Can you imagine a Seattle with dense, green, affordable housing in every neighborhood? Housing interwoven with public transit, where essential services such as child care are located within walking, biking, or rolling distance? This future is possible, and social housing can help us get there.
Like much of the US, Seattle is confronting the overlapping crises of climate change and housing affordability. These pressing issues are deeply interlinked. Decades of urban sprawl, displacement, and carbon-intensive building practices have contributed greatly to climate pollution, compounded by racist and exclusionary zoning policies that have disproportionately pushed communities of color into some of the most polluted areas in Seattle.
Seattle’s population is expected to reach one million by 2044. Yet the City at present does not have a credible plan to meet these needs. The mayor’s Comprehensive Plan, mapping out the city’s growth for the next two decades, is shockingly inadequate, and intentionally so, as article after article have pointed out. Meanwhile, two-thirds of young people in Seattle are rent-burdened, and one in three say owning a home feels impossible in their lifetime.
How we address the housing affordability crisis presents a huge opportunity to curb Seattle’s climate pollution, invest in healthy and resilient communities, and usher in a thriving green economy. With an ambitious and equitable approach, Seattle could serve as a model for the rest of the US.
The Green New Deal offers a way forward: solutions that call for bold transformations to our economy and society that tackle both rampant inequality and climate change at the same time. We need more housing of all types in Seattle, but one particular model serves as an especially strong Green New Deal solution: social housing.
Social housing is permanently affordable, publicly owned, mixed-income housing governed by more resident leadership than traditional public housing. No resident would ever pay more than 30 percent of their income in rent. Importantly, as noted in this report, social housing would help “decommodify human essentials by keeping units permanently out of the private rental market and insulating them from market fluctuations.”
Done equitably, social housing can bring down climate pollution and create hundreds of skilled union jobs, all while reducing inequality and drastically improving the quality of life for the vast majority of people. And, thanks to some really incredible organizing by House Our Neighbors, Seattle now has a social housing developer.
Last year, Seattle voters passed Initiative 135 (I-135) by an overwhelming majority. This decision created the Seattle Social Housing Developer (SSHD), a Public Development Authority tasked with building and acquiring social housing. In addition to being permanently affordable, all new social housing would be built to carbon-neutral energy efficiency standards known as Passive House, and could serve as a model for green buildings and techniques across the nation.
What’s more, adding more affordable housing across the city will reduce displacement and climate-destroying commutes, and build climate resilience. As we face more and more summers with extreme heat and wildfire smoke, our communities deserve to stay housed and healthy with access to clean air and cooling.
House Our Neighbors is now running a campaign to pass Initiative 137 (I-137), a progressive revenue source to fund the SSHD. The campaign has gained significant support from a wide coalition of organizations and labor unions, including climate justice group 350 Seattle and MLK Labor.
The campaign has tremendous momentum, having already gathered over 15,000 signatures to put I-137 on the November ballot. That said, another 20,000 signatures are needed by the end of May to make the cut, and you can help. Join House Our Neighbors, 350 Seattle and other community groups for a signature-gathering event or two—there are lots of opportunities to do so, and you do not need to have any experience or expertise.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, critics of I-137 have already started questioning the legitimacy of the SSHD. One such article states that the SSHD is struggling to “take shape.” This is incredibly misleading. I-135 required the city to provide 18 months of administrative funding, which was delayed until recently. No new entity can get started without sufficient funding, and if the City had respected the democratic mandate of I-135, then the SSHD would have had the required funds long ago. We wouldn’t call a business a failure for fundraising to get started, so why is this any different?
Importantly, social housing is a proven model. Just look at Singapore, France, Finland, Vienna, Montgomery County, Maryland, New Zealand, Egypt and more. Seattle could have this future, too, so long as we ensure a secure funding stream for the city’s social housing developer. I-137 can help get social housing off the ground; let’s not allow misleading critiques to stall Seattle achieving a beautiful, low-carbon future.
Everyone deserves to have a safe place to call home, without fear of displacement. Social housing offers a future in which our fundamental human right to stay housed is met, all while building a city with thriving, climate-resilient communities. This is an opportunity to win climate, economic, and racial justice, and it is a huge step towards achieving a Green New Deal for our city.
Akiksha Chatterji is the campaigns director for 350 Seattle. Aki is responsible for building, managing, and sustaining 350 Seattle’s local Green New Deal campaigns.
I wanted to love this initiative, but I am deeply skeptical of an organization whose governance board elevates identity over technical expertise, and is poorly positioned to self correct when things aren’t working out (ie evictions). I lived through the monorail fever dream and more recently, KCHRA.
@1 – ditto, plus also deeply skeptical of an organization that cannot craft a grammatically correct headline.
“Can you imagine a Seattle with dense, green, affordable housing in every neighborhood? “
No, and that’s a dumb goal. Thanks to the council and our ridiculous tax structure, our SFR owners (or absentee landlords) are even more entrenched than they have ever been. You will never see that sort of housing in North Admiral or Magnolia, or Laurelhurst or along the shorelines.
I’m all for “green, affordable, housing”, but I think they’ll have to be implemented in the urban villages, and that there’ll have to be some sort of incentive to keep them affordable.
@1-@4: Agree in full, and add: from the beginning, this has been sold as a pie-in-the-sky solution which will provide bountiful housing at little cost or effort, thus setting it up to fail from the start. When I-135 struggled to reach the ballot, critics asked where the funds would come from, and were told, “pass the initiative first, then worry about money later.” That bill is now literally coming due, and the organizers still ignore the other basic realities of building and maintaining low-income housing. Addressing each problem as it arrives is not a plan for success.
Lets all remember another key difference between this joke and the real ones they constantly reference in other countries. Low idiot tolerance. In the others, if you don’t pay up and just sit using all day, you get bounced. Bad behavior impacting your neighbors? Bounced. They view living in their social housing as a privilege, not an entitlement.
Here? When they merge it with “harm reduction” and lack of any concern for behavior? Good luck retaining the paying customers who keep the lights on.
@5 exactly. Had they actually visited any of the other countries they think they want to emulate with respect to social housing, they’d discover the tolerance for anti-social, bad behavior is what they’d refer to as “fascist” if even suggested here.
I’m deeply wary of establishing yet another public agency, when the Seattle Housing Authority already runs social housing programs, in addition to its HUD-funded housing. Seattle residents have been funding senior housing programs at the local level for decades. SHA manages the buildings, which are not governed by HUD “public housing” rules because unlike public housing, they do not receive that form of HUD funding. We’re witnessing the debacle of a poorly designed KCHRA. Now we want to set up another brand new agency with a half-baked mandate?
@7, social housing as a model DOES offer something different: above market housing rented to a subset of tenants subsidizes the below market housing. The two existing models are limited to 1) market rate, which doesn’t serve the poor and 2) subsidized housing which is extremely expensive and also scarce. For this new Option 3, there is a big assumption that profits from the market rate customers are so fat that this blended model will work. Assuming that is true, there are still several other challenges that were completely self-inflicted, called out in the other comments. It’s really a shame this concept was so poorly constructed in the governance bylaws because it stood a better chance to work without baked in trouble spots.
Can I imagine Seattle with social housing?
Yes.
Can I imagine it being managed effectively and efficiently?
No.
It would turn out like Cabrini-Green or Pruitt-Igoe
When will these “progressives” get it through their thick heads that the U.S. is not Europe, and that European solutions rarely work here because of cultural and societal differences? Not to mention we don’t need yet another grand bureaucracy with lofty goals that will never be achieved because the people advocating for and running the organization have their heads in the clouds.
“…if you give a man a fish, he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish, you do him a good turn…”
–Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Teach people to work and take care of themselves so they can afford to pay for their own housing.
Sure, things are expensive due to post-COVID supply-chain issues and Biden’s Big Brother handouts inflating the public sector and tightening the money supply, but there’s a severe labor shortage and anyone who can work can find a job.
In fact, the City of Seattle is one of the area’s largest employers, so you could get a public-sector job like Aki, lining up supplicants with government handouts.
Don’t dump this social problem on the doorstep of employed, tax-paying citizens who already have enough bills to pay.
We need to put an end to these co-dependent government solutions that really kick taxpayers in the ass.
Seattle was built-out in the forties and is an extremely popular area, so understandably housing is expensive here.
Developing another government agency to create a problem for a solution is a ridiculous waste of precious time and human energy.
Most social service advocates are too young to remember the Cabrini-Green or
Pruitt-Igoe Public Housing disasters that perpetuated crime and poverty in the Chicago and Saint Louis communities.
These Great Society programs were driven by elite white guilt over slavery, and an unbending desire to have an over-reaching government bureaucracy control poverty, with regrettable, counter-productive results.
Central planning never works, except in the fantasy world of the progressive leftist.
This Green New Deal campaign sounds like the Old New Deal whereby cash is sucked out of taxpayers’ pockets and given to government agencies who pay themselves first and build substandard housing that becomes dens of perversion.
Seattle needs to go on a budgetary diet, and expanding these public housing programs is not the way to do it.
Sure, the universities are churning out these pie-in-the-sky socialists who want the government to do everything for everyone, including wiping their noses and asses, and always point to a European model, even though this is not Europe. Yet.
Nevertheless, why not consider supply-side solutions like getting people off drugs and into the labor market?
Also, let’s make drug use a crime, so people can’t disrobe and shoot up on Third Avenue without official rebuke from Seattle Police.
If indigents continue to shuffle around with their pants down, looking for cigarette butts and leftover tidbits, round them up in a paddy wagon and drop them off in a warm climate like Yakima or the Tri-Cities.