Affordable Housing?
The only solution that seems like a solution also appears completely, utterly unobtainable.
I never thought I’d be active in local land-use politics. I never thought I’d become a pseudo-expert at real estate law, housing law, sub-plats, and developmental loopholes. But, in December of 2025, we received an innocuous-looking letter in the mailbox from the City. It was dated 14 days before Christmas. In obscure language with an unlabeled map, it informed us (only because we bothered to research what exactly it was saying), that our local cemetery (which sits behind the house we rent) was being considered as a site for housing development. I learned later that no graves were being proposed to be moved, but that slices of cemetery land that did not currently have graves on them were slated for platting, and later development. I later learned that they were hoping to develop 3 single-family homes on the land, with an ADU in the backyard of each.
Something inside me snapped, and I thought, “this is my purpose. This is what I was sent to Seattle to do. I can not let those homes be built.” I know that the housing debate is extremely contentious, especially in cities like Seattle where housing is out of reach for many people. In the state of Washington, a family with the average income can afford to buy a home in ONLY ONE COUNTY in the entire state. For everyone else, home ownership is out of reach. And for us, as renters, we are one modest rent hike away from having to leave the city altogether. So I am not anti-housing. It just, turns out, that I am pro-cemetery.
If you are interested in some of the work that I’ve done, through the coalition that I ended up building to fight this development, check out these podcasts and news clips:
KOMO News. “Neighbors Rally to Prevent Home Builds Near Crown Hill Cemetery,”(Regarding the Crown Hill Cemetery Preservation project) December 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5OURuCV29Q
Cascade of History. “Interview with Dr. Kate Burrows” (Regarding the Crown Hill Cemetery Preservation project). January 2026. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0sFtO3dHBEuTmGvSkb0Oh2?si=752479cfc37b473d
Cascade of History. “Interview with Dr. Kate Burrows” (Regarding the Crown Hill Cemetery Preservation Project). March 2026. Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/13bdzMgCP0SEsBDq3I5ac3?si=0d09a482afa449c7
Cascade of History. “Interview with Dr. Kate Burrows” (Regarding the Crown Hill Cemetery Preservation Project). June 2026 https://open.spotify.com/episode/3UU5XBK1cde5WO5kJrsLrn?si=962770162ad34f72
Cascade of History. “Interview with Dr. Kate Burrows” (Regarding the Crown Hill Cemetery Preservation Project). September 2026 https://open.spotify.com/episode/6kCWi3Y9iah1QTn2SDzYz9?si=60dff222cc234c3a
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As a result of this work, I found myself thrown into the contentious debates that are taking place here in Seattle and across the country. I was seen as “anti-development” and our group was listed on watch-lists of “NIMBY groups”. We are not NIMBY. Although none of us would love to see the historic homes in our neighborhood torn down and be replaced with multi-family housing (especially if it was affordable- this neighborhood comes the closest to “working class” that exists in Seattle), none of us would be complaining. We know that multi-family, vertical housing, is essential to keeping people in the city, at all life stages.
I also believe, that as citizens, we have the duty and responsibility and right to hold our elected officials accountable for decisions they make. And, as we embarked on this journey, “fighting the big, bad developers” became much less our focus than “exposing all the places in the city and state government that have laws to prevent this kind of thing from happening, but the city both, as employees acting individually, and systematically in the form of laws and regulations, prevent those safeguards from being activated.” This essentially makes citizens the cops- we are responsible for holding our governments accountable. Even if they pass laws that says a certain thing, in many cases, I am finding, it is up to us to insist they enforce those laws.
So, here in Seattle, as elsewhere, there is tension between those “camps” that want to build, build, build, everywhere they can (and this includes our newly-elected mayor, Katie Wilson, who was elected on a platform of affordable housing) and those who say “Yes, build, and come up with as many other ways as possible of providing affordable housing that don’t require building multi-million dollar single-family homes on cemetery land.”
Which is how we ended up at the Forum for the Future of Affordable Housing last week for our date night. There were 4 panelists- a state senator (or is she a rep, I have forgotten) who has served pushing 30 years in the state legislature, making her calls for “government must make changes” ring hollow, as she has been “government” for almost 3 decades; the CEO of our local Habitat for Humanity (which is a group I’ve always considered heroes of mine and an ally, but towards which I’ve changed positions recently because our local chapter was an outspoken proponent of a city bill that moved to severely restrict citizens’ right to appeal development and land-use plans (they won).) The other two panelists were a local person who has started the first “social housing” project in the country, and a gentleman who represents a national affordable/fair housing non-profit.
The most striking thing that came out the discussion was the divide between the panelists:
- Habitat for Humanity kept saying the whole purpose of buying a house, the whole reason they exist, is to give people access to generational wealth in the form of home ownership and equity. They do not provide housing for the poorest of the poor- they provide as-cheap-as-possible housing to people who can afford mortgages (that are far smaller than the market average, but they are still mortgages.)
- The national guy and the social-housing person were saying the opposite: we need to make PERMANENTLY affordable housing, which means that run-away equity (ie: that generational wealth that is so important to Habitat) needs to go away. The national guy said the only solution to our housing crisis was equity caps. In other words, if you bought your house for $450,000 in 2026 and it is worth $600,000 when you want to sell it 3 years later, you would be restricted by law to only a small fraction of that equity- keeping the house essentially a $450,000 house in perpetuity (let’s not argue the fact that a $450,000 is not “affordable” by most people’s standards).
- The politician, although she was not as plain-spoken about it, spoke about the need for an imaginative overhaul of everything we think we know about housing and that the solution lies in Federal oversight.
So, what everyone but the Habitat people were saying was: make housing a social property, just like utilities and roads (they used those exact examples). Utilities and roads are not private property- they are owned and maintained in common by the community (in the form of elected city and municipal governments). So, the solution to the housing crisis, according to them, is socialized housing. Get rid of the profit motive. Take housing out of the “this is how we build wealth” equation and put it into the “these are the bare necessities of life, and no one should be getting rich off it” equation. Clearly, the Habitat guy winced at this, as did everyone in the audience who has a capitalist mindset.
We left the event depressed and overwhelmed. The solution seems impossible- the creative leaps it would take for this country to move from a private-property model to a shared/community-property model seems impossibly large. Even the people working in this space, like Habitat for Humanity, are catering to the “housing is how we build wealth” line of thinking. We left thinking there is no way out of the bind we are in as a country in terms of housing. This is not a problem of the uber-poor, nor of the unhoused (but of course, it is a problem for those groups). This a problem that affects almost all of us (except for maybe 1% of the 1%).
What do you all think? Do you think a socialized housing model is possible in the United States? Or do you think these speakers are missing another solution- a third option?
