South King County, WA

Housing, Built environment | 2026

Understanding the barriers to maintaining safe and healthy homes to improve housing conditions.

Institutional failures in code enforcement, funding gaps in public repair programs, lack of accountability for landlords, and weak tenant protections all contribute to housing inequities, particularly for residents with low incomes. These public policies and allocations of resources can lead to people living in dilapidated and potentially hazardous homes that affect their health and well-being. The South King Tool Library, with branches in Federal Way and Auburn, seeks to investigate the structural, financial, and access barriers that prevent residents with low and moderate incomes from maintaining safe and healthy homes.

The South King Tool Library will first convene a resident advisory board to codesign a multilingual housing survey that asks local renters and homeowners about housing conditions, needed repairs, experiences with landlords, and potential solutions. The South King Tool Library will administer the surveys during tool-lending hours, repair workshops, and pop-up events. The team will contextualize the survey data with storytelling sessions and participatory mapping sessions to identify areas with concentrations of poor housing conditions. The project team will then facilitate workshops where residents can validate findings, craft narratives, and rank action priorities. In collaboration with the advisory board, the staff will summarize the findings and recommendations in a community brief and outreach campaign.

Through this project, South King Tool Library hopes to inform Auburn’s 2027–28 Community Development Block Grant allocations and the King County Housing Division’s repair funding priorities. Both agencies are actively soliciting community input to inform the spring 2027 planning cycles. City of Auburn Code Compliance staff can use the findings to identify areas to focus efforts, and the Valley Regional Fire Authority can target areas most in need of fire prevention resources. South King Tool Library hopes that residents will use this evidence to activate resources, better engage with agencies, strengthen community-based programs, and build sustained organizing capacity for systemic change.