Seattle Doubles Affordable Housing Aid Funds

The City of Seattle is doubling up its assistance to affordable housing providers.

Seattle is pumping $28 million in funding into its affordable housing system next year for providers to stay afloat, the Seattle Times reported. The funding boost comes as affordable housing providers face rising costs, late rental payments and higher-than-expected vacancies; as a result, affordable housing providers have sold or transferred at least 20 buildings over the past year.

The city last year awarded $14 million to providers in need. This year’s money is aimed at tackling deferred maintenance and establishing “broader portfolio stability,” the Seattle Office of Housing said. Providers will need to hire outside consultants to craft turnaround plans — a requirement added after lobbying from the Housing Development Consortium.

“Nonprofit and community-based providers are doing everything they can to keep homes safe, well-maintained, and supportive for residents,” Patience Malaba, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium said. “But the financial pressures they face are unprecedented.”

Both last year’s and this year’s funding drops were intended to be one-offs, but the back-to-back bailouts have raised questions about whether the assistance is now a structural fixture of Seattle’s housing ecosystem. “$42 million over a two-year period is a critically needed but not sustainable level of support,” Emily Thompson, a partner at GMD Development, told the Times.

As pandemic-era aid has dried up and tenants fall further behind on rent payments, affordable housing operators have been in a pickle, fighting both a loss of critical finances and increasing costs to keep their properties running. The new round of funding “responds to nationwide increases in insurance, utilities, and property management costs that far exceed operating income and are beyond the control of individual providers or the City,” Nona Raybern, a spokesperson for the Seattle Office of Housing, said.

Some observers, such as affordable housing developer Ben Maritz, believe that the city is paying for too many studio apartments targeting people making 60 percent of the area median income. Maritz called for a sector-wide reset to prioritize more lower-income families with high demand for housing.

“There’s too much of this housing,” Maritz said. “The operators don’t have the ability to fill them at the rents they were forecast to get initially. They have these big loans and they’re never going to be able to repay them.”

Seattle’s $28 million support funding will come out of the city’s payroll tax on large businesses. The most any one provider can receive is $2.8 million.

— Chris Malone Méndez