As previously reported, there are plans afoot to convert Cyndy's House of Pancakes to supportive housing for formerly homeless people. On June 9, Bill Hobson, Executive Director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), went to Cyndy's and spoke to a group of concerned neighborhood residents.
DESC is a leading advocate of the philosophy of "housing first." Many other homeless housing projects insist that residents be clean and sober before moving in. (This practice is often called "creaming," which refers to the tendency to focus on the most treatable homeless populations.) On the other hand, DESC believes that agencies get better results if they provide housing first and then focus on the other social services. This approach is understandably controversial, but there is some pretty good empirical evidence from the New England Journal of Medicine and elsewhere that the strategy is generally effective.
Hobson began the meeting with some brief comments that summarized DESC's mission and a discussion of how the group runs its other properties. He invited neighborhood residents to learn more about the organization at DESC's website.
Hobson stressed that DESC requires all residents in all of their buildings to sign a rental agreement with a "good neighbor" clause. Basically, this means that residents promise not to drink, drug, or panhandle in the neighborhood. In addition, the building will be staffed 24/7. There will be 14 to 15 full-time employees devoted to the building, so 2 to 8 DESC staff will always be on site (depending on the time of day). There will always be at least one mental health clinician there--and several more will be present during daytime hours.
There were about 50 people in the audience, and about 80% of them were either extremely skeptical or downright hostile toward Hobson at the start of the meeting. Nevertheless, about 60% of attendees seemed to leave the meeting feeling that DESC was sincere in its desire to be a good neighbor. This is not to say that they were totally happy or that all their concerns were allayed, but rather that they seemed to come away with a sense that the neighborhood could live with this project. About 40% of the audience remained strongly opposed to the idea of putting homeless housing here.
Cyndy's House of Pancakes has been at the corner of Aurora & 105th since 1972.
The bulk of the meeting was taken up by Q+A, which is summarized below. This is NOT a verbatim set of minutes. I've combined and rearranged some questions, and I've undoubtedly made some errors in paraphrasing what the questioners and Hobson said. Nevertheless, here are the gist of the main queries and replies:
Q: How will you determine who will be residents in the new building?
A: This will be a housing project for homeless people with mental illness. We use a vulnerablility index to assess who is most in need of housing. The vulnerability index looks at many factors, but it basically seeks to determine who is most likely to die or be seriously injured if they stay on the streets. 90-100% of residents will have a psychiatric disorder, and 30-40% of them will also have a drinking or substance-abuse problem.
Q: Will the population of your housing project at 1811 Eastlake [chronic, life-long alcoholics] be transferred here?
A: No. This facility will serve a different target population, the vulnerable mentally ill.
Q: Will their be families and homeless women in the building?
A: All of our residents are single people. There are no families. About 60% of residents are men, 40% women.
Q: Do you have a zero-tolerance policy for drinking and drugging in your building?
A: No. We have a zero-tolerance for drinking and drugging in the surrounding neighborhood.
Q: How do you prevent a spill-over of anti-social behavior (drinking, panhandling, etc.) into the surrounding neighborhood? (This question was asked in several different forms by several different people.)
A: I've already mentioned the good neighbor policy in our rental agreements. In addition, the city pressures us to make sure that there is no spill-over. We leave our phone number with all the folks who live close to the building. If they see someone panhandling or doing something disturbing, they call us. When we respond to calls, we find that about 80% of the time, it's not one of our residents. But since we're there on site, we stay to problem-solve and refer the case the appropriate folks--mental health services, the police, detox, Harborview, etc.
Q: Will there be sex offenders in the building?
A: Maybe--but we're willing to listen to the community on this matter. DESC owns 8 buildings, and 7 of them allow sex offenders. In one case, the neighborhood absolutely refused and threatened to kill the project if sex offenders were allowed in. DESC relented. DESC is open to a dialog on this issue and will heed the wishes of the community. However, DESC does believe that sex offenders should be allowed.
"Look at this from the wider perspective of the city as a whole," said Hobson. "We know that there are close to 300 homeless sex offenders in Seattle. Are we safer as a community if we leave them out on the streets? Or are we safer if they live in a supervised housing situation and are receiving treatment?"
(One person in the audience replied, "The city might be safer, but will our neighborhood? There's an elementary school bus stop right in front of this building.")
Q: Do any of your residents have a history of violence?
A: Not generally. There's a stereotype that the mentailly ill are dangerous because of the news stories and TV coverage you see when violent incidents do occur. But actually the data show that mentally ill are less violent than the general population. I can't promise you that none of our residents will ever be violent. I just can't promise that. It does happen from time to time, and when it does, we evict that resident. But overall you're not going to get any more increase in violence than you would from any other 80-90 unit building coming into the neighborhood. When we treat this population, violence is an extremely rare problem. The main problem we face with this population is the tendency of our residents to isolate inside their rooms.
Q: What will the building look like?
A: Our architects are in the very early stages of the design process, so we don't really know yet. You can see examples of our other buildings on our website. Our buildings tend to be attractive; the newer ones are three-star Built Green or LEED certified. The community will have a lot of say in the design of the building. We are going to form a Design Guidance Review Committee, probably in August of this year. If you signed our sign-in sheet, we'll let you know when the first meeting of that committee will be. That committee will seek feedback from the community on the building design, amount of parking, and all those sorts of issues There's a mandatory green space that's a part of any development of this size. We usually like to have gardens or p-patches for our residents, but we're open as to what the final design of that green space might look like.
Q: Can residents come and go as they please at all hours of the night?
A: Yes. This is an apartment building, not a prison. Most of our residents keep normal hours, just like anyone else, so there is not a ton of coming and going at night. We do restrict visiting. Residents can have no more than two visitors at a time, and visiting hours are 8am to 10pm. Overnight stays must be approved by our staff at least 48 hours in advance.
Q: This neighborhood already has a lot of problems. Why are you coming in here, adding to them, and running our property values down?
A: DESC views itself as part of the solution, not as a problem. We view ourselves as part of the neighborhood, and we require our building manager to join the local neighborhood associations. Our residents join trash paint pick-ups and graffiti paint-outs. Our buildings are attractive, and we keep them extremely well-maintained. Just go look at our older buildings yourself to see. And, as far as property values are concerned, there is good evidence that this type of supportive housing doesn't reduce nearby property values. Sometimes it increases them. There's a study up on our website about that. With transit-oriented development coming to Northgate, we view this neighborhood as a good investment. We expect our property values to increase substantially in coming years and our neighbors' values to increase right along with us.
Q: Look at that guy dealing drugs out of that black mini-van over at the AM/PM. How can you think that it's a good idea to put a homeless shelter right next to that? That can't be good for your residents.
A: First of all, this isn't a shelter; it's an apartment building for the formerly homeless. And we have a similar building on 3rd and Yesler, and that's a lot rougher neighborhood than this. We know how to cope in these environments. And we're committed to helping stop that kind of stuff. Our staff can take down license plates, and we cooperate with the police and neighborhood watch. Our buildings are well-lit and we have closed-circuit TV cameras to aid in an investigation in case there is any sort of crime on our premises. But the bottom line is that we help make our neighborhoods safer places.
Q: What was your site selection process? Why did you pick this particular site rather than, say, one of the troubled hotels on Aurora?
A: This property was available and none of the hotels were. This particular site met several of our needs. It's on major bus lines. I has a 40-foot height limit so we can put in enough units to have an "economy of scale." What I mean by "economy of scale" is that we''ll be hiring about a half-dozen staff to provide services, and that's expensive. It only makes sense to do that if you have a building that can have enough units to make it worth our while. We liked the size of this parcel, and we had been looking to open a center in North Seattle for some time.
Q: This lot is zoned commercial. Will you have commercial space as part of this project?
A: Yes. The first floor of the project will have to be commercial space. The top three floors will be housing. We're not in this to make money as commercial landlords, so we want to listen to the community as to who our commercial tenants should be. In our building on Rainier Avenue, the Rainier Beach Merchants Association and a neighborhood association are our tenants. We'd love to have a neighborhood group move into this property. We charge substantially below market rate for commercial leases. We'd prefer not to have a tenant that is going to have a huge parking requirement because we'd like to have as many housing units here as possible. But, again, we're open to listening to what the community wants.
Q: This is a pretty small lot. How are you going to fit 80-90 units of housing in here?
A: Actually, it's a pretty big parcel. The building will be four stories, and our units are small. We're probably only going to have about 15 or so parking spots because none of our residents have cars. Most of their visitors don't either. Mostly, we'll need parking for our staff and our commercial tenants. So, the exact amount of parking will depend on who those tenants are.
Q: Do you require your residents to take their psychiatric medicines?
A: No. You can't require someone to take psychiatric meds without a court order in Washington State. And our experience is that forcing our residents to do something that they don't want to is counterproductive. We ask that they engage with our staff and seek treatment, including medication. 98% of them do that. That % would be lower if we made them take their meds.
Q: You mentioned the eviction process a couple of times. How does that work? What happens to the people who are evicted?
A: We don't like to evict residents, but sometimes we have to. Our two rock-bottom requirements are that our residents have to pay their rent and that they have to avoid violence. For something like assault, we almost always evict the resident who committed the assault. For something like panhandling or drinking in the neighborhood, there are a series of escalating consequences for those who break those rules. We do have to evict some chronic violators. Those folks who are evicted don't stay in the neighborhood. We take them back to one of our emergency shelters downtown, and they typically stay downtown because that's where the social services are. Overall, our eviction rate is low, especially after the first year a building is in operation. After a building has been around a year, residents tend to develop a sense of community. And then there's a sort of peer pressure on other residents. People who break the rules are seen as messing things up for the rest of the building. Most of our residents like where they live, and think of the neighborhood as their neighborhood too. In our established buildings, 75% of residents have been there 24 months or longer. In market-rate apartments, that figure is 18 months.
Q: There are already some halfway houses up the hill in the neighborhood. Aren't you crowding too many social services into too small of an area?
A: Not really. The City of Seattle has certain requirements about how many social services you can have in a given area--and how much low-income housing. These are called dispersion and concentration criteria. Before offering to buy this site, we checked this out and found that this site complies with those regulations.
Q: You mentioned that your residents pay rent. How do they do that? Do they work?
A: No, most of them do not work. They typically receive about $650/month in SSI Disability payments, and we require them to pay 30% of that to us as rent. As far as work goes, we like them to work, but it's important to be realistic about that. We estimate that about 30% of our residents can return to work--real, competitive work rather than make-work types of jobs. But it takes time. Many of these folks have lived on the street for several years, and you can't get that out of your system overnight. And some of them are too mentally ill to work even with treatment. So, you shouldn't come back to this property in two years and expect to find 30% of the residents working. But you would find that in some of our buildings that have been around for many years.
Q: Could you give priority for our local homeless population? That is, would homeless folks who are sleeping up here in North Seattle have priority?
A. Not quite. We'd be happy to interview and consider any homeless people that you'd like us to talk to. We've done that before and some of the people to whom we were referred were eligible for housing. But in the end, that vulnerability index that I talked about earlier is going to be our main criteria for deciding who has the biggest need for our services.
Q: What are the next steps for this project? Have you lined up funding for construction?
A: The Cyndy's property is currently under contract. We have the money to buy the property, and we expect to close within 45-60 days. In the meanwhile, Cyndy's House of Pancakes has signed a two-year lease and will stay here as the project moves forward. We have not yet lined up funding for the actual building, but we expect that we will be able to secure funding from a combination of city, county, and federal sources. If we didn't think we could secure funding, we wouldn't be buying the property. But we don't have it yet. After we purchase the property, we'll form the Design Guidance Committee that I mentioned earlier. And we'll begin the design and permitting process. The flyer that you received said that we could start construction in August 2011. That could happen, but it's a little optimistic. Lining up funding and going through permitting always take longer than you think. It might be more realistic to expect construction to begin at the end of 2011.
Hobson said that anyone in the neighborhood can contact him at bhobson@desc.org if they have additional questions about the project. He promised to try to return e-mail within 3 business days.
