Our Vision and Mission
Photo credit: William Wright Photography
We envision a Puget Sound region where all of us live in vibrant, thriving communities with access to public transit and amenities, giving us the freedom to make our best lives for ourselves and our families.
Our mission is to promote the development of complete, walkable, equitable, and inclusive neighborhoods at scale across the Puget Sound region in concert with the region’s historic investment in transit, specifically through funding and policy that will facilitate strategic land acquisition and assembly for scaled affordable housing development.
A Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity
Communities have the rare opportunity to ensure the region gets the most out of public investments in transportation, while ensuring that post-COVID recovery and subsequent growth will meet critical economic, environmental, racial and social equity goals.
The Puget Sound region is moving forward with expansive and transformative investments in high capacity transit. These investments will provide critically needed mobility to those of us here today and the additional 1.8 million people expected here between now and 2050. Communities have the rare opportunity to plan for and invest in thoughtful, coordinated housing around transit stations, ensuring the region gets the most out of these public investments in transportation, while ensuring that post-COVID recovery and subsequent growth will meet critical economic, environmental, racial and social equity goals.
While Washington’s State’s housing crisis most negatively impacts extremely low income and very low income households, it is felt by people across the spectrum of the income scale. Nearly half of all renting households and more than a quarter of all home owning households in the State are cost-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing. In King County alone, an estimated 244,000 additional affordable homes for both renters and homeowners will be needed by 2040.
The possibility of leveraging current investments in public transit presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet the housing needs of our region at scale.
The consequences of our housing crisis have become increasingly visible over the last decade, but the crisis itself is not new. Beginning nearly a century ago, discriminatory land use policies, real estate covenants and lending practices denied people of color, Black Americans in particular, access to affordable housing, home ownership and the generational wealth building potential that home ownership provides. Over the last fifty years federal funding for affordable housing and social services has been steadily eroded under the auspices of fiscal responsibility and small government. The possibility of leveraging current investments in public transit, however, presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put an end to the crisis and meet the housing needs of our region at scale.