The newly formed Seattle Social Housing organization and CEO Roberto Jimenez are preparing for the first full round of funding in 2026 as the public developer begins its mission to build and acquire buildings for affordable housing.
In an update, the organization says it has issued its first “request for information” for developers to identify “existing properties” Seattle Social Housing could acquire and make part of its program:
Properties that meet the RFI parameters include shovel-ready or entitled multifamily projects that face financing gaps in today’s environment; are finished or in the pre-development phase, or permit-ready. Projects must be located within the Seattle city limits. SSH is not interested in acquiring projects currently encumbered by federal or state affordability covenants (e.g., existing LIHTC properties) that would impede the agency’s ability to implement a mixed-income social housing model.
It could be an opportune time for the public developer. CHS reported here earlier this year as area developers said a confluence of challenging interest rates and uncertain economic forecasts have slowed most development to a trickle.
Seattle voters approved formation of the public developer and later a 5% tax on employers who pay any employee more than $1 million in compensation to finance the program.
In the update, Jimenez and Seattle Social Housing said the organization is preparing to receive its first revenue from the tax starting in February. The tax is expected to raise more than $50 million annually. Officials said the funding will give the development authority power to borrow enough to build or acquire 2,000 units of housing over 10 years.
Voters chose the tax over an alternative funding proposal backed by big companies like Amazon and Mayor Bruce Harrell that would have raided JumpStart revenue and powered SSH at a much smaller scale of only $10 million a year.
That rejected plan also would have restricted SSH affordable housing to only the city’s lowest income levels, a restriction social housing advocates say undermines the purpose of the program and plans for creating affordable housing across multiple tiers of income.
Earlier this year, the Seattle City Council approved a $2 million loan to fund SSH operations.
SSH’s progress represents an early opportunity for Mayor-elect Katie Wilson who will be in position to help the new organization move quickly to acquire its first properties. Wilson’s transition leadership team includes Tiffani McCoy who helped lead the House Our Neighbors effort to create and fund the Seattle Social Housing program.
With opportunities likely to abound under the current challenging economic conditions, there will also be new opportunities in the new year including WSDOT’s surplus land from 520 construction that is being lined for “affordable homeownership” in Montlake.
Jimenez says SSH has prepared by adding board members with finance, labor and urban planning backgrounds. A board development consultant was also hired and has begun leading board development trainings. It is also hiring.
“SSH plans to have its first property under contract in early 2026 and it is on target to meet this goal,” according to the update.
$5 A MONTH TO HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you. Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for $5 a month -- or choose your level of support 🖤
“I’m just a poor kid from the ‘hood” Harrell is SO ABSOLUTELY CROOKED. I couldn’t be happier voters gave him the old heave-ho….
This is what Seattle is all about! You have to pay your own rent, and you also have to pay the rent of some random person who can’t afford to live here in the first place because…well you just do, okay???
And don’t tell me companies are paying this tax. It all gets passed on to us, and the money collected could have gone to better causes anyway.
mkay…so some are authorized to earn a living and live their lives. The wealthy? Not so much.
Character is a bit weak with this one.
What are you trying to say? Please rephrase.
Thanks. I’m not the only one needing to use Alice In Wonderland’s Looking Glass to understand what they’re saying.
The posts remind me of Louis Wain’s cats. More unhinged and nonsensical by the month..they will argue about the color orange and scream maga.
what better causes?
Cleaning up the parks, for starters.
We are doing that. Take the graffiti money and do it
They will spend most of their resources acquiring existing properties, which will add nothing to the housing supply. In fact, it will just take supply off the general rental market, which if anything, will have a tendency to drive up rents for those not able to secure one of their socially subsidized units. I look forward to seeing this organization attempt to acquire, manage, and operate rental housing in Seattle. Should be quite amusing.
Why do you always root for your city to fail Glenn?
To be fair, Glenn is just citing recent past examples in this city.
As for the org itself, I hope they’re more transparent
I was hoping Mayor Harrell, Councilmember Nelson, and City Attorney Davidson would succeed and improve the city. I think they did to some degree. I was hopeful Councilmember Rinck would continue to bring her perspective in concert with Mayor Harrell and offer broad based progress to some of the our issues. Their cooperation on the business tax issue led to potentially good results, I think. I felt the city was slowly moving in a better direction for the last two years.
I don’t think social housing will be helpful in addressing housing affordability. It relies solely on local dollars, foregoing federal assistance to avoid requirements that accompany that money. It attempts to reinvent the wheel to benefit a slightly different population. It’s ramp up will be deathly slow and It hopes to generate only 2000 units, mostly through acquisition, over ten years. The cost, $500 million dollars, is prohibitive. I think it is part of an overall progressive dream to kill the private investment real estate market in our area, which I to me is a dumb idea.
Not rooting for this city to fail at all. It’s success would be good for me and likely good for others, such as you. But I don’t believe the social housing program makes success more likely, and may make it less likely, so I don’t like it.
Well, the problem with seeking federal assistance is partially due to the Clinton administration capping the amount of public housing that can exist nationally, in perpetuity, for any public housing authority at the level it was at on Oct. 1st, 1999. The Faircloth Amendment needs to be repealed before the federal government will be of any significant help when it comes to actually solving our nationwide affordability and homelessness dual-crises. Sure, SSH is different than SHA in terms of income requirements, with SSH having more focus on middle income renters, but I’d imagine if seeking federal dollars was more feasible, it would be explored further. Both dems and repubs have exclusively “market based” private development solutions, and we still have homelessness and affordability problems, who would have thought…And don’t forget who is in the white house right now…do you really think 2nd gen slumlord Donald Trump wants to fund social housing initiatives over his own industry, private real estate development??? That should be rhetorical, but the answer is no.
Real estate should always be thought of as a shelter first. You being a landlord and having your livelyhood tied up in the rent grift is not the public’s responsibility to uphold. Homelessness needs to be addressed first, as an utmost priority, and you can’t just expect to hoard shelter and live off of others’ incomes forever. People making 80-120% of the city’s median income put SO MUCH of that income towards rent. Saving is out of the question, and with housing prices so high–the problem is made more severe. Sell and invest in the stock market or something if you hate being a landlord here so much–as soon as a little competition peeks its head out, too…jfc.
We need to increase the housing supply, and this is the first step to actually taking it seriously. I know Vienna is more palatable for this western audience, but China built “ghost cities” until they filled them all and popped their own housing bubble. Homelessness is not a problem in their massive cities because of this choice to prioritize shelter over investment potential, and because of that it’s fairly affordable to live day to day in mainland Chinese cities, even tier 1 size (and don’t even get me started on how walkable the cities are, but I digress). The point was to house people, and those are now successful and vibrant cities, case closed. They achieved that outcome by materially analyzing the need for housing, and used the government to plan and execute a solution with the knowledge that the private market would be unable to meet these needs.
You make a few decent points. Unfortunately, your use of phrases such as hoarding shelter and rent grift shows your perspective on property owners and housing providers is hopelessly skewed. And you claim that homelessness must be the first priority, but social housing will provide much of it’s housing to middle income people who are not in danger of homelessness. Social housing is about making housing more affordable, which may have a long term positive effect on homelessness, but that is not it’s priority. And China’s housing policies have been a disaster for its middle class, who are trapped as owners of housing declining in value. Squeezing the value out of Seattle’s housing market might have a similar detrimental effect upon it’s middle class.
“You make a few decent points. Unfortunately, your use of phrases such as hoarding shelter and rent grift shows your perspective on property owners and housing providers is hopelessly skewed.”
You kidding me? They collude to fix rent prices. Not small landlords. The fing corporations maybe? The ones being sued? WHO’VE BEEN SUED!!!
So, therefore, you make zero points. And they only skewed perspective is YOURS because you take EVERYTHING personally. Always looking for an excuse to be right and put everyone else down while looking like a complete know nothing.
Are you serious?! Lord
Please stop insulting everyone who has a different opinion than yours. And just like the MAGA that you seem to see everywhere here in Seattle, you get upset when it’s thrown back at you. Go figure.
A city needs property owners, business owners, landlords, and police. Can they all do better at times? Sure. But this hippy utopia that keeps getting batted around by several here just isn’t going to work, for any number of reasons (fentanyl and meth being the two biggest, something that neither Europe or China have had to cope with yet). The city needs a balance – and that balancing has zero to do with MAGA and tipping over to the far right. Can we start there?
If you truly want to excoriate MAGA, then I suggest you start knocking on some doors in Grays County, esp those houses flying the Confederate flag. I’m sure they’ll welcome your opinions with open arms (okay, maybe arms, but not the human kind).
What’s amazing to me and so many others with little or no voice in the public sphere is how Seattle City Council after Seattle City Council is helmed by clueless council members who are too ignorant or stupid to recognize they need to protect the small landlords, the elderly ones with grandfather clauses and waivers for old rental properties, easements and such to reward these landlords for keeping rents down. If any of that is illegal, these goobers should be banging on the doors of the Jamie Pedersens (State Senator) and -until recently- powerful Frank Chopps to insist they DO SOMETHING in Olympia to help such actions along.
The Dems hold the power but they, on this issue, they certainly don’t govern as though they do. Not at all.
Educate yourself? It has not happened yet so my hopes are low.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/11/realpage-agrees-to-change-algorithm-so-landlords-cant-collude-on-price-hikes/
Lol yeah, I use those phrases because my perspective is skewed towards a more egalitarian distribution of resources in society as a whole. Shelter is one of the most basic needs for humans (actually all animals), and creating a speculative market around shelter has created such unaffordability that we now have an epidemic of homelessness. The point I was making about SSH addressing middle income earners in ADDITION to SHA (Seattle Housing Authority) which addresses those very low income individuals was to address your federal funds concern. You contended that SSH should get more federal funding, and I made the distinction between SSH and SHA to highlight the fact that SSH is not what we think of as traditional public housing (as outlined in and limited by the Faircloth Amendment, mentioned in my previous comment) due to the fact that it addresses middle income renters as opposed to SHA’s focus on very low income. I don’t even know the feasibility of getting more federal dollars because I’m far from a wonk regarding this stuff, but I trust the people planning this process are looking for any funding they can get. Do you really think it’s some malicious ploy to drain the local economy?? It’s housing people!!! An utmost priority, as it’s fulfilling a basic human need (and right). Federal dollars are extremely limited by previous legislation (faircloth) but also lack of political will from Republicans (and national democrats!), so your complaint that they rely too much on local dollars is silly, and that’s all I was pointing out. Where else will they get the money if not local or federal?? Tax dollars are ultimately our only option for a funding a widespread solution, and I contend the private market will not solve the problem of unaffordability and homelessness–they haven’t yet, and realistically have no interest in solving it in the future. Proof being–look around us and over the decades leading up to our current state in the US. All private markets, all failing massively for those not already invested.
That said, housing the homeless and making living more affordable is my and many other’s priority, and that’s because we don’t imagine a society where a few wealthy citizens rely on taking rent from other much poorer citizens. We imagine a society where we work a decent paying and meaningful job for an income; my use of GRIFT and HOARDING SHELTER are just descriptors (maybe too colorful for your taste) of what landlords do to make their profit. You might call it investment, but your investment, and the “investments” of the landlord class are exacerbating these affordability problems because you always demand a tidy profit. That needs to end for the affordability crisis to end. Shelter needs to be made affordable and plentiful, and those needs are antagonistic to your profit incentive, which idealizes high prices and low supply to maintain those prices. All the housing values are totally inflated and completely arbitrary anyway, it’s not like you’re losing money that was ever there to begin with. If you live in and take shelter in your house, it’s already generating its worth in value. Quality and location is always a driving factor in price, sure, but not to the point where a 2000 sq/ft house near Seattle costs double to triple the same size/quality house near Philadelphia. Inflated prices (where they exist) are due to limited supply (hoarding by landlords) and no challenges to the inflated market by the state, who is the only entity that can compete with the private market by overlooking the profit incentive…with the knowledge that housing people is of the utmost priority for a healthy society, not the subsidizing of private profits for landlords through lassiez-faire free market BS.
Don’t have time to litigate China in full, mainly because you don’t seem to agree with the idea that more people housed = a priority in the first place, so not much point arguing with a wall…but the point of using China as an example is that their society has been able to build affordable housing and offer it at below market prices to solve a need for sheltering the growing populations around their cities. Profit isn’t seen as a necessary factor when the sheltering part of housing is already taken care of for so many. They have other ways to make money or other goals to worry about aside from constantly upgrading homes and moving based on affordability alone. They are building out their coming century of progress, in stark contrast to our upcoming century of humiliation. Whether or not their property gains or loses value is far more immaterial to the owners because Chinese society maintains affordability for the average citizen such that they don’t need large savings to plan for retirement or to supplement their job income. Living life is affordable, and so is renting and buying. Seattle’s middle class on the other hand isn’t given the opportunity to live affordably, and on top of that can’t even buy a home affordably, thanks to our choice to limit supply in an effort to balloon investment profits for current owners. But as a property owner already, you like that, don’t you Glenn?
Well done…That about covers it.
That whole thing is predicated on an untruth.. China has at least around 2.5 million people who are homeless. Probably not if you ask the government… but authoritarian regimes generally lie about that kind of thing… If you count rural migrants who often have precarious living situations around 300 million..
Still lower than the USA. Not bad for a country that spent much of the last century in corrupt and crazed “communist” agrarianism. Thay’ve improved the material lives of an incredible number of their citizens in a mere few decades. China is far, far, far, far from perfect and *not* the poster child for housing (though Hong Kong used to be one of the standard bearers before this century’s China takeover) I’d use but the point remains- they’ve been making it easier for hundreds of millions to own homes at the same time the USA has made homeownership impossible for most folks who aren’t Boomers or didn’t buy decades ago.
Yup, you nailed it chHill. Glenn, your perspective is EVERYTHING wrong with this country, a lot of the world and the greater balance of humans. No wonder we are on the road to annihilation and extinction, tasking most existing species with us. What a legacy Glenn! Yay.
Not exactly.
From Newsweek in March–
https://www.newsweek.com/what-happened-china-ghost-cities-2047985
They’re building for future need…don’t see how this is confusing. They aren’t property value obsessed like us, because they see housing as shelter first. The Chinese economy has plenty going on so as not to need to rely on inflating their housing prices like we do. Might be why they have little to no homelessness, even in major cities.
China? You mean the millions of unfinished homes that has wiped out the savings of whatever existed of their middle classes?
Did you see the mansions that were being built that make our McMansions look like shabby townhouses?
Housing that is uncompleted is rotting, a complete waste of resources that has been built on some of the worst industrial pollution generated in the last 50 to upwards hundred years. The housing was built in areas where no one lives and no one wants to live.
Look at the numbers regarding how many coal plants they have built.
If you want to see China as having the solution then we would need to start building out for more prisons to house anyone with a substance abuse problem, or who decides they aren’t going to be productive.
Low income housing? Building out ghost neighborhoods in Idaho would be far cheaper for everyone.
Thank you. People arguing China as the model for living? They have no homelessness! Gee, I wonder why? Again, thank you for stating the obvious.
That’s not America…Your entire rant is based on a made up false premise.
I’m sorry China’s success makes you so uncomfortable
As stated in the quote from Newsweek, they were not building for future need, they were building to bail out the developers. China’s population is declining and expected to continue to decline steeply.
Well said chHill!
They were quadrupling down on the same trickle down pro developer legislation that we’ve seen fail over and over in this city and country. Can we stop with meager progress for “middle class” at the expense of the poor and enrichment of a small few elite…
Housing is a human right, social housing is one of the best ways to reach that. If you can’t see that I’m sorry for you!
**oops meant policy, not legislation.
A large majority of Seattles SFH and success was the result of socialized housing in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. That ladder was pulled and a moat drawn when those services were legally required to be provided to all, not just those deemed “deserving” and we’ve been seeing the impacts of that since.
We’re a rich region in resources and people, we have the ability to provide for everyone and a failure to do so is only a failure of imagination.
If you’re banking on federal dollars for low income housing and homeless services right now your even more out of touch than I thought, you cannot be serious right?!?
It all went sideways when the Boomers became voting age.
Can you please stop with your inane nonsense!?!
lolol…It’s only “nonsense” if you’ve never studied the subject.
You’re arguing that the country, state, and city were on the right track until 1964?!?
These are patterns that predate the founding of the city and state, trying to rest blame on a single generation is nonsense
Wow okay…didn’t say that…Round about Reagan is when they all reached voting age so…About there.
Boomer birth year range is 1946-1964 so they reached voting age starting in 1964 as stated by Matt. Boomers were 41% of the electorate in the 1980 election.
Considering how Seattle and WA has been deep blue for decades now with very little opposition, the excuse for why everything seems to get worse here being because of the other party wears a bit thin. Are things getting better for anyone? But there’s no hope in convincing someone who portrays people who voted for ‘the other democrat’ as Nazis.
https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/publications/wage-suppression-inequality/
Glenn (et, al-), you are very, very ignorant. REITs are one of the biggest reasons housing costs what it does today, all over the world. That and the homebuilding/supply cartels who keep raising prices, inflation or no.
The *ONLY* solutions to a lack of *affordable* housing around Earth have been social housing schemes (see Singapore, Hong Kong, Austria, Scandinavia, Taiwan, etc).
Your lame-brained assessments that a) the new public developer will only buy up existing properties and b) that buying up such properties will decrease the overall housing supply are beyond absurd and incorrect because
1) Seattle’s social developer is already working -AS THIS ARTICLE CLEARLY STATES!!!- with government agencies to acquire land for new builds and 2) an entire massive private homebuilder industry exists to swoop in and build stuff whenever there’s a shortage and a market for it. Indeed, that is all those goober want to build.
Investors and profiteers have no souls, only coffers to fill. That is why they’ve done *nothing* to innovate affordable housing models like those employed in Dwell and in the real world in Singapore, Scandinavia, etc.
Private developers will build for those well off enough to pay their jacked prices.
For quite a few folks in this city, a million+ dollar home is do-able. That you fail to know these things underscores why there is no reason to take anything you have to say as useful or credible. Get an education before stating such cutting and absurd things. Clearly, you either hate Seattle or you like to bask in the infinity loop that is humans doing the same stupid shite over and over again and expecting different results instead of the continuation of our downward spiral. Lordy.
I hope this organization will be posting their audits for transparency. $50 million a year for a small org is a ton of money.
The Washington State constitution was written in such manner that there is not any sort of strong auditing on how money is spent.
Unless the folks run into IRS issues, which is unlikely, don’t expect much.
Eventually this will likely be folded into the city once whatever that is going to happen happens.
you have no idea do you. they do that compulsory.
well the financial reports are listed in their meeting notes but they’re not publicly available.