Two years after having West Seattle’s first ceremonial apartment-development groundbreaking in eight years, the partnership of STS Construction Services (WSB sponsor) and Housing Diversity Corporation had another one today. This time, the project is already under way, but they decided to take a few minutes to celebrate anyway. The project they heralded in 2022, at 3405 Harbor Avenue SW, is almost complete; this one is at 9201 Delridge Way SW, and its foundation is taking shape.

The five-story building is going up on a former auto-shop site on the south side of Delridge/20th/Barton; on the north side, STS already has two properties, Blue Stone and Livingstone, both mixed use – the early-learning facility Bella Mente is in Blue Stone, while STS’s company headquarters are in Livingstone. The new project, Keystone, will have 4,000 square feet of commercial space as well as 74 apartments. All speakers at today’s ceremony talked about the challenges of getting a project going amid a difficult financing environment; STS Construction’s Craig Haveson said he and his wife Mara Haveson first invested in the area 17 years ago, and he’s always believed in its potential.

His parents Rena and Paul, wife Mara, and kids Scarlett and Colton were there to join in the celebration, including the ceremonial shovel-turning:

Speakers also included Housing Diversity CEO Brad Padden, who has built more than 2,800 apartments in the Northwest and Southern California; he said the intent of this project, and the heart of his business, is to provide more middle-income housing.

Architect Michelle Linden of Atelier Drome echoed the dedication to affordability, saying that people who grew up in this area deserve to be able to stay in this area:

Too soon to say what the rents will be, as completion is more than a year away, but the goal is for the apartments to be affordable to people making 80 percent of the Area Median Income or less; 15 of the units will be rent-restricted via the city’s Multi-Family Tax Exemption program. Linden noted that the site on which attendees gathered for this afternoon’s ceremony will be a mini-plaza when Keystone is done. The site had proposals under earlier ownership, including a storage facility, but this is the one that finally went through. Meantime, STS and HDC are partners in other future West Seattle developments, including 4448 California SW in The Junction and 17th/Roxbury (which underwent some demolition recently, but that was for safety reasons, not because construction was imminent).

FINANCIAL PARTNERS: Since much was made of the challenges of securing financing for projects right now, here’s who is involved in this project, according to a project-overview infosheet – senior lender First Fed, with a $5 million loan; Nuveen Green Capital as Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy and Resiliency (C-PACER) lender, loaning $9.74 million; and Citizen Mint, raising $5.18 million of equity.