I’m from a Corporation and I’m Here to Help

A recent op-ed in the Seattle Times, written by a pair of executives, one from Amazon and one from Microsoft, makes the case that Washington state needs to build its way out of the housing crisis. They’re right. They also have $3.6 billion ready to help make that happen, which is impresive. Amazon’s Housing Equity Fund has financed over 21,000 affordable homes across the Puget Sound region, Northern Virginia, and Nashville, and they’ve extended the commitment for 14,000 more. These are real numbers and real homes and I don’t want to be dismissive about that.

But Ronald Reagan famously said that the most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I want to help.” And there’s a version of that sentiment that applies to corporations too; it has less to do with skepticism about intentions than about how large institutions are structurally built to operate. Big money works with big projects. Big projects, in the housing context, means apartment complexes.

What the Fund Actually Funds

If you visit Amazon’s housing fund application page, the eligibility requirement is “experience in creating or preserving multi-family affordable housing developments.” That’s the filter. You need to be a developer of apartment buildings to participate. The fund’s own impact photos show crowds gathered in front of contemporary multi-story residential complexes. These are the projects that make sense at the scale Amazon is operating — large capital outlays, institutional partners, national nonprofits, experienced developers. The little guy leasing a backyard spot to a tiny home owner, or the family who wants to park a THOW on a rural property, or the retiree building a small ADU to house a grown child — none of these scenarios plug into a $3.6 billion institutional lending program.

The fund calls itself the Housing Equity Fund, which raises an interesting question depending on how you hear it. Housing equality — meaning access and fairness — or housing equity — meaning the financial kind that builds over generations? The honest answer is probably both, and both are legitimate goals. But the homeownership equity that actually creates generational wealth tends to get built in a backyard or a rural lot, not rented in a subsidized apartment, however nicely financed.

What Gets Left Out

I’ll be transparent about my own position here: my goal in life is to never live in an apartment. I’ve made it this far. Apartment living works for plenty of people and I’m not suggesting we stop building them — that would be silly, and the numbers clearly require them. But there is something about the stacked, repeated, institutionally managed living unit that leaves no room for what I’d call inhabited creativity. No garden you actually care about. No quirky modification to the space. No relationship to the land or the weather or what’s growing outside the window. You live in a module, and the module is fine, and it is somehow also a little deadening.

In the Pacific Northwest specifically — which is, not to overstate it, one of the most beautiful places on earth — it seems worth asking whether the apartment complex is the only template we should be optimizing for. There are backyards here. There are rural properties. There are driveways and greenbelts and small lots on the edges of towns where something smaller and more personal could go. Those spots don’t show up in a multifamily developer’s spreadsheet, but they exist, and people want to live in them.

A Few Things Worth Asking

If large institutional funds are going to shape how affordable housing gets built in this state, a few conditions seem reasonable to put on the table. First: require meaningful community infrastructure as a condition of funding. Not a token courtyard — a community room, green space that people actually use, something that makes a building a place rather than a structure. Dense living works better when it’s designed around human connection rather than unit count.

Second: the funding ecosystem should have room for the small-scale stuff too. A family financing a tiny home, a homeowner putting in a backyard MDU, a nonprofit deploying THOWs for transitional housing — these projects are too small for Amazon’s fund and too unconventional for most institutional lenders. That gap is real and it matters, because the people who benefit most from these smaller housing types are often the ones most poorly served by the large-scale alternatives.

The Amazon executives writing in the Seattle Times are trying to help. I take that at face value. The housing crisis in this state is serious enough that I want all the help it can get. But the solution that gets built is the solution that gets funded, and right now the funding infrastructure heavily favors one type of answer. A more complete solution leaves room for the person who wants to live in a tiny home on a piece of land they can see from where they’re sitting, with a window facing something worth looking at.

Mount Baker Tiny Homes builds custom tiny homes on wheels and van conversions in Bellingham, Washington. Get in touch if you want to talk through a build.