Cash Out

A $350,000 fund set aside by the Seattle City Council to
assist
financially vulnerable tenants has been indefinitely frozen by Mayor
Greg Nickels’s office. The fund—passed as part of the city’s 2008
budget to help tenants displaced by condo conversion—was a
stopgap solution so Seattle residents would not have to wait for the
state legislature to deal with the massive number of apartment
conversions in the last few years.

“We’re just on hold for the next few weeks,” says Sara Levin,
spokeswoman for the city’s Human Services Department, which was put in
charge of the council’s relocation fund. According to Levin, HSD was
instructed by Nickels to hold off on setting up the council fund in the
hopes that the state legislature quickly comes back with a plan to deal
with conversions. However, HSD has lost $565,000 in federal
funding—used to pay for down-payment programs, homeless shelters,
and AIDS housing—and there doesn’t appear to be anything keeping
HSD from reallocating the council fund, to fill the gap in their $114
million general budget, to pay for those programs.

Since 2004, Seattle has lost over 6,000 rental units to condo
conversion. Previously, displaced tenants who made less than $41,700,
or 80 percent of Seattle’s median income, were given $500 to move out
of converted buildings. Tenants and housing groups complained that $500
did not sufficiently provide low-income tenants with the financial
means to move, let alone pay for a deposit and first and last month’s
rent on a new apartment.

The $350,000 set aside by the city council would have provided as
much as $1,500 to tenants who made as little as 30 percent of the
median income. Households that made 31 percent to 50 percent of the
median income would get $1,000, and those in the 51 percent to 80
percent range would get $500.

Tenants in need haven’t seen any of the relocation money, though,
since Nickels held up distribution of the funds, in spite of the
council’s mandate.

Tenants aren’t getting much help from the state legislature either.
Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles’s (D-36) tenant-assistance bill was killed,
and Representative Maralyn Chase’s (D-32) bill made it out of the
house, but is on hold in the Rules Committee.

With no restrictions on the council fund now that it’s been absorbed
into HSD’s budget, there will undoubtedly be a fight between the
council and the mayor’s office over the frozen funds.

“To play with people’s lives like this is an outrage,” says John Fox
of the Seattle Displacement Coalition. “It’s just shameful and we’ve
got to deal with it.” Fox pushed for the council legislation, working
with Council Member Tom Rasmussen last year, and he says he was shocked
to find out about the mayor’s secretive move. “To sacrifice the needs
of a couple hundred households [and hold] tenants hostage is
unacceptable.”

According to Nickels spokesman Marty McOmber, the mayor’s office has
seen a “significant drop off in the number of conversion applications,”
and is still monitoring condo-conversion legislation in Olympia. “We’re
going to work with the council to see how we can best use this pot of
money. It shouldn’t take too long to see how these things play out,”
McOmber says.