As a member of the Building Changes team that recently completed planning work for the Seattle Housing Authority's Yesler Terrace project, I got an inside look at an exciting new community. For the Seattle Housing Authority, the redevelopment of Yesler Terrace -- the second oldest publicly subsidized community in the U.S. and the oldest in Seattle -- is about more than just replacing aging structures and creating stable housing. It's about creating a "Community of Opportunity" for the people who live there. What does that mean? It means making education and economic opportunities more accessible to residents and supporting them to reach their personal goals. It also means providing residents with community leadership opportunities. And it means residents will have access to the support
Community planning processes take a lot of work. I recently participated in one such process and worked on the resulting report,
A Landscape Assessment and Strategic Plan for Increasing Economic Opportunities for People Experiencing Homelessness in Whatcom County. The goal of the plan is pretty straightforward: expand the opportunities of people who have experienced homelessness to develop skills, increase income, and improve self-sufficiency.
What did it take to pull the plan together? For one, a committed Steering Committee -- with leadership from Greg Winter of Whatcom Homeless Service Center and Barbara Leveque of Whatcom Community College -- that met once a month for almost a year. Getting homeless and employment services providers that had never met before in the same room was key,
In 2006, Building Changes and the City of Seattle Office of Housing led a community planning process to assess the existing connections between the workforce development and homeless service systems. This process began a couple of years into our community's Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness, which included only limited strategies related to increasing economic opportunities for those experiencing homelessness. That process, and the opportunities for action that the resulting report recommended, spurred our community to action. Over the past year, homeless housing and services funders have ramped up their funding, and their expectations, for employment programs serving homeless job seekers. Some homeless housing and services providers have already stepped up to that challenge by developing
Local communities have a range of tools they can use to promote affordable housing in a way that meets local needs. At Building Changes, we see our role as helping cities and counties to find examples from across the state and the country, and evaluate what strategies will fit their needs and create the most bang for the buck.
A big focus of our recent planning work has involved working with stakeholders in Snohomish County to identify ways of creating and preserving more affordable housing across the county. We worked closely with the Housing Consortium of Everett and Snohomish County to develop an action plan for increasing the number of households receiving housing assistance over the next ten years. The result of our work is titled Housing within Reach: A Call to Action for Snohomish
