By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
When activists from throughout the Puget Sound area descend on Olympia in February to press the legislature to do more about ending homelessness, organizers hope that the Jewish community will have hundreds of representatives to help deliver the message. A meeting was held at Temple Beth Am on Sun., Dec. 1 to pave the way. About 15 to 20 Jewish activists from a number of area congregations braved the weather to help chart the course and set the lobbying agenda for the two-month legislative session that opens in January.
The meeting was called by the Puget Sound Jewish Coalition on Homelessness, an umbrella organization for congregations’ social action networks, individuals and other organizations interested in providing a specifically Jewish voice to these issues.
“We believe that the provision of adequate, safe housing for everyone is a matter of social justice — tzedek — as expressed in our Jewish tradition,” the group said in its mission statement. Its goals are to educate the Jewish community on the subject, to add to the already significant Jewish presence among advocates and volunteers working on the problem, and to encourage more community groups and congregations to become active in the struggle to end homelessness altogether in the Seattle area.
The Reform temple’s Rabbi Jonathan Singer opened the meeting with a prayer and a brief talk about how the issue of homelessness connected with Hanukkah, which began three nights later.
“The mitzvah of lighting the hanukkiah is ‘one light for the person and their household,’” Singer said. “You have an assumption that someone has a house. Can you make Hanukkah without having a home?”
A trio of speakers outlined homelessness problems and what they hope to get the legislature to do about them. John Fox of the Seattle Displacement Coalition presented an overview of the situation facing the homeless, fueled by the loss of affordable rental housing in Seattle and the surrounding area.
“We can look around this city and we see a healthy city that’s booming,” Fox told the group. “The city just rezoned downtown for the equivalent of another 12 Columbia Towers worth of office development. We are breaking near-record levels of new construction in the residential arena — most of which, however, is being directed toward expensive condominium development, [and] a much lower percentage in the direction of rental housing.”
According to the statistics Fox presented at the meeting, an estimated 4,500 low-income rentals, both houses and apartments, have been lost since just 2005 — 40 percent of which were conversions of rental apartments to condominiums. More than a quarter of the low-income units have been bulldozed to make room for commercial construction or for more expensive “market-rate” housing, and a third as a result of speculative real estate sales. During the same time, the city and private nonprofit organizations have built 500 affordable units per year, meaning that twice as many affordable apartments have disappeared as have come into being in the last three years. Those figures do not take rent increases that pushed existing housing out of range for low-income renters.
Fox used a standard definition of “affordable,” based on the average median income for the city, which is currently estimated as $71,000 a year for a family of four. Low-income is defined as people living below the median — half of the population. Affordable rent would be less than $1,000 a month, but at the same time, Fox said, rents on the remaining housing stock is rising at the rate of 10-14 percent a year.
Bill Block of the Committee to End Homelessness in King County, a familiar face to previous attendees of PSJCH meetings, laid out the agenda that homeless advocates will be pressing at the legislature this year.
“What everyone around the state is talking about is increasing the State Housing Trust Fund,” Block said. The coalition is proposing that the fund be upped to $230 million for the next two years, an increase of $100 million over its current level. “This represents actually not a huge amount, but what is often a very leveraged amount of money into projects that are generally built by nonprofits that are dedicated to affordable housing.
“The second [priority] of the Committee Against Homelessness is that they increase what is known as the Transitional Housing, Operating and Rent Project, a very effective project for relatively short-term housing services to families with kids,” he said. “We’d like to see that increased both by an amount of $10 million, but also expanded so that it’s available to single adults and to families without children.”
The committee’s third program will lobby for increased funding of the Washington Families Fund, which Block described as a public-private matching fund to pay for long-term services for families. Since creating it in 2004, the state has invested $6 million that was matched by private funding. That money, however, has all been used. The coalition hopes to get the state House and Senate to agree to put up an additional $4 million per year to provide for those services.
Other programs homeless advocates will lobby for are reintegration funding to help people coming out of prison and to help foster-care kids who lose their state support when they turn 18, and to support more housing development for working families being squeezed out of the housing market because rents and prices have risen so much faster than wages.
PSJCH plans to participate in the Housing Advocacy Day in Olympia on Feb. 14, almost exactly halfway through the 60-day session.
One other priority is to support the trust fund allocation. Speakers at the Dec. 2 event explained that while major initiatives are often taken up in the odd-numbered years, budgeting is one of the most important functions of the short session held in even numbered years in advance of the November elections.
To find out more about the Puget Sound Jewish Coalition or to be a part of the PSJCH contingent in February can contact Pam Center at [email protected].