Longstanding organizations which receive city assistance for their housing advocacy are fighting to maintain their integrity in the face of pressures from the city of Seattle which discourage them from engaging in effective organizing and free speech.
The Tenants Union's popular and effective workshops to help groups of tenants push for their rights will probably be completely defunded in 1997 if the city keeps with its current funding guidelines. And homeless transition apartments, like the Aloha Inn, have felt pressure from the city to stop their political speech on readerboards posted outside the buildings.
And it's not part of a massive, across-the-board budget cut. Instead, the city wants to fund new methods of dealing with housing issues, methods which will prioritize case management and emergency assistance for individuals, rather than empowerment of tenants. ãThe emphasis is on direct support for individuals who are at risk," says Alan Painter, manager of community services at Seattle's Department of Housing and Human Services (DHHS).
But according to Scott Morrow of the Seattle Housing and Resource Effort (SHARE), the city is creating ãan institutional-bureaucratic system where they can quantify things." Morrow helps run SHARE's downtown homeless shelter, and laments new jargon he says the city is imposing on the activities of housing groups: "Now we are a 'provider' and the people that come to us for help are 'clients'"
Workshops Canned
For eight years, the Tenants Union (TU) has held tenant's rights workshops. City grants of roughly $30,000 to $40,000 per year have funded the program. At a single workshop, a TU representative can speak to many tenants, usually a group from one specific apartment building, and advise about legal matters in dealing with landlords. Last year, TU workshops helped 237 tenants in 28 apartment buildings. Workshops also helped educate an additional 117 local social service workers in tenant advocacy. The philosophy behind the workshops is simple and efficient-reach many tenants at once, and educate them about their rights so they can develop a group strategy. Such tenants are better able to ward off unfair or hasty eviction. This lessens poverty and homelessness in Seattle, and keeps neighborhoods more stable and crime down. Seattle then certainly saves money on policing and emergency services, although the amount is impossible to quantify.
Jim Hammond, housing advisor to Seattle mayor Norm Rice admits that workshops can be positive, but maintains that because their results can't be quantified, "you can't make a case for their effectiveness."
For tenants, however, the benefits of workshops can often be quantified in dollars saved on rent, and in the number of days they are given to look for a new apartment. At the Lakeview and Hampton Court apartment buildings in Seattle last year, resident Lisa Morin, reports that after receiving a TU workshop and developing a solidarity movement, dozens of tenants were able to resist imminent demolition of the apartments, and received three months free rent and $500 cash relocation assistance to boot.
April King, acting coordinator for the TU, explains, "We're into maintaining the dignity of tenants so that they don't come near to eviction."
Although workshops have been very effective from many tenants' point of view, the city funding for workshops, which has been written out of the DHHS's 1997 funding application, will probably disappear after this year unless a groundswell of support sways mayor Rice into restoring the workshops (please see "action needed").
Linkages, But Not for Tenants
Alan Painter of DHHS explains what he sees as a new "holistic" strategy by the city to fund social services: "Federal support is eroding. As much as we'd like to fund a variety of things, we have to strengthen the local network of emergency and preventive services as broadly as possible." The 1997 application for city funding on housing issues is heavy with the word "linkages". Nonprofit housing groups applying for the funding must prove they can link their individual "clients" with other groups and services, thus creating a network. Jim Hammond in mayor Rice's office explains that once the linkages are up and running, social service nonprofits with proven trackrecords can operate with minimum city administrative cost. "We can take a hands-off approach without shirking our duties to taxpayer dollars."
An emphasis on quantitative measurement also drives city officials. Measurable results "isolate us from rightwing attacks and distortions about welfare queens driving Cadillacs," notes Hammond. If you fund programs that aren't quantifiable, "you can get hosed by talk show hosts." Unfortunately, when you're talking about the public good rather than being re-elected, efficient programs aren't necessarily quantifiable, and vice versa.
The 1997 funding application also aims to create another link which doesn't seem at all cozy, one between tenants and landlords. Instead of paying for one-sided empowerment programs like tenants' rights workshops, the city now is offering to fund "win/win mediation", in which the TU might act as an impartial mediator in disputes between a tenant and a landlord. It fits in the new city funding schema because it's individually focussed and measurable: either the tenant comes to an agreement with the landlord, or she doesn't. The TU's April King sees this approach as inadequate: "it assumes that both parties enter mediation with good faith, and that both are equally aggrieved." If tenants or landlords had equal power, mediating might make sense, but the TU's mission has always been to address the relative powerlessness of tenants. "We don't pretend to be neutral," says King.
The TU's mission is also being watered down in a few other ways, most notably in its tenants hotline, in which tenants can call to find out about landlord/tenant law. The hotline is funded in part by the city. Right now the effectiveness of the hotline is measured by how many callers the TU talks to, along with some follow-up surveys. Next year, the city will judge the hotline by how many callers the TU refers to case management for domestic abuse, or drug or alcohol abuse. "It's very much focused on court-ordered evictions for people who have done something wrong," says King. Although such callers are certainly in need of help, they only amount to about 10 percent of all callers, according to an in-house survey at the TU. The other 90 percent are simply in need of legal advice and assistance, but they don't count.
The Free-speech Squeeze
The TU has also encountered pressure from the city to self-censor political speech. This year, the city's DHHS made funding for the tenants' rights workshops contingent on what was said at the workshops. Organizing and strategizing are now solely the responsibility of the tenants. The Tenants Union has become a union that is not allowed to organize, and can only offer legal information.
Before the last few years, the TU actively supported local legislation, including tenant relocation assistance, rental housing inspection, and just-cause eviction. These programs have in recent years all been weakened by the city council, and the TU has no new legislative projects in the works.
The TU is not the only local housing organization to feel the free-speech squeeze. At the Aloha Inn in Seattle, the formerly homeless tenants in this resident-managed apartment building have also felt city pressure to de-politicize themselves. The apartment itself, at 1911 Aurora N., is the direct descendent of the brash Tent City, the squatter encampment that graced the Kingdome parking lot during 1990, raising public awareness of homelessness. Funding from the city, the federal government, tenant rents, and the housing levy helped to acquire and meet the operating expenses for the apartment and the program. The money covers lights, transport, staff, services.
Aloha is not only a place to live, but also a sort of democratic therapy for the formerly-homeless residents. "We are fighting homelessness on the biggest level," says program manager Flo Beaumon, "It's a more complete democracy here than what most people are exposed to in their whole lives."
It's no surprise then that residents at times vote on the message that will be displayed on a public readerboard situated outside the building in view of busy Aurora Avenue. The readerboard says exactly what residents are thinking and it's often of the sort of politics that some city officials may not agree with. The city has directed complaints to the building after such messages were posted as "Vote No on Seattle Commons", "Boot Newt" and a message chiding the city for kicking homeless sleepers off city hall property at night.
Recently, the city's DHHS requested an opinion from the city's Ethics and Elections Commission about the Aloha Inn's political readerboard messages. After reviewing local codes, the Executive Director of Ethics and Elections, Carolyn Van Noy, ruled in a non-binding staff opinion that Aloha's political messages are allowable "so long as City operating funds are not used for the display."
But even if the city is not technically allowed to restrict free political speech of programs it funds, the programs may still feel funding pressure to watch their words. When you have to reapply for funding each year, you are likely to be nice to your funder. Ken Cole, a co-director of the Archdiocesan Housing Authority, which administers the Aloha Inn and other similar apartments, jokes that "every shelter ought to have a readerboard outside so the city will get used to it."
Pity the Downtrodden Landlord
Certainly there is no single force behind the weakening of Seattle's housing activism. Perhaps one reason is that a number of top city officials, including city attorney Mark Sidran, have become landlords themselves, or at least own multiple properties, according to King County real estate records. There is also an active landlord lobby. Organizations like the Apartment Association of Seattle and King County (AASK), and related state and national organizations, are frequent contributors to politicians' coffers. (For a taste of what appears in AASK's newsletter, see "Ten Reasons...".)
In the early eighties, after a push for rent control was defeated in Seattle, the state landlord lobby ushered in a law that prohibited local governments from controlling rents. After their success in Washington, this law was replicated in a number of other states. "They can beat tenant activists thoroughly with their money," notes TU's April King. Lately, the landlord lobby has been asking state legislators to pass a "Pre-emption Bill" preventing any tenants' rights laws at the local level. This would gut Seattle's Just Cause Eviction Ordinance and Bellevue's Residential Housing Code. The bill passed the state house this year, but was stalled in the senate.
Ironically, this bill, whose major sponsors are two Republican legislators, Larry Sheahan of the 9th district (eastern Washington), and Tim Hickle of the 30th (Federal Way and Tacoma), runs contrary to the Republican credo of decentralization, since it would take away legislative authority from localities, and give it to the larger state.
The landlord lobby undoubtedly welcomes the city's attempted shift from tenant empowerment to emergency casework, mediation, and restriction of political speech. If the city's changes are enacted, tenant/landlord problems will increasingly be dealt with as individual issues rather than as class issues. Because the true power of tenants is in their numbers, they will lose out.
Seattle tenants are not likely to receive further support for an empowerment movement unless they try harder to convince the mayor's office of the cost-effectiveness of strong tenant rights. Housing activist Scott Morrow of SHARE notes that, "Norm Rice has always been good at arguing that people need services. He's never been good at realizing the problems with the structure, why there's poor people and rich people.... It's structural changes we need. You can't just give somebody an emergency rent voucher for a month and think that's gonna solve the problem." In other words, individualized assistance is probably much more expensive in the long run than educating groups of tenants or changing laws so that few people ever need rent vouchers. The city's new obsession with quantifiable assistance programs may be easy for politicians to defend on radio talk shows, but there is a great risk that it will in fact be more expensive than simple empowerment programs, and do less good for fewer people.
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