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A dozen or so women came to the door of the Rainier Valley Unitarian Universalist church, various dishes of food in hand, for a potluck dinner and meeting on how to save their homes at Yesler Terrace. But within minutes, they left the building in a huff.
The Seattle Housing Authority, they were told May 3, had no money to hire their regular interpreter, the same one the East African women have relied on for years and trust to voice their wishes to the agency, which is currently drawing up designs to redevelop their low-income duplexes on First Hill.
Last year, the housing authority held a series of public meetings on turning the 580 units at Yesler Terrace, its oldest housing project, into a mix of low-income and market-rate housing in 2011 or later. With a new set of public meetings to start in June on the final site design, Kristin O’Donnell of the Yesler Terrace Community Council says the potluck was one of seven tenant workshops scheduled since January to help residents get organized.
Without interpreters to cover at least a few of the 26 languages spoken at Yesler Terrace, however, the tenants say they can’t even talk to each other, much less articulate their concerns to the housing authority. An agency spokesperson says it’s all a misunderstanding, but O’Donnell and other tenants don’t see it that way.
O’Donnell says she got an e-mail last week written by Brett Houghton, a housing authority staff member assigned to Yesler Terrace, saying there was no more money in the budget to translate flyers or pay for interpreters at tenant meetings. Two interpreters did come to the church May 3 – hired by O’Donnell out of meager council funds that she says can cover one more tenant meeting planned May 17 with SHA Director Tom Tierney, if need be.
She was unable to pay for the potluck’s flyer to be translated, however, which is why only 10 people showed up, she says.
“We have always used [the same] interpreter, one man [who] speaks Somali and Oromo,” said Matayah, a Yesler Terrace tenant who came to the potluck and asked that her real name not be used because she fears her landlord. “When they tell us no interpreter from SHA, we say why?”
The answer, says Houghton, is that the series of tenant workshops scheduled at the church from January to April are over: The money that was budgeted for translating flyers and paying for interpreters for those events — $1,000 — has been spent. “They requested a specific set of funds for a project that was finite,” she says. “They used them and now the project is over.”
Not so, says O’Donnell. She added the potluck event as a sort of “rehearsal dinner” for the upcoming meeting with SHA’s director, but the May 17 event (which may be pushed back) was definitely part of the workshops, she says. And the agency never quoted her a dollar limit on interpretation, which is paid for out of funds that HUD provides specifically to promote resident participation.
Housing authority spokeswoman Virginia Felton says there is still money to pay for flyer translation and interpretation at meetings that it leads and those of the Yesler Terrace Community Council and its leadership (or executive) team. Because the potluck was a leadership team event, Houghton says she did honor O’Donnell’s request and authorized Neighborhood House, a nonprofit, to send the housing authority’s regular interpreters to the potluck.
Felton calls it a snafu that they didn’t show up, not an attempt to shut out residents. But, in the future, the residents will have to find other sources to pay for interpreters at tenant meetings — something she says the agency is willing to help with. O’Donnell calls that unacceptable. “They’ll have their interpreters,” she says. “It’s just our meetings that won’t.”
Without interpreters, Matayah says, there’s nothing to keep the housing authority from forcing low-income tenants out the way it did at Rainier Vista, one of four major redevelopments of SHA duplex communities in recent years.
“They don’t want the people to say the problems they have,” she says. “That’s why they don’t want an interpreter.” |
