New York —
The eight-story, 150-unit Elara at the Market looks like just another sleek apartment building in Seattle’s trendy Belltown neighborhood.
Blocks from Pike Place Market, the Elara opened six years ago with a lush private courtyard, a gym and wine storage lockers. The building is full of Amazon workers who pay more than $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom to live near the company’s headquarters.
But this upscale building with a rooftop deck overlooking the Puget Sound recently transformed into something more likely to conjure images of high-rise public housing in the US or Soviet-style concrete housing blocks: government-owned housing for low-and middle-income renters.
Seattle believes the affordable housing model has left a void for middle-class households that earn too much to qualify for housing lotteries, but too little to pay for a market-rate apartment. The city’s solution is to create a social-housing model inspired by Vienna, where roughly half of residents across a wide range of incomes live in government-subsidized homes.
