Can Other Cities Replicate Seattle’s Win on Green Social Housing?

In our current political climate—defined by deregulation and privatization—Seattle voters took to the polls and surprised the nation with a massive win for public goods. In a landslide victory last month, residents voted to create new green social housing developments, funded by corporate taxation. Seattle is one of several cities across the nation that have turned to the social housing model—which creates permanently-affordable homes owned by a public entity, nonprofit organization, or the tenants themselves—in order to meet growing housing needs.

Traditionally, building affordable housing isn’t easy; it has been frequently made possible through federal programs like vouchers, or Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC)—a program that incentivizes corporate entities to invest in temporarily-affordable housing developments by providing them with federal tax credits. The program is known to be effective, but critics consider it competitive, complicated, and costlier than units developed with vouchers. Under the Trump administration, proposed staffing cuts and stalled funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development have sparked uncertainty about the future of many federal affordable housing programs, as well. Under these conditions, Seattle’s pro-housing activists seem to have pulled off a miracle: Battling corporate interests and fears from existing affordable housing developers, campaign leaders have effectively made Seattle the first city in the country to commit itself to this novel housing model.

The fight to bring social housing to Seattle began in 2021 as a progressive, pro-housing coalition that came together to fight Seattle’s Charter Amendment 29, which would have codified "sweeps" of homeless encampments into the city’s constitution. According to Tiffani McCoy, co-executive director of House Our Neighbors (HON), an organization that formed after successfully defeating the amendment, the group decided they wanted to propose a "positive" idea for fixing the city’s homelessness crisis. They settled on bringing social housing to the city, built on models they’d seen in places like Vienna, Austria, or Singapore: mixed-income housing that is free from market speculation or volatility, built to passive house standards (hence "green" social housing).

I-135, an initiative that went on the ballot in 2023, was born of this pro-housing solution. It proposed the creation of a government developer that would explicitly develop, own, and maintain social housing projects. They received pushback. "I thought that the biggest opposition would be private landlords and private developers. But surprisingly, it was affordable housing developers," McCoy says. The Housing Development Consortium, an allied group of nonprofit housing developers, financiers, and others, led the opposition. On the ballot, they state: "We do not need another government entity to build housing when there are already insufficient resources to fund existing entities."

"A lot of [opposition] has to do with the scarcity mindset," explains McCoy. "The true scarcity that is set up by the federal government, and this idea that only those who are the lowest income should have access to public goods."

Seattle, however, would benefit from many types of housing, targeted at a wide array of income levels. The region, which is expected to suffer from housing shortages for another 20 years, has already passed a number of measures—including legalizing multiplexes in single-family areas and co-living arrangements—in their local legislature. Yet it hasn’t been enough to squash the area’s deep housing needs, characterized as 640,000 units required to meet demand over the next two decades. Hitting the pavement, talking to voters about the issue, McCoy says, was incredibly easy.

"Renters are burdened. People don’t know how much longer they can afford to live in the city. They don’t know what the next rent increase will be. There’s massive market volatility, and there are really no high prospects for home ownership. And even if there was, people are economically vulnerable and wages are not keeping up with the cost of living."

HON won their campaign and created Seattle Social Housing (SSH), a government developer tasked with creating these mixed-income housing units. How this new agency would fund the endeavor was a whole other issue that had to be resolved after I-135 passed. Funding these projects without using LIHTC models requires smart solutions: In Chicago, the city council passed a massive $25 billion bond in 2023 that includes a $135 million revolving loan fund to construct social housing projects; in the DC suburb of Montgomery County, Maryland, which has had a social housing developer at work since the 1970s, the agency acts, according to the New York Times, as a public developer and a housing finance agency. "The dual role allows the organization to sell bonds to finance its own projects. In essence, it can lend itself money to build buildings, while paying itself the interest," reads the story.

In Seattle, however, HON proposed a different model: creating an excess compensation payroll tax that would apply a five percent tax on the total amount of compensation to employees who make more than one million dollars per year. That became known as Initiative 137; according to Grist, it would raise "more than $50 million annually to create 2,000 new units over 10 years." McCoy says that their city council was not particularly supportive of the idea.

"Because we have a really strong business lobby in the city, and because recently, our city council and our mayor was elected in a very centrist, conservative slate, we knew that a lot of our council are beholden to the Chamber of Commerce and big business," she says. City council proposed an alternative to 137 that, she says, was to take what she calls "an insignificant" amount of money allocated for affordable housing developers and give it to the social housing developer with a five-year limit.

Rather than asking a simple yes or no question—yes or no on 137—it became a two-part question, renamed Proposition 1A and 1B. "It was purposely there to confuse voters and to make us have to argue against big money interests, and educate voters on two totally separate questions," says McCoy. Every material that went out to the public—flyers, billboards, even ads they placed on Hulu—included a sample ballot. Voters approved funding for their social housing developer, and selected Prop 1A—the excess payroll compensation tax—to pay for it by a 14-point margin. Residents they spoke with, she says, want to tax the wealthy to support housing solutions.

"We overwhelmingly rely on property taxes and on sales taxes, which we know lower and moderate-income people pay more disproportionate to their income than the wealthiest. We have billionaires and millionaires who come into Washington because we don’t have an income tax," she explains. "We made it very, very clear to people that these businesses are trying to stop the ability for low and moderate-income people to have housing that is affordable to them. They want you to have to duke it out on a private market."

Since their win, McCoy notes that they’ve been receiving calls from residents in other cities like Denver and St. Paul to learn how they might replicate the victory in their jurisdictions, pointing toward social housing as a possible model—even in places not as progressive as Seattle. In reality, regardless of a city’s majority red-or-blue leanings, the housing crisis across the country is untenable. Rather than fighting for what scant pieces of the proverbial federal pie that might be leftover, social housing, says McCoy, can be a paradigm shift for what it means to invest in public goods.

"We can do all of these big and bold things, but it does require us to not rely on only the federal government or on public-private partnerships to solve all of our public needs. We have to go against the grain for the last 40 years when we’ve had to rely on the private market," she says. "We’ve tried to show that it's creating a new pie, it's creating a separate cake." 

Top photo of Seattle by Simonkr via Getty Images.

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