Shaun Scott Joins Got Green and Its Fight for Tenant Rights

Shaun Scott, the new executive director of Got Green, says the first time he realized he had chosen the right organization to work under was during a protest that Got Green helped organize against the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA) at the Rainier Vista public housing complex. 

"We had this momentous meeting where many of the tenants at Rainier Vista — about 60 or 70 — had a confrontation with the building manager and made their demands in person for more timely repairs," said Scott. "We have some tenants in these units who have been waiting years and years for basic repairs. They've been getting stonewalled, placated, and anything but satisfied in their requests for repairs." 

In an op-ed published by Real Change, Rainier Vista tenant Aasho Ali wrote about the Nov. 3 protest and her experience living in SHA public housing: "It is unacceptable that SHA makes tenants live in unhealthy conditions, which impacts our health, safety and comfort."

Scott was announced as Got Green's new executive director in December 2025, when the public housing campaign was already underway. Prior to his employment at Got Green, Scott worked at the Statewide Poverty Action Network, where he was the policy and field campaign manager, so he has much experience organizing alongside underrepresented and underserved communities.

"I believe that I was brought on because I have a long history of not being afraid to speak truth to power," said Scott. "I don't care if you're an office holder or what title that you have, if you're not doing right by the people you're responsible for, you have to be held accountable."

Founded in 2008, Got Green is a community-based, grassroots nonprofit that organizes working-class Black and Brown communities in South Seattle and "fights for racial, economic, and environmental justice," according to its website. The group also emphasizes that its focus on public housing addresses all three forms of justice, as "healthy public housing means better living conditions, protection from severe weather, and less climate pollution." 

According to the Residential Landlord-Tenant Act (RCW 59.18.070), landlords are required to initiate repairs within at least 24 hours after receiving written notice from the tenant for emergency requests, such as no heat in the winter, water problems, and sewage leaks. For requests for issues with essential appliances, such as refrigerators, stoves, ovens, or major plumbing fixtures, repair must be initiated within 72 hours. For non-emergency requests, repair must be initiated within 10 days.

A spokesperson from SHA responded to the Emerald's request for comment regarding repairs, stating that "SHA meets the required 24 to 72 hour response times for all emergency and essential repairs" and that only "non-emergency maintenance requests" make up its backlog of service requests. It says these requests "largely involve capital improvements, which are bigger projects that require planning, coordination, and take more time than a standard repair." 

SHA also stated that it understands "how frustrating the wait can be" for residents and that it "has created a dedicated team for non‑emergency repairs and is developing a capital improvement plan to address larger projects more efficiently. Our maintenance staff is working on a new approach to addressing non-emergency maintenance needs enabling our technicians to lower planning and coordination time for more involved work such as painting and reflooring with minimal disruption to resident households. We look forward to sharing the capital improvement plan with residents as part of our ongoing engagement with Rainier Vista. Most importantly, we recognize that clear communication is essential as we work through the non‑emergency maintenance backlog, which is why we SHA staff will continue partnering with residents to increase transparency and information sharing in addition to the established monthly community meetings."

Although Got Green primarily focuses on organizing tenants in the South End, the organization's goal is to spread its impact across the entire city. "The organizing that we're doing is centered in South Seattle, centered on primarily Black, largely immigrant tenants in housing developments in South Seattle, but this is a problem SHA has across all of its properties throughout the city," explained Scott. 

According to its website, SHA owns and manages approximately 8,777 units across 376 sites throughout the city. Nearly 80% of tenants are children, elderly, or disabled. One in 10 students enrolled in Seattle Public Schools (SPS) is housed at an SHA property.

"When you organize with an intersectional framework and understand power dynamics, you know that when you are taking care of the people who are the absolutely most vulnerable, it tends to make things better for everybody," Scott said. "We're organizing right now in, I think, about as friendly a climate you could possibly have for this sort of organizing — a new mayoral administration, two citywide councilmembers who were recently elected on pro-housing platforms who understand racial equity. So there's that synergy between what we're trying to do on the outside and learning how to make the demand to people on the inside and official types."

In addition to being the new executive director of Got Green, Scott is an "official type" himself. He represents Washington's 43rd Legislative District and is the first socialist to be elected to the Washington State Legislature since William Kingery in 1912.

Prior to his employment with the organization, Scott and Got Green were both part of a team of organizers and organizations that rallied behind ensuring that the revenue from the Sweetened Beverage Tax (SBT) would go back to the vulnerable communities that faced the highest tax burden, in the form of social services. 

"That tax would have been much more detrimental to low-income families if we didn't get involved," said Scott. In the end, it was determined that revenue from the SBT would fund food-security programs and early childhood education. 

At the end of 2025, Scott announced HB 2100, colloquially called the Well Washington Fund, a progressive 5% payroll tax intended to cushion Washington from federal funding cuts from President Donald Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" — which impact schools, health services, housing services, transit, and more — by raising tax revenue from an estimated $2.2 billion to $3 billion. As of March 2026, Scott's legislation has not passed. The legislation was modeled after the Seattle City Council's JumpStart payroll tax. 

Scott, who is originally from Queens, a borough of New York City, has been living in Seattle since 1992 after moving to attend school at the University of Washington. He says that when it comes to public housing, Seattle seems to have followed a similar path to NYC. 

"Public housing in NYC in areas like the Lower East Side and Williamsburg were originally built to house white tenants, and it did its job, because eventually most of those tenants were able to move to the suburbs and buy property," explained Scott. "Crime was not associated with public housing developments at first. It wasn't until after the federal government divested and people of color moved in that we began to see high rates of crime associated with public housing."

The phrase environmental racism, coined by civil rights leader Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., was originally used to describe the deliberate placing of facilities that produce waste and harmful pollutants in Black and Brown neighborhoods. 

In addition to living in closer proximity to environmental pollution than their white counterparts, people of color endure poorer housing conditions, like the kind being faced by SHA renters. And because the majority of SHA's residents are Black and Brown people — SHA's residency is made up of 75% people of color, with 20% of residents identifying as white and 5% whose ethnicity is unknown — Got Green's campaign argues that these unhealthy housing conditions constitute environmental racism. 

According to Scott, Seattle is a city that was founded on environmental racism, and the housing discrimination he sees on a daily basis does not surprise him. 

"The Native Americans who lived on this land for centuries prior to the establishment of the city of Seattle — named after their chief — were banned from residing here unless they were employed by settlers," said Scott.