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Donna Steensland never imagined she would end up homeless. It’s just not something she thought could happen to a working person, she says.

For many years, Steensland, 55, was a postal carrier in Monroe and lived what she calls a wonderful life with her husband and a home on six acres. But while delivering the mail one day in 2004, she got hit by a car, requiring two back surgeries and two years of therapy just to walk.

Despite the on-the-job accident, the federal government cut off her workers’ compensation — and the income she relied on for her end of the mortgage. In May 2007, the couple lost their home, then got divorced. Six months later, Steensland says, she moved into Seattle’s Salvation Army shelter and out of the stability she had always known.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my god, what’s happened?’ and cried myself to sleep,” she says.

If it hadn’t been for Seattle voters, she might still be on the streets, she says. But with the help of the YWCA, Steensland moved into Capitol Hill’s Jubilee Women’s Center, a transitional housing program that received funding from the $86 million Seattle Housing Levy passed in 2002.

On April 29, Steensland and others who have gotten housing through the levy stood with Mayor Greg Nickels as he announced a proposal for a new seven-year measure of $145 million that, if the City Council approves it, would go on the November ballot. But it’s already facing resistance from downtown businesses over the amount and questions from housing advocates about the mix of who the levy will serve — people like Steensland who are homeless with little or no income, or wage earners at $45,000 a year who can afford to rent or even buy housing on the market.

The proposal, which the council could change or scale back, as it did with the 2002 levy, would raise the average Seattle homeowner’s property tax $30 a year. The money would go to build or buy 1,670 low-income rental units, provide emergency rent payments to about 4,000 households and make down-payment loans to 180 first-time home buyers.

In a first among the four housing measures that Seattleites have passed since 1981, a new acquisition loan fund would also let affordable housing developers borrow money for the first three years of the levy in order to buy unsold condos, apartment buildings or land while the market is still low.

Except for the acquisition fund, the housing numbers are roughly the same as in the current levy, Nickels says, but, given inflation, it will cost $145 million — a figure, he says, that he reduced from his levy advisory committee’s recommendation of $167 million. Office of Housing Director Adrienne Quinn says the larger amount would have included $9 million more rental units and more funding in each category overall.

In a telephone survey conducted with 800 Seattleites in March, Quinn told councilmembers in a housing levy briefing last week, a wide margin of respondents — 73 percent — said a bad economy is the right time to fund low-income housing, compared with 24 percent who said it wasn’t.

Sixty-four percent of those questioned expressed support for the levy before knowing its details, she said, and more than half also picked $167 million as the preferred levy option, compared with 20 percent support for a $144 million levy.

But Seattle’s Building Owners and Maintenance Association, the Downtown Seattle Association and the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce say that, in tough economic times, both are too much.

In letters sent to the mayor, the Building Owners, DSA and the chamber have called for scaling back the levy to $86 million, perhaps reducing it to three or four years or having no levy at all.

In response, Nickels said at his news conference, he reduced his proposal to $145 million. But Rod Kauffman, president of Building Owners’ Seattle-King County chapter, says he’d prefer the number be $107 million. “We very much support renewal of the existing housing levy,” he says, but “the $86 million passed back in 2002 would equate to a levy of $107 million now” – without reaching “too aggressively” in this economic climate, he says.

“I’m shocked that the Downtown Seattle Association and the chamber and BOMA are having problems with the levy. It’s outrageous,” says Sharon Lee, director of the Low Income Housing Institute, a nonprofit Seattle developer. “It’s absolutely to their benefit because the housing that will be produced will benefit [low-wage] service workers” in downtown buildings.

Lee is a member of a coalition of housing advocates who are calling on the council to stick with $145 million — and keep the mayor from raising the income levels served. In the current levy, 59 percent of the rental housing money was set aside for those at or below 30 percent of area median income (AMI), or $17,700. The new proposal would reduce that to 55 percent and raise the income cap on how the remainder could be spent from today’s 60 percent of AMI ($34,500) to 80 percent of AMI ($44,800) — an income level, Lee says, that doesn’t need housing assistance.

“I’m very concerned that the levy may very well not serve a larger percentage of those under 30 percent of AMI than the last levy did and we have a very different world out there,” says housing activist Sally Kinney, who says she’s seeing an increase in the hungry and homeless in her Lake City neighborhood.

“Without the levy and the housing, I truly don’t know what would have happened to me,” says Steensland, who now lives in a subsidized apartment in Belltown. Getting into Jubilee Women’s Center “was the beginning of a new life for me,” she says. “They gave me hope, they gave me strength and I felt like a human being again.” 

The Seattle City Council plans a public hearing on the 2009 Housing Levy proposal on Tues., May 12, at City Hall, 600 Fourth Ave., Seattle. Sign-up for speakers starts at 5 p.m. Comments can also be e-mailed to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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