UW Partners with Worrisome Real Estate Giant Greystar, Plans Lack Transparency and Care for Community and Tenants
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Photo of Blakeley Village on East Campus under construction in November 2025, photo contributed by student activist Gabriel Kennedy-Gibbens.
Last month, UW students and local community members rallied outside of the Laurel Village student housing area, which is currently closed off for construction to protest. Over a year after Greystar made plans with the community, different plans were seen on approval permits. Greystar, a private equity firm and the nation’s largest real estate firm, partnered with UW and changed its plans last minute.
What was the plan?
Greystar, selected by the UW Board of Regents, is partnering with the University of Washington to complete a multi-step housing initiative This proposal includes a $183 million tax-exempt bond joint acquisition of Nordheim Court and Radford Court by Greystar and partner Provident Resources Group Inc. The University of Washington has said that Greystar and its non profit partner will ultimately be leasing all four of these University properties to the student and staff community.
Last year, a series of public meetings were held with Greystar at UW, with the community. These meetings were to discuss the redevelopment plans at the Blakeley & Laurel Student Housing complexes on the east portion of campus. This original plan involved the removal of some trees, but would consolidate housing to provide opportunities for future green spaces. According to a statement sent to The Nightly from student activist Gabriel Kennedy-Gibbens: “Students, neighbors, community members, and Tree Action Seattle understand that some trees must be removed to add density, and we are all ok with that trade-off … Those 6 meetings produced a site plan agreed upon by all parties showing every tree on the site, and whether each was to be removed or protected.” Tree Action Seattle is a local environmental activism group and has played a large role throughout this process.
Why is Greystar so terrible?
Greystar, living up to its expectations in the private equity and real estate sectors, has been accused of deceiving business practices and has settled with plaintiffs on multiple occasions. Greystar has been the subject of several lawsuits over these alleged practices that have victimized working-class people who rely on them for housing as tenants.
Just recently, the Department of Justice, who settled with the real estate firm, shared that Greystar, was accused by the original plaintiffs to have allegedly “shared competitively sensitive data to generate pricing recommendations using RealPage’s algorithms, which also included anticompetitive rules that aligned competitors’ pricing. In addition, Greystar and other landlords discussed competitively sensitive topics — including pricing strategies, rents, and selected parameters for RealPage’s software — directly with each other.” Greystar was the subject of a similar private class action lawsuit. In other words, Greystar, allegedly, colluded with other exploitative real estate corporations to artificially raise prices by up to 14.5% in some apartments. Greystar was accused of working with other firms and RealPage software to fix artificially high prices on tenants in order to line their own pockets and settled with the accusing plaintiffs. They boasted about how RealPage’s algorithm outperformed the market, which was at the expense of tenants. Concerningly, up to 70% of apartments in some Seattle neighborhoods have been priced using RealPage pricing algorithms.
According to the University of Washington, across the Blakeley & Laurel Student Housing complexes, there will be approximately 1350 single student apartment beds when the overhaul is finished. Of these approximately 1350 apartments, only approximately 33 will be set at 50% of Area Median Income (AMI). That means only 2.4% of the units will be specifically priced to cater to low-income tenants. Families with these low-income rental agreements will be forced to move to 127 other 50% AMI set units at Radford Court. Bear in mind that all four of these complexes will ultimately be leased out by Greystar, the company that has been concerningly accused on multiple occasions of gouging its tenants through deceiving practices. This, in our opinion, directly conflicts with the previous statement from the University that this initiative is intended to “increase housing options, affordability for students, faculty and families, and improve student housing quality.” While we at The Nightly ultimately believe that ‘having a landlord’ shouldn’t actually be part of being housed, we still find this development to be incredibly concerning. The University should be striving to create affordable living for its community. Handing over control of the roofs that will ultimately be over thousands of our community members’ heads to capitalist profiteers is irresponsible.
The University of Washington undertaking a multi step project with Greystar, who has settled on multiple occasions in instances of alleged deceiving business practices, including price fixing and collusion, is extremely problematic in our eyes here at The Nightly. Picking a corporation that has been subject to so many serious allegations of wrongdoing from poor and working people is appalling to us here at The Nightly.
The three construction plans seen from original to present, photos contributed by student activist Gabriel Kennedy-Gibbens.
What happened?
Community members felt hopeful about these plans and felt that their community was being cared for, until unexpected changes were approved by the city weeks before the destruction of the agreed-upon trees was set to begin. According to Kennedy-Gibbens, “About a month ago, Seattle Tree Action became aware of new approval permits issued by the City of Seattle for additional tree removals beyond what was agreed to in the plan. This was accompanied by a new site plan, showing the same configuration of buildings, but with an additional 15 large trees marked for removal when compared to the original plan.” The community, seemingly, only became aware of these changes right before the start of the intended tree removal set for November 17th. According to Kennedy-Gibbens, Greystar had seemingly walked back their previous plans they had made with the community, “it's not surprising to see this change announced in the 11th hour, when it was too late to go back to the drawing board,” and he further remarked that this was seemingly a “bait-and-switch” tactic.
A spokesperson from Tree Action Seattle told The Nightly that while “Greystar stated in their community letter that 'the majority' of perimeter trees were being retained, the final removal maps show this:”
Laurel: 19 of 67 border trees are being removed (28%)
76 of 140 total trees are being removed (54%)
Blakeley: - 34 of 83 border trees are being removed (41%)
90 of 136 total trees are being removed (66%)
(provided by Tree Action Seattle)
On November 9th, community members and organizers from Tree Action rallied outside of the Laurel Village construction area to protest Greystar’s actions. Following the rally, a UW spokesperson told KOMO that they strove for “a reasonable mix of mature and newer trees at each site, while allowing the progress toward providing more housing that our students and their families can afford.” Despite the many meetings last spring, seemingly neither Greystar nor UW chose to inform the community on the plan to destroy 15 additional trees.
Greystar did come back to meet with the community, as Kennedy-Gibbens told us that “the negative media attention prompted the UW and Greystar to offer to meet with several community members, a representative of Tree Action Seattle, and me as a student. I appreciate that this effort was made.” In the meetings that transpired after the rally, Greystar did have their own reasons for these changes. According to Kennedy-Gibbens: “Greystar acknowledged that in their initial design phases, they overlooked factoring in the grade (slope) of the site. They had simply looked at what trees could be preserved from the aerial view of the building footprints, but failed to consider that the buildings would need to be cut into a slope, requiring a retaining wall to allow light to show through to the windows of the bottom-floor units. This wall will sever the roots, killing trees. It's unfortunate (but again, not surprising) that they knew about this retaining wall for a long time, but chose not to say anything.”
Activists were able to gain some concessions in the meeting with Greystar. According to Tree Action Seattle: three large oaks are now preserved, an arborist assess validity of saving other trees, Greystar will adhere to irrigation, mulching and monitoring of retained trees (required by law), and UW has “invited ongoing coordination with its urban forest management staff to ensure earlier integration of tree protection in future projects.” When speaking to The Nightly, a Tree Action Seattle spokesperson said that they are “glad the UW responded to community concerns and saved a number of trees, approx 20 at most out of 166 to be removed.”
While Greystar seems to have reasons for the change of plans, the lack of, public communication from the real estate giant is concerning. While not surprising, this raises big questions as to who the University of Washington is partnering with and how these decisions affect the health of our local environment and student finances.
Photo of Laurel Village on East Campus under construction in November 2025, photo contributed by student activist Gabriel Kennedy-Gibbens.
What about the trees?
While in the long run, this project could be a win for environmentalism as a result of the hard work of concerned community members and activists who kept the University and Greystar in check, the short term looks grim for the local university trees. When speaking to The Nightly, a Tree Action Seattle spokesperson told us that “this project is a continuation of what we have already documented through LIDAR data, that the UW is losing tree canopy. By prioritizing new plantings of small-species saplings instead of retaining large shade trees, the UW campus is on track to become progressively hotter and more polluted, with health impacts to students and the wider community.” The University and surrounding area, specifically, had one of the highest loss of trees across Seattle over a ten year period in a 2017 report from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Both Kennedy-Gibbens and Tree Action Seattle cited concerns for the loss of mature trees. Kennedy-Gibbens told The Nightly that “despite Greystar's flashy claims to plant two new trees for every tree removed, all of those associated benefits will be lost for the next 50-70 years, and lost forever if Greystar plants small trees that are designed for landscaping purposes to never grow big.” This is reiterated by Tree Action Seattle on their website. They explain that “planting saplings does not replace the ecological services of mature trees, which provide 70x more carbon sequestration, stormwater management, and cooling. Urban saplings also have 30-50% mortality rates in the first 5 years.” We find it incredibly ironic that the University of Washington claims to be making efforts to achieve its 2050 carbon neutrality goal while destroying trees that serve as a massive sequestration and stable storage of carbon.
Whether it's partnering with an allegedly deceiving and certainly massive private equity and real estate firm, the lack of affordable and environmentally friendly housing, or the utter lack of transparency throughout the process of planning the redevelopment of the Blakeley & Laurel Student Housing complexes, the University administration has failed us as community members. We have a commitment to this earth, not to the corporate powers who exploit it. Ultimately, we would much prefer that there weren’t capitalist efforts in our community in the first place; for now, though, we desire action. We at The Nightly echo calls for transparency from the University to its community, and that steps are taken to actually protect the environment and community members from the capitalist forces it has allowed in.
Check out Tree Action Seattle and their amazing work here.
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