Late last year, one of Seattle’s most vaunted affordable housing providers put six buildings up for sale.
A few months later, another nonprofit listed four of its eight.
Then, another developer gave up its stake in all three of its affordable properties in Seattle.
While one-off sales happen from time to time, 13 buildings with more than 1,100 units where low-income people live is an unusual amount and a symptom of something bigger: The affordable housing sector is at a breaking point.
The number of subsidized properties losing money has surged since before the pandemic as rapidly rising operating costs collide with lagging rent payments. In an industry that has scraped by for decades on razor-thin margins, the math no longer adds up.
Some low-income tenants are at risk of losing their housing through sales or loosened eviction rules, as providers search for financial remedies.
All three organizations that are selling or have transferred buildings, along with 20 others, had asked Seattle for money to prop up their troubled properties in 2024. The city had given them at least part of what they asked for, but it wasn’t enough to stop the sales. Now, Seattle’s politicians are weighing where their remaining dollars are better spent: building new homes or propping up those that already exist.
“We have a shaky and unstable affordable housing sector that, without bold action, could fail,” city staff wrote in a mayoral briefing at the end of 2024.
Some providers are lobbying Seattle’s elected officials to make it easier to evict and screen out tenants who aren’t paying rent — a fight that’s already roiled city politics. One organization has gone so far as to sue the city for its tenant protection laws, claiming they have “destroyed the value” of its property.
Housing advocates say the stakes for finding a solution could not be higher.
“If nonprofit and mission-driven housing providers can’t afford to keep their properties running, we won’t just see an increase in evictions, but we will see the loss of the entire affordable housing portfolio,” said Patience Malaba, executive director of the Housing Development Consortium, a network of Seattle housing providers.
Skyrocketing costs
For the past two years, affordable housing providers have raised alarm bells with state, county and city officials saying they are in dire need of financial relief.
Community Roots, a nearly 50-year-old nonprofit, received $660,000 from Seattle in 2024 to prop up its buildings. But the help was a drop in the bucket; the organization is currently losing more than $2 million a year in rent collections, said spokesperson Kiley Dhatt.
The decision to sell six buildings was grounded in an effort to “maintain organizational stability,” said Dhatt.
Providers’ concerns began as the pandemic wound down and they began opening eye-watering bills.
Their tenants had been cooped up in mostly small studios and one-bedrooms when everyone was told to stay home. All that extra time inside was coupled with worsening mental health and limited staff on site, said Wubet Biratu, a director at the state’s Housing Finance Commission, which oversees Washington’s publicly financed affordable housing.
“So the units got a lot of beating,” Biratu said.
Even after a stack of repair bills, the pandemic wasn’t done squeezing out their pocketbooks.
Biratu said providers had to offer large wage increases to entice staff back to work.
Construction costs in Seattle increased more than 40% since before the pandemic.
A 2024 state survey of affordable housing providers found that insurance rose about 80% over the previous three years.
Providers that have to refinance buildings faced interest rates that had doubled.
Across the board, expenses rose 47% on average between 2019 and 2023 in Seattle, according to a large sample of affordable housing providers’ finances by the city.
At Denny Park Apartments in South Lake Union, operating costs tripled between 2019 and 2023. At GMD Development’s 60-unit Encore building in Belltown, nonmortgage expenses nearly quadrupled between 2022 and 2024.
The rapid inflation of the last several years broke the model that most affordable housing was built on. Organizations had assumed the modest annual cost increases they’d seen during the 2010s would continue. But when those shot past projections, providers had few ways to pay for them besides raising rents, depleting reserves, or selling buildings bleeding cash.
Less rent
To make matters worse, some tenants stopped paying rent.
Nearly every tenant was paying rent before the pandemic. In 2024, 60% to 90% were, according to a 2024 state survey of affordable housing providers in Washington.
In Seattle Housing Authority buildings, the number of tenants not paying was 8% in 2019 and 23% last year.
A number of organizations trace their unpaid rent problem to the eviction moratorium and rental relief provided during the pandemic.
At the Low Income Housing Institute, one of the largest nonprofit affordable housing providers in the state, Executive Director Sharon Lee said the measures caused a cascade effect. One tenant would stop paying rent and then tell neighbors they weren’t evicted and pretty soon, more people on the floor stopped paying, Lee said.
Others said their low-income tenants lost jobs or income during the pandemic. State data shows the percentage of affordable housing tenants paying more than 30% of their income toward rent — the threshold that housing is considered affordable — increased from 36% to 44% between 2018 and 2023.
The number of properties in Seattle losing money roughly doubled between 2019 and 2023, according to state reports that most affordable housing buildings submit.
Inland Group, a Spokane-based developer, opened two affordable properties in 2023, in Lake City and Rainier Valley, which immediately lost more than $300,000 combined in their first year. The organization transferred its stake in all three of its Seattle buildings that “struggled to be self sufficient” to April Housing, a subsidiary of the global investment fund behemoth Blackstone, according to records obtained through a public disclosure request.
Six other organizations told the mayor’s office last year they were “likely” or “highly likely” to sell buildings.
Rents in most of the properties being offloaded must remain capped. But affordability requirements have expired for two of the buildings nonprofit Mt. Baker Housing is selling in South Seattle where primarily people of color live.
There, the buyer can do whatever they want, including raising rents or redeveloping them.
Evictions as a solution
In January, the Low Income Housing Institute filed to evict Kiholly Smith, a formerly homeless single mom living in an affordable housing building in the Central District who stopped paying her rent six months prior. Smith wanted to pay, but struggled to find work after her job ended last year.
“They can’t get blood out of stone,” Smith said.
Last month, with the help of local tenant lawyers, she was provided with rental assistance that will keep her housed, avoiding the nightmare of returning to living in the woods off Myers Way where she lived with her 7-year-old son before moving into their apartment four years ago.
Still, she represents the tension between tenants and nonprofit providers, which aim to keep people from homelessness, but are themselves teetering on the edge.
“You’re going to see nonprofits having to go out of business,” Lee said.
Eviction filings in King County, driven partly by affordable housing providers, are on pace to hit their highest level in at least 10 years. But tenants in Seattle are protected by a handful of laws, including bans during the winter time and school year.
One for-profit provider, Goodman Real Estate, sued Seattle in October claiming its laws financially crippled its downtown affordable housing building by preventing the organization from screening out destructive or violent tenants and restricting it from evicting tenants who stop paying rent. The organization said it lost $2.7 million in 2023 alone.
The lawsuit was thrown out in court. But some local officials agree with Goodman.
Conversations about a bill that could roll back limitations on evictions and allow for sharper screening of tenants have been ongoing in City Hall for more than a year now.
There’s no timeline for its introduction, but the fight over the bill will likely be intense. Already, its rollout has been caught in a complicated political calculus among the council, for-profit landlords, tenant-rights advocates, the mayor’s office and affordable housing providers. Protesters, including former Councilmember Kshama Sawant, have taken to City Hall to accuse members of selling out renters.
Katie Wilson, who helped write many of the city’s current regulations and is now running for mayor, said she agrees the problem facing affordable housing providers is significant. But while she’s open to making tweaks to the city’s law, she questions how much those changes would translate to improved standing for providers.
“I think we all acknowledge there’s a big problem,” she said. “The question is: Will this landlord-tenant stuff help at all?”
Malaba said while the Housing Development Consortium has been pushing for reforms to tenant protections, it is primarily to protect the safety of other residents, not because it will be a panacea to providers’ budget problems.
“The financial strains are larger than just four or five policies,” Malaba said.
Less affordable housing
Seattle officials are now weighing a tricky political question: Should they assume current dire trends will continue? That would mean it would cost more to subsidize affordable housing going forward and they’d be able to add fewer units.
Already, Seattle is funding fewer new units than it used to, despite a big boost in dollars for affordable housing since 2019.
Those dollars have instead gone toward higher building and operating costs.
The city has spent $130 million since 2023 offsetting increased costs for projects that were already planned and funded.
In 2024, $14 million went toward “stabilizing” affordable housing providers’ budgets.
This year, it allocated $52 million on operations and maintenance subsidies — seven times more than it did in 2019 — and will likely make more funds available next year for ongoing support, according to city staff.
Additionally, Harrell will soon sign an executive order authorizing more rental assistance, according to a spokesperson.
Still, providers say it hasn’t been enough and are pushing for more, and faster. The city’s pace, said Emily Thompson, partner at the for-profit GMD Development, “does not meet the moment of the crisis we find ourselves in.”
Some in the sector worry that if buildings continue losing money and banks foreclose on them, private investors may pull out of Seattle’s affordable housing market altogether, causing the system to fall apart.
City officials say they have already spent a lot of money in the short term trying to stabilize affordable housing and are looking into long-term sustainable solutions. They expect to meet the housing production goals of the 2023 levy, but they face an increasingly tight budget, and are weighing trade-offs between stabilizing and preserving existing affordable housing and new units.
Officials at the state Housing Finance Commission said they’re also shifting their focus away from adding as many affordable housing units as they can.
“Now, I’d say it’s all hands on deck to preserve the units that we have,” said Lisa Vatske, a director at the agency.
Seattle Times reporter Heidi Groover contributed reporting.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the hedge fund that owns April Housing. It is Blackstone.
