News

HDC appreciates all the passion, hard work, and dedication our members devote to the affordable housing movement. No single organization could make this impact and secure this progress alone. The collaboration and connection among members is the human energy that works to ensure all people have a safe, healthy, and affordable home. We want to show our appreciation and learn more about our affordable housing community through these member highlights as each member is crucial to achieving the larger vision of this movement. This week our featured member is Beacon Development Group. Thank you for all the work that you do!

What excites your team about the work you are doing?

The positive impact we are making by helping to provide housing stability to people with limited resources is incredibly exciting.  We are fortunate to have our WA office located at one of our development consulting projects, Plaza Roberto Maestas. Coming to work every day to a multicultural community where we see children playing and people gathering in the plaza is a daily dose of excitement. Attending grand openings where we can see residents smiling is a reminder of why our work is so important.

What is a favorite office anecdote?

For 18 years our office had a strict no dog policy.  This spring while a colleague was coming in to the office he found a lost dog wandering the neighborhood.  He brought the dog upstairs while he tried to track down the owner.  In the meantime, there was a 30 minute doggie love fest as staff chased, fetched, scratched, and played with that dog.  There were some sighs when the owner came to re-claim the dog, but the smiles and morale boost lasted all day.  So now after 18 years, we are considering joining the dog-friendly workplace movement in Seattle.

What upcoming projects, partnerships, and news are you looking forward to?

We are privileged to be working on projects that represent diverse cultures with rich heritages. Filipino Community Village, Ethiopian Community Services, and Chief Seattle Club all have beautiful and unique cultures that have been exciting for us to learn about.  Creating housing that reflects the shared stories of cultures and creating community spaces in which traditions can be carried on for generations is something we are honored to be a part of.

What have you been most proud of during your time as an HDC member?

Beacon and HDC have grown together over the last few decades.  We have jointly weathered dramatic changes in the economic and political climate and both tried to lead and respond to the evolving affordable housing industry.  The fact that we are both still standing after this many years is something we can both be proud of.

HDC appreciates all the passion, hard work, and dedication our members devote to the affordable housing movement. No single organization could make this impact and secure this progress alone. The collaboration and connection among members is the human energy that works to ensure all people have a safe, healthy, and affordable home. We want to show our appreciation and learn more about our affordable housing community through these member highlights as each member is crucial to achieving the larger vision of this movement. This week our featured member is SAGE Architectural Alliance. Thank you for all the work that you do!

1. What excites your team about the work you are doing? 

As a multi-cultural, woman-owned firm, we at SAGE are very excited to be offering insightful, innovative responses to affordable housing.  We believe racial, religious, and gender equity include an architectural team led by those from within the culture of the community served.

2. What is a favorite office anecdote?

At a senior housing project, residents described the relief and gratitude they had having a safe place to live.  One woman described what it meant to her that anyone would care enough to build something for the elderly that made her feel honored and remembered.  She said she especially liked the commons area that referenced that atmosphere of a bistro-café.  She said she couldn’t get out to meet friends, but the commons area gave her the opportunity to feel like she was still her old self, seeing friends for coffee.

3. What upcoming projects, partnerships, and news are you looking forward to? 

We are very excited to be working on a new model of care for the developmentally disabled population that are aging and need nursing care.  Visioning workshops and stakeholder meetings have yielded a model that is home-like, affordable and operationally efficient.  We are also very excited about other ongoing projects including micro-apartments, work force housing projects, homeless youth housing, community-based 16-bed behavioral health enhanced supportive housing, and senior housing renovations. We are excited to bring quality housing and supportive services to vulnerable populations serving homeless youth, veterans, elderly, immigrant refugees and those chronically homeless. Our passion and strength is for building strong communities designed for social connection and wellness.

4. What have you been most proud of during your time as an HDC member?

We are proud of being early advocates for supportive housing, attending national conferences and hearing early results of supported housing studies in New York, we advocated for services to break the cycle of homelessness.

We are proud of our long-term advocacy for senior housing needing supportive services to age in place (and in community).  We have been long-time participants in the Senior Affinity Group, including the role of co-chair.  As experts in licensed senior care as well as affordable senior housing, we attend national senior housing conferences and follow innovative senior housing practices from across the country.  Now we can see that memory care will become an emerging issue in senior affordable housing.  With the population aging and half of 80-year-olds having significant dementia, we should be organizing spaces and programs to keep seniors independent.

We have been long-term advocates for innovation in energy and construction technology.  We were participants in the Housing Washington first “Biggest Bang for the Buck” and contributing participants HDC committees tracking practice design solutions.  The firm is certified as a Passive House Consultant and we have several Netzero projects underway.

HDC appreciates all the passion, hard work, and dedication our members devote to the affordable housing movement. No single organization could make this impact and secure this progress alone. The collaboration and connection among members is the human energy that works to ensure all people have a safe, healthy, and affordable home. We want to show our appreciation and learn more about our affordable housing community through these member highlights as each member is crucial to achieving the larger vision of this movement. This week our featured member is Walsh Construction. Thank you for all the work that you do!

1. What excites your team about the work you are doing? 

   We love problem-solving, sharing knowledge, using technologies and strategies that build value. What excites us most is helping our partners and clients build the project they want to build and helping make a difference in our community.

2. What is a favorite office anecdote?
   

Our Seattle office held its first Take Your Child to Work Day this year and it was a big deal – we wanted to cover all these construction subjects and not end up with thirty bored kids! At the end of a full day of fun, age-oriented activities cooked up by our incredibly creative TYCTWD team, we surveyed the results. The kids had tackled Building Information Modeling, Estimating, Plan Reading, and learned the Rules of Safety. They explored Quality Control with infrared cameras (woohoo!), built toolboxes, made legendary Lego structures, ate pizza and got to visit a jobsite and “drive” a backhoe. They were fulfilled. We were exhausted…but ready to do this again! Engaging all these youngsters (5-9 years) and older youngsters (10+), had been a great success and we were ready for next year. However, we realized our scheduling was off:

Walsh Parents:  You guys ready to come back to work next year?

Walsh Kids:         We have to wait a whole YEAR? We want to come back to work next week!

3. What upcoming projects, partnerships, and news are you looking forward to? 

We’re excited to begin construction on several upcoming community projects. These include

Station House for Capitol Hill Housing, which will have 110 apartments affordable to working families. The project sits adjacent to Capitol Hill light rail station and will include over 1,300 sf of community space. Two others starting soon are Little Saigon Housing, developed by LIHI, with 69 affordable apartments for families with children, seniors, couples, and shared space for community events; and the 501 Rainier project developed by Plymouth Housing, which will provide 106 apartments with support services for residents.

We also want to congratulate Elizabeth Rinehart, our new General Manager in Washington! Elizabeth has more than 18 years’ experience in the construction industry, including 13 years with Walsh, and brings a commitment to building sustainable and affordable neighborhoods. Her work has helped provide new housing and services for individuals, families and seniors across King County.

4. What have you been most proud of during your time as an HDC member?

We have been grateful to be a part of HDC for the past 21 years. We are consistently inspired by the community of HDC members all working toward the common goals of ensuring that all people live with dignity in safe, healthy, and affordable homes. We are proud to build the projects that make a difference in our communities and we are in awe of the housing provider’s abilities to pull together difficult projects and then partner with us to let us build them!

HDC appreciates all the passion, hard work, and dedication our members devote to the affordable housing movement. No single organization could make this impact and secure this progress alone. The collaboration and connection among members is the human energy that works to ensure all people have a safe, healthy, and affordable home. We want to show our appreciation and learn more about our affordable housing community through these member highlights as each member is crucial to achieving the larger vision of this movement. This week our featured member is Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority. Thank you for all the work that you do!

1.     What excites your team about the work you are doing?  

“Many of us have been a part of the CID community for many years – as visitors to the museum, patrons of the restaurants, and shoppers in the stores.  We felt a part of this neighborhood before working here, but our investment is only deeper.  What I think is really great about our jobs is that we are able to make a lasting difference in this community – both in the physical sense in our projects and the relationships that we build in the community.

— Jamie Lee, SCIDpda Director of Community Initiatives

2.     What is a favorite office anecdote? 

“A lot of what we’re building on [at Hing Hay Coworks] is supporting economic development and business diversity in the neighborhood. Predominantly, the businesses here are retail and restaurants—mostly restaurants. We want people to know that the CID is more than just retail and restaurants. We give folks in our neighborhood an opportunity to see that there are resources here. The folks that come into Hing Hay Coworks, who occupy a community space within Hing Hay Coworks, they bring their friends in, and they bring their clients in, then they go out into the neighborhood to get a coffee or have a lunch meeting. So the capital stays within the community, as well. Being able to support that, as well as offering more than just retail and restaurants is important.”

— Eliza Chan, Program Supervisor for Hing Hay Coworks, a program of SCIDpda

3.     What upcoming projects, partnerships, and news are you looking forward to?  

“Because SCIDpda works in a neighborhood with some of the highest density of unreinforced masonry buildings (URMs) in the city, we have been working with the city on the URM policy committee for many years. While we’re proponents of seismic upgrades for all our URMs in the city, we do want to make sure that adequate funding and support are provided by the city before a mandatory upgrade policy passes. Seismic upgrades for our historic CID buildings will save lives but also may serve to protect the century-old history of the CID by protecting the buildings in which so many people live and work. The URM policy is a large development and historic preservation challenge for the CID, and we look forward to helping property owners in the district pull all the pieces together to keep these buildings viable for another 100 years.”

— MaryKate Ryan, SCIDpda Preservation Planner

4.     What have you been most proud of during your time as an HDC member? 

“I’m not one to be reflective of what we’ve done, as there’s just so much more to do. I think for me personally one of the best things about HDC was the development of the asset management group because it showed growth in the industry. But one of things I’m most hopeful for is that, as the PDA has changed, how can HDC better benefit my organization with some of the younger people coming on and looking at how the affordable housing industry fits into greater community development work. I’m looking forward to the future developments within our organization and how HDC can support us.”

— Maiko Winkler-Chin, SCIDpda Executive Director

HDC appreciates all the passion, hard work, and dedication our members devote to the affordable housing movement. No single organization could make this impact and secure this progress alone. The collaboration and connection among members is the human energy that works to ensure all people have a safe, healthy, and affordable home. We want to show our appreciation and learn more about our affordable housing community through these member highlights as each member is crucial to achieving the larger vision of this movement. This week our featured member is Byrd Barr Place. Thank you for all the work that you do!

1. What excites your team about the work you are doing? 

Byrd Barr Place (BBP) is a Community Action Agency supporting the diverse neighborhoods of Seattle’s Central District with a variety of services for those in poverty. BBP nurtures a more equitable Seattle through programs and advocacy that enable people to live healthier, prosperous lives. What excites us is that each year, our programs help 20,000 Seattle residents with basic human services—a warm home, food on the table, and immediate financial relief—so they can break the cycle of poverty and build self-sufficiency.  This work is fulfilling, we go home at the end of each day feeling that we’ve made a positive impact on the world around us.

2. What is a favorite office anecdote?

One of our senior clients stated a few weeks ago that she just loved coming to our building, because all of the staff members smiled at her.  She doesn’t go anywhere else where so many people she didn’t know smile at her.

3. What upcoming projects, partnerships, and news are you looking forward to? 

We will be partnering with the Washington State Commission on African American Affairs and the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle on a research project on health and well-being in the Black community; the first phase of a multiyear initiative to foster a groundswell of positive change to address the inequities in health in Seattle and King County. The study of our findings will be released in the summer of 2019.

4. What have you been most proud of during your time as an HDC member?

We have been asked to present as a panelist at the upcoming Prosperity Now summit in D.C. next month.

We will be presenting on a project we plan to rollout in the fall: To develop and distribute communications that will inspire, educate and enable communities of color to form land trusts or similar entity that acquires and preserves long-term land ownership; as a means of preserving cultural diversity, fighting displacement and increasing long-term wealth creation.

HDC appreciates all the passion, hard work, and dedication our members devote to the affordable housing movement. No single organization could make this impact and secure this progress alone. The collaboration and connection among members is the human energy that works to ensure all people have a safe, healthy, and affordable home. We want to show our appreciation and learn more about our affordable housing community through these member highlights as each member is crucial to achieving the larger vision of this movement. This week our featured member is one of our founding members, Environmental Works. Thank you for all the work that you do!

1. What excites your team about the work you are doing?

Everyone at Environmental Works is passionate about our mission of designing culturally appropriate places for underserved populations.  Our team loves it when we are  engaged in community design processes for our projects.  Community design ensures that our constituents have a voice in the design of their homes, feel ownership and pride of place where they live, and are empowered to craft their communities in ways that are specific to their needs and culture.

We are also excited to be increasing our capacity to serve underserved communities!  We have expanded our team to 20, to keep up with increased need for affordable housing and community facilities.  We recently renovated our offices at the historic Fire Station 7 (our home for over 45 years) to accommodate our growing staff.

2. What is a favorite office anecdote?

EW’s board and staff have an annual tradition during the winter holiday season of preparing a meal for residents of a recent project we have designed.  It’s a great way to stay connected to the people we serve, and to commemorate the importance of housing for all.

3. What upcoming projects, partnerships, and news are you looking forward to?

The Everett Safe Streets Project with Catholic Housing Services, under construction now, will be one of the first net-zero supportive housing facilities in Washington thanks to a special award from the Housing Trust Fund.

The Bryant Manor Apartments redevelopment, in partnership with the FAME Housing Association and Catholic Housing Services, is an exciting project on a great property that is serving a critical need for Black families in Seattle’s Central District.  This is a project full of opportunity to connect with the existing community, and reconnect with members of the community who have been displaced in recent years.

4. What have you been most proud of during your time as an HDC member?

We are proud to have been one of the original members and founders of HDC, and to continue to work with this tight-knit group of passionate and inspiring individuals to ensure that people in Washington State have homes they can afford.  We are grateful that HDC provides an opportunity for all of us to come together, so that we can connect with people who have worked on other aspects of our projects (such as financing).  EW’s Christina Congdon notes, “The HDC leadership course was a great way to meet colleagues, and helped me feel more confident as a member of the housing community.”

HDC appreciates all the passion, hard work, and dedication our members devote to the affordable housing movement. No single organization could make this impact and secure this progress alone. The collaboration and connection among members is the human energy that works to ensure all people have a safe, healthy, and affordable home. We want to show our appreciation and learn more about our affordable housing community through these member highlights as each member is crucial to achieving the larger vision of this movement. This week our featured member is Weber Thompson. Thank you for all the work that you do!

1. What excites your team about the work you are doing?

We are really excited to be working on a few projects utilizing a mixed-income, integrated services model. We really believe in the broader impact of this type of work.  Bringing together a more diverse group of residents and integrating more deeply in to the community is a different model for affordability and we think it’s the right approach for our city.

Another great thing about some of our projects, Othello Square for example, is that we’re hearing the voices of those who don’t typically feel they are being listened to when it comes to the redevelopment of their neighborhoods. We’re engaging in meaningful community outreach programs and we’re seeing people step forward in droves to be a part of the change that’s occurring near their homes, schools, and workplaces.

2. What is a favorite office anecdote?

We can’t help but think about our beloved co-founder, Scott Thompson, who passed away in 2017. In addition to steering the firm toward sustainability, he led us to design affordable housing. It was easier said than done however, and winning that first affordable housing project was tough. But we’ll always remember his tenacity. After a particularly disappointing close second place finish on a potential project with Seattle Housing Authority, his response was: “You know that we are just going to keep coming back until you hire us, right?” That persistence paid off! We won the very next job: Raven Terrace in the Yesler Terrace redevelopment.

3. What upcoming projects, partnerships, and news are you looking forward to?

We’re over the moon to be working on our first high-rise affordable housing project! It’s the perfect project for us because it utilizes our firm’s extensive high-rise experience and combines it with our passion and dedication to creating healthy communities for people of all means to thrive.

4. What have you been most proud of during your time as an HDC member?

Well that’s an easy answer: our back-to-back Affordable Housing Week theme song wins! We’re really proud that our team is fearless enough to put themselves out there in the name of promoting affordable housing. We’re still waiting for those videos to officially go ‘viral’ though…we thought Construction Spice would shoot to stardom overnight! Oh well, there’s always next year.