Seattle’s public housing is supposed to provide our city’s lowest-income people and families with affordable, comfortable places to live. From what our organization, Got Green, a community organization based in South Seattle, has seen, the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA) is allowing their units to fall into a serious state of disrepair that is threatening the health and safety of tenants. Last month, we published a report about the state of public housing in Seattle. In spring of 2024, Got Green canvassed five SHA properties located in South Seattle: NewHolly, Holly Court, Rainier Vista, Barton Place, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Apartments. We spoke to 205 tenants on their door steps, at their kitchen tables, and in their living rooms. Through these conversations, and a review of SHA inspection records, we found that public housing tenants are being forced to live in unhealthy and unsafe housing conditions and are waiting far beyond the legal limit for repairs to their homes. We also found tenants that were routinely ignored, minimized, blamed, and disrespected when they communicated their problems to the SHA.  Our report found horrendous conditions: bathrooms covered in black mold, broken refrigerators and stoves, cracked walls, sagging ceilings, warped floorboards, rat infestations, electrical issues, and plumbing problems that exposed tenants to fecal matter. SHA knows that their units are unsafe and unhealthy, and noted some of these problems in their own publicly-available records. According to inspection records from 2022 and 2023, 95 percent of units inspected by SHA staff had at least one unaddressed repair. Sixty-one percent had at least one “health and safety” maintenance issue. Left unaddressed, moderate health and safety issues “[can] cause or worsen a chronic condition that may have long-lasting adverse health effects; or that the physical security or safety of a resident or their property could be compromised,” according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to SHA’s records, a supermajority (67 percent) of SHA’s public housing units have waited over 10 days for maintenance. The law requires landlords to promptly address repairs: within 24 hours for electricity, water, and heat repairs in the winter, 72 hours for appliance and plumbing repairs, and 10 days for any other repairs). And for many tenants, repair requests have gone completely unaddressed for weeks, months, and even years. As of August 2025, 3,372 households in SHA’s public housing have incomplete repair requests, many of whom have numerous repair needs for their individual home. In one instance, a mother with an asthmatic child provided SHA with a doctor’s note attesting that SHA’s failure to address mold had further harmed her child’s health. This was ignored by SHA. Another SHA tenant had been living for years with toxic black mold in her bathtub. She said she had submitted multiple repair requests to SHA, and even after multiple visits, SHA never fixed the problem. Another tenant shared how SHA did not address a leak in her apartment for, again, years, which resulted in soggy carpet and a moldy floor at her home daycare, where children played. As the tenant told us, “unfortunately, [an] emergency for us does not equate [to an] emergency for SHA.” In addition to disrepair, tenants shared that they’d felt disrespected by SHA when they’d communicated their needs. For example, one disabled tenant in an ADA-accessible unit shared how she’d fallen through a large hole in the middle of her bathroom, a hole she’d repeatedly asked SHA to fix. The fall sent her to the emergency room. When her son complained at the neighborhood SHA office, the SHA representative allegedly laughed because they found the story funny. Last month in Rainier Vista, public housing tenants and community members presented SHA with a scroll of thousands of unaddressed repair requests that SHA has failed to complete, some dating back to 2016. As the largest and most powerful public housing authority in the region, SHA must do more to deeply prioritize the health, safety, and well being of tenants in public housing.  This must start with fully completing the backlog of unaddressed repairs and transforming their maintenance system so that delays and disrespect are of the past.  Despite these significant issues, public housing in Seattle can be healthy housing, if SHA chooses to fulfill their mission and abide by the law. Our communities will continue to experience many storms: floods, heatwaves, and wildfires, as well as cuts to survival services, displacement, and the violence of war, police, and ICE. Without the sanctuary and safety of a healthy home, these storms become even more severe. Seattle deserves public housing to weather the storm. Got Green is a south Seattle community organization that builds power in working class communities of color and fights for housing, jobs, food, and care for people the planet. Got Green is currently focused on healthy public housing. Shaun Scott is Got Green’s Executive Director, Emily Chan is the Communications Organizer, and Sean O’Neill is the Deputy Director. Shaun Scott is also a Representative of WA’s 43rd Legislative District. The post Guest Rant: Seattle Housing Authority is Failing Their Tenants, Their Mission, and the Law appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less