Last week, Hinoki Apartments, in Seattle’s Yesler Terrace neighborhood, celebrated its grand opening. Despite the day’s heat, numerous officials, project leaders, and community members gathered to acknowledge the milestone accompanied by sweeping views of South Seattle and children making use of the courtyard playground.

Hinoki was designed by Seattle-based HEWITT and PYATOK for the Seattle Housing Authority, delivering 136 units affordable to low-income residents, along with childcare amenities, a community meeting space, all-ages courtyard, and community garden beds. It is the fifth project to open as part of SHA’s phased redevelopment of Yesler Terrace.

First completed in 1940 by the nascent housing authority, Yesler Terrace was Washington State’s first public housing project, and the country’s first racially-integrated housing development. The initial structures were two-story garden apartments arranged across the 30-acre hilltop site that would house residents for the next 70+ years. After the turn of the millennium, SHA began plans to redevelop Yesler into a more dense, mixed-use, mixed-income community that could accommodate one-to-one replacement of the 561 existing units in addition to thousands of new homes.

Hinoki gets its name from a cypress tree species indigenous to Japan. PYATOK also co-designed Red Cedar, the preceding development that opened in 2019 and was honored by the Urban Land Institute with a Jack Kemp Award of Excellence in Affordable Housing.