Working material for the board and invited collaborators.
What we would settle, in what order, and who is best placed to settle each one.
Each entry says what it settles and who is best placed to run it. Where we do not have a cost band or a sponsor we would stand behind, the entry says so.
Settles: whether renovating Brighton Place forecloses any of the growth program, whose largest scenario reaches 104 more homes, where parking goes in each combination, and whether a tax credit transaction on the existing building constrains the same parcel for the length of its compliance period. Best placed: the two firms that produced the studies, in one room, with an architect holding the pen. Sponsor: Brighton, and it is the cheapest item on this list because both inputs already exist.
Settles: what liquefaction prone soils mean for foundations under each scenario, and what they add to cost. The renovation study maps the site as liquefaction prone and recommends this work before a final decision, and it sits outside the study's own cost total. Best placed: a Seattle geotechnical engineer. Sponsor: Brighton. Cost: we do not have a fee proposal, so we are not putting a band on it.
Settles: what the service upgrade actually costs and whether Seattle City Light can deliver the capacity the electrification options assume. Every home is currently on a forty amp panel. The renovation study carries escalation, A/E fees, taxes, project management, permit fees, and both the electrical-capacity and soils investigations outside its total, so this is a known gap rather than a discovery. Best placed: the electrical engineer on the existing team, with Seattle City Light. Sponsor: Brighton.
Settles: which code pathway the renovation runs on, which drives cost more than any single line item. The position today is qualified, not final: the consultant letter states the scope is not a Substantial Alteration, and SDCI's approved response says it does not appear to trigger one, notes ambiguity about the quantity of homes, and says the project will be reassessed during permit plan review. Best placed: the architect of record with SDCI, through a further pre-submittal. Sponsor: Brighton.
Settles: the number the board is actually deciding on. The study's own printed total is $11,928,243 in Fall 2025 construction dollars. Carrying escalation to a later start plus tax and fees, our own rough figure lands nearer $16M. That is our arithmetic and not an estimator's, and a difference of that size can change which option makes sense, so it should be tested rather than used. Best placed: the cost estimator who produced the original. Sponsor: Brighton.
Settles: whether the two parcels Brighton's own documents call its most important targets change the growth arithmetic rather than adding to it. They adjoin the campus, which is what makes them different from the rest of the pipeline. One of them appears in the priced list at $675,000. Best placed: the firm that produced the growth study, re-running its scenarios with the parcels included. Sponsor: Brighton.
Settles: whether the $4.1M note maturing in January 2028 is replaced or resized into a facility that also funds acquisitions. Best placed: Brighton with its lender and a capital advisor. Sponsor: Brighton. The preservation and debt restructuring round expected from the Office of Housing by the end of 2026 lines up with this, and being ready for it is a piece of work with a date on it.
Settles: how many commitments exist, what instrument each one is, and which property each sits against. The material describes them three ways against two properties and states $5.5M to date as an aggregate. Every conversation about the renovation stack depends on the answer. Best placed: Brighton, from its own records and the grant or loan documents. Sponsor: Brighton.
Settles: how the two silos conventional real estate finance serves least well actually work: $2,450,000 sought for the deferred second pool, plus the crowdfunded and self directed retirement account silos in the capital stack. The community has already raised more than $400,000 in a couple of weeks for the Arches purchase, so the demand side has been demonstrated. Best placed: securities counsel with experience in Regulation Crowdfunding and Regulation D offerings, which is specialist work we would bring in rather than do. Sponsor: we went looking for one in the material and could not find one. It is open question nine on the strategy page.
A floor case, a base case, and conditional cases. Each conditional case names its trigger, the date, and who controls it. The triggers below are real and dated. The numbers that go against them are phase two work.
| Case | What it assumes | Trigger, date, and who controls it |
|---|---|---|
| Floor | The 149 homes owned today, held and maintained, with the renovation scope as priced and no additional homes. This is what a first phase is financed against. | No trigger. This is the case that has to work on its own. |
| Base | The floor plus the South Holly townhomes, which sit under the middle housing rules that passed in December 2025 rather than under any pending upzone. | Brighton controls this one. |
| Conditional A | Core campus growth on Rainier and South Brighton under current zoning with a lot boundary adjustment, up to about 90 homes on the contiguous campus by our own arithmetic. | Trigger: the reconciliation in study one concludes that renovation and growth can proceed on the same parcel. Controlled by Brighton and its design team. |
| Conditional B | The renovation funded through a preservation round rather than out of the balance sheet. | Trigger: the Office of Housing preservation and debt restructuring round, expected by the end of 2026. Controlled by the City. The note maturity in January 2028 sets the deadline. |
| Conditional C | The two adjoining Brighton Street parcels inside the campus boundary, changing the capacity arithmetic rather than adding to it. | Trigger: control of both parcels. Controlled by the current owners, so the date is not ours to set. |
| Conditional D | Any outcome that needs additional height or a wider use table on the Rainier frontage. | Trigger: Centers and Corridors adoption, now scheduled for 2027 and trimmed from earlier drafts. Controlled by the City Council. Nothing in the cases above depends on it. |
Three or four, no more, each with a baseline and a publisher who is not us.
Stated as plainly as the benefits, because a board reads this part first.
The ordering follows from what blocks what.
The reconciliation, the soils work, the electrical capacity work and the Substantial Alteration pathway. These four decide what the renovation is and what it costs, and three of them are already named in the study Brighton paid for. Study eight, the Amazon reconciliation, runs in parallel because it is records work rather than consultant work.
The cost test needs the outputs of the first four to price anything real. The Brighton Street parcel question follows because its answer changes the growth model that study one has just reconciled.
The note and facility process is dated by January 2028 and by the preservation round expected at the end of 2026. It starts now regardless of where the design work has got to, because the lender conversation takes longer than any of the studies above.
Securities structuring waits until there is a specific use of proceeds to structure against. Doing it earlier produces a document that has to be redrawn.
The table names the party responsible for each piece of work in the plan above.
| Who | What only they can do |
|---|---|
| Brighton Communities | Decide the organizing idea, which the strategy page marks as unresolved. Answer the open questions from its own records. Commission the four studies that run first. Hold the relationships in the neighborhood, which nobody else on this list can do. |
| The board | Set the risk tolerance the scenario ladder is built against, and say which case the organization is willing to finance. |
| The design team that produced the two studies | Reconcile their own work. Nobody else can say what each study assumed that the other did not. |
| Geotechnical and electrical engineers | Answer the two questions the renovation study set aside on purpose. |
| SDCI | Settle the Substantial Alteration pathway. Only the department can. |
| Seattle Office of Housing | Score a submission. Its published criteria are the specification for what a submission has to contain. |
| The lender | Price the refinance and say whether the facility can carry acquisitions. |
| Securities counsel | Structure the community investment silos. This is specialist work and we would bring it in rather than do it. |
| Now City Labs | Read, reconcile, sequence and price. Hold the figure register so that one number means one thing across every document. Convene the working sessions and write what they conclude. |
Half a day, and no budget.
Half a day with the design team, the estimator, Brighton, and an architect holding the pen. Four things come out of it: whether renovation and growth can proceed on the same parcel, where parking goes in each combination, what a tax credit transaction does to that parcel for the length of its compliance period, and which of the four studies that run first can start the following week.
Everything else on this page follows from that session, and it uses material Brighton has already paid for.