After receiving a slap on the wrist from the federal government, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority is transforming the process for selecting who gets to move into housing from streets or shelters.
Until this year, King County has relied heavily on an informal, unsanctioned process to determine how scarce housing resources are allocated among the thousands of homeless people who need them. Under this system, a homeless person’s chances of getting permanent housing often depended on their case manager’s connections.
But the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has its own system that it requires the entire country to use, and in November, it sent a letter to the Regional Homelessness Authority urging it to stop bypassing federal rules. It’s not the first time it’s had to do that.
The federal government, which funds many of these units, said there should be a transparent process that allocates housing to people with the highest level of need.
But that can often be at odds with the goal of filling an open unit quickly. And housing providers are loath to leave a unit vacant for long when so many people need them and organizations’ funding can depend on their units being occupied.
The authority has recently implemented a system to better comply with federal rules that also allows social service providers to quickly fill empty units. The course correction raises questions about whether the region’s homelessness and housing systems are geared toward helping those who need it most or those who are easiest to help.
Some experts say that homelessness service providers could introduce more bias into the decision-making under the new method. Already, providers have expressed low confidence in the agency’s ability to execute administrative functions and say they have received little guidance about how to implement these changes.
The authority says the changes will help retain federal money and bring inside as many people as quickly as possible, at a time when the authority and the mayor’s office are putting intense focus on moving people off the street.
Competing priorities
Since 2016, two processes have determined who receives housing in King County: One was sanctioned by the federal government and tried to give housing to the person who needed it most. One was unsanctioned and tried to fill an open housing unit as fast as possible.
The first process, called Coordinated Entry, took the thousands of homeless people who applied for housing and ranked them based on health conditions, age, race, gender identity, pregnancy status and behavioral health risks. The ranking determined whether someone was prioritized for one of the 6,125 beds of permanent supportive housing, transitional housing, and rapid-rehousing money, which are nearly always occupied and seldom become available.
Anyone not at the very top of this list had essentially no chance of obtaining housing even if they had been living on the street for years. Often, this process was slow to fill an open bed. Simply locating and making contact with the people who made it to the top of this list was a challenge.
“If you can’t find that person, there’s a significant delay,” said Peter Lynn, chief program officer at the Regional Homelessness Authority.
At Cascade Women’s Program, a few rooms for single women have been open for months.
“We’ve been working really hard to get our building filled,” said program manager Candice Russell.
One unit at nonprofit Low-Income Housing Institute’s Marion West Apartments has been empty since February.
All the while, thousands of people sleep outside and housing providers miss out on funding since, for certain programs, they are only reimbursed by housing vouchers if a unit is filled.
After two weeks, the organization with the open bed was allowed to fill its vacant units as quickly as possible, however it could. Housing providers would contact outreach workers, case managers and emergency shelter providers they knew, oftentimes within their own organization. In most cases, the first person to reply would get the open bed. In 2021, two-thirds of open housing beds were filled through this secondary process rather than Coordinated Entry.
While that filled open beds faster, it also meant the chances of receiving a bed was subject to “who you knew and also how seasoned and well networked that case manager might be,” said Alex Ebrahimi, who leads the Regional Homelessness Authority’s Coordinated Entry team.
It also bypassed federal housing requirements and potentially incentivized housing providers to pick the people who were easiest to serve, said Norm Suchar, director of the Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, who wrote the letter to the Regional Homelessness Authority.
Suchar’s office found out about this practice while it was helping the Regional Homelessness Authority with its Partnership for Zero initiative, which is working to reduce the number of people living on downtown streets.
If the Regional Homelessness Authority had not made moves to comply in this case, Suchar said he could have asked the authority to repay federal grants.
Last year, HUD also had to nudge the authority to follow federal requirements when conducting a census of all homeless people in the county. The authority tried to ignore the single-day count required by HUD saying it had a more accurate yearly figure, but was told the mandatory count was tied to federal funding. The authority eventually complied, but rushed to finish by the deadline.
A compromise on strategy
With Coordinated Entry becoming the only process for filling housing units, the Regional Homelessness Authority knew it had to cut down the time it took to get someone inside.
Now, beds aren’t only available to a small number of people on their list with the highest needs. Open housing units are announced before daily “case conferencing meetings,” in which any case manager or outreach worker can nominate someone who needs it. When multiple providers nominate different clients for the same housing unit, they are ranked by need.
When a person is picked for a housing unit under this new process, the Regional Homelessness Authority doesn’t need to locate them. They are already connected with a provider who is then required to navigate their client through the housing process, which may include documentation gathering or transportation planning to and from appointments, which can also aid in getting them inside their unit faster.
This strategy is similar to the one the authority used to become one of the country’s most successful Emergency Housing Voucher utilizers, a pandemic-era federal program created to quickly move people from the streets into housing.
National homelessness policy expert Stephen Metraux at the University of Delaware says these changes could increase the efficiency of the housing system for homeless people, but may also be biased toward people who are able to maintain an active connection with a case manager, meaning they likely don’t have severe mental health issues, substance use disorders or physical impairments.
Patrick Fowler, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has researched Coordinated Entry systems, said the authority’s new method may also be subject to the favoritism of individual case managers, who are deciding which clients they will nominate.
The Regional Homelessness Authority said behavioral outreach teams who focus on working with the “hardest to serve in our community” are able to nominate clients for housing, which should mitigate that concern.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development said the Regional Homelessness Authority’s idea could work well as long as it ensures case managers and outreach workers are prioritizing engaging with people with the highest levels of need.
Some say it’s not worth all the effort to develop the absolute best way to allocate housing.
“We’re going to spend thousands of hours and thousands of dollars trying to find this one person who has the greatest need when probably the top 4,000 people have great need,” said Sharon Lee, executive director of the nonprofit shelter and housing organization Low Income Housing Institute.
‘Lack of partnership‘
Some service providers are frustrated, saying the Regional Homelessness Authority has provided little opportunity for them to provide feedback and shape decision-making, echoing a recurring complaint about poor communication by authority staff.
Alison Eisinger, executive director of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, wrote a letter to the Regional Homelessness Authority’s leadership last month castigating them for their lack of engagement with service providers before implementing changes that would significantly affect their operations.
“Regardless of whether or not these changes will benefit the people our system is supposed to serve, this process or the lack thereof is wholly unacceptable,” Eisinger wrote. “The lack of partnership is unnecessary, and deeply disheartening.”
Several service providers told The Seattle Times they never heard about these changes from the Regional Homelessness Authority.
The Regional Homelessness Authority said it sent an email notification April 13 to providers and would be hosting a video conference meeting with them this week about the changes. Ebrahimi at the authority also said he met with leaders of several adult homelessness service providers prior to the policy change to get their input.
Whereas previously, housing providers could take over the process to fill their housing beds, this change requires providers to completely cede control to the Regional Homelessness Authority. But the authority is short on trust, and some providers are worried the changes will make the situation worse for people living outside.
“My fear is how we might have long-term vacancies while still having a lot of homeless people out on the street,” said Teena Ellison, director of housing services at Compass Housing Alliance.
Lynn said he is asking service providers to “give this an opportunity. We will sit down and map out strategies if this does not actually solve the problem, but it seems to us that it will solve the problem.”
The Regional Homelessness Authority expects to finish implementing these changes by the end of May.