Q&A with District 6 Councilmember Dan Strauss

It’s time again for our monthly installment of our Q&A with District 6 City Councilmember Dan Strauss.

If you want to add your questions to next month’s conversation, email us at tips@myballard.com.

“I see large empty carparks near the Seattle docks and I wonder why that blacktopped area is not opened up to be used—instead of camping on grass areas.“

If we are able to provide a place for people to go, then we are able to say very clearly that you cannot be here, right? So this gets to the crux that we need adequate shelter for people to move into. We have an additional three tiny home villages budgeted for as part of that surge investment that I was referring to, and I know that we actually have more than three sites.

But this gets exactly to my point: We have appropriate places to site these locations all throughout the city, and we need to get moving to use those spaces appropriately. 

By way of background, tent cities are a privately funded organization, they do their own fundraising, and the city does not provide funding for an organization. We don’t necessarily have leverage over how that entity is being managed.

There are many churches that have found really great success because they do a really good job of managing the folks that are living there (who are also self-managing each other) and doing great work with community members so that neighbors know what to expect. And if there’s an issue, who to call.

In terms of why the blacktop area is not open to be used: I have been asking these questions of departments, of what is publicly owned land that we can utilize. And I’ve been working with my colleagues to identify other places that are owned by other governmental entities, that we could also utilize, such as King County or Sound Transit.

When you do address city parks in regards to things getting worse, I want to know that anyone who’s paying property tax has their receipt where it demonstrates which portion of their property tax goes to what level of government.

Something that’s important for folks to remember is that about 50% of property tax goes to the state, and about a third to a quarter of that goes to funding education, in part from the McCleary decision. And while a lot of that money goes to fund Eastern Washington educational facilities.

I understand that when you pay your property tax, it can hit your pocketbook pretty hard, and the city is also not receiving all of that money.

If we had an earthquake or large-scale emergency, we would see a response that would move quickly and adequately to address the crisis. But here we are six years into a civil state of emergency, we have not seen the level of shelter that we need to address this crisis. An example of this is with the COVID pandemic. In March, we had field tents in Shoreline, and we had a field hospital at Seahawks Stadium, all stood up within a matter of weeks. And so

We know that if we were to address this as the crisis that it is, we could move quickly. That’s part of where my deep frustration comes from is that we have not moved fast enough.

“Did he respond publicly or privately to the letter about crime written to him by the Ballard Brewery Coalition, North Seattle Industrial and Ballard Alliance? Did he bring it up in discussions with the rest of city council?“

This gets down to the power of relationships. So even before the letter was sent, I was meeting with businesses, and a lot of what I was asking from them was contained in the survey that they provided.

As I’ve explained in the newsletters that I’ve sent, one of the strongest reports that I get when I say that we need to be addressing this crisis at the scale that we’re experiencing it, is people will say to me, ‘It’s too expensive. We’re already spending $150 million on homelessness.’ 

When I look at that, what stands out to me is that we’re not taking into account the secondary costs borne by the city whether it’s you know, the Clean Cities Initiative or other issues like that.

What’s also not being taken into account is the tertiary costs borne by private residents and businesses. So in my conversations with the folks in the Ballard Alliance, with brewers, with the industrial community, I was really asking for more concrete figures so that I can build my cost-benefit analysis to demonstrate to other electives into the general public that we’re already spending the dollars that we need to spend to address this crisis. It is just that we are spending these dollars on symptoms other than the root [cause].

I’ve again met with the Ballard Alliance ratepayer board. Since then, I’ve met with the industrial folks and helped them to resolve some of the issues that they’re experiencing as part of our District 6 resident casework. 

That point-in-time letter is helpful to put everyone’s thoughts in one place and what is even more powerful is having those relationships, because having those relationships in that ability to talk in real-time is what allowed me the ability to make some of the budget proposals that I made last year, whether it’s outreach workers, the folks who are focused on chemical dependency and behavioral health issues. So because of those relationships and my ability to talk to these business owners, more resources came to our district.

“How is he going to make sure the Ballard Commons Park is safe for families? As it’s unusable for families currently.“

This is a clear demonstration of the secondary costs that I was describing about homelessness response: When you’re solving for the symptoms, we are not using our dollars to their highest and best value. I do not have a timetable at this point for when the situation will change at the Ballard Commons Park, in part due to the CDC guidelines.

If we didn’t have District 6 outreach workers, I would not have as much leverage to say I need help here. Ballard Commons Park is one of a number of parks in the area that needs some pretty intense shelter options provided. Because of my experience with Ballard Commons Park is again why I focus everyone’s conversation on, yes, it’s good to have surge investments, and we have to solve for the whole problem.

We can’t just solve for a third of the problem, because, in my experience, the Commons will have an encampment removal. They’ll come back, and I’m tired and frustrated that we keep circling around failed policies, shuffling people around our city when we’re not spending the money on lasting solutions.