Seattle native Barry Mar was dedicated to providing affordable housing, so in the 1970s he managed the conversion of his family’s Atlas Hotel property in the Chinatown-International District (CID) into low-income apartments.
This legacy of Mar, who died last month, will continue in the form of an eight-story development at 701 S. Jackson St., just up the street from the Atlas. The Mar family has agreed to sell the nearly third-acre corner lot to Seattle-based OZ Navigator, which will develop approximately 245 rental units for people who make between $42,000 and $55,000 a year.
OZ Navigator is a partnership between two Seattle companies, Housing Diversity Corp. and Nitze-Stagen. Nitze-Stagen has been active in the CID for several decades, doing the extensive renovation of Union Station, now the headquarters of Sound Transit, and developing the Union Station garage, which it still owns.