How to House Our Neighbors
Seattle’s successful campaign to win a public developer and build mass social housing
Thank you to Jeff Paul and Ben Ferlo from House Our Neighbors for speaking with me for this article.
There is so much natural beauty in Seattle. The city’s glimmering skyline strikes a sharp juxtaposition with the Cascade Mountains, which fade gently into the horizon, almost like a watercolor painting. Sometimes, you walk up a street, turn a corner, and all of the sudden, the snow-capped peaks of Mount Rainier come into view. Water, too, is everywhere — the city’s grid is dotted with inlets, bays, creeks, and lakes.
Seattle is built with the adventurer in mind. Olympic National Forest and Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest are both within two hours of the city, making it easy for Seattleites to get outside. But adventure is also available within city limits; around 11% of the city’s land is dedicated to park space, leaving Seattleites with miles of open space to run, climb, walk, and play in. In Discovery Park, the city’s 534-acre crown jewel, there are nearly 12 miles of hiking trails, making it one of the few urban parks in America where you can truly escape the city. The city’s impressive trail system, with projects like the Burke-Gilman Trail, the Green Lake Loop, and the Cheshiahud Loop, is also a major boon, delighting cyclists and runners alike.
Seattle’s Discovery Park
With so much going for it, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Seattle is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the United States, with the population growing by around 20% in the last 10 years. What is less surprising, however, is that the city is experiencing a multi-faceted housing crisis of terrifying proportions.
Seattle is facing a serious housing shortage. Despite the city’s rapid population growth, 66% of the city’s land is still zoned for single family housing, though recent zoning reforms now allow between 4 to 6 homes to be built on these lots. These reforms alone, however, have proven to be insufficient; between 2021 and 2024 Seattle produced an average of 7,875 housing starts, while the city’s population grew by an average of 15,171 people per year over that same time frame. Considering that the majority of these new units were studios and one-bedrooms, this rate of housing production is seriously inadequate to keep up with the city’s rate of growth. Concerningly, more recent proposals to increase housing density in the city have faced serious opposition, leading Mayor Bruce Harrell to scale back housing production targets in Seattle’s Comprehensive Plan.
Furthermore, rents in the city have skyrocketed. Seattle’s Fair Market Rent, a HUD statistic used to determine payments for housing assistance programs, has increased by $715 dollars in the last five years, skyrocketing from $1,523 in 2021 to $2,238 in 2025. Of course, low-income tenants have been disproportionately impacted – nearly 65% of renters making below 100% of the city’s Area Median Income are rent burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing. The 55% of Seattleites who rent their homes have also been hurt by widespread rent-fixing; 800,000 leases in Washington State were priced using RealPage, an algorithmic tool used by landlords to inflate market rents, between 2017 and 2024. To combat this, the Seattle City Council did ban use of RealPage in June of this year, but this does not negate the widespread harm the software’s widespread use in Seattle has already caused. Fortunately, some (modest) relief is on the way for tenants — Washington State did recently implement statewide rent regulation. However, the policy, which restricts annual rent increases to either 7% plus inflation or 10% (whichever is lower), is fairly weak, and excludes common housing typologies in the region, like single family homes and new construction units.
As high rents push more and more Seattleites towards the brink, the need for affordable housing in the city continues to grow. Recent estimates show that there are only 23 units of affordable housing available for every 100 extremely low-income families in King County, which is home to Seattle and many of its inner-ring suburbs. Concerningly, Seattle’s affordable housing industry isn’t prepared to meet the moment — it is strapped for cash, losing supply, and is incapable of producing new units at scale. Local affordable housing developers are losing money on their projects or facing other serious financial issues, as post-pandemic economic trends like inflation, rising interest rates, and economic insecurity amongst tenants drive up costs and lower rent collection rates. Due to these challenges, some affordable housing developers have even made the unsavory decision to sell off their buildings to private equity investors or advocate for the loosening of the city’s tenant protections, putting the homes of low-income Seattleites at risk. At the same time, the number of federally subsidized units in the Seattle region actually decreased between the 2000s and the 2010s, worsening competition for the city’s scarce affordable housing supply.
As rents continue to rise, rent burdens continue to grow, and affordable housing production continues to stall, thousands of Seattleites have been pushed out of their homes, neighborhoods, and communities. Consequently, Seattle’s homeless population has soared, with King County’s total homeless population increasing from 11,199 in 2019 to 16,868 in 2024. But Seattle has been steadfast in ignoring its own culpability in rising homelessness; instead, the city has subject those living on the street to constant encampment sweeps. Although there is only one shelter bed for every two people experiencing homelessness in King County, Seattle conducted over 2,500 encampment sweeps in 2024, costing the city a staggering $32.5 million. To make matters worse, nearly 90% of encampment sweeps in 2024 were categorized as an “obstruction”, which absolves the city from providing the people they displace with social services. This approach has actually taken resources away from solutions that bring people inside, such as expanding the number of non-congregate, high quality shelter beds (under current Mayor Bruce Harrell, the number of shelter beds in the city has decreased each year) or address the root cause of homelessness, such as providing folks with stable housing.
With homelessness on the rise, affordable housing in decline, and housing production stagnating, it’s clear that Seattle’s existing solutions to the city’s burgeoning housing crisis aren’t working for the average person. While the city’s tech-driven elite cautioned against drastic changes, calling for tweaks to existing programs, many Seattleites understood that something entirely new was necessary to build a city where housing could actually be seen as a basic right instead of something to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. They understood Seattle needed social housing.
Affordable Senior LGBTQIA+ Housing in Seattle’s Capitol Hill Neighborhood
On a sunny August evening, I met Seattle organizer Jeff Paul by the Lenin Statue in the city’s Fremont neighborhood, hoping to pick their brain about the House Our Neighbors (HON) campaign, a group that's been fighting for social housing as a solution to Seattle's housing crisis for the past several years. Paul, a long-time organizer with the campaign, explained that HON was initially formed to oppose a business and real estate driven 2021 ballot measure deceptively called “Compassion Seattle”, which would have required the city to clear all homeless encampments from public spaces as long as 2,000 new units of emergency housing were built. The campaign sharply divided the housing field; some non-profit organizations serving low-income Seattle residents were placated by the promise of new units, and partnered up with Compassion Seattle.
Homeless folks, however, were able to see through the plan, arguing that the promise of new units was an unfunded mandate to justify rendering homelessness invisible across the city. As organizers with the campaign began having conversations with their neighbors about why Compassion Seattle was harmful, the brokenness of Seattle’s existing housing infrastructure inevitably came up. So, gradually, campaign members began to brainstorm what a new housing ecosystem could look like in the city, investigating a range of global housing models. As Paul described it, HON wanted to pose a positive vision for housing in Seattle, one where all people could afford to stay in their homes without threat of displacement or crushing rental burdens.
The municipally-run social housing program in Vienna, Austria, which houses around half of the city’s residents struck a particular chord with HON, perhaps because it is so fundamentally different from any large-scale affordable housing programs in the United States. While most American housing programs, such as public housing or Section 8 housing vouchers, are only available to those making very low incomes, Vienna’s social housing program serves a wider range of the city’s population, with 80% of the city’s population qualifying for a unit. Unlike American public housing, however, no one is forced out of their unit if they start earning above the income limit. Paul, who visited Vienna with HON in 2024, also gushed to me about the robust communal amenities provided in most of the city’s social housing developments. On-site kindergartens and communal kitchens have reduced caregiving pressures on many Viennese women, while libraries and theaters have provided residents with opportunities for cultural enrichment. In Seattle, a city with very few neighborhoods allowing mixed-use buildings, amenity-rich social homes like those built in Vienna could prove to be a huge boon for future residents.
Ultimately, Vienna’s robust program proves that, when done correctly, social housing can be beautiful, deeply affordable, and widely popular. If social housing is readily and widely available to people, there will be a strong, innate base that will fight to expand, improve, and protect this housing. The political base for social housing in Vienna has insulated the city’s program from the (deeply unjust) attacks and funding cuts that have plagued public and subsidized housing programs in the United States, ensuring that social homes in the Austrian capital remain high-quality for generations to come.
Determined to buck this trend, HON became interested in pursuing a municipal, universalist social housing program back in Seattle. After “Compassion Seattle” was removed from the ballot by a judge due to legal issues with the proposal, the campaign pivoted towards this vision, and began working on its own ballot measure, one that would create a public development authority (PDA) capable of directly developing mixed-income, permanently affordable housing across the city.
In drafting their ballot measure, “I-135”, Ben Ferlo, an economics graduate student and organizer with the campaign, told me that HON used flexible, non-prescriptive bill language that would allow the authority to be adaptable in the wake of political or economic shifts. While the proposed Seattle Social Housing Developer (SSHD) would be required to build affordable housing for a wide range of incomes, including extremely-low, very-low, low, and moderate income Seattleites, the ballot measure did not include strict income bands or income limits. Due to the wide range of incomes that the SSHD is allowed to serve, Ferlo emphasized that the SSHD hoped to use “cross-subsidy”, a model where the higher (but still permanently affordable) rents paid by more affluent residents help to offset the lower rents paid by lower-income residents, to keep the public development authority financially stable.
The authors of I-135 also wanted the SSHD to provide residents with a degree of stability that is unfathomable in private sector housing; the authority would provide permanently affordable housing to people at all income levels, with rents set based on tenant incomes as well as building operations, maintenance, and loan service costs. Furthermore, tenants are not supposed to spend more than 30% of their income towards rent, protecting SSHD residents from onerous rent burdens. The SSHD would also offer robust tenant protections; tenants cannot be evicted due to changes in household income, and must undergo a restorative justice process before losing access to their unit.
Furthermore, to insulate the SSHD from the pressures of the private market, it must be the exclusive owner of any housing it acquires or produces, preventing the authority from selling off units or entering risky public-private partnerships. The ballot measure also gave the social housing authority a right of first refusal for public land, requiring the city to prepare a feasibility study to consider if public land should be transferred to the SSHD before selling it off to a for-profit entity. With the understanding that land acquisition costs are prohibitively expensive in a high-market city like Seattle, this process potentially makes it easier (and cheaper) for the SSHD to acquire property. Lastly, the authority was required to provide residents with opportunities to participate in decision-making about their homes, and build to green building and Passive House standards.
To govern this public development authority, a thirteen-member board was proposed, with two members appointed by the City Council, one member appointed by the Mayor, one labor-affiliated member appointed by the Martin Luther King Jr. County Labor Council, one member appointed by a local community organization, and one member with green development expertise appointed by the city’s Green New Deal Oversight Board. Lastly, seven of the board’s members were to be social housing residents, who would be elected to the board by those living in the city’s social housing developments. However, with the understanding that the public development authority would not immediately have tenants, the ballot measure gives the Seattle Renters’ commission the initial authority to appoint resident representatives. The ballot measure also put the city on the hook for supporting 18 months of initial start-up costs for the social housing developer, allowing the authority to get off the ground before consistent revenue sources were identified.
Of course, to win the public development authority, HON first had to get their initiative on the ballot, something that posed initial roadblocks. Initially, the campaign, which had to collect thousands of signatures to get their measure on the ballot, had hoped to get on the November 2022 ballot, a major midterm election that would likely have a more progressive voter base. However, the campaign was not able to collect the required number of signatures to get on the November ballot, and instead was placed on the ballot for a February 2023 special election with lower projected turnout. Additionally, the campaign was unable to pair their initial ballot measure with a funding source due to legal issues, which led to bad faith attacks about the authority’s financial viability from the Seattle Times and other pro-business organizations. While the authority did have bonding power, a potentially potent source of funding for social housing construction, many folks doubted that bonds alone could meet the authority’s funding needs.
To overcome these challenges, HON built a broad, diverse coalition to push for social housing. Ben Ferlo, the economics graduate student and HON organizer, emphasized that the campaign’s success came from the breadth of their coalition, which included socialists like Seattle DSA members, pro-housing organizations like Tech 4 Housing, labor unions like PROTEC17, and organizations representing homeless Seattleites, like Real Change. To get I-135 on the ballot, volunteers across the coalition spent months gathering the necessary petition signatures, providing the campaign with another opportunity to help people understand what a social housing developer could do for them. In the months leading up to the February 2023 vote, HON scaled up their outreach work, building a large-scale, grassroots canvassing operation that knocked thousands of doors across the city.
According to HON co-executive director Tiffani McCoy, talking to Seattleites about social housing was easy, telling Dwell Magazine “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.” On Election Day, McCoy was proven right — Seattleites did really want social housing. 57% of voters supported the I-135 measure in February of 2023, making Seattle one of the first American cities with a dedicated social housing developer.
Coalition members were obviously thrilled by this huge victory, but they still had a lot of work to do. A board had to be appointed, an office had to be found, and an executive director had to be hired. Some steps towards building out the SSHD were taken quickly; an initial 13 member board was appointed by the Seattle Renter Commission, Mayor Bruce Harrell, the City Council, the MLK Jr. County Labor Council, El Centro de la Raza, and the Green New Deal Oversight Board in April of 2023. But HON had to figure out a way to pay for its social housing program. Some, like State Senator Frank Chopp, a long-time housing champion, proposed that funding could come from the State Legislature, but this funding stream never materialized.
Instead, HON chose to pursue a second ballot measure, one that would create a 5% “excess compensation tax” to fund social housing development. Under this proposal, which is predicted to raise over $50 million a year, businesses would pay the 5% payroll tax for each Seattle-based employee paid over $1 million annually in salary, stock, and bonuses. This, of course, scared big business. And when big business gets scared, so does current Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, and (most of) the city’s moderate City Council.
So, of course, Seattle’s monied elite came together quickly to mount an aggressive, deceptive campaign against what was ultimately a moderate revenue ask — especially in a state like Washington, which has no income tax. After HON successfully collected tens of thousands of signatures to get their new measure, Initiative I-137, on the ballot, business groups like the Seattle Chamber of Commerce pressured the City Council to create a counter-measure to the “excess compensation tax” proposal. In a particularly heinous move, the City Council voted to delay I-137, moving it from the November 2024 ballot to a lesser-known February 2025 special election in order to buy more time to draft a counter-measure that would satisfy Seattle-area businesses like Microsoft and Amazon.
The alternative proposal that the City Council ultimately put forward changed the way voters were asked about social housing on their ballots. First, voters were asked if they supported dedicating payroll tax revenues towards the city’s social housing authority. Voters then chose between two proposals to fund the authority — Proposition 1A, the “excess compensation tax” put forward by HON, or Proposition 1B, the Council’s alternate proposal, which would have allocated $10 million dollars from existing payroll taxes to the authority each year, leaving it with only 20% of the funding it would have gotten under Proposition A. Furthermore, Proposition B would have prevented the authority from building mixed-income housing, as city funds were required to serve those making 80% of Area Median Income or less.
Unsurprisingly, the city’s business class immediately opened up their pocketbooks to try and block Proposition 1A from passing. Amazon and Microsoft both gave $100,000 to “People for Responsible Social Housing”, an organization seeking to block the new payroll tax from being implemented, while Seattle’s Chamber of Commerce and T-Mobile gave the group $40,000 and $20,000 respectively. People for Responsible Social Housing used this corporate money to send out deceptive mailers, many of which featured current Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, claiming that Proposition B would allow the city to produce social housing without raising taxes. This, of course, ignores the fact that the SSHD would only get $10 million dollars each year in revenue from Proposition B, hardly enough to develop a significant amount of housing in a city with high construction costs.
HON was quick to highlight People for Responsible Social Housing’s corporate backers, holding a rally in support of Proposition 1A in front of Amazon’s headquarters. Building off of growing resentment against tech billionaires in the city, the coalition also sent mailers highlighting Microsoft and Amazon’s attempt to block a robust social housing program in the city. This approach seems to have worked on voters — when Seattleites headed to the polls on February 11th, they voted for Proposition 1A by a nearly 20 point margin, creating a strong political mandate for a well-funded, universalist social housing developer. The power of organized people won out over the power of organized money.
Since HON wasn’t able to combine a ballot measure authorizing the authority with a revenue source funding it, the campaign was put in the strange position of building a social housing authority while also fighting for a secondary ballot measure to fully fund it. While campaign volunteers were collecting signatures and knocking doors in support of Proposition 1A, HON also had to push for a functional SSHD. Seattle’s business-backed Mayor and City Council certainly weren’t eager to offer help. While an initial 13-member board was appointed in 2023, the SSHD wasn’t able to hire a CEO, the authority’s first full time staff member, until the summer of 2024. The city also stonewalled the SSHD on its contractual obligation to pay start-up costs for the authority over 18 months, only covering a year of the SSHD’s initial expenses. The city was also slow to dispose of funds to the SSHD, forcing the authority to essentially operate without any financial support for months on end. As a result, it took the authority over a year to get an office space and develop a website, let alone make additional hires, like a chief financial officer, or project managers capable of helping the SSHD analyze the viability of future projects.
Other growing pains surfaced for the SSHD; the board struggled to comply with the State’s Open Public Meetings Act, failing to post agendas for their monthly board meetings. More recently, multiple board members resigned, alleging that the authority’s CEO engaged in abusive, racist behavior. While these allegations are serious, concerning, and should be fully investigated, the resignations left the board with three vacant positions, some of could not be filled for months while members of the Seattle City Council obstructed appointments to the Renters Commission in the hopes of giving it landlord representation. Furthermore, Seattle has also been slow to set up the infrastructure necessary to collect the “excess compensation tax”, with a spokesperson for the mayor claiming that funds will not be made available to the SSHD until early 2026, even though the tax is retroactive from January 1st, 2025.
Unsurprisingly, social housing opponents, like the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, have hit the SSHD hard for its perceived shortcomings, arguing their early missteps are somehow proof that the developer as a whole is doomed to fail. These attacks, however, are disingenuous for several reasons. While the Seattle Chamber of Commerce has been extremely critical of the SSHD for its failure to publish meeting agendas in adherence with the State’s Open Public Meetings Act, it hasn’t spoken up about the business-friendly City Council’s aggressive crackdown on public comments at meetings. Clearly, the Chamber only has issues with public access when it serves their own political will. Furthermore, the SSHD cannot (and should not) be expected to function without access to the funds it has a contractual right to. If the city continues to nickel and dime the SSHD, it won’t be able to hire the staff they need to support the board, meet open meeting regulations, or even think about developing projects. It’s hard to expect a social housing developer to succeed when the government actively wants it to fail.
But there is a big, bright light gleaming at the end of the tunnel for the SSHD. First of all, more money is finally on the way; after dragging their feet for nearly a year and a half, Mayor Bruce Harrell and the City Council finally approved a $2 million bridge loan to the developer, giving it a crucial infusion of funds allowing the SSHD to staff up and look towards actually producing or acquiring housing. Even more encouragingly, voters in Seattle’s August 5th primary rejected business-friendly elected officials — Katie Wilson, a progressive mayoral candidate (and social housing advocate), outperformed incumbent Bruce Harrell by 10 points. Progressives fared similarly well in the City Council; left-leaning Council Member Alexis Mercedes Rinck, a proud supporter of Proposition 1a, absolutely crushed her moderate opponent, while Dionne Foster, the former executive director of the Progress Alliance of Washington, outperformed City Council President (and Seattle Chamber of Commerce darling) Sara Nelson. While Seattle’s top-two primary system means that these moderates will still move on to the November general election, they face an uphill battle with the city’s electorate. Furthermore, if insurgent, pro-social housing progressives like Wilson and Foster beat their moderate opponents, government support for the SSHD will increase, putting the authority in a better position to succeed.
At the same time, HON is still pushing forwards with its vision for well-funded, deeply affordable, universalist affordable housing. The organization has begun to look at potential development sites for social housing projects, even partnering with an architecture firm to create renderings for a potential publicly-owned rental project on a city-owned site in Seattle’s Northgate neighborhood. The 35-unit proposed project combines a range of housing typologies, including 2-bedroom townhouses, 2-and-3-bedroom apartments, and “co-living” units, which have shared kitchen and bathroom facilities. It features two ground floor amenity spaces and an interior courtyard, providing young children with a safe place to play. The project would also meet sustainability goals; the development would be built to Passive House standards, and the site is located near the Northgate Light Rail station, likely reducing car dependency.
Picture Credit: House Our Neighbors and Neiman Taber Architects
This kind of project, which would combine different types of housing and accommodate a wide range of incomes, is nearly unfathomable in most parts of America, due to a combination of inadequate government support, onerous zoning regulations, limited affordable housing programs, and lack of political will. It is beautiful and spacious and green, things we don’t typically associate with affordable or social housing in the United States. Thanks to projects like these, Seattle may finally be the American city that starts to disprove long-held cultural misconceptions about “affordable” housing: that it is poor-quality, ugly, unsafe, and undesirable. It just needs the institutional support necessary to carry out its political mandate.
During my conversation with Ben Ferlo, the economics student and HON organizer, he compared the social housing developer to USPS. If Americans could only ship packages using private companies, like United Parcel Services, Fedex, or DHL, he argued, it would be a lot more expensive to send mail. Having a public option brings down prices for everybody. He told me he hoped that the city’s social housing authority could do the same sort of thing for housing. Of course, the metaphor also works well with regards to funding; USPS deliveries are likely to become less reliable due to Trump’s massive cuts to the agency. Similarly, social housing will be less attractive to folks if it’s not well-funded, lowering its likelihood of success.
While I’d never quite thought of it in this particular way, Ferlo’s argument seemed similar to Catherine Bauer’s in her landmark 1934 book, Modern Housing; government-built, high-quality social housing should directly compete with the private market to bring down prices and improve housing quality for everyone. And one day, if we build enough social housing for all of our neighbors, maybe — just maybe — we can crowd the private market out. But for that to work, social housing needs support. Seattleites have been loud and clear that they want social homes in their city — the overwhelming support for both I-135 and Proposition 1A proves that. Now, it’s time for the city government to step up. The city government must accelerate its plan for collecting the “excess compensation tax” and work towards getting those funds to the SSHD, so the city can finally get the social housing it has been fighting for.