Maddux is First in New Healthy Housing Pilot Program

SEATTLE—In early 2017, Seattle designated Mt. Baker Housing’s five properties in the Mt. Baker neighborhood as Redevelopment Opportunity Zones. This allowed Department of Ecology funds to flow directly to the nonprofit and affordable housing developer for the remediation expenses necessary at The Maddux site.

Environmental remediation of The Maddux affordable housing site is now complete, according to MBH. The Maddux is the first project in Washington State to reach this clean-up milestone as part of the Department of Ecology’s new Healthy Housing pilot program.

The program uses Ecology funding to remediate brownfield sites statewide that are often prohibitively expensive to clean up, and therefore remain undeveloped. With this new funding, qualified sites such as The Maddux are eligible to receive remediation funding from Ecology, as long as funds are used as part of a redevelopment plan to build new affordable housing.

In the first-of-its-kind partnership between MBH and Ecology, Ecology provided $400,000 to MBH to start the clean-up process, and the Washington State legislature authorized another $6.2 million to complete the clean-up work for the project, which was contaminated by a former gas station and dry cleaner.

“We are strong advocates for this program and believe it will continue demonstrating how the Department of Ecology is a critical partner in the clean-up of fallow brownfield sites that, once remediated, can add significant new affordable housing to communities in need,” said Mike Rooney, executive director at Mt. Baker Housing. “We are proud to have completed the remediation work for this important project, and are excited to have closed on our construction financing, as well. We look forward now to starting construction sometime next year.”

Pioneering New Program and Partnership

MBH entered into the legal agreement with Ecology in 2018. The clean-up began in June 2020 and took five months to complete.

As the first project in Ecology’s new program, the partnership between Ecology and MBH has now demonstrated this type of collaboration between state and housing developers can achieve multiple meaningful goals including environmental clean-up, community redevelopment and creation of transit-oriented affordable housing.

“It’s exciting that Washington’s clean-up law is helping transform contaminated brownfields into safe places for affordable housing,” said Rebecca Lawson, acting manager for Ecology’s Toxics Clean-up Program. “It’s powerful to combine clean-up funds from our state’s hazardous materials tax with our clean-up process. The Maddux is the first of these projects to reach stage that we literally can call groundbreaking.”

Financing Construction Equals Hundreds of Family-Sized Homes

Located on South McClellan Street on the east side of Martin Luther King Jr. Way South in the Mt. Baker neighborhood, The Maddux is within blocks of the Mt. Baker light rail transit station. Construction financing also closed in mid-December on the project which is slated to open in 2022.

All 203 new homes at The Maddux will be affordable to those earning up to 60% of area median income or less and include studios, one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartment homes. Roughly 20% of the homes will be much-needed two- or three-bedroom family-sized affordable housing.

With a focus on preserving the affordability of future housing and community facilities along transit corridors, The Maddux will also be a demonstration of many of the principles within Mt. Baker Housing’s equitable development strategy. The project will also utilize new zoning stemming from the city’s Mandatory Housing Affordability rezones and include onsite mandatory housing affordability units, GlobeSt.com learns.

“The visionary Healthy Housing program from the Washington State Department of Ecology provides funding for brownfield clean-up on sites that, without this funding, would likely lay fallow,” Rooney tells GlobeSt.com. “Earmarking the clean-up funds for affordable housing doubles-down on the program’s effectiveness. Without this meaningful collaboration between Ecology leaders, members of the Washington state government and our talented consultants, Perkins Coie and Aspect Consulting, this milestone would not have been possible.”

In addition to The Maddux, Mt. Baker Housing is also moving forward on several additional projects in the Seattle area. The nonprofit will begin construction on its 221-unit Via7 mixed-use affordable housing development in Rainier Beach next spring. And, it will start construction on Grand Street Commons, a 202-unit mixed-use affordable housing development project, in the fourth quarter 2021.

Mt. Baker Housing is also advancing 600 affordable housing units in southeast Seattle and in total, the company plans to bring more than 1,200 affordable units to the Puget Sound market within the next five years.