Renton Councilmember Carmen Rivera appears to support moving Burien homeless residents to Renton Econo Lodge

Renton Councilmember Carmen Rivera and King County Regional Homelessness Authority imply our Red Lion Hotel and Convention Center is still hosting business and leisure travelers, even though it’s leased and boarded up by King County. It was converted to a shelter, and never converted back after ruinous fires and floods.

Is the Renton Econo Lodge next? Renton Council Member Carmen Rivera argues that since the County wrecked the Red Lion Hotel and can’t restore it, it shouldn’t count as a hotel that Renton has given up.  So the Econo Lodge and others should now be available to the County.

At least one Renton Council Member appears to be arguing in favor of Burien moving some of their unhoused residents to the Econo Lodge Hotel in Renton.  Burien’s official city website says they are still considering the idea (it’s the REBLX site in their official post). To help get more of Renton’s hotels converted to shelters, Council Member Carmen Rivera provided a guest editorial to the Renton Reporter so full of obfuscations and misstatements regarding my comments on the topic that it will take me several blog entries to unpack it.  Her goal appears to be to increase Renton’s already way-oversized contribution of hotels to the County’s sheltering efforts.

The only accurate thing Councilmember Rivera said about me in her letter was that I voted in favor of an ordinance creating some reasonable size, location, and operating guidelines for homeless services use in Renton, along with four of my colleagues.  We did so to ensure we didn’t have another hotel produce dangerous living conditions or fall into ruin the way the Red Lion Hotel and Convention center did.  My opponent in my current council race, Kim-Khanh Van voted against this sensible ordinance, along with one other council member. And based on her op-ed, Carmen Rivera would have voted against this ordinance if she had been on council.  In other words, like Kim-Khanh Van, she would like no limitations on converting Renton’s hotel space to shelters to solve other cities’ homeless challenges.

Even the large restaurant and banquet facility is gone, after hosting nightly large events over decades, like the Chamber of Commerce After Hours in December 2019.

I’ll cover more about this tomorrow.  For today, I’ll point out that in my blog entry on the Econo Lodge, I stated that “22  percent of Renton’s hotel rooms had been converted from traveler use to shelter use, while county-wide (including 38 other cities) only 4% of hotel rooms have been converted to shelter use.  With the Econo Lodge, Renton’s percentage of converted hotels would reach 29%.”

In her criticism, Carmen Rivera chose to blame me for a slight misquote by the Renton Reporter.

This is what Carmen wrote: ‘One such falsehood stated in the article is, “22% of hotel rooms in Renton serve as homeless shelters dedicated to the King County Regional Housing Authority, with the potential addition of the Econo Long to raise that number to 29%,” which is inarguable untrue.  The Ordinance 5996: Emergency Interim Zoning Controls – Homeless Shelters, which passed 5-2 by the Renton City Council in December 2020, led to the current closure of the largest emergency shelter in Renton, the Red Lion. Corman was among the five yes votes, a proponent of the ordinance and closure. Now, we are experiencing the consequences of an uptick of individuals trying to survive on our streets with limited, adequate wraparound services.’

My focus in my blog and in my phone discussion with the Renton Reporter was on the loss of hotel space, and that was also the focus of the article in the Renton Reporter article.  I did not claim that the Red Lion was still providing shelter space…it obviously is not.  It’s well known that because of the poor management of the Red Lion shelter, including multiple dangerous fire code violations, this shelter caught fire at least twice and was flooded multiple times, and it now sits ruined while still costing King County taxpayers $330,000 per month.   I’ve covered this in detail. The County has not returned the facility to a hotel and convention center, and they may never be able to do so.  The work required may be so extensive that it trips codes requiring the whole building to be brought to modern seismic standards, which may not even be economically feasible.  So I said truthfully and accurately it is not available for travelers.

Council Member Rivera’s letter makes it sound as if she and Council Member Kim-Khanh Van consider the Renton Red Lion shelter a success story that should be emulated, apparently at the Kennydale Econo Lodge next (helping residents of Burien ahead of Renton).  If this is the case, they will put us on a path to lose more of our hotel rooms for travelers.  The final cost of renting the Red Lion and then ruining it could climb into the tens of millions of dollars, and it provided increasingly poor shelter for about 250 people for 18 months (as fire, flood, and other damage piled up).   I encourage readers to read my other blog entries themselves, and see how much Renton has done to alleviate homelessness in much better ways, and my views on how we should be working across the county on creating affordable housing and shelters that are designed for the use, not converted hotel rooms.

Renton’s hotel rooms are needed to support essential business travel, support our local restaurants and shops, reunite families with visiting loved ones, grow tourism, make our city an event destination, and support our city government with sales and lodging tax.

Renton’s former Red Lion remains boarded up with a permanent security fence around much of the hotel and parking lot. (Photo taken over the fence)

Landscape around Renton’s boarded-up former Red Lion Hotel, Convention Center, and Restaurant are largely ignored by the tenant, King County.

December 2019 Chamber of Commerce After Hours, a few months before King County took over the hotel

December 2019 Chamber After Hours, inside the Yankee Grill