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Wire Insider: SeaTac City Councilmember Peter Kwon

SeaTac City Councilmember Peter Kwon joins us as a “Wire Insider” to discuss affordable housing, one of the paramount priorities for both parties this legislative session.

One of the things we’re working on is the issue with mobile home parks, because there is a mobile home park in SeaTac that is up for redevelopment, and we want to be able to provide more protection for the residents and the owners. And that’s controlled by state policies. So, that was one issue.

The other one is, obviously, dealing with affordable housing. They kind of go hand-in-hand, in some sense. And we have a lot of affordable housing, currently, but the issue is not so much workforce housing. So, we found that a lot of the actual workers around here don’t live in the city, they live somewhere else. And we’d like to change that and help workers in the city live in the city.

I don’t think there really is an easy solution. However, what we are dealing with here locally–folks who, you know, the airport and the hotels are primarily the some of the largest employers in the area, and being able to provide workforce housing for those employees I think would be one step towards being able to promote folks that live here, at least in this city and work here in this city, and make that more realistic. Whether we can make that happen or not, we’ll see. We have some plans in the works coming up this year in 2019, so we’ll have a better idea at the end of 2019, next year.


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