ActionPlan

Pathways Home: Seattle’s Person-Centered Plan to Support People Experiencing Homelessness
on sound business arguments and incentives for participation. More information on the Housing
Resource Center can be found in the Barbara Poppe Report.
Ensuring Good Government and Performance
The City of Seattle and the Human Services Department also have had a significant role to play in the
current state of our homeless response system. The lack of clarity, strategy and formal investment
process is a contributing factor to the disjointed patchwork collection of programs. Routine competitive
funding processes have not happened in over a decade, resulting in legacy funding with little change to
accommodate new directions or models. That type of environment does not encourages innovation.
In order to develop a person‐centered homeless response system, the City must make investments
strategically, based on data and grounded in best practices. HSD commits to conducting routine
competitive funding processes and engaging in performance based contracting.
Implementation of Minimum and Target Performance Standards
In 2013, the Seattle/King County Continuum of Care (CoC) established CoC System Wide Performance
Metrics for: 1) Exits to Permanent Housing, 2) Length of Stay, and 3) Returns to Homelessness that each
program aspires to accomplish. The current CoC targets were developed based on a review of existing
project type data considering sub‐population distinctions. The City of Seattle, King County, and United
Way funding contracts all include the current CoC targets language detailing the quarterly monitoring of
targets and the consequences of projects failing to meet projected targets. While the City of Seattle has
included these targets in contracts, monitoring and contract negotiations do not routinely use targets.
Focus Strategies has recommended that our continuum move away from an approach based on
incremental improvements to our current system to one based on setting standards according to
national best practices. They also recommend that the Seattle/King County CoC adopt minimum
performance standards that determine eligibility for future funding, and adopt two additional
performance measures, utilization rate and entries from homelessness.
The City of Seattle, along with King County and the United Way have agreed to the adoption of the
following performance standards for inclusion in all future funding processes and resulting contracts:
Utilization Rate:
Measures the average daily bed or unit (for families) occupancy of the program. This is
calculated by using HMIS data compared to maximum program capacity. Rapid re‐housing does
not have utilization rate standards because the rapid re‐housing model does not have a fixed
bed capacity to generate occupancy comparisons.
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