200ish units of ‘affordable’ housing per year for a decade will not make any meaningful difference in the overall state of the housing situation in Seattle.

Homelessness caused by lack of ability to afford rent will continue to rise, hundreds of thousands of people will continue to be rent overburdened.

Unless you multiply the amount of money involved here, expand the scope by about 10x - 100x or even 1000x, and actually direct this money toward building units with actually affordable prices, this is just massive virtue signalling over a tiny token measure.

Quoting my own earlier comment on another thread about this:

… $50 million dollars a year?

Construction costs for a single unit of an apartment in Seattle average $300k, on the low end.

Thats about 160 to 170 units for $50 million dollars, if they’re all studios, less if there’s a mix with one bedrooms and two bedrooms.

So, if they’re buying existing apartment complexes or townhouses or something, maybe they can get that up to 200 units?

Meanwhile there are at least 16,000 homeless people in Seattle, and half of all housed Seattleites (380k ish) pay more than 30% of their income toward rent.

To add some info from this article:

Twenty-three percent of Seattle renters spend over half their income on housing,

Now back to my old comment

You’d need something like 100x or 1,000x or 10,000x this level of spending to make a meaningful impact, otherwise you’re just making the equivalent of a couple more Section 8 buildings with 8 year waiting lists.

Or, even better, additionally, massively tax landlords that don’t basically follow a rent control schedule, and emminent domain any buildings with landlords that won’t comply with a lower profit margin, and massively finance new construction of public housing construction, thus actually turning housing into a public good, instead of continuously using the language that implies that that is what your goal is while not doing anything even remotely approaching that.

Seattle has at least 70k households making below 80% AMI, about 45k households below 30% AMI.

AMI is about $120k.

For the 45k households making below 30% AMI, that means you need 45k units with rent at or below about $900 a month for them to not be rent overburdened (>30% rent to income ratio).

For the 25k between 30% and 80% AMI, that means you need 25k units with rent between $900 and $2,400.

Adding a max of 200 units at probably about $2.2k - $2.4k monthly rent does nothing.

Now, I’ll grant that my original comment was based off of roughly $50m over ten years, as opposed to $50m each year, for ten years, as that was the wording in the original article I was responding to.

So its 10x what I thought the spending on ‘social housing’ would originally be… but it still needs to be at least 10x to 100x even that to truly make a difference in the overall housing market.

Also, my last quoted line is the main crux of the problem with this program:

This is not targetted at providing housing to actually poor people, below 80% AMI people, who are in the most need of actually affordable rents.

This program is aimed at 80% to 120% AMI people.

Here’s Dick Lilly from the Post Alley blog:

There are some in the local political world who believe that lots of Seattle voters think social housing is low-income housing, something they’re used to voting for in large majorities. But social housing is not low-income housing, at least not primarily. “We need to recognize there’s a broader population,” says former 43rd District representative and long-time House Speaker Frank Chopp. He and others point out that people with incomes between 80 percent and 120 percent of Area Median Income (AMI) who can’t be helped through existing low-income housing programs are effectively priced out of the Seattle area rental market where rents typically exceed 30 percent of their incomes.

It’s those 80 to 120 percenters that social housing and Seattle’s SSHD is designed to serve. They’re “rent burdened” and over time will be forced to move farther and farther from the central city. Eighty percent of Seattle AMI for two people is $96,400, allowing for a rent of $2,712/mo. (Office of Housing/U.S. HUD). Per census data 120 percent of AMI is $146,577, allowing for rents of around $4,000). Chopp thinks providing for that lower middle-class group, workers at the lower end of the income pyramid, “workforce housing,” is the real and most important purpose of the movement for social housing.

This program is not going to result in a massive amount of actually affordable units for the actually poor.

It is going to result in a max of 2000 units, over ten years, which will be priced upwards of $2.6k for a one bedroom, aimed at those within +/- 20% of AMI.

This will do absolutely nothing to help the 45k truly poor households (roughly 100k people) who can’t afford rents above $900, this will do nothing to help the 25k relatively poor households (roughly 50k people), who can’t afford rents over $2.4k.

This will give maybe, max, 5000 people, over 10 years, who are in roughly 120k +/- $20k income households, rent that is a bit less expensive, maybe something like a 10% to 20% lower rent, at best.

If you doubt that this is who this program is aimed at, here’s the SSH themselves:

Its mission is to develop, own, lease, and maintain housing for individuals and families who make up to 120% of area median income (AMI)—housing that is permanently affordable and owned as a public asset.

Social housing is intended for people who make up to 120% of AMI in Seattle (based on family size). The current AMI for a single-person household in Seattle is about $116,068.

Is doing this better than not doing this?

Yes.

But please, please let’s not pretend this program is going to massively improve the overall housing situation in Seattle, this is not going to fix the housing crisis.

Let’s not pretend this is a real solution for homelessness or the working poor who are massively rent-overburdened.

Anyone who thinks that is what this will do, in its current state, is mis- or under- informed at best, and at worst, cynically virtue signalling.