The story of Seattle’s homeless shelters that are without a home

“Know anyone who might need some homeless shelters?”

The question, asked by Barb Oliver, is meant as a joke. Of course I know of a certain struggling city, near and dear to my heart, that desperately needs them. We’re standing in the middle of it.

We’re in a lot in Sodo, south of downtown Seattle, surrounded by 71 new tiny homes. They’re so fresh they still have that new-house smell. They were built by volunteers during the past year, but ever since have been lined up next to the BNSF railroad corridor, two or three rows deep, waiting.

Waiting to be put into service by a city or a church or really anybody who will use them to help get people off the streets.

It’s a vexing scene. The homeless shelters are themselves without a home.

“It’s extremely frustrating that so many of these are just sitting here,” Oliver told me. “Every day when I go by somebody living out on the streets, I think back to this. Sometimes it makes me want to scream.”

Oliver runs Sound Foundations NW, a nonprofit that builds the 9-by-12-foot tiny home shelters in a Seattle warehouse called The Hope Factory. Other people build them, too, such as high school shop classes and church groups. One of the homes at the storage lot, featuring wood shingles in a pattern above the door, was made by people incarcerated at Cedar Creek Corrections Center south of Olympia.

All the tiny homes are insulated and have laminate flooring, come wired with heat and lights and are finished with bright paint. The materials for each cost about $4,200.

So why are so many sitting around in a storage lot, yet to be used?

There’s no simple answer, other than unsatisfying ones like “bureaucracy.” Over the years a string of politicians, from City Council to mayors to a speaker of the state House, have called for Seattle to stand up a thousand of these tiny homes, or more, to use as cheap stopgap emergency shelter during the city’s homelessness emergency.

But it’s never happened at that scale. They’ve had arguments over where to put them, or whether this type of modest shelter is dignified enough. Years ago a consultant called them “shacks”; last year one agency derided them as “shantytowns.” There also have been personality clashes between some government leaders and the nonprofit that runs most of the tiny house villages, the Low Income Housing Institute.

While some say the tiny houses are not good enough, others fret that they’re too good. People sometimes stay in them so long that what’s intended to be temporary shelter may morph into permanent, substandard housing for Seattle’s poor, some advocates worry.

Meanwhile, the people who should matter the most — the homeless — are clamoring for them.

The city took data this fall on how people living in greenbelts and under bridges responded when outreach teams offered them shelter. Of 375 contacts made in encampments during October and November, about 40% refused to come in out of the cold, even when their encampment was about to be swept.

The No. 1 reason given? “Want tiny home,” the outreach workers reported. In all, 36% who rejected offers of shelter — and presumably then stayed in encampments — said they would have left this cycle of misery for a tiny home, if one were available.

At one encampment on Shilshole Avenue in Ballard, social workers offered shelter to 21 people over six days, according to the report. Fourteen said they would move into a tiny home, but only a few tiny homes were available. In the end, only six out of the 21 accepted shelter (three to tiny homes, the other three to more traditional shelters).

Said City Councilmember Andrew Lewis, who heads Seattle’s homelessness response committee: “My bottom line is this, encampments go away at the pace by which we stand up tiny homes.”

Well then, I do know where the city could score some!

At that storage lot, Oliver said that with all the political “blockages” around here, the tiny homes increasingly are being shipped outside the city, sometimes out of King County. She’s hoping to soon stock a proposed village in Spanaway, in Pierce County, and another is in the works in Tukwila.

Seattle did approve funding one additional village in 2023, according to budget documents, which should add 50 units later in the year. This is good but far short of the need. Tiny homes are not the only emergency shelter answer, of course. But other strong options, such as hotel rooms, have proved so expensive they aren’t being ramped up to scale either.

Oliver said her factory is set to make 200 more tiny homes in 2023, enough to shelter 600 people, as the average stay is about four months. This past week, the factory was hosting volunteers from Boeing, who built a tiny home in a day.

That home is set to be transferred to the storage lot, where it too will sit for … who knows how long, she said.

“Why in the world would they not put this roof over a homeless person’s head?” Oliver said, pointing at one done up in the colors of the Ukrainian flag that had been there for nearly a year. “Or this roof, or that roof? Every day I ask this.”

I’m with you, Barb. We’re now in year eight of Seattle’s declared homelessness emergency. And there’s still no answer for why we aren’t treating it like one.