{"id":23731,"date":"2018-08-13T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2018-08-13T15:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmond-reporter.com\/news\/one-table-has-no-clear-game-plan-for-tackling-regional-crisis\/"},"modified":"2018-08-13T08:30:00","modified_gmt":"2018-08-13T15:30:00","slug":"one-table-has-no-clear-game-plan-for-tackling-regional-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.redmond-reporter.com\/news\/one-table-has-no-clear-game-plan-for-tackling-regional-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"One Table has no clear game plan for tackling regional crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
Back in January, King County Executive Dow Constantine, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, and Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus convened the One Table task force—a group of more than 70 business leaders, homeless service providers, nonprofit affordable-housing developers, local elected officials, and other stakeholders—with the goal of developing “community action steps to confront the root causes of homelessness under an “aggressive timeline.” When the formation of the group was announced, Durkan said in a press release<\/a> that it was designed to “create a regional, coordinated approach and holistic response to our homelessness crisis.”<\/p>\n However, roughly eight months into One Table’s existence, a “regional, coordinated approach” has yet to materialize. While the task force has produced a very broad set of policy recommendations, it at this point still has no way to ensure that local governments, nonprofits, or the private sector actually pursue them.<\/p>\n On Friday, Aug. 3, the group convened a meeting at Seattle City Hall, where the chairs and their staff tried to claim the project as a success that had produced tangible results. “We have a set of recommendations to move forward,” Constantine said before the assembled task force in the Bertha Knight Landes room. “Those recommendations represent our region’s collective commitment.”<\/p>\n But very little is tangible in the group’s final recommendations<\/a>. The nine-page document is essentially a outline of relatively familiar policy ideas that still lack any clear financing mechanism or timeline. The affordable-housing section of the recommendations calls for increasing “financial resources at the local, state, and federal level to build more affordable housing,” as well as enacting land-use policies that promote dense development with affordable units. Similarly, the criminal-justice portion vaguely calls for work with staff of the justice system to “increase understanding on homelessness and housing needs.”<\/p>\n After several initial meetings in the spring, the group had produced only draft recommendations that identified broad “priority actions”—such as building 5,000 affordable homes over the next five years and employing 1,300 people at risk of becoming homeless—without identifying any ways to pay for these investments. In response, some One Table members argued that the draft was underwhelming<\/a> since it featured neither new revenue sources or strategies appropriate for the scale of the regional homelessness crisis. (The draft was allegedly informed by task-force discussions, but ultimately created by county officials.) County officials have estimated that the region needs around 90,000 additional units<\/a> of housing affordable to those making less than 50 percent of area median income.<\/p>\n