News

Member Highlight: Aspect Consulting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 Aspect Consulting. Thank you for all the work that you do!


What excites your team about the work you are doing?

Aspect is a 100+-person, Northwest-based environmental science and engineering company with local roots. We know that being embedded in the communities that we serve is critical to our success. We look to use our technical skills to benefit the environment, our clients, and our community. Often the only sites left to develop are perceived as “not available” to the affordable housing community because the costs to get to shovel ready are too high. Unable to compete against the deeper pockets of private developers, non-profit housing developers pass on blighted sites. Why? The perception is that they are too risky, too costly, and too difficult to get to the finish line.

Through experience and creativity, the Aspect team has paved a new way to reduce environmental risk, cost and difficulties of buying and redeveloping contaminated property. We are excited about providing new opportunities to the housing development community who want to recycle contaminated land into better uses. To us at Aspect, this means helping client buy, clean up, and build affordable housing with integrated local businesses where the community can walk to transit, a coffee shop, or a local tailor. Success is helping clients obtain state funding for the cleanup and development of these sites.

What is a favorite office anecdote?

Around the Aspect office, we approach affordable housing projects with a “what does our community need?” mindset. Then we formulate plans where earth + water scientists and engineers can collaborate with planning and design teams trying to solve community problems. In our minds, all projects start with the earth – and if the earth isn’t satisfied at the end of a project, then we aren’t either. The great projects result in multiple “wins.” This is why affordable housing projects on cleaned-up land are so special – the earth is improved, property is recycled, the community gets new homes and businesses, and it’s an equitable solution.

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

Two projects that we’ve been working on with Mt. Baker Housing Association.

1) The Gateway Maddux North and Maddux South project at MLK Jr S and S McClellan; and

2) The Grand Street Commons mixed use project in partnership with Lake Union Partners at Rainier Ave S and S Grand St.

These two projects are literally breaking new ground in the affordable housing marketplace. Very complex, contaminated property that has sat fallow at prime transit hubs will now become new community gateways, hubs, centers.

Through Aspect’s understanding of what it takes to fund a cleanup project, we’ve been able to leverage relationships and community involvement expertise so that the Gateway and Grand Street Commons projects benefit through grants, insurance recovery, and liable party pursuit dollars. These “dollars” will be used to help defray significant environmental assessment and cleanup costs that would have prevented any other property acquisition and redevelopment from moving forward.

Learn more about our affordable housing work here: www.aspectconsulting.com/affordablehousing

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

At Aspect we are most proud when a geologist or engineer can sit at a table with someone that we normally wouldn’t meet were it not for our HDC connection – and have a discussion about solving critical neighborhood issues. We’ve found that we are at our best when we put on our community cape first

Member Highlight: Multi-Service Center

 

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 Multi-Service Center. Thank you for all the work that you do!


What excites your team about the work you are doing?

There is a tremendous need for affordable housing in the South King and Pierce county regions that we serve, and we have heard consistently from hundreds of community members and stakeholders that the lack of affordable housing is a top contributor to poverty in our communities. Having a safe, secure, affordable home transforms lives and allows individuals and families to succeed and communities thrive. MSC is excited and grateful to have the opportunity to help meet the need for affordable housing in our communities so that individual community members and communities themselves can fulfill their potential.

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

We are currently renovating and preserving an affordable housing property in Tacoma as well as a project based Section 8 senior affordable housing property in Gig Harbor.  We also have other projects in early stages of the pipeline, such as workforce housing project in South King County and a service enriched Veterans Housing project in Tacoma. In order to keep up with our growth and add capacity in affordable housing development, we recently hired Amanda Santo for a newly created position of Director of Affordable Housing Development and Operations for MSC. Amanda was previously the Employment and Education Department Director for MSC.

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

MSC has been incredibly  proud to partner with HDC and to work with so many inspiring leaders and organizations within affordable housing. Together as a consortium, we have successfully advocated for legislation that has helped to improve the lives of low-income community members and increase access to high quality affordable housing. We have also raised the visibility of affordable housing needs and best practices in our region.

Member Highlight: Beacon Development Group


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.

Staff Reflections

National Conference, Local Perspective

Our Advocacy Mobilization Manager, Patience Malaba, attended the NACEDA conference this past week. Here are her reflections from the national conference and how they reflect on HDC’s work.


Last week l had the honor to spend time with fellow National Economic Development Associations (NACEDA) members who consist of state and regional associations like HDC from across the country at the NACEDA Summit in Philadelphia. I am excited to have had the opportunity to learn and connect with some of the best minds in our sector and bring that knowledge home.

We opened the summit with a stellar panel conversation on emerging leaders in our field. This new crop of leaders is eager to get things done and reciprocal mentorship between emerging leaders and the trailblazing housing legends will help us all advance our field to be able to get things done. As we think about who composes this set of emerging leaders and who gets taken under the wing of prominent leaders, both the existent and emergent set of leaders have to prioritize diversity and inclusion, not just to check the box, but as an integral strategy for creating a field that is reflective of the inclusive communities we strive to create. When I think to HDC’s work with our Racial Equity Initiative, Recruiting Diversity Task Force, and our Leadership Development Survey Course, I feel confident that HDC is on the right path of matching our work to our values. 

A focal theme was on creating healthy communities of opportunities through policy and systematic change. As the nation changes, thanks to the demographic forces; we are confronted by a host of puzzles about how the nation should adapt to the scope and scale of change in our metropolitan and suburban communities. Yet persistent segregation by race and income as underpinned by the geography of exclusion continue to be a factor to opportunity and well-being of our communities. It requires a fundamental shift in policies, process and relationships as well put by our keynote speaker Michael McAfee, President and CEO of Policy Link. I look at our county and see this play out in the “suburbanization of poverty” that defines the affordability crisis in South King County. King County has a long history of race and housing. You can follow the trail of our legalized segregation along red lines. When we talk about housing, we know there is more to do than just building a home because if we continue to build on a foundation rooted in inequities we will be on shaky ground.

My biggest take away is that in moving towards our vision of safe, healthy and affordable homes for everyone in communities of opportunity we must understand that equity must mean one’s life outcomes cannot be predicted by race. This requires that beyond giving service to communities, our work must demand systematic change in our land use, planning, zoning and anti-displacement strategies to undo the legacy of housing segregation. Underlying it all is the fact that we need a strong sector that can create more housing options to create strong communities. The way to a strong sector, strong communities, and strong solutions is by actively pursuing internal and governmental strategies rooted in the idea that when we say “inclusive” and “diverse” we mean it.

 

Written by:Patience Malaba. Edited by: Leah Haberman

Member Highlight: SAGE Architectural Alliance

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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

Member Highlight: Walsh Construction

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.

  1. 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!

  1. 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.

  1. 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 Member Highlight: SCIDpda

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

  1.     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

  1.     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

  1.     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

Member Highlight: Byrd Barr Place


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.

 

  1. 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.

 

  1. 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.

4 Ways Climate Change and Affordable Housing are Connected

 

Looking out your window this morning, you might have assumed today was just another typical gray, cloudy Seattle day. It’s not until you walk outside and you are hit with the pungent smell of smoke and hot muggy air rather than the crisp chill you were expecting that you know there is something very atypical going on. The world is warming, natural disasters are becoming common place, and climate change is undeniable.

Seattle Times photo

Between the air quality alerts and electeds leveraging this to pass much needed legislation, the conversation on climate change is on the front of everyone’s mind. Often these conversations take a turn of looking at this problem through the environmental lens alone. We know that none of our social problems exist in a bubble and the whole team of our passionate housing and environmental advocates must work to see each other as allies. Addressing the urgent concerns of our environment can be done in concert with affordable housing, so here are four ways climate change and affordable housing solutions are connected.

  1. Transit Oriented Development: Shorter Commutes, Smaller Emissions
    Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is a development strategy of building affordable housing near high capacity transit centers such as the new light rail stations. This allows low-income residents to decrease their transportation costs as they are continually priced out of the cities where their jobs are concentrated. The overarching goal of TOD is to provide housing and transportation choices that give residents access to homes, jobs, recreation opportunities allowing for less dependency on a motor vehicle and shorter commutes leveraging public transit. Instead of driving for most trips, people can more easily walk, bike, or take transit in a city thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This way people are able to save money, save the environment, and save their time. It’s a win-win.
  2. Denser Cities Leads to Less Sprawl
    “Density done right” is a strategy for building the city inwardly, while combatting the tendency for cities to spread out and claim valuable land.  This strategy integrates land use, transportation, and housing policies to foster vibrant and safe mixed-use communities where residents, employees, and visitors can walk, bicycle, or take transit to reach their destinations. This way cities can continue to grow in a manner that is healthy for both people and the planet. By supporting policies in our city such as zoning changes, we can make it easier to produce more housing options across the income spectrum and enable people to find affordable housing without having a long commute. This helps cities grow without contributing to polluting sprawl and protects our wild spaces from further development.
  3. Environmentally Sound Buildings: Sounds like Saving Money on Utilities
    When developers and designers are starting their affordable projects, they are challenged by the added costs of “deep green” construction. However, through the partnerships of environmental groups and housing developers, new sustainability initiatives are allowing developers to build green without a huge financial burden. These initiatives emphasize energy efficiency and reduce the need for heating and cooling systems. This allows for environmentally cognizant development that in the end also saves residents utilities costs because their energy and water consumption is reduced. Check out how this works in practice.
  4. Who it impacts?
    When we talk about who bears the biggest burden from climate change and from our housing shortage, the answer is people with lower incomes and people of color. These problems compound and together leave the most vulnerable and the least culpable with the lion’s share of the problem.

As we continue the vitally important conversations on environmental justice and affordable housing, we must seek solutions that advance all aspects of a vibrant community. Check out HDC’s Housing and the Environment page to learn more about the intersection of the two issues and tweet at us with how you see environmental justice and affordable housing working together!

Links:

https://www.epa.gov/smartgrowth/smart-growth-and-affordable-housing
http://emeraldcities.org/cities/seattle 
http://uli.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Report-7-Environmentally-Sustainable-Affordable-Housing.ashx_.pdf
https://www.housingconsortium.org/sustainable-building-initiatives/
http://vault.sierraclub.org/sprawl/affordable.pdf
https://www.planetizen.com/node/65288
http://www.hcd.ca.gov/policy-research/specific-policy-areas/housing-climate-change.shtml
https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article159746774.html
https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_hudpartrpt_120111_1.html

Safe and Healthy Housing in Renton

Opportunities to Learn about Healthy Housing for Renton Residents

Do you live in Renton?  Do you want to learn more about how housing codes impact your quality of life? Here are three great learning opportunities provided by HDC, Somali Youth and Family Club, and The Coalition for Refugees from Burma for City of Renton residents only to engage on this issue from understanding the basics of the intersection between health and housing to how to engage with your elected officials on the topic.

There will be a stipend offered.

September 10th: Community Listening Session 
Find out how the issues of healthy housing standards are relevant to your life.

September 19th: Healthy Housing 101 Advocacy Training
Learn about the advocacy tools and policies you can use to ensure your community has healthy housing

October 1st: Engage with Electeds @City Council Meeting
Put your new knowledge and skills to work and advocate for healthy housing policies!!

Food and Childcare will be provided!

If you have any questions, please reach out to Patience.