Vibrant Washington exists because the housing crisis isn’t an accident — it is the predictable result of a series of policy choices that can be unmade. Founded by Alex Booth, a licensed architect in Seattle who has spent his career designing affordable housing, and he started this organization because design and architecture alone are not enough to ensure every person is housed.

For nearly a decade, he has worked across new construction, renovation, and urban planning, helping lead complex affordable housing projects through public agencies, community processes, and the regulatory layers that determine whether any housing actually gets built. That work taught him something all architects learn eventually: the best-designed building in the world doesn’t matter if zoning won’t allow it, financing won’t pencil, or permitting takes three years longer than it should. The crisis isn’t a design problem. It’s a policy problem, and we need people willing to work on it directly.

That’s what brought him to land use, transit, and housing reform, not as separate causes, but as three levers on the same goal. Housing is what we’re actually trying to fix; land use and transit are how we get there. He brings an architect’s eye to this work: an attention to how policy actually translates into buildings, neighborhoods, and the people who live in them. Vibrant Washington is where that perspective meets advocacy, built on the conviction that housing, like architecture, should serve people through sustainability, justice, and joy.