An Interview with Affordable Housing Consultant Ginger Segel

Ginger Segel and Low Income Housing Institute
Ginger Segel worked on wide-ranging projects with the Low Income Housing Institute

An Interview with Affordable Housing Consultant Ginger Segel

A Conversation with Ginger Segel

Ginger Segel has 33 years of experience in affordable housing policy and development. She was the Housing Director and the Director of Advocacy and Resident Services for the Low Income Housing Institute, the Executive Director of the Washington Low Income Housing Network, and the Chief Development Services Officer for Community Frameworks. She has participated in the creation and preservation of thousands of low-income rental units in Washington State and has developed housing for seniors, homeless individuals and families, low- and moderate-wage workers, and people with mental illness or other disabilities. https://gsaffordablehousing.com/
In interviewing Ginger Segel, we hope to get a perspective from someone who works in nonprofit housing development. What do they think is working, what are the obstacles and what does the future look like?
SARAH
I heard about your work with the Nehemiah Initiative in Seattle. I know churches own a lot of land in urban centers. Leveraging some of those land assets as the community ages for senior housing is a really interesting idea.

GINGER

So I’m not involved in the initiative itself, I am involved with Mount Zion Baptist Church. But I have talked to Don King (Founding Member and Architect) and I think the basic nut he’s trying to crack is that the Black churches in the Central District have a lot of land, and they could put that land to work to house people and counter the displacement of their parishioners. They could use their land to leverage the creation of housing, either by building on it themselves or selling it in exchange for a promise of building on it or in some way making it available. People were forced out of the neighborhood because of rising costs. This housing will at least allow some people to stay in the neighborhood, like Black elders who raised their families and now can no longer afford to live there.
A side issue to this is Fair Housing. I’m sure you know about redlining and why certain neighborhoods have high concentrations of certain ethnicities. But now Fair Housing says you can’t discriminate either in lending or in renting based on race. So now, Fair Housing has been used to stop strategies that would correct some of the wrongs of the past. You can’t give preferential lending or preference for down payment assistance or homeownership programs to Black people in the Central District because that would be a violation of Fair Housing—even though the reason why the Black community has just a portion of the assets of the white community is because they were denied access to homeownership for so long.
SARAH
We just started a Sam Smith Fund. It’s for Black buyers in Seattle; it’s a down payment assistance program through HomeSight funded by Windermere contributions. It’s already being used, but because HomeSight is non-profit and they have a designation that allows them to tailor loans for specific racial groups. HomeSight is a CDFI (Community Development Financial Institution).

GINGER

The city did come up with a very clever workaround with its community preference program. Community preference allows developments to prioritize applicants when leasing or selling in communities at high risk of displacement. So, if you have ties to the Central District and you and your family had lived there before, you can get preference. This would be for a place like 23rd and Union.
Ginger Segel, Expert on Affordable Housing

SARAH

The Liberty Bank Building.

GINGER

Yes, and it’s something like 80% Black. I think that was the first building that used the preference policy. Mount Zion will be using that preference policy too when the building I am now working on opens.
SARAH
If you ran the world, what would be some of the policy changes that would make the city more equitable when it came to housing?

GINGER

Well, I think the city’s been doing a pretty good job. That might be a minority viewpoint in some circles, but the heavy investment has been great, through the levies, the Jump Start tax, and the HALA developer fees. There’s a lot more public investment through the city and affordable housing—that, and the up-zoning. There is more housing diversity, especially in the last five years. Some people hate these little pillbox townhomes, but they are giving access to people that didn’t have access before.

SARAH

Yes, I talk with my colleagues and clients a lot about the benefits of density. I love telling people about the benefits of being in a Seattle Housing Community like Rainier Vista or King County’s Green Bridge. Those have been successful private/public partnership models for housing in Seattle. They re-sell well, were built around good transportation, and are well-priced for their size and condition. Also, their upkeep is funded by homeowners’ dues.

GINGER

Yes, I feel pretty good about Seattle’s priorities for housing, but you don’t see the same level of investment in the suburbs or the areas around Seattle. Some places where Seattle could make movement is investing more in Black nonprofits. There’s an issue where a lot of nonprofits are white-led, but they serve primarily people of color. And so, there’s this schism in Seattle between who is developing and owning affordable housing and who is living in affordable housing, and working on that disconnect.

SARAH
Having the community be represented from the beginning.

GINGER

Yes, and having ownership.

SARAH

Are there things that you have learned in working with private developers that have been helpful, or do you feel “Okay, that really doesn’t have to do with me”?

GINGER

Well, I am really shocked at the profit margins, to be honest.

SARAH

Yes.

GINGER

I mean there’s risk. The generous view is that there’s a lot of risk so there are high profit margins, but I don’t think those high margins are necessary. What I’ve learned most is that it’s not that different. We’re using the same builders. We’re using the same building components. The codes are so much better now that the range of quality is narrower because the codes require much higher quality than they used to, especially on energy. It used to be that you could do the crappy build or the high-quality build. I spent a lot of my youth being pretty seriously anti-developer, and I now see that the world is more complicated. But isn’t that what happens as we get older?

SARAH

I would love to know a little bit about how you started. This kind of work feels more like a calling than a career.

GINGER

Well, I was living in New York City. I was going to college in the city and the school I was attending was buying up housing in the neighborhood for its staff. Then they set a benchmark of who was eligible for the housing. Only the upper job classes were eligible. They systematically evicted everybody that was below that job class. It was my first exposure to how vulnerable people are. How vulnerable renters are to the environment they’re in, who owns their housing, and all the class issues. This university saw housing as a problem for its faculty members, but they were not concerned about housing for their cafeteria workers or the people that were maintaining their buildings. That was my first introduction to how someone could just be uprooted because of forces that were completely outside their control. So that was my first lesson in housing and the basic problem of vulnerability.

When I came to Seattle, I was fortunate to get a job with the Tenants Union. I worked on a tenants’ rights hotline and did community organizing. I got deeply steeped in landlord-tenant rights, responsibilities, and the public policies that affect those relationships and the quality of life for tenants. This was in the late 1980s. At that time, it was really shocking to see people with no place to live. That hadn’t been the case before.

There was a systematic change in Seattle. There was an emptying out of the lower-income buildings in the urban core to make way for other types of development. The classic example is the loss of single-room occupancy (SRO) housing. There used to be a lot of SRO housing where people rented a room and shared kitchens and sometimes baths. There was some component of shared space, and the accommodations were super modest, but it was affordable. A lot of people lived there. When that type of housing was either renovated and repurposed or just demolished, that demographic essentially had no options. So that demographic went straight from having an affordable housing option to having no housing option and living on the street.

SARAH

I hadn’t thought about the SROs being such a large percentage of the housing landscape.

GINGER

The country lost something like a million units of SRO housing during that period. To me, you can draw a pretty straight line from the loss of SRO housing to the rise of homelessness for single people. A lot of low-income families lived in rooming houses. That was the same sort of idea where they shared some component of their housing. I mean, when was the last time you heard of a rooming house? It’s very rare now.

SARAH

In our current times, I think about something like the Apodments, smaller units and shared common space. It sort of feels like it’s a new kind of SRO-type of housing.

GINGER

The Apodments did some tricks around zoning. In Seattle, you can have eight unrelated people living in a single housing unit. So, the first Apodments were permitted as single units with eight bedrooms.

SARAH

Oh, I didn’t know that.

GINGER

In Eastlake, for example, there were neighborhoods that were zoned for triplexes. The first Apodment developments were 24 units in three different buildings in triplex zoning. People were furious because these big buildings went in next to their little, tiny old triplex. But with Apodments and other kinds of smaller and funkier housing, there is this kind of American value judgment about what’s appropriate housing—which is really detrimental to the whole conversation. This is one place where I think the market should define what is acceptable. Of course, I think people should be safe. There should be fire codes, there should be ventilation, et cetera. 

SARAH

Heat and working appliances.

GINGER

Yes, but other than that, I think the market can decide whether 140 square feet is acceptable or not. I don’t think there should be regulation deciding. And similarly, small houses—if you want to live in a 400-square-foot house, you should be allowed to live there.

SARAH

I think there’s something about arguing for perfection rather than “good enough.” That really stops a lot of housing too, I think.

GINGER

Yes, this idea is that only transient people could live in those kinds of accommodations. It’s a veil for discrimination.

SARAH

So, when you went from the tenant work, how did you transition into helping with development?

GINGER

I got involved in homeless activism. It was the late ’80s and early ’90s. We took over empty buildings and we got a lot of public attention on homelessness. But we also got a couple of buildings. What happened was that in one of the buildings, the Arion Court, the owner basically said, “We will sell it to a nonprofit.” The Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) stepped up and said, “We will buy that building.” So, we got involved with this nonprofit, affordable housing world. There was a parallel track, so we were on the front page of the newspaper and as a result, we were creating public concern for the rise of homelessness in Olympia. They created the State Housing Trust Fund. We didn’t know we were helping to create this new funding mechanism for affordable housing.

SARAH

And I think the Low Income Housing Institute, they’re the ones who do the tiny homes. Correct?

GINGER

They are, but that’s new. They have a history of activism. Their first two buildings were the Aloha and the Arion Court. The owner would say “Just buy it, take it from me and do something with it if you want it so much.” And that’s how LIHI was born. They’ve since become a huge nonprofit, a really substantial provider of housing.

SARAH

And in your work right now, what do you think is working currently?

GINGER

Well, I put the financing packages together and do project management for affordable housing. The people who live in the housing that I help put together have won the lottery. They have gotten these housing units that are so rare, that can be life-changing for their families. It can mean the difference between not having enough money for everybody in the family to having a stable, reliable place to live and more money. But the reason why I say it’s like winning the lottery is there are just so few of them compared to the need. It’s not big-picture enough. There’s this narrative which says we are throwing good money after bad. We put so much money in and it hasn’t solved the problem. But all that money that went in has changed a lot of people’s lives, and has made a lot of people’s lives better. The fact that there hasn’t been enough money to solve the full problem, doesn’t mean that first money was bad.

SARAH

That’s a good way to look at it.

GINGER

It means it just wasn’t enough. There’s just really a lack of understanding between the size of the problem, the causes of the problem, and the solutions. It’s kind of like climate change, you see people really worried about buying this car or that car. The approach is just so out of whack with the size of the problem.

SARAH

I see what you mean. What I hear from a lot of developers is that when the nonprofit sector develops housing, it’s a lot more expensive than private development.

GINGER

The nonprofits do typically build at a little higher cost. Some of that is for good reasons and some of that is for bad reasons. The good reasons are that they’re subject to prevailing wage laws. Whenever you get public money, you’ve got to pay your workers the prevailing wage. I think most people would agree that workers should be paid good, decent wages. The second is that anything with public money typically has to be built to a higher energy standard, so there are more sustainable practices in the building.
The bad reasons are that they have these super complicated financing packages. So, you spend all this money on the administration of 10, 12, 14 funding sources to get something built.

SARAH

Federal, state, private—that combo.

GINGER

Yes, and they all have different regulations and sometimes the regulations don’t agree with each other. It just takes a lot of administration. A private builder will typically have a certain amount of equity and then they will bring in a bank loan and it’s much simpler. It’s not as highly regulated. The government should get together and solve that. Maybe the city pays for this project and the state pays for that project and the federal government pays for these three projects.

SARAH

So those can be more streamlined?

GINGER

Yeah. And don’t insist that you have these super complicated scenarios for each development that you’re building. That’s one issue that could be fixed. The other, frankly, is one that a lot of my peers would maybe not agree with, but I think nonprofits are truly not as efficient. Not on the development of the buildings, because they’re using the same builders as private buildings. The nonprofits have large organizations that they have to sustain, and there’s a chunk of money that goes in that direction. On the other hand, private developers are siphoning off even more money in profit.

SARAH

They need to make more money.

GINGER

A lot of private development needs 11-14% in returns.

SARAH

Do you find in Seattle that resistance from neighbors to building affordable housing is costing more money? There was a very widely read article in the New York Times recently about this in Los Angeles.

GINGER

I think in Seattle there’s much less of that NIMBYism. I still find it in rural areas, especially for homeless projects. But it’s not as much, not that it doesn’t ever happen. It’s not as prominent a part of the process as it was 15 years ago in Seattle. That’s my own opinion. I live in central Seattle, and we’ve had a couple of big affordable housing projects. There’s one at Union and 23rd and there’s one at 23rd and Jackson and I don’t think either one of them had community opposition.

SARAH

Just to wind up, how did you start consulting? Did you see somebody who was doing it? Did you see a place in the market that needed it?

GINGER

Well, I saw the limitations of continuing to work for an employer. I got to the point in my career where I felt like I had enough stature that I could get work and be fully in control of both the work I accepted and my political views.

SARAH

How many people like you are there in the city?

GINGER

Oh, there’s only a handful of us. I turn away work all the time and have nowhere to send people. There are just not enough practitioners. I’ve been participating in an internship program trying to bring new people into the field. It’s a very specialized, technical field, so you can’t just step in and say, “This is what I want to do.” There’s a big learning curve.

SARAH

And probably like commercial lending, the rules change all the time. The programs change so you have to keep up with your education about how every little thing works.

GINGER

Yes, I’ve been doing this for 30 years and there are a couple of people like me, so we know, “Oh, that’s that old HUD program that morphed into this program and then became this.”

SARAH

I think that’s a great idea. You have to build a system to train people.

GINGER

Yeah, absolutely.

SARAH

Ginger, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time.
2500 1666 Sarah Rudinoff
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