Latest Mt. Baker Renovations Ensure Affordability for Decades

Mt. Baker Village Apartments is a transit-oriented development two blocks from a light rail station.

SEATTLE—Mt. Baker Village Apartments, located at 2900 McClellan St., was built in 1957 as garden-style market rate apartments. Seattle area nonprofit affordable housing developer Mt. Baker Housing was formed in the late 1980s to purchase the poorly maintained property, which at the time, left hundreds of refugee families in unsafe conditions. Its residents, then as now, are largely Southeast Asian Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees who relocated to the Seattle area in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mt. Baker Housing tackled the community redevelopment project and transformed the existing four-story seven-building Mt. Baker Village Apartments into a transit-oriented development two blocks from the Mt. Baker light rail station. It includes 156 one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom apartment homes affordable at 30 to 60% area median income. At the time, Mt. Baker Housing’s 1988 renovation represented an early use of the low-income housing tax credit program in Washington State.