Stephen Norman has helped house thousands of households and now is looking forward to passing the baton
Stephen Norman, the executive director of the King County Housing Authority, will retire at the end of the year after more than two decades on the job. He will be working right up to the last minute, closing out two bonds worth thousands of units of affordable and workforce housing and getting households into units using emergency housing vouchers approved through recent federal legislation.
“Let me tell you, retiring is hard work,” Norman said.
Norman began his career as a community organizer in the Sunset Park neighborhood of South Brooklyn. It became clear to him that access to safe, affordable housing for the communities with which he was working was a critical precursor to other objectives.
He joined New York City’s Housing Department in the 1980s as homelessness became visible on the city’s streets and worked to set up a pipeline for thousands of units of affordable housing for people experiencing homelessness. He went from there to the Corporation for Supportive Housing, a national organization that worked on what was then a new model called permanent supportive housing (PSH). PSH is now the gold standard for high-need individuals.
Norman came to the King County Housing Authority (KCHA) in 1997. In the past 25 years, the organization has worked to preserve naturally affordable housing, prevent displacement of vulnerable communities and open the doors of high-cost, high-opportunity locations to people who would otherwise not be able to afford to live there. But the region has also seen the loss of housing units and slow movement on embracing density paired with mass transit, exacerbating the strain on the housing market.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Real Change: What are your thoughts on how the PSH model has changed over time and the take-up rate? Do you feel that it has been embraced as it should?
Stephen Norman: No. I think our frustration over the years is that the model has proved its effectiveness. The proof of concept is there, the jury is in, that quality, permanent supportive housing has successful outcomes, both for the individuals who are being housed [and] for the communities they’re being housed in, because it is far better to have folks in housing than on the streets. And it has also been a success from the perspective of the taxpayers in that it is far more cost effective to get people into permanent supportive housing than it is to have them endlessly cycling between the streets and the jails and the emergency rooms, each of which works on whatever the presenting issue is and then just sort of passes people on again.
… And I think that the frustration is that the federal government in particular, but also ... state and local governments, have never really put in the level of resources needed to scale this up.
What role has the housing authority played there?
I think the focus on housing authorities has been on housing folks who are at an economic level that they need additional support to be housed. And I think what we’ve seen over the last decade, a little earlier in the case of the King County Housing Authority, was a proactive outreach to other systems to see how we could partner to provide housing. Although I would be the first to say that we don’t run permanent supportive housing; this is not within our expertise.
We partner with the groups who know how to do that — the Catholic Community Services, the Plymouth, the DESCs — to provide rental subsidy in housing that gets developed as PSH. And I think part of our frustration out in the county is that there has not been, until relatively recently, much of a pipeline in PSH outside of the city of Seattle. That’s where the nonprofits — for a variety of reasons, including the fact that you had a city housing levy to provide the additional funding needed — that’s where they focus much of their efforts.
Here what we did was we aggressively went after special purpose Housing Choice vouchers — Section 8 vouchers — that could be used with homeless populations. And we’ve used most of that on a scatter site basis. We have, at this point, over 5,000 vouchers. Well, most of it is vouchers. Some of it is housing, but we have 5,000 households that receive dedicated rental subsidies who are either homeless or living with disabilities.
What work has the King County Housing Authority done to preserve “naturally affordable” housing?
I want to give full credit to Dan Watson and Tim Walter on the staff, most of whom were here before I left...
[B]oth were here before I came, and both of them are in senior leadership roles as I leave. They really started this program back in the early ’90s, but we have been able to accelerate it, particularly in the last few years. We currently have over 8,500 units that we’ve purchased around the county, and we do this for a number of reasons.
The first is to avoid the displacement of existing populations as the markets change around them. And I think Wonderland Estates is a great example. Another is Highland Village, which was a complex we saved in Bellevue a few years ago. Bellevue Manor, which is three blocks off Old Main in downtown Bellevue, where the prior owner was opting out of the federal subsidies and selling the site. This was extremely low-income seniors, and I have no doubt that the site would have been a construction site within a year and a half.
So, we do a lot of this to keep folks from being displaced. The second is that we are essentially trying to create a portfolio of housing, a percentage of the inventory in this region, that is decoupled from rising market pressures. What economists would say is it’s been “decommodified.” And this is essentially social housing that is owned by the Housing Authority, directly.
And for a region that is never going to, I think, get to rent control, this is the strategy that can keep rents reasonable for a portion of the inventory, and this is not new. This is essentially the European social housing model that’s been practiced in most major European social democracy urban cores since World War II, in the case of Vienna, since World War I. And I think it’s an important approach here — really across the country — is that we need a far larger portion of that rental housing inventory in urban areas that is owned by either nonprofits or public entities simply so you don’t have the kind of dynamic pricing that we’re seeing in much of the housing market in hot communities.
The third thing it does is, because we are buying this housing mostly in what we would call “high-opportunity neighborhoods,” is that it keeps existing residents in those neighborhoods with good schools and job prospects. But we are a very receptive Section 8 landlord. So about 15 percent of the housing in this inventory is occupied by people with housing choice vouchers. They have a true mix of incomes here from zero to 80 percent of [area median income (AMI)], but it gives access, broader access, for extremely low-income households into these kind of high-opportunity neighborhoods.
And we have combined that with buying up small complexes and converting them to public housing. … And this is also another way of creating more options for extremely low-income families to live in these high-opportunity neighborhoods and take advantage of the fact that they have all sorts of strengths that help households and their children, most particularly, prosper over the long term.
State law doesn’t allow for rent control in our area. But if you were to be able to wave a magic wand, is that a policy preference that you would have?
I think some kind of what we called in New York “rent stabilization,” which was a middle path between complete rent control and complete unfettered market capitalism. I think the devil is always in the details, but I think that we do need to figure out a way to mitigate the impacts of these rent increases, particularly if we are not successful — and we are not — in addressing the supply-demand imbalance that we have within our market.
What are some policies that you’ve seen over the course of your tenure at the Housing Authority that could allow these kinds of solutions to scale?
The first is on the availability of housing choice vouchers. Nationally, one-in-four households that is eligible for a voucher actually gets a voucher, and it is the only means-tested federal poverty program where qualifying doesn’t get you the benefit. If you qualify for food stamps, you get food stamps. If you qualify for Medicaid, you get Medicaid. If you qualify for housing choice vouchers, you get on a waiting list, which is frequently five-to-10 years long. So, I think the first challenge is that we have to have a much larger supply of vouchers.
We both need to preserve the affordable housing through the strategies we were talking about before, but we’ve also got to build a lot more housing. And I think a couple of key elements of the production piece are one, around density. And I think that we have to look at this region as a whole because we can’t load all the density into Seattle. And I will be clear that as somebody who grew up in Manhattan, my concept of density is a little different than folks out here, and I understand and respect the concern about quality of life in single-family neighborhoods.
But I think that there needs to be a thoughtful, regional approach that both tries to maximize the protection for the lower-density neighborhoods that people have invested, in some cases, their life savings in and are concerned about change. But at the same time, we need to create enough land that is zoned for sufficient density that we can really start to see a significant increase in housing production. But a lot of that also will involve transportation. Mass transit is first and foremost, not a people conveyor, but a land use determinant.
The other piece is the cost of housing construction for a wide variety of reasons is too high, and the reality is that the rents that many people can afford to pay in this region won’t adequately support the cost of the private sector constructing this housing. It ranges from the cost of land because we don’t have that much developable land that has been zoned right, to a scarcity of contractors, to a scarcity of workers, to material costs, to the overlay of regulations.
Over your tenure at KCHA, what do you consider the greatest challenge that you had to overcome, and what do you see the challenge for your successor to be?
Well, I think the challenge for everybody in the housing arena at the moment is homelessness. They declared a state of emergency, what, a decade ago?
The most recent one was in November of 2015, if I recall correctly.
Okay, six years. People were dying on the streets in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. This is a moral imperative that we figure out how to do this. And I think from where we sit, the frustration is we think we know some of the tried-and-true solutions. Rental subsidies, housing development. What we need are the resources to do more of it, to scale it up. And then I think, particularly on the [homelessness] challenge, the behavioral health care system in this state is simply not providing the level of resources to local-based efforts to address homelessness that it needs to do.
In the current climate where we are seeing housing prices escalate to the degree that we are seeing it, do you see the role of the housing authority changing or the need for it changing as we continue on this path?
Well, I think that our scope has broadened out from an initial focus on households that were earning between zero and 30 percent of AMI to a broader range of incomes through the acquisitions we’re doing, because I don’t think you can solve the homeless issue. I don’t think you can solve the total housing issue for folks between zero and 30 percent of AMI unless you really solve the housing issue for folks up to 80 percent of AMI, and it gives you both opportunities to do more income mixing within complexes. But it really tries to start to stabilize a portion of the inventory across that full range of incomes.
Can you elaborate on issues of equity in housing?
Well, I think a lot of what we deal with in this country and in this region in terms of poverty and homelessness is a result of deeply embedded, systematized, historical patterns of racism. Everything from the deliberate efforts by the federal government to keep African American households from buying housing in the suburbs that were being created after World War II; which is one of the main drivers in the disparities in terms of household wealth between African American and white households in this country, to the fact that we have criminalized, to a certain degree, homelessness, poverty and race in this country and that we deal with a lot of clients who, I don’t think, if they were white, would have the records that the police department will show they have for things that really are the result of being homeless, being of a different color, and that this all has an impact on people’s life successes.
After 45 years in this business and 25 years at the King County Housing Authority, what are you going to do with your free time?
First thing I’m going to do is catch up with sleep… I’m looking forward to taking some time to kick back and relax a bit and sort of take stock. We are housing about 60,000 people a night, and the operational demands of that are pretty all-consuming. I would like to really sort of sit back and take a little stock and gain a little bit of perspective before I commit to doing anything else. Certainly I am going to be working on brushing up my barbecue skills and catching up on my reading.
Do you have any advice for the next person who’s going to sit in your chair?
I think my strongest piece of advice is that the critical elements of success in this job are, one, listening to the communities we serve and then, two, partnering on all levels and in all directions. Those are the key elements here. There’s a tremendous staff at the housing authority. We have some 450 employees, and I can’t praise them highly enough, particularly the frontline workers who, even in the midst of this pandemic, are out there serving our communities and trying to get people housed and helping keep people to stay housed. They really get all the credit.
Ashley Archibald was the editor of Real Change through July 14, 2023, after working as a staff reporter for the newspaper for several years. She left to become a communication specialist for Purpose. Dignity. Action., previously known as Seattle’s Public Defender Association. Real Change is proud to know this talented person.
Read more of the Dec. 22-28, 2021 issue.