SEATTLE – Housing that aims to put working Black families on the path to prosperity is being built through a new partnership of Catholic Community Services/Catholic Housing Services and First African Methodist Episcopal Church (FAME).

The partnership in the Elizabeth Thomas Homes Project is the culmination of CCS’ “Black American Initiative” under its Communities of Concern Initiative, according to Evelyn Thomas Allen, who began working on the initiative with Michael Reichert, president and CEO of CCS/CHS, more than a decade ago.

“This is an awesome moment for me and Michael,” Allen said during the initial blessing ceremony for the $40 million project February 22.

“This moment is transformative for us because it’s going to be transformative in the future for our community,” said Allen, who is retired from CCS and is president and executive director of a new Black community-led organization, FAME-Equity Alliance of Washington.

“This moment is transformative for us because it’s going to be transformative in the future for our community,” Evelyn Thomas Allen, president and executive director FAME-Equity Alliance of Washington, said at the initial blessing ceremony for the Elizabeth Thomas Homes project. (Courtesy Black Community Impact Alliance, Facebook)

For this project, CCS made FAME-Equity Alliance of Washington “a co-managing member … and the successor nonprofit to ownership,” Reichert said in an interview. That means ownership of the building will pass to the Black organization in 15 years.

With a limited pot of resources available to fund affordable housing projects, the money typically goes to “the strong players” like CCS/CHS and other large nonprofits with a track record of successful projects, Reichert said. Funding runs out before getting to proposals from smaller organizations, such as those operated by communities of color, he said.

The new model opens the door for communities of color to be partners in developing and managing projects that they will one day own. CCS/CHS also has a memorandum of understanding with FAME-EAW for transfer of ownership of two other buildings in the coming years, Reichert said.

It’s part of CCS/CHS’ initiative to help strengthen communities of color by investing in them and giving them the means to help themselves — “to enable and support our brothers and sisters in minority communities to become those self-determined, self-caring, self-managing organizations,” Reichert said.

‘Family comfortable living’

Located in the Rainier Valley, the Elizabeth Thomas Homes Project is named in honor of Elizabeth Thomas, a Black nurse and activist who sat on the CCS board for some 20 years and helped an “untold number of families” through her work at the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic in Seattle, Reichert said during the ceremony.

This rendering shows the six-story, mixed-use Elizabeth Thomas Homes project being built in the Rainier Valley area of Seattle. (Courtesy Equity Alliance of Washington)

The building, expected to be completed in May 2023, will provide 119 units of housing for working families who earn 50–60% of the area’s median income, Allen said in an interview. It will have a plaza and playground, offices, a community room and a rooftop deck. Services and activities designed for the Black community will be offered for residents. The ground floor will have space for businesses and a Black-led community organization, creating an investment in the broader community.

Designed with the cultural norms of Black families in mind, the building will have apartments with up to three bedrooms to accommodate families of different sizes that may be intergenerational, Allen said, and larger kitchens because “Black families cook at home.”

“The space is designed for family comfortable living, not cramped living,” she added.

Blessing the future of families

During the blessing event, Reichert expressed gratitude for the many people involved in the initiative, especially Allen — who responded to “my call or challenge to say that we as an agency need to do more, and more meaningful things in the community.”

CCS had been doing charity — “caritas,” Reichert said, “but it’s not change.” He noted that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. died 50 years ago and “African American families and children are not much better off now than they were when he died. So all of us need to do something different and better,” Reichert added.

He thanked Rev. Carey G. Anderson, FAME’s senior pastor, and the entire FAME community for their “courage … to step in and begin to tread where not too many Black organizations, church communities or others have yet tread, which is into the melee of the distribution of public entitlement funds for poor people.”

Michael Reichert, president and CEO of Catholic Community Services/Catholic Housing Services, speaks at the February 22 initial blessing ceremony for the Elizabeth Thomas Homes affordable housing project. The apartment project is being built in the Rainier Valley area of Seattle through a partnership of CCS/CHS and First African Methodist Episcopal Church (FAME). (Courtesy Black Community Impact Alliance, Facebook)

As CCS/CHS works with Native, Latino and Black communities, Reichert said, “our struggle is to get players who are self-determined, self-directed, self-caring, self-managing organizations to be present.” FAME came forward, following a tradition they’ve had for a century, to “continue that in a new partnership with us,” Reichert said.

He also thanked Archbishop Paul D. Etienne for the support of the local Catholic Church.

“We as a Church know that these are our brothers and sisters, and everything we can do, we will do to help support their further development,” Reichert said.

Archbishop Etienne and Rev. Carey gave blessings on the project before using trowels to turn soil from the building site that was brought to FAME for the event.

“We are blessing not just a building site and not just a building,” Archbishop Etienne said, “but the future of all of the families that will dwell there, that will build a home there, that will build their history.”

Community-based model

As director of the CCS family center in Seattle for some 13 years, Allen’s work focused on helping the homeless, providing emergency assistance and programs like counseling and foster care.

But she also noticed the number of poor, low-income and unhoused Black families was increasing, despite the available services. She realized the services weren’t addressing the community’s core issues, agreeing with Reichert that any substantial changes in service models “really had to come from within the community.”

That is the “brilliance” of the CCS/CHS Black American Initiative, Allen said.

“As a Black person, I’m born and raised in my community; I know the dynamics, challenges, struggles that we as Black people have gone through and continue to go through,” she explained. When services are offered by “someone who looks like you … you get to a quicker place of comfort and comfortableness with them, and also get to a quicker place of trust,” she added.

The partnership initiative was so unusual that people in the Black community didn’t believe it was going to happen — that there would be “an initiative in housing that would be designed for them,” Allen said.

But CCS/CHS, dedicated to its mission of living out the social justice teachings of the Catholic faith, “determined they would use their institutional gravitas to benefit our community,” Allen said.

“CCS lived up to its word,” she said.