(Image: Environmental Works)

Thursday, Capitol Hill-based affordable developer Community Roots Housing and GenPride are announcing the results of a community process to name their new eight-story, LGBTQ-affirming affordable senior housing project set to break ground later this year on Broadway between Pike and Pine. The result, Pride Place, a new home and community center for seniors in the core of Capitol Hill.

“The name is important because we are staking a claim in a historically LGBTQ neighborhood,” GenPride executive director Steven Knipp tells CHS.

The coming development is still wrapping up permitting with the city to create 118 units of “affordable workforce rental housing” above GenPride’s new offices and services from community organizations that will call the building home in a 4,400-square-foot LGBTQ senior community center and 3,600 square feet of commercial retail space along Broadway.

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The planned building will take up two parcels: the long vacant Atlas Clothing building and the landmarked auto row-era Eldridge Tire Company building which has housed Tacos Guaymas and Folicle Hair Design. With the landmark designation, the new building will keep the old Mission Revival-styled structure’s facade while preservation incentives help boost the project.

The building will provide rents affordable at 30% to 60% of area median income.

Knipp said the Pride Place name was arrived at as part of an ongoing, multi-year community advisory process with help from some of the city’s leading LGBTQ focused communty groups — the LGBTQ Allyship, Gay City, GSBA, POCAAN, Seattle Counseling Services, County Doctor/Carolyn Downs, Ingersoll Gender Center, and Aging with Pride.

Pride Place will be one of Seattle’s first “community preference” developments encouraging developers receiving city money to offer a portion of their affordable units to communities with ties to the neighborhood, particularly those with a high risk of displacement.”

Community Roots Housing — then still under its original Capitol Hill Housing name — collaborated with Black and Central District focused groups to open the Liberty Bank Building, an equitable development and affordable housing project at 24th and Union, in 2019.

GenPride, a nonprofit “focused on empowering older LGBTQ+ adults to live with pride and dignity,” will help make Pride Place a friendly place for all seniors as it focuses outreach efforts for new residents on the senior LGBTQ communities around the city. LGBTQ seniors, studies cited by GenPride say, face a unique set of challenges and health disparities as they age: “compared to their peers, they are more likely to be in poverty, are at higher risk for illness, are less likely to have the support of children or biological family, and often face discrimination and difficulty finding culturally competent care.”

The 2019 opening of the Liberty Bank Building in the Central District (Image: CHS)

The nonprofit says Pride Place will help combat isolation and “make aging as an LGBTQ person something that is part of the fabric of our community, and not something that segregates or hurts us” while countering displacement and helping LGBTQ communities reclaim their space on the Hill.

Meanwhile, there are other Central Seattle communities facing similar challenges and moving forward with projects to make new homes for their aging loved ones. In the Central District, Mount Zion is planning senior housing on 19th Ave to help address displacement in the Black community.

Community Roots Housing, meanwhile, also just broke ground on its new Yesler Family Housing, a new development with the Seattle Chinatown International District PDA that will create a mixed-use building at the corner of 13th and Yesler creating housing “for current and returning Yesler families as well as others in need of affordable housing in the area.” The building is planned to be uniquely suited to families, including 25 three-bedroom and seven four-bedroom units along with an early learning center on the ground floor. It will also serve households with incomes at 30% or 60% area median income.

The $44.1 million Pride Place project including the estimated $4.2 million GenPride community space is being funded through a mix of $12.6 million in public funds, $13.5 million in Low-Income Housing Tax Credit bonding, a $9.4 million loan, $2.1 million in equity from developer Community Roots Housing. An additional $2.5 million is being raised by organizations to complete the project.

The properties were made available in a complicated four-way swap involving Sound Transit transit oriented development parcels, Seattle Central and the state community college system, and Community Roots Housing. Sound Transit traded its Broadway “Site D” near the western Capitol Hill Station entrance to Seattle Central and the college system in exchange for the Atlas property. Sound Transit then swapped the Atlas site to Community Roots Housing as cash and other properties also changed hands in the transaction.

The Pride Place team expects the project to break ground on Broadway by this fall with the first residents moving in by early 2023.

You can keep track of progress and learn more at communityrootshousing.org.

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