closed.
Nobody wants an ugly confrontation with the police forcibly removing people, but I have a hard time seeing the residents leaving any other way. The property the village sits on belongs to Seattle City Light, the “tiny houses” themselves belong to LIHI, and the city is paying for utilities and other basic necessities. It makes for a difficult impasse.
I learned from my fellow CAC member Ed Mast that HSD has submitted a budget to the City Council asking for $1.2M to shut down the Northlake and Georgetown villages, but that Kshama Sawant has introduced a counterproposal to spend those dollars, plus several million more, on opening up more tiny house villages rather than closing them down. City Council is deciding on the budget over the next month, with a scheduled final vote on November 25.
Many village residents may be holding out hope that Sawant’s proposal will save their community, but when Adrienne was asked whether the budget proposal might affect the outcome of the village, she said they were separate issues, and that the Northlake Village was being shut down for non-compliance, not for budgetary reasons.
Jami Fecher, the pastor at the Gift of Grace Church in Wallingford (and a fellow CAC member) has expressed a willingness to have the Gift of Grace church “sponsor” Nickelsville to manage the village on its existing site. This would provide the village with a legal entity that carried insurance to take the place of LIHI. However, the likelihood of the HSD agreeing to this change seems remote, at best.
The whole thing is sad. From my perspective, there have been ham-handed, short-sighted missteps and acts of poor faith on everyone’s part: LIHI, HSD, Nickelsville and even the residents. Unfortunately, when the dust settles, everyone at LIHI and HSD will still have a job, the Nickelsville staff will all have homes, and the Northlake Village residents will be back on the street.
This is disappointing.
Over and over the city and other advocates repeat their Mantra that “If only people had housing, they would get jobs and not be homeless.”
Well, these residents have had two YEARS? to accept help with permanent housing, and to find a job to eventually support them. But, when you get free rent, utilities, etc, there is very little motivation do what the intent of the Village was.
Don’t we as a society, as a city, as taxpayers have a duty to make sure people either play by the rules and accept help (as has been repeatedly offered in this case), or we don’t provide them services with out property taxes?
Do you know that the people living in Northlake Nickelsville don’t have jobs?
From the article, only 10% have transitioned to alternative housing, which is the purpose stated for having a Tiny House Village. It’s meant to give people a place to stay while they look for a job, and then once they have a job, get transitioned to permanent housing.
If residents DO have jobs and are still living in taxpayer supported housing (not transitioning to section 8 low income housing which LIHI helps arrange), with all utilities included, it makes this situation sound even worse.
There’s not nearly enough affordable housing…it’s amazing any of them found some available, since there’s such a shortfall, really:
Exhibit 3 illustrates the point. In 2016, 116,000 households in King County had income of less than 50 percent of the AMI, but there were enough affordable homes for only half of them given that they had to compete for housing with people on higher incomes who “down rent.” Even assuming, somewhat unrealistically, that all new affordable housing currently planned by the city of Seattle was made available without delay, we estimate there would be a supply gap of 60,000 homes.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-cities/the-economics-of-homelessness-in-seattle-and-king-county
Not sure what’s wrong with supporting people with our taxes? Isn’t that kind of the point of taxes? If your point is that playing by the rules is important, would you have been OK if rules were different? How about a rule that everybody has to have the same type of house, regardless if they paid in full or nothing? Kind of like roads and schools and many public utilities?
I think the success of this small village already shows us the solution: expand this kind of programs as a way to provide cheap housing in the city. Low transition rate actually shows how good an option this is for many. and we should create more good options.
Success means getting people up on their own feet, in permanent housing, with permanent jobs. The point of the article was that this wasn’t a complete success, but did help get people in a position to be more self sustaining, which it appears they squandered. 10% placement rate into more permanent housing is terrible.
Not sure why success means permanent jobs. Who has permanent jobs these days? And what about the old and the weak? Permanent housing goal is instantly met if you make these villages permanent.
“Self-sustaining” is a lie. None of us are self-sustaining, since we all live in a society with shared resources.
So far, the best homeless solutions have been just giving people housing. Finland did it in the most extreme way, and in ways opposite to what you are saying.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-46891392
TJ you needed to make sure the title of the article was visible 🙂 :
The city with no homeless on its streets
“How about a rule that everybody has to have the same type of house, regardless if they paid in full or nothing?”
Are you serious? Do you actually believe that? Even for you, I find that amazing if true.
I am just making an example of what rule can be. People usually only advocate for obeying rules, when the rule is something they agree with.
And I am pretty serious about what I saying. What’s critical to the success of many social programs is to ensure they are not just for the poor, so there will not be stigma for people utilizing it. That’s why school lunch systems is designed to hide who is having it free and who is paying. Social security works well and is supported by almost all because it’s universal. Public school systems are the best in areas where participation rate is high.
So how do you remove the stigma associated with housing? It can start by having everybody living in more similar houses and more similar neighborhoods, rich or poor. The US culture surely isn’t ready for something like that, with the dominant idea still being very individualist and self-centered. However, it’s not really that crazy an idea. It’s implemented in some extend in some Nordic cities. In most countries, people all live in much smaller houses than in the US anyway, so by default the variation was already smaller.
” It can start by having everybody living in more similar houses and more similar neighborhoods,”
And how, exactly, do you “have” people voluntarily live in houses that maybe they’d rather not live in if they want something else or can afford something bigger and better?
It’s pretty easy. We can do progressive property tax. Make the property tax rate progressive by size. I know you like zoning codes. We can also use that to add restrictions.
I can even just design a policy on the fly. In most Western countries 400 ft2 per capita is typical. So we can set the base property tax rate to cover those smaller than 1600 ft2, since we don’t want to penalize family housing over one-bedrooms, and we don’t want something too complicated. Then we start to treat sizes above that as luxury. 1600 ft2 is typically for 10 people in Hong Kong by the way. For 1600~3200ft2, we add 25% to the base tax rate. For 3200~6400ft, we add 50% to the base tax rate. For 6400ft and above, we double the base tax rate.
There you go, a policy that makes it a norm for most people to live in reasonably sized houses.
I attended many of the CAC meetings when this encampment was in Ballard. Scott Morrow is evasive, at best, if not downright dishonest. For example, he and his people claimed they couldn’t even give a ball park figure for how much they spent on a water tank. (It was donated.) They ejected their “barred” residents onto the streets so unsanctioned encampments sprouted up nearby. They keep the camp clean but left needles in the parking lots of nearby businesses. When their stay was up, Scott was more than willing to put all of them out on the street rather than accept a smaller parcel (which was large enough to accommodate the current residents) or place them in other sanctioned encampments because he’s trying to grow his “business”. They had a pathetic rate of going into permanent housing and were generally only interested in getting donations, living in encampments, and getting more encampments. HSD should cut Nickelsville off permanently.
Yup, they’re about legitimizing homelessness, not getting people out of it. Btw, the Ballard Nicklesville is where the infamous Carter Subaru rapist was staying, since Scott Morrow doesn’t believe in warrant checks. The guy’s a sleazeball.
You’ve got it right. It’s all about Scott Morrow and his narcissitic personality disorder (much like Trump), which I’ve seen on full display at the Othello tiny house village, where I’ve been on the CAC. But he certainly runs a very media-savvy and cult-like political machine.
This is a result of having too much restrictions. It’s so sad that the overall practice of choking supply even applies to this type of housing, resulting in individuals being able to manipulate it. If we have this type of housing much more wide-spread with more competition, the complaint you have wouldn’t exist.
People got scared easily when there are so few “seats” in these obviously better than tent city places. If there is no tent city and all tent city residents can live in something like this, it’d be much harder to influence residents.
One thing that we might learn from this, is that where we wanted this to be a choice between living in a shed vs. moving up the housing ladder, it turned into a community vs. the choice to walk away from it. If LIHI & associates want to beat that, rather than let Morrow and his gang settle in these camps, they need to come up with a better alternative.
There are no rungs above the shed above the ladder…
Exhibit 3 illustrates the point. In 2016, 116,000 households in King County had income of less than 50 percent of the AMI, but there were enough affordable homes for only half of them given that they had to compete for housing with people on higher incomes who “down rent.” Even assuming, somewhat unrealistically, that all new affordable housing currently planned by the city of Seattle was made available without delay, we estimate there would be a supply gap of 60,000 homes.
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/future-of-cities/the-economics-of-homelessness-in-seattle-and-king-county
Well, in other encampments 30% of the people went to permanent housing so, yes, there is a rung above the shed.
It was a figure of speech – obviously even 10% was greater than “0.”
It’s location location location. Million dollar houses in Wallingford looks like ghetto houses in most other places. Why do people pay more to live in Wallingford instead of Othello? Because of the location. This specific encampment has a great location, therefore lower incentive for people to move away.
I find it very strange that neither this article, nor the Times article, mention Scott Morrow. He’s been hanging out and disrupting things in the Othello tiny house village (where I’m on the CAC), true, but he’s been using his Othello location as his office, to direct his other enterprises, including this Northlake operation, where Marvin Futrell and Peggy Hotes are his staff on the ground. All this conflict is about his need for control, to run things his way. His “self-governance” model is a carefully constructed illusion, as he is an expert at manipulating people and processes to get what he wants.
The able bodied man who said how will he afford housing when he doesn’t qualify for benefits? Typical! It’s called get a job you leech. Seattle has been ruined by the so-called homeless, the majority of whom are drug addicts. I just moved away from Seattle and out of the state last week because I am fed up with working my fingers to my bone to pay for those who take and the stupid libtard Seattle Council who perpetuates a lifestyle that only takes from the rest of its citizens and the dumb Seattleites who cannot seem to make a connection between their cars and homes being prowled and the homeless people – DUH!
And we can also make the connection further upwards: thefts linked to homelessness. Homelessness linked to huge increase in housing cost. Huge increase in housing cost linked to limited supply. Limited supply linked to strict zoning codes. So whose fault is it?
Certainly NEVER the fault of the criminals, right? What, your car got prowled and your bike got stolen? It’s YOUR fault for resisting upzones.
Of course many people are at fault, just that it’s probably more on those resisting upzones than libtards.
Very timely article on this topic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/stealing-amazon-packages-age-nextdoor/598156/
Whose fault? Does it even matter? People assign fault as if that would lead to solution. This type of problems can’t be solved that way.
“People assign fault as if that would lead to solution.”
And yet that’s exactly what you just did. You blamed criminal activity on people who don’t march lockstep in line with your upzoning ideology, rather than ascribing one iota of personal responsibility to the thieving junkies themselves. Which, by the way, is the reason why we have such a high property crime rate here, and not because of a lack of affordable housing.
BTW, I just got done reading the article you posted. Was this supposed to be some sort of “down-on-their luck” sob story? Because as it turns out the person profiled in the article is (surprise!) a thieving junkie.
Here we have the story of a woman who has been victimizing her neighborhood for YEARS, using her 6 year old daughter as an accomplice, stealing packages and credit card info from hundreds of her neighbors and selling them for pennies on the dollar to feed her heroin and meth habit. And then when she gets confronted about her crimes she has the gall to call them racist.
Despite being given countless chances to change her criminal ways, she finally gets kicked out of the free public housing and blows her chance to move into a “fancy new building” that taxpayers provided for her. Was that the fault of those evil NIMBYs fighting upzones?
She repeatedly skips out on court hearings, leading to warrants for her arrest, once because she was literally busy stealing more packages. Was that the fault of the NIMBYs?
And in the end, the countless videos and reports of her victimizing people FINALLY landed her where she belongs. In jail. And that’s not only a win for the neighborhood, it’s also good for her:
“I asked her whether she had found landing back behind bars to be—
“Relieving?” Fairley interjected. “Yes.”
good ol sharon lee and her $200K + salary “earning” a career off the homeless “crisis”. such a mess.