Zahilay and Wilson Partially Dismantle KCRHA Amid Rising Homelessness

Last week, Seattle and King County announced that they are re-absorbing their contracts for homelessness services from the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA). The KCRHA has been administering over 400 city and county contracts worth around $160 million, but these contracts will be returned to Seattle’s Human Services Department (HSD) and King County’s Department of Community and Human Services (DCHS) by the beginning of next year.

County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson both insisted the troubled regional homelessness agency wasn’t being fully dissolved but wouldn’t discuss its future beyond asserting the continued importance of a regional approach to homelessness and their intention to engage in “broad stakeholdering.”

“Mayor Wilson and I have inherited a lot of issues, but we will not maintain the status quo just because change is hard,” Zahilay said in a press conference announcing the new direction of the agency. “So today we are taking further action to stabilize, right-size, and reset KCRHA. Our aim is to strengthen this organization's foundation, improve accountability, and put the agency in the strongest possible position to fulfill the responsibilities that are entrusted to it.”

The City of Seattle declared homelessness a civil emergency and public health crisis in 2015, under Mayor Ed Murray. Envisioned as a way to take a regional approach to homelessness, KCRHA was formed in late 2019 and began operations in 2021. However, the new regional agency had trouble getting buy-in from the majority of the region’s cities, wasn’t given its own taxing authority, and struggled to act independently from its two primary funders: the City of Seattle and King County.

https://www.theurbanist.org/zahilay-and-wilson-partially-dismantle-kcrha-amid-rising-homelessness/