Mayor Durkan signs executive order for affordable housing

SEATTLE — Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan signed an executive order Wednesday in an effort to create more affordable housing, and protect long-term residents from being displaced.

Durkan’s executive order directs the city’s housing office to create a “community preference” policy. This would allow city-funded developers of affordable housing to give folks who have been displaced the first crack at new units.

The order also calls for requesting more state resources to help prevent displacement and create more affordable housing, and asks for investments in existing neighborhoods with higher displacement rates.

“To help create a city of the future, we must work together to protect against gentrification and displacement and make it possible for families to stay in Seattle,” Mayor Durkan said in a Wednesday news release.

Affordable housing has been a special focus for Durkan in recent months.

“As Seattle has grown, we have seen far too many communities of color pushed out of their homes in Rainier Beach, the Central District, Beacon Hill, and Chinatown-International District. With this Executive Order, we are refocusing our work on strategies to prevent displacement and gentrification,” said Durkan.

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​Earlier in February, she advanced a $90 million project to redevelop Discovery Park’s Fort Lawton into more than 200 affordable homes.

In November, ground was broken on the future site of 102 new housing units in Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood for those experiencing long-term homelessness, as part of a larger effort to have 2,500 city-funded affordable rental homes by 2021.

The month before that, Mayor Durkan marked the opening of a 69-unit low-income housing site in what used to be a fire station in Lake City.

You can read the mayor's full executive order here.

For more on this story, click here.

mynorthwest.com