Seattle Vote on “Social Housing” Could Break the Stranglehold of Private Landlords
Real estate and business interests are spending big against a February referendum to fund housing as a public good.
Rebecca Burns
On a once-vacant plot of public land in Seattle, a cluster of mid-rise buildings surrounds a tree-filled courtyard. Children play on swings while adults run laps and chat on shared stoops. Some neighbors live in dorm-style rooms with common kitchens, others in family-sized townhomes — but all benefit from access to parks and transit, affordable rents and a democratic say in how their buildings run.
None of this exists yet, to be clear. But it’s the vision, laid out in proof-of-concept sketches and during door-to-door canvassing conversations, that Seattle housing activists are hoping to make tangible to voters as they campaign for a corporate tax to fund a new type of solution to the city’s housing crisis: social housing, available to residents from all walks of life, that’s free from the speculative market and owned in perpetuity by the public.
Two years ago, Seattle voters approved a referendum creating a new public agency to build, acquire and operate thousands of units of social housing. The measure was developed by House Our Neighbors, a grassroots coalition that formed in 2021 to defeat a business-led effort to intensify the city’s sweeps of tent encampments.
If elected officials were honest with the public, says House Our Neighbors co-chair Tiffani McCoy, “they would say that we do not actually have a plan to address the housing crisis at scale — we don’t have the tools, we don’t have the means.” That’s an opportunity, says McCoy, “to look outside of our borders to see what other places do … to address housing as a public good.” The group’s model is inspired by the famous social housing system of Vienna, where nearly 50% of the population lives in apartments owned or subsidized by the city.
After winning approval for the new agency, the next step for campaigners was to establish a funding source. So after gathering more than 35,000 signatures last year, House Our Neighbors is now running a second ballot initiative, asking voters to approve a new 5% payroll tax on corporations paying salaries of more than $1 million, which would generate an estimated $53 million annually for the new agency.
A handful of state and local governments nationwide are already experimenting with new models for public sector-owned housing. But Seattle’s initiative is in the cross-hairs of the city’s business lobby, which last fall prevailed on the City Council to introduce a competing measure onto the ballot.
“We are hopeful that the Council will take the time to consider alternatives before taking action to place [the new payroll tax] on the ballot,” wrote Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce CEO Rachel Smith in an August email to two Council members, obtained by House Our Neighbors and shared with In These Times.
Instead of creating new revenue, the alternative ultimately created by the City Council diverts $10 million from existing funds historically earmarked for other affordable housing, pitting the nascent social housing developer against other programs. Voters must now choose between the two options during a special municipal election on February 11.
Last month, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and a prominent real estate law firm registered a political action committee — called “People for Responsible Social Housing” — to oppose the new corporate payroll tax and advocate for the business-backed alternative. Real estate and other business groups have donated at least $110,000 to date, according to the latest filings with the city Ethics and Elections Commission.
In an e-mail to In These Times, Chamber CEO Smith wrote that while the group is not debating the merits of the model overall, “social housing in Seattle is not ready for primetime.” Smith questioned whether the new development agency would be ready to spend $53 million annually, citing board turnover and the lack of a comprehensive development plan.
House Our Neighbors contends that the city has intentionally slow-walked the process of getting the new agency up and running, including by delaying startup funding required by the ballot initiative.
Seattle’s social housing campaign — and the backlash against it — reprises a nearly century-old battle over the contours of the U.S. housing market. In the 1930s, a coalition of labor unions, housing campaigners and urban theorists pushed for a vast new system of federally supported noncommercial housing that could provide for the majority of Americans, as historian Gail Radford chronicles in her classic book, Modern Housing for America. What won out instead was today’s regime of massively subsidized private homeownership, alongside a smaller, built-to-fail system of public housing for the poor.
The potential for alternatives to take root and break the stranglehold of private real estate still exists, says Radford — and it’s “the nightmare scenario from the point of view of housing developers.”
The combination of sky-high housing and consumer prices, driven in part by the so-called “Amazon effect,” makes Seattle one of the nation’s most expensive cities. Nearly a quarter of Seattle-area tenants spend more than half their pay on rent, and at least 16,000 people are experiencing homelessness in King County, according to the most recent federal count.
In 2021, former Seattle City Council member Tim Burgess joined forces with business groups to propose a charter amendment — ominously named “Compassion Seattle” — that would have required the city to forcibly clear tent encampments from public spaces, so long as 2,000 new units of emergency housing were built.
While some of the city’s large housing and social service nonprofits backed the measure, mutual aid and tenant organizers launched a “No” campaign and began conversations with city residents about what real solutions to the housing crisis might look like. After a judge ultimately removed the anti-tent encampment initiative from the ballot, “we went back to those conversations,” says Tye Reed, an organizer with the grassroots group Stop the Sweeps and a member of House Our Neighbors’ community advisory committee.
In a series of listening sessions, Reed says, the group explored, “What do we want to do differently from [low-income housing]? What do we want to keep that really is helpful and allows people to flourish in their neighborhoods?”
What emerged, a few months later, was a proposal for a new public agency to build housing that would be appealing and affordable to both low and middle-income residents, cutting against the de facto segregation of much existing affordable housing. No resident would pay more than 30% of their income, and rents from higher income tenants would subsidize lower ones. Each building would also have a tenant governance council, and democratically elected residents would make up the majority of the board overseeing the new social housing agency. The board also includes architects, urban planners and real estate experts.
In July, the agency hired longtime affordable housing developer Roberto Jimenez as its first CEO, and is busy modeling the finances for possible first properties.
The scale and design of affordable housing are frequently dictated by what investors are willing to fund. But as a public agency, the social housing developer can issue bonds backed by the stream of revenue from the excess compensation tax. That power — and the absence of a profit-hungry investor to satisfy — gives it more wiggle room than traditional affordable housing developers. Jimenez says the new agency wants to experiment with smaller-scale buildings that utilize passive heating and cooling design and place features like community gardens and childcare on-site.
One longer-term aim, Jimenez says, is “to utilize the housing to develop community,” a model that he saw working firsthand at Oregon’s Farmworker Housing Development Corporation, where he began his career more than 20 years ago. The group pairs labor organizing with farmworkers’ direct participation in the development of their own housing. That approach leads to more engaged residents and even smarter design choices, says Jimenez — as when farmworkers familiar with rainwater harvesting suggested incorporating it into the green redevelopment of one aging building.
Jimenez sees social housing as a promising tool to combat both the unaffordability and the isolation of gentrified cities. But without sufficient initial funding, advocates worry that Seattle’s experiment won’t get a real shot at success. The business-backed alternative measure would also restrict the income eligibility for social housing residents to those making no more than 80% of the Area Median Income, undercutting its financial sustainability and vision for socially cohesive, cross-class communities.
Gina Owens, a longtime member of the housing rights group Washington Community Action Network, is campaigning to build social housing after her own struggle with homelessness in Seattle.
Two decades ago, after a debilitating car accident rendered her unable to work, Owens was evicted and spent nearly three years struggling to find housing again. An advocate for housing since, she’s watched a series of marquee initiatives to end homelessness — including a much-hyped public-private partnership that imploded in 2023 — fail to tackle its root causes.
The city “is still trying the same old tactics,” says Owens. “For me, I feel like we already know those tactics have not worked in decades. Why not try something new?”
Rebecca Burns is an In These Times contributing editor and award-winning investigative reporter. Her work has appeared in Bloomberg, the Chicago Reader, ProPublica, The Intercept, and USA Today. Follow her on Twitter @rejburns.
