Seattle's first social housing building gets 10,000 resident applications

Seattle just opened its first social housing building, and over 10,000 people applied for the 150 units available.

As Heidi Groover explains in The Seattle Times, "The developer received 10,243 applications for the building during a two-week lottery that closed Friday. Starting Monday, the agency plans to draw names at random. It will first offer apartments to people making 30% of area median income or less, about $34,500 for a single person, until it has filled about 15 vacant apartments in the building."

According to Groover, "The Seattle Social Housing Developer, a publicly funded development authority, said it would pay nearly $61 million for the Elara, its first acquisition since voters approved creating the public developer three years ago and the funding source last year. The sale has not yet officially closed, according to county records."

Seattle needs roughly 100,000 new homes in the next two decades to meet demand. The social housing agency hopes it can build roughly 1,670 new units in the next five years. "Seattle funds the developer with a tax on companies that pay individual employees salaries exceeding $1 million."