The 35-unit building is part of a neighborhood that includes small to midsize apartment buildings and single family style homes like the famous pink house next door (Image: CHS)
An $11.6 million acquisition is turning a market-rate Capitol Hill apartment building into affordable, supportive housing for “queer, transgender, two-spirit, Black, Indigenous, people of color” experiencing chronic homelessness as county and city officials pin their hopes on a new approach to creating housing facilities better integrated into neighborhoods and communities.
King County Executive Dow Constantine and Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell squeezed into an E Republican studio apartment just off Broadway Monday morning to explain why the housing is being created here — and to introduce the Lavender Rights Project, the organization that will operate the soon to open building and make it the black and trans community resource and advocacy group’s new home with help from the American Indian and Alaska Native people-dedicated Chief Seattle Club,
“We’re working to have Health Through Housing facilities in every community, particularly communities where there’s need,” Constantine told CHS Monday about the program that powered the purchase of the newly constructed 35-unit apartment building using funding including $6 million allocated from unneeded jail spending during the pandemic.
“This building is really focused on two aspects of overrepresentation in the homeless community. Black indigenous population is massively overrepresented in homelessness,” the county executive said. “This population intersects with gender diverse communities which are also overrepresented. So this is a place where we can meet those who most need the help and get them into safe housing with services and remaining connected to community.”
The new building will be a test of the concept as previous acquisitions of hotel properties in commercial areas of the county haven’t worked out.
CHS broke the news earlier this month on the supportive housing project’s plans to join this Capitol Hill neighborhood just off Broadway near Broadway Hill Park as the county program moved beyond its earlier unsuccessful acquisitions of hotels. The Capitol Hill deal comes under the Health Through Housing measure passed by the King County Council in 2021 which aims to house up to 1,600 people experiencing chronic homelessness by using hundreds of millions of dollars raised from a sales tax on properties in Seattle and five nearby cities. The E Republican apartment building started construction more than five years ago in a process that was delayed and then brought to a standstill during the pandemic. The development’s marketing name for the project still hangs in blue letters on the building.
The county says All Health Through Housing properties will include 24/7 staffing and on-site supports “to help vulnerable people regain health and stability.”
In the project, the Lavender Rights Project and Chief Seattle Club are taking on the challenge of developing new social housing.
“This is an interesting, unique project,” Jaelynn Scott, executive director of the Lavender Rights Project, told CHS Monday. “We’re looking at collaboration between the indigenous and black community and we are so much better when we’re working together to address the issues in our community.”
Scott said the experience Chief Seattle Club has gained in operating supportive facilities with its management of the Salmonberry Lofts in Pioneer Square which opened late last year will help her organization grow its offerings.
“I just want this to be a model and inspiration for the nonprofits or thinking about doing housing. They don’t how to actually get into it and Health through Housing in King County thankfully came up with a model where we can get capacity and build with support from an elder in the community, which is what Chief Seattle Club is.”
Mayor Harrell, meanwhile, recalled Capitol Hill’s history as “a very inviting, loving, accepting area” in response to concerns that residents in the area of the new facility might not be fully accepting of their new neighbors and to questions about why the program chose Capitol Hill for this major investment.
“I think this is very appropriate to start this kind of effort or continue this kind of effort right here,” Harrell said. “And we have light rail investments. We have a college not too far away.” The major also quipped about the nearby Dick’s “where I always like getting good cheeseburger.”
Capitol Hill is an area with “a lot of compassion, a lot of understanding,” Harrell said.
The area around the newly purchased building including Broadway Hill Park and the nearby streets and sidewalks, meanwhile, won’t see any specific city investments coordinated with the new housing facility, the mayor said.
As for the $330,000 per unit investment in the building, officials say it is a bargain in the grander scheme of things with purchasing completed buildings a faster solution to offering people a place to live and a better spend in the longterm than the costs of services like helping with addiction and incarceration.
Leo Flor, director of King County’s Department of Community and Human Services, said Monday it would cost the county and the city $450,000 to $500,000 a unit to “purpose build” supportive housing.
“That’s a lot of money,” Flor said. “It’s also completely comparable with how much it costs to buy housing or create housing of any type. This building will have an average per cost of $330,000 and the overall portfolio is closer to $300,000. So it’ll have been both faster to produce and less expensive because we’re able to buy these buildings off of the market.”
But the deal is hoped to truly pay off in the future.
“Three days in an emergency room costs the same as three months in a jail, costs the same as one year in permanent supportive housing,” Flor said. “So the cost proposition could not be clearer enough before you get to the moral cost of allowing 6,000 people a night to sleep outside every day, which the executive, the mayor, and I think everybody here finds completely unacceptable. So it’s cheaper, but it’s also better.”
This Capitol Hill apartment building is also part of a wave of low income and social service acquisitions just starting to build. CHS reported on a handful or recent purchases here. More will be coming with February’s approval by voters that will shape a new Social Housing Developer in Seattle to acquire and take over management of existing properties for affordable housing while also setting the groundwork for philanthropy and grants to create new renter-governed housing in the city.
Constantine, who will also be on Capitol Hill Tuesday at 15th Ave E’s Bar Vacilando for the Yes on Proposition 1 Crisis Care Centers levy Election Night party, says these apartments are “exactly what we need to be doing.”
“We know that trying to provide the people services under recycling in and out of overnight shelters is very ineffective,” Constantine said. “We also know that the primary problem in homelessness is a lack of homes. And so, providing a place that is permanent and has services, and provides people that space to get centered to begin to heal is absolutely critical to this process.”
“You can warehouse people and other cities have done that. We’re committed to doing more than that. We’re committed to making sure people can be inside secure and provided the help they need to live full life, to begin to take control of their lives again.”
Learn more about Health Through Housing at kingcounty.gov.
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Why the capitol hill? Buying similar properties in Northgate or around would cost less. I don’t understand the trend of relocating all homeless with substance abuse to this area. Why not to help families with children and young working people instead? Or disabled with no substance abuse problems? I am tired of seeing so many unhinged, drugged up here. City should be responsible for the actions and for the raising crime in capitol hill. This decision is quite irresponsible, if not plain stupid.🤷
This isn’t a zero sum game… Lowell Elementary School nearby serves many unhoused students and this could provide stability to some of those families 🙏
“I don’t understand the trend of relocating all homeless with substance abuse to this area.”
Summer child, I hate to reveal this shocking truth to your sweet sheltered world, but … prepare yourself …
Homelessness exists in Capitol Hill already!! *GASP*
Great that this building has services. But why is King County investing in real estate in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city?
Further, why are we not working with the state to find locations for housing and services that could be less expensive than any real estate in Seattle? What if we built large independent housing with addiction treatment and mental health services elsewhere in the state? Could we not help double or triple the number of people with the same $$?
Seattle has already taken in more than our fair share of the chronically homeless and addicted from the rest of King County. King County should be building and buying these types of projects exclusively in communities across the county that have not done their part for years.
CHS reports on CH. Here is a list of other properties around KC coming on board.
I haven’t dug deep and am not debating whether or not CH absorbs a lot, haven’t dug deep. Just adding data.
https://kingcounty.gov/elected/executive/constantine/news/release/2023/February/02-hfp-awards.aspx
Thanks for the link. I took a quick look and it appears that 100% of the housing for the chronically homeless through this funding is in Seattle. A majority of these individuals are drug addicts, many of which are from other areas in King County and beyond. Seattle is collapsing under the weight of having to take in every lost soul in the county with a severe drug addiction. We need to push back against taking on an unfair and unsustainable burden. This is not “affordable housing”. What a charade.
Affordable housing or free housing? If it is free housing, it should be built where land costs are lowest, not in a neighborhood in desperate need of affordable housing for working people and families that can no longer afford to live where they work. It seems like at least half of the new smaller scale buildings in the neighborhood have been bought by homelessness, inc. The concentration of these buildings and associated drug dealing, drug-related crime and disorder place an unfair burden on the neighborhood and worsens the affordable housing crisis. It also makes it very challenging for addicts to break free from the addiction. This makes no sense.
If you don’t identify as one of the groups mentioned, will you be denied housing if you are homeless? Will this complex allow drug use?
The reason so many unhinged people settle on Capitol Hill is because no one pushes back. They are moving them out of downtown for obvious reasons. Capitol Hill is never a priority for for sane solutions.
Pushing back how? You’ll simply be ignored, or drowned out by those having convinced themselves we’re actually doing a good thing. There was a flyer distributed in the area announcing some token community meeting some time last year, I’m still waiting for KC to explain to me why there wasn’t an actual invite to the same when I asked for one alongside some inconvenient questions.
Echoing earlier comments, why are they buying in the most expensive part of the city? Makes no sense at all.
By far NOT the most expensive part of the city, not even close. But it’s not good to plant so much need & instability in one neighborhood regardless. Poor CH, it’s so unfair. I fear that this marks an historic change that people will look back on as the beginning of some serious problems
Last I checked, this building was not in Broadmoor, Madison Park, Laurelhurst, or Windermere. So, definitely not in the most expensive part of the city.
You also have to factor in how much it costs to survive in car-dependent suburbs. Living in the further out parts of the county (or even most of Seattle) requires a car, and gas, and maintenance, or relying on bus service that is not even close to reliable. So, the less expensive parts of the county aren’t really less expensive.
$11.6 million ($330,000 per unit) is an awful lot of money to house relatively few people. Probably a great deal for the developer, though! And of course there are the ongoing maintenance costs, including 24/7 security, which seems to be necessary for this and the other similar buildings located on Capitol Hill recently.
I also have a concern that only people from certain groups will be eligible to get a unit there. That seems like blatant discrimination to me.
The market for developing properties is crashing at the moment, no institute is loaning money for these sorts of projects; projects that have been built can no longer obtain bridge loans to pay interest on the debt incurred that would have been paid off when the units were sold.
This deal is a bailout for the developer; the price per unit additionally is just pushing up the cost per unit for Capitol Hill.
The same amount of money could have been used to buy double the number of units in other areas of the county, on bus lines.
all of these “THIS will help put a dent in homelessness” ideas seem to overlook the huge % of that population that are drug addicts and wouldn’t be able to pay rent if it was $50 a month.
Many addicts are on disability and get a monthly check. I asked one of the new formerly-homeless residents at the 10th Ave E/E Republican building if he paid rent, and he said yes, at 30% of his disability income. But either way, whether free rent or 30%, taxpayers are on the hook for the housing costs of this population.
It’s such a small amount of money overall of the total government budget. Millions more dollars in tax breaks and handouts are given to corporations. Look at all the money that was handed to wealthy business owners (and pocketed) during the pandemic by the government. The amount given to low-income housing and disability payments is miniscule in comparison. If taxpayers want to be outraged, punch up instead of punching down to the most vulnerable people in our society.
Capitol Hill is being sacrificed to move the fentanyl markets out of downtown. The more we concentrate addicts and services in Capitol Hill, the more addicts that will come or be shipped here from the rest of the city, county, state and country. The response will be to concentrate even more services and free apartments here. It is a downward spiral.
I feel bad for the neighbors of this apartment, especially for the owners of those single houses. I feel bad for Capitol Hill and I am wondering how long the situation will be spiraling down. I know what it’s like to live in this kind of housing. No matter, if you have security on site or not. It’s a madness 24 hours. Screams, fights, drugs and alcohol. I have no idea, why those who live here and especially who own the property here do nothing? I think it’s time to stand up and demand to stop inserting every homeless drug addict in the neighborhood. I know a family with two kids. Good family, no substance abuse, but disabled, who ended up on the street, living in their car, because the rent went up and disability payment didn’t cover it in full. Why not to help those kind of people, families? It’s really upsetting and I don’t know why everyone are silent and do nothing.
“I feel bad for the neighbors of this apartment”
Seriously, what kind of perspective drives one to see a story about people getting homes, and feel yourself compelled to respond with dire worries about people already having homes suddenly finding themselves near poor people?
Rhetorical question, btw, I probably don’t really want to know. Just … wow. You got some real hot takes.
Conjecture much? Living close to such a place, I have similar sentiments. I don’t think going down the list of nightly yelling, increase in property destruction (including repeated smashing in of car windows and having glass bottles smashed on the car), having ambulance visits several times a week, the trail of syringes etc. is going to do much because you just believe what you want to believe, that there is no problem and everything will be hunky dory. I’m sorry people voicing their (valid) opinion perturbs you so much.