By Erica C. Barnett
Plans to open a new tiny house village in Southeast Seattle’s Brighton neighborhood, just south of Hillman City, have stalled over an apparent lease dispute, according to the organization that has been trying to provide shelter at the site since 2023.
Nickelsville, a grassroots shelter provider that has operated sanctioned encampments and tiny house villages around the city for more than a decade, was weeks away from breaking ground at the site, in August 2024, when the city’s Human Services Department abruptly canceled the project.
In a story about the city’s sudden reversal, Real Change reported that Mayor Bruce Harrell’s deputy mayor overseeing homelessness, Tiffany Washington, personally denied the permit, citing a supposed lack of community outreach. “It was just NIMBYism,” a Nickelsville repreesntative told PubliCola last week. “We were saying, ‘Get to know us— we’re not a low-barrier shelter, we require sobriety in our villages—but they didn’t want to give it to us.”
After the Real Change story ran, the city reversed course, telling Nickelsville they could restart the process of getting a permit for the site. As they did the first time, the group went door to door distributing flyers and held a community meeting, this one at the Rainier Beach Community Center. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until early August, when, according to the Nickelsville representative, the city said there was some kind of problem with the lease.
“We finally got a meeting [with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, which is serving as an intermediary between the city and Nickelsville] on August 5, only to be told that [the city] has no idea how to execute the lease agreement,” the Nickelsville representative said. “We said, ‘What do you mean? How hard can it be?'”
According to HSD spokeswoman Kamaria Hightower, the department can’t sign a lease with Nickelsville’s faith sponsor, Lighthouse Temple Church, until the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections issues a permit for the property, which “requires an agreement that documents religious sponsorship.”
After PubliCola sent questions about the property to HSD and SDCI, SDCI’s permit portal showed a burst of new activity on the site, including a new permit allowing Nickelsville to move forward with repairs on a side sewer, one of several utilities that will have to be hooked up before the project can move forward.
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However, even if the city allows Nickelsville to start working on electric, water, and sewer connections, that’s no guarantee that HSD will approve, or even be directly in charge of, the lease. According to the Nickelsville representative, the city instructed the group to route all their communications with the city through KCRHA, an unusual arrangement if KCRHA is not going to hold the lease. (As PubliCola reported in May, a similar lease dispute nearly derailed the relocation of Tent City 4, another self-managed encampment that was on track to move to city-owned land until Mayor Bruce Harrell and then-councilmember Cathy Moore almost scuttled the deal).
Hightower said the department considers KCRHA “a critical partner on this project. KCRHA administers Nickelsville’s service contract and has provided support to the Brighton Village project at every stage, from proposal development and site selection to ensuring that community engagement requirements were met.”
However, HSD did not say whether the city or KCRHA will ultimately hold the lease for the tiny house village—a critical, if bureaucratic, hurdle that could further delay the project. “It is still to be determined if KCRHA will be formally represented on an agreement between the City and Nickelsville,” Hightower said. We’ve asked KCRHA for more details about their role in the project.
Elected officials and candidates have embraced tiny houses and other freestanding structures as a consensus, highly desirable form of shelter—unsheltered people are often eager to move into tiny houses because they are the most home-like shelter option available. But in practice, the city often puts up hurdles to construction, especially when neighborhood residents start to complain about the presence of homeless residents.
Partly in response to neighborhood pushback, the Brighton village—in the works for more than two years—has been shrunk down to just 14 units in order to leave a minimum of five feet between each unit, but it still faces significant hurdles. It’s possible it will never get built.
As Nickelsville noted in an action alert earlier this month, more than 800 people have died outdoors since the group started trying to site the Brighton Village project in 2023. “We really want to get started on this, because the weather’s changing and there are things we can do now,” the Nickelsville representative said. “If you’re just fiddling with the language of the lease—if that’s the real reason—let us start moving houses onto the property.”
It is really hard to imagine the neighbors of Brighton, a blighted, very low-income neighborhood, complaining about the tiny house village, even at 4x the 14 tiny homes. The neighborhood is more accurately described as “Blighton”: there are some 20 auto-related businesses fronting Rainier Ave in just 4 blocks. Rather, is this simply too close to the view homes of Seward Park?