Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Richard Mohler
Washington State’s Puget Sound Region has a shortfall of over 156,000 housing units yielding the nation’s third largest population of people experiencing homelessness. At the same time, the region is investing $56 billion in light rail and bus rapid transit with over seventy stations scheduled to open between now and 2041. This offers an historic opportunity to leverage public transit to build complete, equitable and resilient communities at scale in response to a worsening housing affordability crisis and growing impacts of climate change. However, this will not happen without community intervention. Sound Communities is a volunteer group of civic leaders from the public, private, non-profit, and academic sectors, including architecture and real estate faculty from the University of Washington College of Built Environments (UW CBE) focused on leveraging this transit investment to address the region’s housing and climate crises at scale by building complete, equitable and resilient communities at planned station areas. The group is working with elected leaders, city staff, technical advisors, and community stakeholders from multiple jurisdictions in designing and advocating for an entity, the Housing Benefits District (HBD), that will help to ensure that all the region’s residents prosper from its transit investment and economic growth.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.111.52
Volume Editors
ISBN
978-1-944214-41-8
