It is too late for the Madkin — but buildings like it could make for ideal acquisitions once the new entity is formed
It appears Seattle is on its way to creating a public social housing developer with hopes of helping the city combat its ongoing housing and affordability crisis after Tuesday’s first tally showed I-135 with a healthy “yes” vote lead.
With an Election Night count hitting 21% in what election officials have predicted will be around a 33% turnout in the February special election, 53% of Seattle voters were approving the initiative to create a new public developer “to build, acquire, own, and manage social housing” in Seattle.
If approved, Seattle City Hall will fund the shaping of a new Seattle Social Housing Developer to acquire and take over management of existing properties for affordable housing while also setting the groundwork for philanthropy and grants to create new renter-governed housing in the city.
I-135 backers including the House Our Neighbors coalition led by Real Change claim the initiative would create a city-run, government-empowered, renter-powered entity to help keep buildings affordable and, eventually, build more new affordable housing.
Opponents relied on Seattle Times op-eds to bash the plan while some nonprofit and affordable housing developers and lenders have said the new public developer would increase competition for already limited funding for affordable housing.
“Several housing agencies already are creating ‘social housing’ through tenant-owned co-ops, land trusts, and mutual housing serving low-income households in perpetuity,” the formal opposition statement on the initiative penned by old-school Seattle homelessness and housing advocates Alice Woldt, David Bloom, and John Fox reads. “Initiative sponsors could have proposed dedicating more city housing dollars for these efforts instead of public-private partnerships they disavow,” they conclude.
Housing and social justice advocacy and support group Solid Ground said the Housing Development Consortium lobbying group it is part of did issue a letter raising concerns but took a neutral stance on the initiative. “That’s in part because some of their members – including my own organization, Solid Ground – have endorsed and actively support I-135,” a representative told CHS. “Other HDC members who have endorsed I-135 include El Centro De La Raza, the Low Income Housing Institute, and AIA Seattle.”
Starting the authority would be funded by the city budget and cost around $750,000 with ongoing funding to be determined from local and state sources. The city council would be required to sort out how to fund the department with the option to pursue bonds for the public developer.
Under the proposal, the public development authority would create and acquire only publicly financed housing and maintain the properties as permanently affordable developments. The ballot initiative would also create a renter-led board to form a charter for the authority and lead the development. The initiative also includes environmental and labor restrictions including requiring new development to be built to Passive House energy standards and to use union labor.
Unlike the existing Seattle Housing Authority which typically serves only low-income residents, backers of the House Our Neighbors proposal say the new authority would be free of federal constraints on income levels and could be made available to renters with earnings ranging from 0% to 120% of area median income to help create a diverse pool of tenants across the authority’s properties.
Starting the authority will be funded by the city budget with ongoing funding to be determined from local and state sources. The city council would be required to sort out how to fund the department with the option to pursue bonds for the public developer.
If the initiative passes, it will be up to Mayor Bruce Harrell and the Seattle City Council to shepherd the formation of the new entity. CHS reported here on how the candidates lining up to run for the District 3 seat on the council supported the initiative and its components.
Seattle voters, meanwhile, will have another big decision in April as the rest of the county joins in on the vote on a $1.25 billion behavioral health levy to create a new “regional network” of emergency mental health care centers across King County.
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How many people who voted for this actually read the fine print? You all be paying for this bureaucratic boondoogle through the nose for this for years to come.
Someone has been drinking the Seattle Times editorial board Kool-Aid.
Naaah….just the middle-class homeowners that are systematically chased out of Seattle by crippling property taxes. This process will continue till WA eventually collapses due to the lack of a state income tax that highly paid (mostly renter) techies pay too. When those highly paid techies eventually buy expensive houses and condos they’ll start voting no on all these levies that only hit homeowners. Till then Real Estate Investment Trusts will snap up every parcel they can get when individual homeowners throw in the towel. Then they’ll either rent out those homes for even higher rents than everyone’s paying now; or they’ll build shiny new apt buildings that cost even more. Did everyone think some developer of “social housing” would be able to compete with that ocean of cash from REITs? LOL. Naaaaahhhh….SuperLOL. Suckers.
As much as it sounds good, unless that kind of program exist in all states, having it here only will welcome more homeless people from others cities and states and the homeless problem will never be resolved.
Affordable, not free. Helping people get on their feet helps everybody (except the parasites who think investment income is a job)
This is going to be the single largest financial boondoggle in the long and well documented history of Seattle ultra left wing progressives wasting tax payer money on completely ineffective programs.
This will turn into a massive multibillion dollar liability that may very well bankrupt the city about 10 years from today. The young, idealistic, yet completely financially uninformed, voters of Seattle just passed a massively expensive new program, with no funding source for said program identified, in a period when the city is facing contracting revenue for the foreseeable future due to: 1) Fewer home sales and slowing growth in property values 2) Lower B&O taxes from both declining business revenue from the largest employers in the city as well as smaller businesses shutting down or relocating out of the city due to the inability to moderate the issues with street crime/vagrancy/encampments despite the hundreds of millions of tax payer dollars already spent on failed programs and 3) Tech layoffs that will impact both sales tax revenue as well Jump Start head tax revenue.
Building, developing, improving, and maintaining properties is really expensive and hard to do profitability over the long term, even when the people doing it have deep experience in the field and are charging top dollar for rents. The idea that a bunch of government employees, with all the massive waste that will come with inefficient management and wasteful overhead, will be able to step in and successfully run and maintain properties while charging below market rates is pure fantasy. The fanfare they will receive from a fawning media apparatus in Seattle when they first buy a couple run down properties and move some people in will be overwhelming, but the rubber will not truly hit he road until years later when they own multiple buildings that are all in need of 10’s of million of dollars worth of unfunded repairs and maintenance. Simply look at the state of our bridges to get an idea of how well our city government handles basic repairs and ongoing maintenance.
Its would be hard to think of worse thing for a city to do when facing the forward looking economic and revenue challenges Seattle is than to create a new massively expensive, completely unfunded, and totally unproven government program, but it is about the most “New Seattle” thing I could possibly think of.
LOL
Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s
Kids scoring points with their memes! (Lol did I get that right? Are they still called memes?)
God forbid the children of modern day Seattle take the time to understand the full implications of what they are voting for, amiright?
Just get that low information vote in so you adequately signal to the rest of kids that you are “down for the cause” before you throw that super cool brand new Che Guevara t-shirt on and head out to spend your Amazon salary getting drunk on over priced drinks before you then call in hung over the next morning to your first WFH meeting.
Don’t worry, all us actual adults will find a way to clean up your mess when the tech tide washes back out and all the senseless children leave the city behind with the mess they created from their impractical failed ideas.
A large portion of the backers of I-134 are low and middle income residents who will benefit directly from this type of housing… The tech boom and those, now mostly, WFH workers are a big part of what created this housing crisis and I-135 seems like a smart, responsible, and more sustainable approach to help our city have low and middle income housing, because the private market doesn’t really see a lot of “value” in this type of housing.
Instead of just regurgitating a word salad of trendy made up terms like “housing crises” and “middle housing” can you try explaining to me what specifically in this specific initiative that you just voted for makes it “smart”, “responsible”, and most importantly “sustainable”?
This could easily turn into program that costs in excess of a billion dollars a year, yet it passed without identifying any source of funding at all. If you have no idea at all where the massive amounts of money that this program will require is going to come from how specifically is it “smart”, “responsible”, and “sustainable”?
In addition, I have not seen a single estimate as to what this program will actually do. How many buildings do they plan to own, at what cost, and by when? How many actual people have the supporters of this program estimated will be helped by this program, and for how long?
You literally just voted to create a new city agency without any identified source of funding, and no idea what it will actually do or when it will do anything, and you think that vote was “smart” and “responsible”?
We are truly through the looking class in this city now, up is down, in is out, and unfunded billion dollar mandates are “sustainable”. Crazy times we are living in.
I’ve made plenty of arguments on posts on CHSB about this, but by setting aside public land for affordable housing available to low and middle income households within Seattle, the city will have a stable housing stock for the primary workforce that makes most cities actually function. Also, I think you need to do more research, I-135 does not create a city agency, it creates an independent public corporation that must follow it’s charter, similar to the Seattle Housing Authority. Some people like the SHA charter model, but clearly many others like a social housing model that doesn’t try to turn housing for those whom need it most into a commodity 🤷🏻♂️
Also they got the meme wrong & in a way that reads kinda sexist. It goes, “Sir [as in Michael from The Office] this is a Wendy’s restaurant.”
LOL I love the privileged old-money landlord whining. Decades of low interest rates and practically gifted property wasn’t enough eh? Now you want to cut into social housing?
I figure if this passes it will be the new monorail… We will throw away lots of $$ paying people to do feasibility studies, planning sessions, funding proposals… we will have multiple referendums proposing how it will be done and in about 10 years it’ll be dumped because we either find we have no longer have a need for it, or an established and more knowledgeable government department will have already stepped in and taken over with a process that doesn’t require popular approval.
Serious question – do ANY levies, initiatives, etc fail to pass?
Lots of funding initiatives for expanding the light rail network failed before finally passing… I’m guessing you’re referring to the school-based levies? If you drive around rural WA you’re likely to see semi-permanent signs encouraging voters to “support schools”, I’m quite certain this is the result of the lack of state income tax, and hence the need to fund basic necessities with property levies that require regular reauthorization via popular vote.
It seems a worthwhile effort and might lead to generally lower rents or at least reasonable ones while doing some good. It might be an important piece of the mix.
I would hope that it would make a difference rent; all of the property bought up by the city for this will be exempt property taxes. Does this create a burden on schools, etc… who survive on property taxes?
Yes.
Cue all the crybaby landlords whining about taxes while they drive their second Teslas all over our roads where streetcars once were
Nah… most of the local, small landlords have already been driven out of of the business (or converted what they have left to short term rentals) by not only high taxes, but the insane rules that Seattle has imposed. Most of what’s left is corporate that just hires another huge company to manage all of their buildings… If anyone’s driving their 2nd Tesla around, it’s not likely to be here.
“small landlords” lmao…yeah just ol ma and pa over here with enough money to have second and third properties. Give me a break.
I grew up in just such a family… not here, in a different city, but yeah, my parents have never been rich. They were (barely) high school graduates. They got their start by buying an absolutely decrepit old house (it had an honest to goodness little old cat lady die in it..) and spending several years using every weekend and vacation to fix the place up and sell it. They used that money to finance other projects. They had at most, at any one time 4 buildings with something like 14 -15 units between all of them. They didn’t charge a ton of rent, none of them were fancy, just duplex, fourplex type buildings, and not in expensive neighborhoods. They did any and all work that needed to be done in those buildings themselves (except the once when a tenant brought in roaches… that required an expert) – but if a sewer needed rooting they did it, if the place needed paint, or a leaky pipe fixed, the water heater broke or the building needed a new roof, they did it. They also worked full time jobs… I know you like to think that people just sit there and rake in cash for nothing each month, but that just didn’t happen. Of course they were able to make something.. it wouldn’t have been worth all the work otherwise, by really most of it went right back into the mortgage and the maintenance.
Just because you are too young or too new here to remember it, real estate hasn’t always been as prohibitively expensive here as it is now (and where I grew up, it’s actually still not). If you were willing to put in the work, it was more than possible be a small landlord without being “rich”. I’m sure there were plenty of ordinary people just like my parents here… and they are not so old that they couldn’t still be doing it, had they chosen to. Not many left anymore though, way too fraught with legal problems for small operators, who really cannot afford non paying tenants or empty units. It’s far easier to just cash out, let some big company take over or redevelop.
You really have no clue, do you? I used to be one of those “small landlords”. I owned precisely one condo—that I used to live in— that instead of selling, it I rented it out for just barely what it cost to own. It was completely leveraged to get the mortgage on my house. No way could I have made two mortgage payments. You think “second and third properties” means you’re so rich you have the kind of cash laying around to make payments on all of them if your tenant stiffs you on the rent? Yeah, that’s not the way it usually works.There really ARE lots of one-rental landlords who aren’t rich, they’re using the rent to pay the mortgage. It’s part of their retirement plans. It’s why they’re willing to rent to good tenants at less-than-market rent, because their tenants act responsibly and appreciate not having an asshole for a landlord who rips them off. But every additional tax levy, two or 3 times a yr, jacks those property taxes up, and drives one-property landlords out of the market and out of Seattle. And still tenants think everyone who owns a home or owns one rental property is rich. Not so. Just keep voting for these huge property-tax-raising boondoggles, and the only landlords left in Seattle will be corporate. And they will give precisely zero fux about you.
Yeah, this describes a number of our friends too. Had a little studio condo, used that to help finance a bigger home when they got into a permanent relationship, had kids or just wanted a bigger place. I rented my first place here from a one condo landlord… people don’t realize how many there were and how difficult the city is making it to still do that…
I probably would have had a tough time getting a place from a corporate landlord, when I landed here – just out of college, just started a new job… run these folks out and you don’t make it easier to rent.
The old streetcar lines were made by and for crybaby landlords. They were created and ran by for profit developers & privatized east coast utility companies. When streetcar profitability tanked around ww1 due to increased auto use the city bought the remnants of the lines that had consolidated.