Jordan Bollag

What is the current state of the housing market in Seattle, and how does it compare to other US cities?

Tiffany McCoy

I would say the housing market is atrocious, just like it is across the nation. We’re seeing that individuals on a full-time salary or full-time wage scheme can’t afford to live in the cities in which they work, and Seattle is no different.

We crunched the numbers, and only about 6 percent of our overall housing stock is “affordable.” The rest is all at the discretion of the private for-profit market, so we are leaving one of our most basic human needs, housing, in the hands of people trying to make a profit off of that as a commodity.

Jordan Bollag

Proposition 1A imposes excess-compensation payroll taxes on employers to fund social housing. Can you explain what social housing is, and how it differs from traditional public housing and other models?

Tiffany McCoy

Unlike traditional public housing, this social housing does not rely on the subsidies from the Department of Housing and Urban Development or any federal government subsidies in order to pay its bills and to maintain operations and maintenance.

That’s where the cross-subsidy model comes in: folks at the higher end of the income spectrum are cross-subsidizing those at the lower end of the income spectrum. Right now, our affordable housing tools are really geared toward those who are lowest income and also completely at the discretion of what Congress wants to decide to fund on a year-to-year basis. And given the Trump administration’s across-the-board cuts that have just been prescribed, it’s critical that we create housing as a public good and not just as an asset on a public sheet.

Jordan Bollag

Can you talk more about the specifics of the social housing model that was just passed in Seattle? How does it compare to other models, like Vienna’s for instance? Does anywhere else in the United States do something similar?

Tiffany McCoy

The Prop 1A model is inspired by Vienna and Singapore and cities and countries around the globe that provide housing as a public good, not, again, as a commodity. When we were drafting the social housing developer charter, we looked at a bunch of different countries and picked and pulled pieces that we liked.

Take Finland, for example. Finland has resident governance councils in each of their buildings. We also put that in the social housing charter here in Seattle. But we really grabbed the cross-subsidy model from Montgomery County, Maryland. They don’t call it social housing; they call it just mixed-income public housing. But that’s done through their public housing agency.

Seattle is the first city in the country to create a social-housing developer through a ballot initiative and to call it “social housing.” We also created a governance board that’s actually majority residents of social housing. And we require passive house construction, which is one of the highest green standards. No other housing agency in the country requires new builds to be climate-resilient housing.

One of the key things that’s different from traditional affordable housing is that this is publicly owned housing in perpetuity. It cannot be sold off to the private market; it cannot be sold off to enter into a public-private partnership. This is unlike traditional affordable housing, where often after tax credits from the federal government run out, affordable housing developers have to sell because they can’t keep up with operations and maintenance costs.

Jordan Bollag

It often seems like progressives don’t have a clear vision for housing. There are a lot of arguments around and division on the issue. How can we try to deal with that division? How might social housing be an important unifying demand?

Tiffany McCoy

House Our Neighbors and the coalition we’ve built realize that social housing is a critical piece of our housing puzzle. But without coupling a social housing developer and movement to end exclusionary zoning, social housing can only go so far.

If we’re still allowing for wealth to accumulate in the whitest and richest neighborhoods, which don’t have to take on multifamily housing the way that traditionally black and brown and low-income communities have had to, we will not be able to address the housing crisis at scale. So we also argue that we need to change our zoning in order to address the crisis.

However, we do not believe that zoning alone is going to change it, because [we don’t believe that we can leave all the building up to the private market]. And [private market housing], at the end of the day, would still not be providing tenants a voice and not providing climate-resilient housing that we need. So we see social housing as a “yes, and.”

Jordan Bollag

How did this campaign come together? And how did this coalition ultimately win against a powerful political establishment that was against you?

Tiffany McCoy

We’ve been building this coalition up for the past four and a half years. It just keeps expanding. More and more people believe in this model and this fight. With the housing crisis and homelessness crisis worsening, people are looking to alternative models. This is rising on a national scale: multiple jurisdictions are looking at social housing. It’s helping to grow the coalition here.

We were able to go up against the Chamber of Commerce and Amazon and Microsoft, who spent over half a million dollars in twenty-one days, because of that work in community, with labor, with affordable housing developers, and with nonprofits and the Democratic Socialists of America here locally that believe in this and want to build this movement.

I would say that the Trump administration has been a galvanizing force too, because people are seeing the chaos that’s happening at the federal government and recognizing that we cannot continue to rely on the federal government to meet our most basic human need.

Jordan Bollag

I’m curious about the role of DSA in this, and what DSA chapters or progressives in other cities might learn from the Prop 1A campaign if they want to pass something similar.

Tiffany McCoy

Yeah, Seattle DSA was critical. We would not have won Initiative 135, the previous initiative [to create the Seattle Social Housing Developer, passed in 2023], without DSA, and we would not have won Prop 1A with the margin of victory we did without DSA. DSA serves on the steering committee of the campaign.

Speaking as a former member of a different socialist party, DSA is a socialist organization that does believe in, let’s call it a popular front — or it believes in mass movements and that it has a role to play, without it being its way or the highway. There are some socialist groups that very much think, if you do not theoretically agree with us 99 percent of the way, we can’t work together. What’s amazing about DSA is it has its principles and its beliefs, and it works in coalitions to make the lives of working people better across the board.

I think what other DSA chapters and other community organizations around the nation can take from this is that we do have power. We do not have to rely on [elected officials] to make change. If you have the ability to run ballot initiatives in your states, look into running a ballot initiative.

That doesn’t mean that it’s easy, or it doesn’t cost money, or it’s not a ton of work. But especially under a Trump administration that is slashing funding for some of our most basic needs, we have to come together and find ways to make the world better on our own.

Jordan Bollag

As we mentioned before, the Seattle political establishment is very opposed to this initiative. It will probably continue to try to undermine social housing. How can we make sure that we get 1A implemented properly?

Tiffany McCoy

That’s exactly why I left my [previous job] and we created House Our Neighbors as an organization. Not because we need more nonprofits in the world, but because we want to make sure that social housing actually comes to fruition. If you do not have an org or a community group that has the time to make sure that the charter is being upheld, that the will of the people is being upheld, and that, as you said, the powers that be aren’t undermining this behind the scenes, social housing will fail.

We see that across the globe. When there are not mass movements and political alignment for social housing, that is when social housing developments, like in Germany, get sold off to the private market.

We continue to have a steering committee with DSA as a key member of that to stay rooted in our principles and to stay rooted in what we’re fighting for. And that’s also why we will continue activating all of our volunteers for the next steps. It’s plugging people into the watchdogging, the advocating, and continuing to make sure that not just the developer but also city officials follow the will of the voters.

Because we expect a lawsuit. We very much expect the business community to fight this, because it was never about any concern [over the policy]; it was about business not paying a dollar more in taxes for our housing crisis. And the mayor and the city council are very opposed to social housing, so they may slow the rollout of the funding mechanism. We have to be completely on top of it.

Jordan Bollag

What should people pay attention to in particular going forward? And what are the next steps, both for your coalition and for the social housing developer?

Tiffany McCoy

[The coalition will soon be] having a next-steps meeting [where] we’ll be talking about a House bill at the state level to change zoning for social housing. We’ll be plugging volunteers in to make sure that the city starts this tax now, because it was passed retroactive to January, and then also plugging people into local candidate elections to make sure that we have people in power that also vociferously support social housing.

For the social housing developer, it’s about getting these funds and then starting to build housing and getting its board staffed up — probably hiring more staff. As a wonky aside, in Initiative 135 that created the developer, we required eighteen months of in-kind start-up support. That is dollars to the developer to hire staff. And the city has only met the first twelve months of that. The city still owes six months of in-kind start-up support that it has not paid yet. What legal recourse might we have against the city for going against the will of the voters? That’s something to keep an eye on too, I would say.

Then we’re going to be doing road shows around the Puget Sound region, in other jurisdictions, to start talking about a state social housing agency.

Jordan Bollag

Can you talk a little more about the structure of the social housing developer and how it will be governed?

Tiffany McCoy

The social housing developer has a CEO, Roberto Jiménez, and that’s the only staff person it has now. It has a thirteen-member governing board: seven of the members are renters chosen by the Seattle Renters’ Commission, [which will be the case] until the social housing developer has its first social housing building.

Once the social housing developer has its first building, the Renters’ Commission will no longer have a role. It is then up to the tenants of each of the social housing buildings to elect people onto the board. How the buildings hold those elections will be up to them, but each building can and should have a residence governance council — that’s in the charter. How tenants decide to hold the elections for who fills those seven renter seats on the developer board will be up to them. We didn’t want to be too prescriptive.

The majority of the developer’s governing board will be renters. MLK Labor [the central labor council for King County], the Green New Deal Oversight Board, the mayor, and city council all have appointees also.

However, one of our city councilmembers, Cathy Moore, who staffs the Housing Committee for the city, has not been appointing renters to the Renters Commission. So we do not have one renter seat on the social housing developer filled currently, because Cathy Moore has not been doing her job as a councilmember for the past twelve months. [We need to] make sure that she’s doing her job and upholding the will of the voters.

Jordan Bollag

The social housing developer is both building new housing and acquiring existing housing. How much social housing do you expect to be built, and how do you expect it to affect the overall rental market in the city? When should people expect these changes might actually happen?

Tiffany McCoy

I’m speaking for myself, not the social housing developer, but it could acquire buildings as soon as it receives that first allotment of money, because Prop 1A set it up that they get paid on a quarterly basis, not just once a year.

Once that money starts flowing, the developer can start acquiring buildings, or it can build. That’s going to be up to it to decide. I do hope the developer acquires a high-quality building because, as you know, building can take years with permitting and finding land and all of that. I know that it does have a goal within the first year to have a building, maybe two.

Again, this will all depend on when the city starts paying Prop 1A taxes. We estimated with a different developer that this could create two thousand units of social housing in the first ten years. We’re looking at two- and three- and even four-bedroom apartments, because we also have a huge lack of family-sized housing in the city.

Jordan Bollag

That two thousand includes both new housing and acquired housing?

Tiffany McCoy

Yes, and that’s just based on the $50 million a year from Prop 1A [tax revenue]. But the social housing developer also has the ability to issue bonds, and once it starts becoming a secure lending group and starts getting that money coming in, which can take a year or two, it can bond on the future rents and accelerate that production.