Thursday, October 1, 2026
A former state office building in Lacey’s Woodland Square Loop reopened in early August as a 50-unit, market-rate apartment complex.
The City of Lacey attributed the project’s completion to its Multi-Family Tax Exemption ordinance, which granted MJR Development an eight-year exemption on property tax to help make the residential improvements.
“The HUB Apartments are another investment in the (city’s) vision established in the Woodland District Strategic Plan to transition Midtown into a mixed-use urban district,” said the city in a statement on Thursday, Aug. 7.
The HUB Apartments are located at 629 Woodland Square Loop SE. MJR Development, of Kirkland, reconfigured the property into a market-rate apartment complex featuring studios, one-bedroom and two-bedroom units.
The ribbon cutting marked the project’s official opening, completing a redevelopment process that included pavement repairs, sidewalk installation, landscaping and utility upgrades.
The Lacey City Council’s adoption of the Multi-Family Tax Exemption ordinance enabled the redevelopment. The ordinance mandates that qualifying projects located within the city’s residential target areas are eligible for an eight-year exemption on property tax applied to residential improvements.
The HUB Apartments fulfill planning objectives outlined in the 2013 Woodland District Strategic Plan. The plan charts long-term direction for transforming Midtown into a dense, walkable urban district. Housing infill in the Woodland Square Loop was identified as a target in the mentioned redevelopment process.
“Congratulations to MJR Development on completing this project and thank you for the continued investment in the Midtown vision,” the city stated.
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TheVirtualOne
You want to solve the housing problem? Give this tax break to all builders and stop spending money you don’t have on things the taxpayers don’t want. Sounds simple, and it is. Do it and watch the housing crisis disappear. It’s about supply, stupid!
Monday, August 11, 2025 Report this
Quadlok
Poking around some statistics, it looks like there are roughly 115,000 households and 125,000 units of housing in this county. So there's 10,000 vacant units, and with a roughly 60/40 split that is an apartment vacancy rate of 5%, or 2500 empty apartments. There are only around 1000 unhoused people here. So seems to me its a problem of affordability and location, not supply.
Tuesday, August 12, 2025 Report this
HappyOlympian
Lacey adopting Olympia methods to encourage new construction - make current residents pay taxes for the new residents. Seems apt, we encourage out-of-town homeless folks to move here too. Freebies for everyone who wants to move here!
Tuesday, August 12, 2025 Report this
TheVirtualOne
Good job Quadlok! I like that you are doing some research and thinking. One thing I want to mention is that affordability has many different characteristics. My point about increasing supply operates using fundamental market principles. While the current vacancy rate may be 5%, owners of apartments have to compete for renters more than they do now if supply is increased. The only way they can compete is to lower their prices. However, local and state governments are not doing builders and apartment owners any favors by making it more difficult to get permits, build, tax, and then roll out unnecessary programs like rental inspection programs (yes, I hope you are listening City of Olympia), which ultimately increase the cost to the renter and provide virtually no benefits. You have to cut costs so investors can afford to lower rents, otherwise the upward spiraling rents will just continue.
Tuesday, August 12, 2025 Report this
Quadlok
I'd say its a fundamental error to think housing must be a market driven sector. It's pretty clear that corporations like Blackrock, and the financial sector more broadly, have been using the housing as a major profit center for decades now. They've forced homeowners and local governments to become complicit in their profiteering, just as they have with the stock market, by destroying traditional pensions and advocating for increasingly regressive and uneven tax regimes.
At the same time as they were doing this, they used the disastrous war on drugs to smear the concept of public housing. The rich have succeeded in turning our entire nation into a company town, where every last cent they pay us and then some flows back into their pockets.
Tuesday, August 12, 2025 Report this
BobJacobs
The multi-family tax exemption program is a give-away to rich developers, pure and simple.
MJR was stuck with an office building they couldn't rent for offices or anything else so they were going to do this in any event. No need for their tax bill to be charged to all taxpayers for eight years.
So sad that our policy makers don't have the sophistication or principles to say no to this program.
Bob Jacobs
Tuesday, August 12, 2025 Report this
ARLormand
So an investor gets a tax break for creating more market rate housing? I couldn't afford to live there on a single income! What are we doing for the population that are disabled but can't get housing? This sure isn't it. I was hoping it was going to be a better program than it being all about the money.
Tuesday, August 12, 2025 Report this
Yeti1981
It’s important to remember that Lacey’s Multi-Family Tax Exemption (MFTE) program isn’t a “giveaway,” it’s a targeted incentive that makes otherwise infeasible projects possible. Converting an old office building into housing is not cheap, and without tools like MFTE, many of these properties would sit empty for years.
This project added 50 new homes without requiring new land or new infrastructure, and it supports the Woodland District’s long-term plan for a walkable, mixed-use neighborhood. That benefits existing residents and businesses too.
MFTEs are also structured with limits: they only exempt the value of the new residential improvements, not the underlying land or existing structures, and they expire after 8 years unless affordability or other criteria are added. In other words, the tax base is preserved and eventually grows once the exemption ends.
No single policy is a silver bullet, affordability and supply both matter. But programs like MFTE help bridge the gap by reducing the upfront cost of redevelopment, accelerating housing production, and leveraging private capital to meet public goals.
If we want to address affordability for all income levels, we need a toolkit approach: MFTE, streamlined permitting, ADU flexibility, reduced fees, and partnerships on workforce and subsidized housing. This project is one piece of that larger puzzle.
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 Report this