affordable housing

The federal government is hoping you, the public, won’t notice that homelessness in America reached an all-time high last year. That was the impression given by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) when it quietly released the 2024 annual homelessness report on the Friday between Christmas, Hannukah, and New Year’s. Nationwide, 771,480 people were experiencing homelessness in 2024, an 18 percent increase from the year before and the highest number on record. The HUD administration attributes this record-setting number to a lack of affordable housing, systemic racism, and rising inflation. Impossible to hide, the report also highlights the strain caused by a surge in migrants and asylum seekers: “new arrivals” made up 13,600 of Chicago’s sheltered population and Read More ›

According to a 2024 report on housing production from Up For Growth, the metro area encompassing Seattle, Tacoma, and Bellevue is facing a shortage of 71,060 homes. That amounts to 4.2% of the region’s total housing stock. While the production of new homes is vital to closing the gap between supply and demand, so is the preservation of existing housing, especially affordable housing. A recent op-ed in the Seattle Times called on Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell to suspend the city’s winter eviction moratorium, a law that halts evictions for the nonpayment of rent from December through March every year. The article is authored by Sharon Lee, executive Director of the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), and Emily Thompson, a partner Read More ›

Just last week, a 19-year-old tenant allegedly stabbed her 73-year-old landlord to death. The murder took place in an apartment in White Center, a neighborhood south of Seattle. According to a news report, the landlord asked the tenant about unpaid rent before being stabbed twice. The suspect told authorities that her landlord struck her in the face and admitted to the stabbing one the phone with a 911-operator. Incidents like this are not representative of the vast majority of tenants, but they are not anomalies either. At an apartment community in Tacoma, an angry resident attempted to grab a hammer from a grounds-maintenance cart in an act of aggression towards a maintenance technician. According to an incident report, the resident Read More ›

Current Laws Make Affordable Housing Untenable Seattle is facing a massive lawsuit and the outcome could alter the city’s affordable housing landscape. GRE Downtowner says crippling rental regulation ordinances passed by the council between 2018-22 have made it difficult to evict problematic tenants. And more renters with serious criminal histories are now coming in and causing chaos because the current laws do not allow a rigorous vetting process. Caitlyn McKenney has a breakdown of the legal ramifications. What It’s Like Inside Recently, management allowed reporters to see what it’s like inside a well-maintained unit. But we also got to view the chaos that unfolds inside the apartments when a problematic tenant takes over and ruins it for everyone.

Seattle’s nonprofit affordable-housing providers are finding themselves in deep water. According to an Alex Fryer column in the Seattle Times, the City of Seattle has recently given $14 million in emergency funding to affordable housing nonprofits and developers in an attempt to stabilize them and mitigate their losses. The article reports the financial losses of several nonprofit housing providers due to non-payment of rent, costly evictions, vacancies, and behavioral challenges with tenants. However well-intentioned the efforts to finance nonprofit housing have been, the properties have been plagued by policies that strip tenants of accountability at the cost of landlords and a legal system that seemingly stonewalls attempts to remove non-paying or destructive tenants. But the problem isn’t isolated to urban Read More ›