The RHA included tiny house villages in its most recent budget only because of the criticism of many organizations and individuals that they did not appear in its draft 5-year-plan.

“Council Member Andrew Lewis worries the interim [between Dones’ departure and a replacement being hired] will be tumultuous for the Authority, the nonprofits with whom it contracts, and the people those nonprofits aim to serve.”

Given Dones’ performance on the job, I don’t think anyone will notice the difference.

Does no one remember that Dones wasn't even the first choice for the job? They got it by default after the top candidate looked at what the job would actually entail and said "thanks but no thanks."

‘As a member of the KCRHA governing board, Lewis will bring forward a resolution next month calling for performance metrics, deadlines, and “articulable, achievable goals” from the Authority.’

These are all mandatory minimums at any well-run organization, especially one receiving public funds. The lack of them until now makes for yet another sad comment on the state of local homelessness response. I’m not saying Dones was responsible for the lack of these controls, just that Seattle and King County have failed at homeless response in just about every way possible.

“The Seattle Times reported that nonprofits had lost confidence in the KCRHA because of funding delays, a situation they had not experienced when the City and the County held their contracts. The bottleneck caused YouthCare to max out its credit cards just to pay its workers. Nonprofits made similar complaints last year.”

The massive, wasteful, and massively wasteful Homeless-Industrial complex has long become used to receiving truckloads of public money with zero accountability. I can only imagine the temper tantrum they threw at anyone who actually asked them for a homeless person to get stable, permanent housing. The nerve!

“Considering its struggles with the fundamentals, the KCRHA shocked local leaders with the $25.5 billion price tag on its 5-year budget request at the beginning of the year. This request blew the 2020 McKinsey report out of the water, which estimated that the County needed to spend more than $1 billion every year for ten years to solve homelessness.”

Negotiations should always start with everything every party wants on the table, and proceed from there. That said, there’s a difference between a reasonable request and an absurdist fantasy. This was obviously the latter, and it showed just how far out of touch with reality Dones really was. That amount would be a significant chunk out of the state’s budget, to say nothing of the county’s, and to come after a long record of failed homeless response pushed it into a truly stratospheric level of insanity.

(It’s worth nothing the never-released McKinsey study, which simply assumed homelessness could be ended by construction alone, was a triumph of “consluting,” where the consultant simply tells the paying audience everything they want to hear. The audience were local private architectural, engineering, and construction firms, who stood to make billions from the public expenditures proposed in the study. The KCRHA request thus simply piled fantasy atop fantasy, for a truly absurd result.)

Sometimes sinecures just don't work out and it's time to leave the sinking ship.

From the ST article when they were hired: "Dones, 35, is a social entrepreneur and perhaps an unconventional choice: While they helped design the authority, they come more from the world of racial equity and activism than direct homelessness services."

Maybe next time they should choose someone who has experience managing large, complex organizations and bringing together divergent stakeholders and worry less about check boxes and lived experience.

demands for accountability and a fixation on measurable results are hallmarks of a systemic culture of oppression

@13: Yes, that describes the Bolsheviks pretty well, although I prefer, “history’s most ruthless middle managers.”

Sans threat of the Gulag, “demands for accountability and a fixation on measurable results” are simply how things get done properly. Lord Kelvin told us our science is only as good as our measurements, so how else to measure whether an organization is meeting goals?

Just a terrible article. There are plenty of good reasons to dislike Marc Dones, and indeed many of these were given in the Seattle Times article Hannah cited, not to mention various other articles cited. But she buries the lede and instead spends half of the article focused on the complaints about his unprofessional attire, which she then trivializes (no, it doesn't make you a square to think the CEO of a major city bureaucracy shouldn't show up to work in a tank top and flip-flops... although Dones didn't actually show up at all and lives in Ohio).

Obviously The Stranger is pro-Dones, since he branded himself a progressive, let the homeless do whatever they wanted, antagonized people who disagreed, and the squares and suits in the Harrell administration hate him. But refusal to even acknowledge that there were very real reasons to dislike him beyond behaving unprofessionally isn't doing him any favors. If you really want your readers to think Dones was a great guy, you need to write a robust defense of his work that addresses the many serious complaints. Not just say "oh he got fired because the suits didn't like their CEO showing up to work in gym clothes". Readers aren't that stupid.

Hannah, you're as fucking dumb as a Gen X'er gets and don't have a sliver of journalism skill. WTF is a "Tiny Shelter?" You fucking twit...they're called "Tiny House Communities," my 4th grader is smarter than you! That alone shows you're a fucking lazy-ass moron that didn't even try and understand what the fuck you were writing about, you made up your "sources" and stupid jokes about slacks simply amplify your 3rd-grade mentality. You're better off working at Mcdonald's...

So is the Stranger now just reprinting articles from the Seattle Times? This is almost word-for-word what the Times came out with. Only one small paragraph is properly quoted as being from the Times; the rest is just presented as being by from Hannah Krieg. Pretty shoddy.

@12, they did. That person turned them down. Then they asked Dones and he accepted the job.

"It was obvious from day one the Dones was not qualified for the job. This was their first job outside of Academia and their first job with actual metrics."

When referring to an individual; it's grammatically correct to use either 'he' or 'she', or 'his' or 'hers', not 'they' or 'theirs' (which is the plural form in reference to describing more than one person). When making your living as a writer; you will be judged (in part), by the grammar that you keep, or don't....