The mayor froze the money. The Seattle City Council got some of it released. Now the city has contracted Seattle nonprofit Solid Ground to disburse the new moving assistance to people facing condo conversions
— if only, the program manager says, she could find someone who qualifies.
In a city where conversions of apartments
have run rampant in the past few years, John Fox of the Seattle Displacement
Coalition, who lobbied the council for the $350,000 it approved last year to create the pilot program, finds that odd. But Donna Dziak, Solid Ground’s housing counseling manager, says the national credit crunch has slowed conversions — the city received conversion applications
for only 24 units in January and none in February — and the program isn’t backtracking to find people who have already moved.
The program, which the city’s Human
Services Department is authorized to operate through May, provides extra money for a low-income tenant to rent a new apartment, over and above the $500 that the building’s owner is required to pay them by law. In January, when a lost grant left the department short in its budget,
the mayor froze the funds, $25,000 of which the council got released to start the program that Dziak has now set up.
The money is slated to cover tenants in buildings that applied for conversion after Sept. 1 of last year — but only if the owner has already given the tenants an official 90-day notice to move and they’re still in the apartment. So far, Dziak is working from a Department of Planning list that includes 166 units in 15 buildings. But, of the building owners
she’s reached by phone, she says the conversions are “either on hold or folks have moved out.”
If she does find a conversion that’s proceeding, Dziak says she will take flyers to the building informing tenants of the assistance, which is based on a sliding scale. Renters can qualify for up to $1,500 if their pretax income is at or below $1,370 a month, up to $1,000 for incomes at or below $2,280 a month and up to $500 for incomes at or below $3,480 a month. Tenants who believe they qualify can call Solid Ground at (206)694-6767.
Fox criticizes the city, however, for not authorizing Solid Ground to follow up on tenants who have already moved out — something he wants to see rectified.
“They have an obligation to figure out some way of doing outreach to those folks,” Fox says. “They would have received
the assistance if the city hadn’t been dilly-dallying.”
He also plans to push the council to extend the program through at least Aug. 1, when a new state law takes effect allowing the city to make condo developers
pay tenants up to three times their rent in moving assistance. |
