We’ve spent the last few days reflecting on Speaker Emeritus Frank Chopp’s legacy and the impact he had on Habitat SKKC. With his passing last weekend, we lost a deeply committed champion for fair housing and a longtime collaborator and supporter of our work. His impressive career included serving as Washington state’s longest-tenured Speaker of the House and co-founding and leading the Fremont Public Association, which later became Solid Ground, a nonprofit focused on ending poverty.
Habitat SKKC staff and volunteers knew him as a dedicated advocate who attended numerous Habitat events—and rarely wanted to be recognized for his work. He often showed up with no warning and stood in the back. While he rarely took credit for his contributions to affordable housing and homeownership, Speaker Chopp’s legacy at Habitat SKKC can be seen in the work he did as a partner on many impactful housing policy efforts.
He was a co-creator of the Housing Trust Fund (HTF), which has invested more than $2 billion in capital funding to build or preserve more than 58,600 affordable housing units across Washington state. HTF invested funding into our Olympic Ridge project in the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
Speaker Chopp recently attended our Olympic Ridge groundbreaking, blending in with the crowd gathered onsite. During the program, Habitat homeowner Amber C. held up and spoke about a book called Goals for Seattle: The Report of the Seattle 2000 Commission. She pointed out that the book was written in the 1970s and how it laid out many goals for the City of Seattle. While she spoke, Speaker Chopp started to chuckle to himself. As Amber read from it, she touched on the different great ideas the book had to address problems facing the city. At one point during her talk, Amber asked the crowd which problem still persists in Seattle. When Speaker Chopp answered “housing,” Amber was curious how he knew.
His response was, “I’m one of the primary authors,” to which everybody in the crowd turned and looked.
Ryan Donohue, Habitat SKKC’s Chief Advocacy Officer, remembers Speaker Chopp fondly, saying, “He was a community organizer at heart, focused on helping people and making progress every single day. A true community organizer dedicates their life to the community that they’re serving, and they believe in the power of people to be able to move mountains. Frank Chopp was a quintessential community organizer.”
Speaker Chopp was also a key partner in the coalition that helped pass the Covenant Homeownership Act with bipartisan support. The work of the Black Home Initiative (of which Habitat SKKC is a part), the Housing Development Consortium, Sen. John Lovick, and Rep. Jamila Taylor, who sponsored the bill, resulted in the Covenant Homeownership Program. The program offers a significant downpayment and closing costs for people who were historically discriminated against in Washington state.
These are merely a few of the impressive contributions to Washington state that Speaker Chopp made in his 30-year career as a legislator. He will be remembered as a humble public servant, a lawmaker who believed in creating bipartisan coalitions, and a tremendous leader for affordable housing. We thank him for all that he contributed to housing advocacy as we strive to honor his legacy in our work.