We Saved The El Rey! Here’s what comes next…

In early spring 2025, we learned that The El Rey building next door to Common Area Maintenance on 2nd Ave was scheduled for demolition. We had a better idea. 

Instead of becoming another empty pit in Belltown, we envisioned transforming The El Rey into affordable housing, short-term residencies for visiting artists and performers, gallery, classroom and community space and storefront retail spaces for mission-driven businesses. Now, after a year of intense work and thanks to support from Seattle’s arts community and city government, we’re turning that idea into a reality.

The 4-story El Rey began its life in 1910 as an apartment building, but since the 1990s had transitioned to serve as a residential mental health and addiction treatment center. The center was operated by the Community Psychiatric Clinic until 2019, when ownership was transferred to Sound Behavioral Health. But Sound found that the space had too many problems to continue serving its mental health mission. Years of deferred maintenance had resulted in plumbing issues, sewage leaks, and other issues, and the space was shuttered in 2020. 

By 2024, the building was still owned by Sound Behavioral Health, and still unsuitable for its purposes. And after standing vacant for so long, it was declared a potential fire hazard by the Seattle Fire Department, requiring 24-hour surveillance. It could have been the death knell for the space - in January 2025, Sound Behavioral Health filed to have the building demolished.

That’s where Common AREA stepped in. While The El Rey had serious problems, it also still held a great deal of potential, especially in a city where housing has been a growing challenge for artists and creatives for years. We visited Sound Behavioral Health’s offices in Tukwila and met with senior vice president Guy De Lisi, who outlined the issues facing the building and explained that their organization had a responsibility to get the property off their books and prevent it from becoming a drag on their mission. Demolition was the clearest path forward, but not necessarily the only one, and they were extremely open to a different future for The El Rey - one where the space wasn’t demolished, but reimagined to serve the community once again.

All we had to do was convince the city that it was the right path.

In April 2025, our Save The El Rey campaign began in earnest. More than 250 arts organizations and thousands of individuals from around the Pacific Northwest offered their support to help transform The El Rey, including mayoral candidate Katie Wilson during a visit to Common AREA. As the campaign gained steam, pledges of support developed into foundational partnerships. We spent six months working with community leaders and neighbors on a plan to transfer The El Rey deed to Common AREA Maintenance. - which was ultimately rejected by the Office of Housing. 

It became clear that we needed some further expertise in the financial protection matters around the transfer, and we got the support of the affordable housing development firm Conlin and Columbia LLC to step in as a development partner.

We also formalized our partnership with Clarion West, a storied arts and cultural organization focused on literary arts and speculative fiction. They’ve long run a six-week residential workshop, but Seattle has become so expensive that they were no longer able to hold this keystone event in person. The El Rey project became a beacon to their organization as it was a pathway to allow them to be in person once again, reestablishing and fortifying one of their cornerstone programs. 

With the help of partners like Conlin Columbia LLC, Clarion West, BNB Builders, and many others, we kept pushing forward, articulating a vision of an El Rey that provided a stable space for artists to live and work that would continue to exist as a resource for the arts community in Seattle for generations to come.

In November 2025, with just a week to spare, our persistence paid off. Sound Behavioral Health agreed to sell the building to CAM for a symbolic fee - the best $20 anyone has ever spent - and the Office of Housing signed off on the sale. While the building cost $20, we had to raise nearly $50,000 very quickly to cover the final closing costs. It’s still Seattle real estate, after all. Even a free building is very expensive. That said, the deal also included an agreement that the outstanding loan attached to the building would be forgiven once it was operational and being put to use for the public good. We’re well on our way to meeting both those criteria. 

It hasn’t been easy, but thanks to some creative problem solving and support from our community of artists and volunteers, we’ve made strides toward rehabilitating the El Rey in just a few short months. 

To manage the round the clock monitoring that was still necessary when we took over the space, we established a Firewatch Residency, with volunteers, artists, and writers taking shifts day and night, writing and making art in CAM’s storefront windows while ensuring The El Rey didn’t endanger the people and buildings around it. 

By January, the fire marshall took the space off of firewatch, a huge step toward The El Rey’s bright future, if only the first. Since then, we’ve partnered with professionals like Mark Johnson from Signal Design + Architecture who have generously donated their time and effort making renderings and plans for what a revitalized El Rey could look like. We’ve brought in electricians to help us understand what work the building needs, and how we can get it done most efficiently and safely.

Today, a building that was on the brink of destruction barely a year ago is primed for renewal instead. We’ve come a long way in a short time, and we are so grateful to the many members of our community who got us this far.

But the reality is, for all the progress we’ve made, we have even further to go, and getting The El Rey ready to serve the thriving community of artists and writers who helped secure its future will take much more effort, and many more hands. 

In the coming months and years, we’ll need support with a host of projects. At the top of the list is the freshly-launched El Rey Pledge Drive. In order to be eligible for a major buildings grant we are working to raise $1million by June 30th and we’re reaching out far and wide for support. If you’re interested in helping with this campaign, you can learn more HERE.

Stay tuned to this blog and sign up for our email to stay up-to-date about what the El Rey needs, and how you can help. Follow us on Instagram to learn about upcoming work parties where you can connect with the community while building its future. 

We can’t wait to share more about what the future holds for The El Rey, for Belltown, and for the community we’re building together, and we’re so excited for you to be a part of it!