A new 98-unit apartment community has opened on South Mason Avenue near Tacoma Mall, offering income-restricted two-, three- and four-bedroom homes aimed at large and multigenerational families. Viridian Grove Apartments requires residents to earn no more than 60% of the area median income, a threshold that works out to a little less than $51,000 a year for a single person.
Twenty of the complex's 98 units are specifically set aside for households with developmental disabilities, according to Pierce County, a detail that fills in a target population left out of initial coverage of the opening from KIRO 7 News. Pierce County Human Services coordinates housing funds specifically to steer specialized populations toward permanent supportive housing options, and the county put real money behind that goal here: $2 million in local county funding helped support Viridian Grove's construction.
Monthly rents at the property range from $1,638 for a two-bedroom, 868-square-foot apartment up to $2,088 for a four-bedroom unit spanning 1,175 square feet, according to listing figures from Trulia. Those rates are capped under Area Median Income rules tied to the project's financing, which came together through Low-Income Housing Tax Credit bonds approved by the Washington State Housing Finance Commission in December 2024. LIHTC remains the primary federal lever used to get private developers building income-restricted housing at scale.
Filling a Gap Tacoma Is Racing to Close
Viridian Grove lands as Tacoma works through an ambitious, and so far incomplete, construction target. The city built 403 affordable housing units in 2025 alone, pushing its cumulative total to 1,964 units completed since 2019 — still short of the 6,000-unit goal the city set for 2028 under its Affordable Housing Action Strategy, per the City of Tacoma. The strategy also calls for preserving 2,300 existing low-income homes by 2028; the city preserved 101 of those in 2025 and 378 overall since 2019.
That pace matters because Pierce County's homelessness numbers have been moving the wrong direction. A January 2024 Point-in-Time count tallied 2,661 people experiencing homelessness countywide, a 23% jump over the prior year, with more than half reporting a Tacoma zip code before losing housing, as Hoodline previously reported. Large-format units like Viridian Grove's three- and four-bedroom floor plans are designed to reach exactly the family households at greatest risk in that count.
The Funding and Policy Pipeline Behind the Project
Two local mechanisms have helped make projects like this possible. Pierce County's Maureen Howard Affordable Housing Act, a 0.1% local sales tax voters approved in March 2023, generates roughly $20 million a year and has already supported more than 1,000 affordable units in its first two years. On the zoning side, the Tacoma City Council unanimously passed the Home in Tacoma reform in November 2024, replacing restrictive single-family zoning with urban residential zones to speed up middle-density and multi-family construction; the change took legal effect in February 2025.
Cambridge Management handles on-site property management and tenant compliance at Viridian Grove, including the income verification and annual recertifications federal rules require of income-restricted operators, according to a post on the complex's Facebook page. Even with rents capped well below market rate, the $1,638 starting price for a two-bedroom unit still represents a significant monthly cost for households earning near the 60% AMI ceiling, underscoring the affordability pressures that persist even inside subsidized housing.
Part of a Broader Pierce County Push
Viridian Grove is one piece of a wider regional effort. Hoodline recently covered plans for 28 affordable homes in Frederickson South, a separate homeownership project using a public land-lease model. Together with zoning changes recognized in a statewide award for Tacoma's community engagement work, these efforts represent the kind of layered local, county and state coordination housing officials say is necessary — even as leaders acknowledge the challenge of scaling production fast enough to meet the pace of need across Pierce County.
