Persons, holding the ribbon on the right, to celebrate this summer’s opening of The Devonshire in Belltown (Image: Community Roots Housing)

Some of the Community Roots Crew marking Persons’ last day falling on Halloween (Image: Community Roots Housing)

By Matt Dowell

There is still much to be done about affordability in Seattle. The buildings of Community Roots Housing can’t talk. But Chris Persons can.

Persons celebrated his final day as CEO of Community Roots Housing, the affordable housing developer that’s serviced our neighborhood since 1976, on Halloween. His successor is in place. Seattle community leader Colleen Echohawk is now at the helm as Community Roots projects move forward — including the eight-story apartment building under construction at Broadway and Pine as part of the Constellation Center affordable housing, youth education, skills training, and employment academy project in partnership with YouthCare.

Persons’ 18 years leading the affordable developer saw Community Roots through a Seattle construction boom, a growing mission (they were Capitol Hill Housing when he started), and the delivery of hundreds of affordable housing units to the city.

Persons talked with CHS about his first hand experience with Seattle’s struggle to build enough housing. He has thoughts on how we can do better.

But first, a round of roses and thorns. Retirement is a time for reflection, after all. What could have gone better in the last 18 years?

“So much,” he sighed.

Persons came to Seattle from the midwest, which may explain the self-deprecation. But it belies CRH’s track record through his tenure of driving forward sizable housing projects across Capitol Hill, the Central District, and the International District.

Pride Place

The highlights: 12th Avenue Arts with 88 affordable apartments plus performing arts and community meeting space, opened in 2014. Liberty Bank Building with 115 affordable apartments at 24th and Union, built in 2019 in partnership with Africatown Community Land Trust, the Black Community Impact Alliance, and Byrd Barr Place. Station House with 110 affordable apartments above the Capitol Hill light rail station, opened in 2020. Pride Place with 118 LGBTQIA-affirming affordable apartments for seniors, opened in 2023. 13th & Fir with 156 affordable apartments in Yesler Terrace, built in partnership with SCIDpda, opened in 2023. Africatown Plaza with 126 Pan-African community-affirming apartments in the Central District, built in 2024 in partnership with Africatown Community Land Trust.

Many of these buildings hold down central intersections in our neighborhoods. They’re often large and typical of the mixed-use mid-rise style that spread to prominence in the last decade. They’re landmarks in the visual environment of modern Capitol Hill and CD.

If you ask Persons what he’s most proud of from the last 18 years, he’ll highlight how these projects tailored themselves to the communities they were built in.

“For us it was never about finding some cheap land and maximizing the number of units. It was about, ‘How can you get out of the way so that the community can empower themselves?’”

“That’s a challenging thing to do. As we became more experienced at it, we partnered with organizations who were smaller and we provided them majority ownership of the projects, which created a significant risk for us as an organization. But it was the right thing to do.”

He mentioned the Liberty Bank Building, 13th & Fir, and 2025’s White Center Community HUB as examples.

“When we changed our name [from Capitol Hill Housing in 2020] it was very intentional. We took three years to do it and I don’t think we could have done a better job.”

Today, CRH operates 44 apartment buildings with 1,849 apartments where over 2,400 people live. Nearly 1,000 more apartments are in development, predevelopment, or slated for rehabilitation.

Eligibility for their apartments is often based on income, ranging from 30% to 80% AMI (Area Median Income), or $31,620 – $84,320 for a single person as of the beginning of 2025.

During Persons’ time as CEO, CRH’s holdings expanded from the neighborhoods around Capitol Hill to Seattle’s far reaches, from White Center to Northgate.

But the organization hit headwinds after the pandemic that required them to move on from a number of their properties. Some older buildings in their portfolio had grown expensive to maintain.

Missed opportunities
More impactfully, the Heartwood project, CRH’s innovative 126 unit eight story cross-laminated timber building at Union and 14th, was a venture into “missing middle” housing that didn’t pan out. After its 2023 opening, the building became a major financial burden on the organization when rents failed to produce enough revenue to offset its funding costs, making it hard for CRH to refinance its expensive construction loan into manageable, permanent funding.

Persons sees it as a missed opportunity for the city, which he says signaled support for the project before it broke ground but did not come through for it later on.

“Five or ten years prior to the pandemic, there was so much conversation in the community about how tax credit housing – the kind we develop – serves people who are at 60% of AMI and below. Market rate serves people who are at 100-120% AMI and above.”

“So there wasn’t any housing for people in the middle, who had jobs, made a little bit too much to get into a tax credit building, but were overwhelmed by the cost of a market rate unit.”

“We had investigated that for years, came up with a model, and developed Heartwood. It didn’t go well.”

“If we had opened that building in 2019 it would have been fine. But by 2021, the rental market had largely collapsed. At the same time, there was a glut of studio apartments on the market, and Heartwood is mostly studios, so the rents just plummeted.”

“The building’s beautiful, it’s fully leased up, but we weren’t able to achieve the rents that the project needed.”

“It’s fine at this point in time but it was a hit to us as an organization. When we realized the project was in trouble, we went to the county, the city, the state. We said a relatively modest investment would immediately turn this into a long term affordable project. It’s already built.”

But none of the public funders came to the rescue.

“The rationale we heard was that at that time, they had already funded so many projects that they couldn’t invest in one that didn’t previously have public funding.”

Persons describes this period as the most challenging of his career at CRH and the time he was most disappointed in the public funders. He stresses that the organization’s step outside of their comfort zone at the Heartwood wasn’t made without careful thought.

“Prior to the pandemic, the mayor’s office released a report that said we needed to finance middle income housing. I talked with them saying that we wanted to get into this part of the market. They said that’s a great idea.”

“It didn’t work out and that’s part of the business and I get it, but we weren’t making a decision willy-nilly.”

“The city, state, and county had the opportunity to preserve a property as affordable and now that is gone.”

During their November 2024 board meeting, CRH noted the difficulties and said they had “suspended indefinitely all middle-income housing activities”. The Heartwood went up for sale in February 2025, though a CRH spokesperson told us it’s no longer for sale and that the organization continues to explore options for permanent financing.

Persons on a rainy Seattle day in 2011 as the 12th Ave Arts project was announced at the site of the East Precinct’s parking lot (Image: CHS)

The Windy City
Persons came to Seattle from Chicago when he was hired at CRH in 2007. There, after years running a small non-profit on the city’s north side, he ran for city council. A technicality (and maybe some Chicago machine politics) knocked him off the ballot. Though he felt he had a good shot at winning, he hasn’t felt called to politics since.

“Chicago is a very liberal city,” he said. “But there was definitely a streak of leadership that was a little more conservative than my worldview. When I got to Seattle, guess what, everyone on city council, on the state legislatures, were as liberal or more liberal than me.”

“I felt well served by the people representing me.”

These days he feels our leaders must take steps to foster the development of more housing.

“My view is that housing is underfunded and overregulated.”

“It’s expensive to build housing or to buy old housing and to fix it up. It’s just expensive.”

“The way market housing works is you have rental income and it pays all expenses, the mortgage, and the owner a bunch of cash flow. If that rental income is capped, then the amount you can get back on the building decreases significantly. That’s what creates, even in tax credit housing, a big gap.”

“Money from the city’s housing levy is what CRH fills the gap with. That money, even though it’s significant, only funds a few projects a year. There’s no way that’s going to keep up with the demands of affordable housing across the city.”

“There’s no way it can be resolved at a city level. It requires funding at the federal level. And with this administration, don’t hold your breath.”

“The flip side is that it’s all over-complicated. There are so many rules. I’m all for protecting the tree canopy but when my affordable housing project has to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on the trees, on updating the sewer system, it adds so much cost.”

He feels that, while many regulations are well intentioned, they get in the way of progress on the more pressing issue. He also wonders if the regulations should apply to an affordable housing provider.

“Some of the sustainability requirements in the city are enormously costly and add significantly more time. At some point you have to decide, how much is this affordable housing building supposed to achieve?”

“We’re already providing affordability well below market, and we’re also required to meet the exact same sustainability requirements that market developers are. We’re required to fix the sidewalks and sewers and the tree canopy.”

“Of course all the advocates for those things would say yes, you do! That’s fine but every million dollars we spend to develop a project is another five or six units that can’t be included.”

(Image: Community Roots Housing)

Parting shots
In recent interviews, Persons has advocated alongside other affordable housing providers for modest rollbacks of landlord tenant laws rolled out during the pandemic, saying that an inability to evict dangerous tenants or to charge fees for tenants who don’t pay rent has hurt the majority of tenants and has put the overall mission in jeopardy. He mentioned, in one instance, that a tenant repeatedly lit fires inside their unit, but that CRH had difficulty getting them out of the building.

CRH and other organizations have seen an increase in “antisocial behavior” from people with acute behavioral health care needs, including active fentanyl addictions. Persons has called for more treatment centers and housing to serve these individuals.

“Someone who can’t be independent and we evict them – where do they go?,” he asked. “This is exactly why we have a homelessness issue. They don’t have a place to go.”

“Those people are sick, they are suffering. We don’t have a place to put them. We need lots of those places. Which leads to the Crisis Care Center [slated to open in 2027 at Broadway and Union], which is great, but have you seen how many actual beds it’s providing? Probably not enough to serve the people who are in the alley behind Pride Place damaging the buildings, making it so our residents and tenants feel unsafe going into our alley.”

“Those individuals need help. In my view, substance use disorder is a mental illness and those individuals need help and support, mental health housing, treatment housing, and we are not building it fast enough. I’m not sure that putting 30-some reclining chairs on Broadway where someone will come in for a day and be released right back on the street where they will have access to fentanyl is the absolute best thing to do.”

Community Roots won’t stop adding affordable units as it moves into a post-Persons era. In September they announced Colleen Echohawk as their new Chief Executive Officer. Projects underway include the Northgate’s CopperLeaf development which will add 232 affordable apartments near the Northgate Link light rail station this year.

Canopy White Center – a new residential building with 76 family sized apartments – opened this year as part of the larger White Center Community HUB campus alongside a public plaza and a three-story, 25,000-square-foot community and human services center. CRH will hold a grand opening celebration for the campus on January 24-25, 2026.

Work continues on the eight-story apartment building coming in 2027 to Broadway and Pine as part of the Constellation Center affordable housing, youth education, skills training, and employment academy project in partnership with YouthCare.

Persons, though, is taking time to unwind.

“Right now I get maybe ten emails a day,” he said. “Even during the last week of work I was getting two hundred a day.”

“It’s nice. I’ve done a little writing. I’ll continue to do some work in the community. I’m ready to focus on the things I like to do: put on a backpack and get up into the hills a little bit.”

“I’d like to climb Rainier before I die.”

A tractable challenge. Who can blame him?

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