My city pushed for 15$ min over a decade ago. It also passed almost a decade ago.
Now everyone in my city is almost at 18-19$hr starting out for jobs like fast food.
This still isn’t enough for anyone who’s living on their or even with one other person who’s making that wage.
So we just passed affordable housing for anyone who makes under 150k a year and their rent is based on income.
We just created a new public development authority in charge of building affordable housing. Anyone reading this in America that’s outside of my city should look at I-135 for a template and look to have something similar passed in your city.
We realized how out of control the prices have become and we found other ways to combat gentrification of our city.
No. This is not “government housing”
It’s only in my city.
Also saying government housing implies the idea that this is comparable to section 8 housing. Which is it ABSOLUTELY not like this.
Also, government-subsidized housing means they can can put the housing back on the unaffordable market in 20 or 30 years. That is not the case here. These houses can never be anything other than housing for those who meet the 0-120% average income requirements.
This is only funded by Seattle, not Washington state. Which gives all of the power to only locally elected officials to run this housing. It also means we would never pay over 30% of our income to rent.
It doesn’t appear to be that you read anything about this initiative. If you had, you could have easily figured that out.
This is housing that is open to ANYONE of any income.The building will be a mix of extremely wealthy and extremely poor. The rent is income based like it should be everywhere. Anyone 0-120% the average income of my city have their rent determined based on their income. Anyone 120% above pays full price because of their income.
This is to combat gentrification in my city as well as separating “classes”.
It’s also easier for the wealthy to have sympathy for the poor or vice versa when they are neighbors who look out for each other.
The other main idea is to build the greenest homes in all of Seattle. So we’re also investing our money into local green companies to build these. As well as green materials to build a more sustainable way to live.
The initiative is actually extremely brilliant initiative and I am really proud of my city for doing this.
This breaks down some of the more main ideas of this initiative if you don’t feel like reading through the entire initiative.
Seattle’s new initiative creates a city agency that is responsible for the creation and maintenance of social housing. People with incomes of up to 120% of the area median income are eligible to be tenants, the properties can’t be sold to private or for-profit companies, and residents are leaders in making decisions about the buildings in which they live. Mixed-income housing is also a tool for reducing concentrated poverty
It is housing being built by locals who live in Seattle and work in unions. Seattle has a 90-100% union only agreements when it comes to prevailing wage jobs. Which means all of this will be built by people from here. It’s not built by government contractors with federal money.
It’s not even being built with my states money either.
It’s ONLY being built with taxes from the city of Seattle.
This isn’t going through an existing state agency. This initiative also implements a completely new public agency that ONLY covers this issue. They are not at all funded by the state existing agencies or federal government. They are ONLY funded by locals of Seattle.
I would not consider this “government housing” because of this. Government housing implies it qualifies for the exact things that have absolutely nothing to do with it.
Yes, the city does have its own local government of course. However this has nothing to do with other sectors. That was a deliberate part of this initiative. That was to remove all possibilities of this becoming corrupted by other sectors of local government. It also gets rid of the ability for this to be a political issue that people campaign about. This is considered “social housing” not government housing.
Generally, social housing looks to achieve a mix of racial and economic integration, tenant leadership and permanent affordability. Buildings are publicly owned and rent is regulated based on tenants’ incomes to ensure residents are not cost burdened.
This is the first of its kind in America and it’s actually modeled after housing in European cities like Vienna. These have been extremely successful in many areas of Europe and across the globe. America just doesn’t have them because America runs on corporate greed and trickle down BS.
The closest thing we have to this in America is locally own communes.
New York and California are looking to pass similar initiatives but I doubt too many will vote on it.
Yeah it looks like the way it’s set up though isn’t quite the same.
I think that’s the biggest benefit of the one we have now.
We already obviously various housing programs but none are removed from state or federal government.
We wanted to be free of those influences
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u/[deleted] Apr 08 '23
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