Saint Mark’s is forming a community-based organization (CBO) to expand its role in addressing Seattle’s housing crisis and ensure that Communities Harmed are represented in affordable housing redevelopment on campus. This page is under development – stay connected for updates to come!

A Commitment to Housing Justice and Cultivating Community

This new 501 (c)(3) community-based organization is envisioned as guiding Saint Mark’s to:

• Grow its housing and social justice work with the active leadership and participation of members from Communities Harmed.
• Encourage truth telling and acknowledging historic traumas through engagement, education, and actionable next steps with CBO Board of Directors, Vestry, cathedral parish, Diocese of Olympia, neighborhood, and broader community engagement.
• Design and develop a “third place” in the affordable housing project, and manage and program the use of that space to foster and support community building.
• Deepen relationships with community partnerships.

Saint Mark's hope is that the cathedral’s affordable housing project and the associated “third place,” can become a hub of community support, resources and stability for families. The housing community is designed to be intergenerational with at least 35% two- and three-bedroom apartments to accommodate families with school-aged children.

 

Historic Setting and Opportunities

Saint Mark’s is positioned in a neighborhood that, during the early and mid-20^th century, was subject to redlining by lenders and restrictive deed covenants on real estate ownership that enforced racial and ethnic discrimination. Cathedral and Diocesan leadership were complicit in that trauma. Disparities in housing access and generational wealth persist in our city and in the neighborhood where the cathedral was built nearly a century ago. Saint Mark’s has a unique opportunity to go beyond words and use its campus to repent and repair the harm and injustice that has kept people out of the neighborhood historically.

In May 2024, Saint Mark’s hosted a forum in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History project to begin the work of truth-telling about racial redlining and restrictive covenants.

 

Resources/Links

• Affordable Housing at Saint Mark’s
• Housing and Hunger Ministries at Saint Mark’s
• Addressing Housing Justice in New Ways (The Rubric, Fall 2025, PDF)