Over the past few weeks, Seattle Housing Authority tenants have been organizing against Nora Gibson, the chair of the board of the public housing provider. The mayor had supported Gibson for reappointment to the board, but she withdrew her name yesterday in the face of opposition.
“I felt that it would be better to resign than to fuel the controversy,” she said today.
The council is considering three people the mayor recommended be appointed or reappointed to the board. (This is the second set of appointments to SHA this year, totaling five spots on the seven-member board.) Murray had nominated Gibson for another term.
Gibson said she withdrew her name after a group of SHA tenants denounced her at a meet-and-greet City Hall event on June 1. “There were organized protests very similar to what you saw in the Stepping Forward community meetings,” she said, “with most questions focusing on me and attempting to discredit me.” Those protests, both last year and this year, were backed strongly by Socialist Alternative and the Tenants Union of Washington.
When she learned that council member John Okamoto had decided not to support her nomination, Gibson said, she decided to resign. Okamoto did not respond to a request for comment.
Stepping Forward was a plan put forward by the housing authority to raise rents by 500 percent over five years on more than a third of its tenants and provide them with career assistance. It met with widespread opposition, both from SHA tenants and the mayor, multiple city council members (including Sawant), as well as the League of Women Voters.
She said today the SHA has completely shelved the Stepping Forward plan. But she also defended the idea behind it and insisted that most people who were opposed to it “didn’t seem to understand the meat of the proposal.”
Under questioning by council member Sawant at a May 21 committee meeting, she described Stepping Forward as a way “to allow people to feel the motivation to work.”
She said there was “anecdotal” evidence that this was a problem. Pressed for details today, Gibson, who is also the executive director of a nonprofit called Full Life Care, said some SHA tenants whom she employs at Full Life Care are deliberately cutting back on their hours as their wages go up under the city’s minimum wage law. They’re doing so in order to avoid losing their rent-stabilized units, she said.
“That’s a frustrating piece of the truth that’s not coming to the surface,” she said. “They’re trying to avoid paying more rent.”
She kept describing this group of people as “East African,” and I asked her to explain why. “To my knowledge, it’s not the East African community at large,” she said. “But there’s a portion of them who are living in public housing who are East African where it is a problem.”
Again, I asked her for more specificity, and she told me a total of five of her employees had cut back their hours. That’s partly why, she said, she supported Stepping Forward.
Abdi Mohammed is an East African housing activist who organized demonstrations against Stepping Forward last year and against Gibson this year. “For her,” he said, “using the race card on people—especially, talking about a few East African employees—that’s very inappropriate. That’s discriminatory.”
Council Member Sawant said Gibson’s comments “skirt dangerously close to being anti-immigrant and anti-poor.”
“Tenants do not want the council to appoint individuals who are not going to uphold their right to affordable housing,” she said. “The lesson from this whole episode is that organizing works.”
A spokesperson for the mayor’s office said Gibson served in a “very committed and honorable way over the years” and that the mayor would get to work nominating a replacement. Gibson will continue to serve on the SHA Board until her position is filled with someone new.
