There’s been a lot going on with social housing in Seattle, and everyone seems to have an opinion about it. In a sense, that’s a good thing. We want the public to pay attention to what the Seattle Social Housing Developer — the Public Development Authority established in 2023 to build social housing in the city — is doing. After all, a majority of the public voted to establish this new agency, and so it only makes sense that people have a vested interest in our work.
In particular, we’ve received a lot of media attention lately because the Seattle City Council approved the transfer of money from the 5% excess compensation tax on pay above $1 million, which is paid by companies and funds us. This model of funding was also approved by the vast majority of voters in a special election last year. We’ve received a lot more money than expected from the tax — $130 million, in fact. We are thankful and well aware that with money comes scrutiny.
We intend to use the money to acquire our first building in the coming months. As Jamie Madden hints in his March 5 op-ed “Social housing isn’t delivering on its promises. But it’s not too late,” the development authority’s buying rather than constructing housing still does a world of good: It’s an assurance that rents there will remain permanently affordable, that the housing will forever be owned by the public and renters will have a direct say in how their building is run.
Seattle Social Housing Developer interim CEO Tiffani McCoy has hired attorney and organizer Nikkita Oliver to help design our resident governance systems, so that renters can meaningfully participate in social housing. Eventually, half our board will be made up of tenants living in Seattle social housing.
But we have no intention of stopping there. The developer does not plan to simply “buy existing housing rather than add to Seattle’s housing stock.” We are acquiring properties to start, and are taking on debt via low-interest bonds precisely to create a development pipeline. In just two years, we plan to have built dozens of units. In five years, we plan to have constructed hundreds of units of new housing, with a focus on family-sized units — two- and three-bedroom apartments that are hard to come by in Seattle. Tenants will be able to stay in place, even if their incomes changes, with a growing family or as they age. It’ll be as close to owning a home as possible, but without the burden of a down payment on a million-dollar home.
And yes, though we are not “a jobs program,” we do feel it’s important to use union labor for construction and green sustainable design that will create a housing supply we can all be proud of. To help manage these properties, we intend to establish a property management division.
People can and will have opinions about what SSHD should have been doing for the last couple of years, but the agency survived with a $2 million loan from the city, which we have paid back. Only now do we have the staff needed to fulfill our mission. That includes Ginger Segel, our chief real estate development officer, with close to 40 years of housing development experience; James Mayton, director of acquisitions, who spent years at the Seattle Housing Authority; and architect Michael Eliason, director of design and policy.
We know there will be plenty of skepticism about what we’re doing, even from people who want us to succeed. Although social housing has been around for more than a century in places like Vienna, it’s a relatively new concept for Americans, many of whom have been sold on the idea that only by owning a home can one truly achieve the American dream.
We’re not buying that, especially in a city like Seattle where more than half the population is made up of renters. The Seattle Social Housing Developer won’t be perfect, but we will be as transparent as possible, and, if needed, correct course. This is important to us, and to the thousands of low- and middle-income workers who are still struggling to make ends meet.
