If you support community-based, affordable housing for the Chinatown International District, you should vote yes on Proposition 1A. If adopted by voters, Prop. 1A will tax large companies on the pay of millionaire workers in Seattle to build community-run, social housing across the city.
Be aware though — there is a trick! City Council is trying to confuse voters with a competing initiative on your ballot called Proposition 1B. Both look good at first glance, but 1A is the only one that creates new funding for social housing and builds additional affordable homes, more on that later. Prop. 1A is backed by grassroots community who collected thousands and thousands of signatures to get it on the ballot.
How will Proposition 1A help keep the CID affordable?
I know too many people who had to move out of the CID neighborhood due to being rent burdened. This neighborhood has been a place where folks were able to find affordable rent and enjoy being in community. The CID is the place to shop, work, enjoy being with friends, family, and community. Folks calling it home overwhelmingly continue to want to call it home.
Folks who leave are often forced to leave because they fall out of compliance with affordability limits, yet don’t make enough for nearby market-rate apartments. That’s why social housing is an important tool to help stop displacement and gentrification.It’s housing that’s affordable at all levels of income. It lets people sandwiched in the middle of too much and not enough stay in Seattle and stay in their neighborhood which is just right as rain.
In social housing, if you start off living in a rent-limited unit but then get a better financial situation, you stay by paying a little more rent. If you are doing really well, and can afford it, you pay the highest rent in the building so that others with less can pay less rent. It’s a model of community housing, and it’s what Seattle needs.
The good news is that Seattle agrees, and by a 57% majority of residents who voted to create a Social Housing Developer (SHD) in 2023. The SHD is ready to build new and preserve existing apartments in places like the CID.
Unfortunately, our City Council is trying to stop 1A’s new tax on the pay of millionaire workers. After organizers gathered signatures for Prop. 1A and submitted them to the City, the Council added 1B to confuse voters and get people who support social housing to vote against it.
Proposition 1A would bring in $50 million a year in new funds. In contrast, Prop. 1B diverts City funds, $10 million/year, from other affordable housing programs to pay for social housing. Without new tax revenues, Proposition 1B does not create more new housing. And, the funding ends in only five years. They are setting up social housing for failure!
Simply put, Prop. 1B is the evil twin of 1A — a fancy, mustache-twirling maniacal ruse to keep the pay of millionaire workers, employed by the biggest companies in the world, from being taxed.
So when will social housing come to the CID? With a new light rail station being planned now, we can start planning for it now. But we need Proposition 1A to pass. Please vote for more friends to be able to live and stay in the neighborhood. Vote for Proposition 1A.
Rachtha Danh is the Chinatown-International District Organizer with Puget Sound Sage.
