Section 3 program helping
residents land jobs
HUD program proving
successful in Seattle
SEATTLE—October 26, 2007—You get a
sense, in talking with Samuel A. Pierce, that he’s not an easy man
to say “no” to.
It’s not that Pierce, the Employment Coordinator for Seattle Housing
Authority’s Section 3 program, is fierce-looking or loud. On the
contrary: He’s pleasant-looking and quite soft-spoken.
But if you were a contractor
working on a Seattle Housing Authority project and Pierce were to
approach you about hiring low-income SHA residents, you’d be looking
for ways to accommodate his request.
If you were in charge of a union’s apprenticeship program and he
asked you to consider certain residents for your program, you’d do
your best to take those residents in for training and placement.
And if you were a low-income resident eligible for the Section 3
program, you’d find it nearly impossible to turn Pierce down when he
offered to create a résumé for you, point you to programs that
provide training and education, and let you know that all you have
to do is give the word and he’ll do his best to find you a good job,
a job with benefits, a job with a future.
All because you’d find him relentlessly pleasant ― with an emphasis
on “relentless.”
Pierce’s days are spent in
outreach: in meeting with contractors and union officials, in
setting up and attending job fairs, in meeting and encouraging
residents and potential employers alike. He meets every day in his
High Point office with SHA residents and other prospective clients.
He meets every month with an 11-member advisory committee that
oversees both SHA’s progress toward Section 3 goals and contractors’
compliance with Section 3 requirements.
“My goal is to help eliminate
barriers in the building trades,” Pierce said. “I really want to
help people in the community be successful.”
Section 3 ― the name for a HUD program that dates to 1968 ― provides
the legal basis for SHA to provide or find jobs for residents and
award contracts to businesses in construction projects that receive
certain types of HUD financial assistance. These projects are mainly
the HOPE VI communities of High Point, NewHolly and Rainier Vista.
In bid documents on these projects, and in its construction
contracts, SHA requires contractors and their subcontractors to
agree to hire people who live in or near HOPE VI communities. More
particularly, SHA requires that 30 percent of new hires, that is,
workers outside a contractor’s experienced core work crew, go to
Section 3-eligible residents. (The agency actually wants to see 100
percent of Section 3 contractors’ new hires going to its qualified
residents and other low-income people.)
Of these new hires, 15 percent must
be apprentices — a figure that’s much higher, Pierce said, than on
most building projects. For its part, SHA identifies low-income
people it houses in HOPE VI communities and others, including people
who receive assistance under the Housing Choice (Section 8) voucher
program.
After Pierce prepares a résumé for a client, he tries to get him or
her hired. His chief mission is placing people in
construction-industry jobs, but together with his colleagues at The
Job Connection, his workplace at SHA, he also places clients in
production, warehousing, social services, administrative and
secretarial jobs.
Under federal rules, Pierce is required to give first priority, in
helping clients find jobs with contractors, to low-income residents
of HOPE VI communities at which construction is planned or taking
place. Next he looks to any resident of any SHA building or program,
including Section 8. Then he turns to people in “Youth Build,” a HUD
program administered by King County that trains people for jobs in
the construction and building industries. He then reaches out to
low-income residents who live near HOPE VI communities, which in
practical terms means people who live in adjacent ZIP codes.
Typically Pierce develops a list of
eligible Section 3 prospects for submission to contractors and
subcontractors. Among those contractors are Tri State Construction,
W. G. Clark, 3 Kings Environmental, Inc., Absher Construction and
Turner Construction.
“I’ll send the list to the contractors, and a person on the list
will interview with the contractor,” Pierce said. “If all is O.K.,
he or she gets hired. If not, we send another person. If no one is
qualified, then the contractor or subcontractor can hire out.”
Contractors are often looking for experienced workers, for
journeymen, but, Pierce said, there aren’t usually too many
out-of-work journeymen in the population of residents he serves.
Still, he does identify some, and he sends them and a steady stream
of apprenticeship candidates the contractors’ way.
If a contractor shows interest in a prospective apprentice, the
contractor endorses the candidate, who then spends a week in
Kingston, Wash., in a training program before reporting to the job
site. Most apprentices learn earthmoving and similar skills, or
carpentry.
Michael Woo, a community organizer with a good deal of experience in
construction who sits on the Section 3 advisory committee, said
recently that Section 3 “aims at trying to provide benefit to all
members of the community. It’s an important tool to help community
residents reach some level of success in transforming their lives.
SHA has shown a strong commitment to the Section 3 program. Without
that commitment, the program would go nowhere.”
Pierce meets often with his peers and colleagues at social service
agencies and at the Seattle Vocational Institute. As a former
employee of Workforce and of the Seattle Youth Employment program
with a long experience of delivery social services, he speaks their
language.
Another member of the advisory committee, Grover Johnson, of the
Northwest Regional Organizing Coalition, said recently that what SHA
is doing for people under its Section 3 program “should be
implemented by other agencies throughout the city and the county.
SHA is seeing to it that people get jobs that come with health
insurance, good jobs, and I hope that this will be a model for other
agencies.”
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