the best housing they have seen in a very long time. >> thank you. >> joanna >> thank you, raj, marc, i know in the last 6 years i've worked a lot with you and called you many times about clients and complaints and situations. i wanted to address my question for the outreach team, for the hot team. i know you talked about master leasing hotels that are very low threshold. at the same time along with those really old buildings come a lot of physical accessibility problems. and one of the struggles that we have been having in our office and i think with the groups, the people that you work with, is the fact that now disability is so multi layered, we see our population aging, especially our chronickly aging folks are

on the street and they develop a lot of physical ailments as a result of homelessness. so how do you see or how do you fill the gap between the need for access in those stablization rooms and the stock that you actually have available? because we have heard stories of folks where wheelchair users were having it crawl up stairs and not being able to fit into the rooms or once they get there, they can't use the restrooms, they can't use the common bathrooms. how do you see that and how do you plan on addressing it? >> and that's absolutely true. it depends on which hotels you are talking about. some are better than others. for example, i don't know if the civic center hotel may have popped up in your mind but we've been having difficulties with the civic center. they have had chronic issues with their elevators, they have tried to fix it, it's a costly

thing for them to fix the elevator. we are currently considering getting out of the civic center because it's been quite some time and we are the homeless outreach community is about 55 or so units, it's quite a few units, for people who have no mobility issues, they don't have any complaints about at least the elevator issue, but we have another building that does have elevator access that's better. in the past we have had elevators where you have to swing, not swing the door but the chains. those have been difficult and sometimes narrow. so we try to find other buildings. but the fact remains that in the cost range that we're talking about you end up dealing with buildings that are older, you end up dealing with buildings that are in neighborhoods that are sometimes not the best. having said that, people are still generally satisfied with being in a building as opposed to being on the street. i don't feel satisfied personally about that, but it's a stepping

stone as well to get into places that are way better, you know, in terms of the housing and urban health stock that we have. so it's an on-going process and we have left hotels, some hotels have asked us it leave because the clients we were bringing in were just too much for that environment and it didn't work out for them. we remain flexible about that and we're always looking for better and more diverse places. we started with 3 or 4 buildings and we have 8 now. for clients also one may not work out and we may have you go to another place. the other thing we've done, we have a little bit of muscle in the sense we have 55 units in a place. and to say to the owner, look, this must be fixed, otherwise we're leaving, and that's kind of where we're at with the civic center. that's one way to get the owners to improve the places that they have. the other thing is policy changes. when we first started, companion animals were mentioned earlier. a lot of

these buildings did not take animals. so we said, look, out of our 40 units how about 6 of them or 8 of them or 10 of them if you can allow us to bring in animals. ann parker, who you mentioned earlier, she is our dog whisperer and she literally will assess the dogs by rolling on the floor with them so we're very proud to have her. so we check out the dogs. if the dogs don't have their shots, we get those done. if the dogs don't have companion animals done, i do those papers. a lot of people have them for their psychiatric disabilities. we restructured these things with the hotel, okay, maybe you don't want 20 people with dogs but maybe we can have 8 with dogs. we bought muzzles for the dogs that needed muzzles so it's easier for them to be buildings and we talked to our clients. look, you are able to bring a dog in but do not, you

have to be mindful about how the dog behaves with other people in the building because otherwise we're not going to be ail to continue to host you in this building. so it's an on-going negotiation with the hotel managers, with the clients, with the dogs, with our staff members, because we want to continue to be as flexible as we can to be as accessible in a variety of ways for our clients so it works out for everybody. but it's a challenge and i'm not going to say it's all in a simple day's work. >> it's interesting because you and i, i know, have argued at times about housing and the reasonable accommodation process. and it's really important to note that these folks do not actually have tenancy rights. this is essentially a hosting place, a very low threshold place. one of the hopes and the wishes would be that you take an accurate inventory of the accessibility or the physical

layout of those units that you actually leverage city money for. >> correct. >> and develop a longer term plan to actually provide an equal sort of percentage or a more appropriate percentage of accessibility in those very low threshold units. >> currently as far as elevator access, i'm going to include the civic center, we probably have 40 percent of our units that are elevator accessible. and certainly the number of our folks that need elevators is way less than 40 in terms of mobility impairment and that sort of thing. by and large, the disabilities that are the most often seen within our population are psychiatric, substance abuse related, but certainly physical issues, especially when you are out there so long. someone with hypertension who is home and

has meds, that's one thing, but when you have a stroke and it brings about its own issues, it's an on-going challenge. >> any other questions? i just wanted to mention if you ever get a building with a full gym and swimming pool, i want to be at the top of the list. but since you don't have one right now, i want to thank you both. you are not just taking people and giving them homes, you are saving their lives. just getting them off the street with permanent housing, that's wonderful and we need more of that. thank you for your work and i hope you can continue for a very long time. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you. (applause). >> looking at the time, it's 2.35, we still haven't taken our break so we're going to take one now and we'll be back in about 10 --. >> hold on. >> wait just a moment. i'm

sorry. >> oh, public comment, i'm sorry. please come up. >> thank you, i'll be quick, i know people want to go on their break and i appall yiez for being late and missing part of the presentation. my name is jessica layman, i'm with senior disability action. as a lot of folks here know, we have been working with the sro collaborative on improving conditions in sro's for seniors and people with disabilities. so i was really interested in hearing more about daas and the homeless outreach team. a couple questions i had particularly about the homeless outreach team, you mentioned not having tenancy rights and i wondered why that is. how do you hold private hotels accountable for good living conditions since we know that's an issue. >> so with respect to tenancy rights, these rooms are sort of

a hybrid between a shelter bed and a hospital bed in the sense that they are provided free of charge, they are provided for treatment and stablization purposes, they are provided as a quick way of getting off the streets. but since there is no payment expected from the client, in fact we don't accept payment for these rooms, you know, we checked with the authorities with the city attorney and this was thought to be, you know, a good legal way of doing it. what it allows us to do is to have that low threshold. we don't need id checks, we don't need checks about people's criminal backgrounds, that sort of thing. it is a bit of a bargain that you make but again most of our folks that are in these rooms do not have an issue and our policy is not to have them leave with any kind of arbitrary timeline. when they get into permanent housing is when they leave. i mentioned it takes 4 or 5

months to get all the documents and all that together. once you apply for housing it can take 2 or 3 months more to get through that process so people stay in these places until they get into their housing. we have not had too many difficulties with this. if we had to have tendency rights we would probably not have this problem because then people would not leave and we would have attrition of the program over time. people sign to even access these units, that's clearly stated that you do not have tenancy rights, that you are a guest of the department of public health and people have generally been okay with that. the issue of how do you work with the hotel managers, the ability we have to impression upon the hotel managers that things need to be a certain way is really the contract that we have with them and that there are certain expectations about cleanliness and about access and about safety that are in there. so when hotel managers are not

following through, then we have a process by which we inform them that this is an issue. sometimes we actually involve environmental health, part of the department of public health, to help us with that. sometimes it's a matter of housing and urban health administers these units for us, it's a matter of talking to marc, talking to margo, this just isn't working out, perhaps you want to take 20 percent off because it isn't working out and let's get the equivalent number of rooms elsewhere. that's the type of bargaining we have to do. in general what the hotel managers will do is make some sort of fix that makes things better. it may not be perfect, but the client says that's fine. and when it doesn't work we have sometimes left hotels and gone on to others. does that make sense? >> public comment? public

comment. >> go ahead, walter. >> i always knew (singing) there's a place for us, somewhere a house for us, housing to share in everywhere, out there, everywhere, somewhere, some way we'll find a knew way of living, we'll find a way of forgiving. somewhere, some way, somehow, right now. >> thank you, walter. and with that i think we're ready for our break. thank you. we'll be back in about 10 minutes. (short break)