Tag: Tiny house villages

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson’s Shelter Plan, King County Assessor’s Stalking Charges, an Ambitious Library Levy, and More

By Erica C. Barnett

If you aren’t listening to Seattle Nice, the weekly podcast I co-host along with political consultant (and my former Stranger colleague) Sandeep Kaushik and longtime reporter and producer David Hyde, now’s a great time to tune in—in the last couple months, we’ve talked to City Councilmember Eddie Lin about plans to increase density across the city, debated Mayor Katie Wilson’s apparent plan to move forward with the police surveillance cameras she once opposed, and talked to Downtown Seattle Association director Jon Scholes about the DSA’s unusually sunny forecast for the future of downtown.

This week, we talked about the mayor’s plan to build 500 new tiny house village-style shelter units by this summer, stalking charges against the King County Assessor (who has refused to step down despite a unanimous King County Council vote demanding his resignation), and the latest library levy, which Sandeep said was just another example of Seattle’s willingness to pay any amount of taxes for any purpose.

Sandeep said he was impressed by the mayor’s announcement last week that the city will open 75 new shelter beds in Interbay and expand tiny house villages in two other locations. The biggest unheralded news, he thought, was the announcement that T-Mobile, Starbucks, and Microsoft are all helping to fund the mayor’s initial shelter push, kicking in around $3 million so far.

As someone who’s genuinely excited by Wilson’s ambitious agenda but skeptical about her ability to upend the Seattle Process, I argued it’s too early to declare victory—noting, for instance, that the last time the city participated in a privately backed venture to address homelessness, the “Partnership for Zero” effort to eliminate visible homelessness downtown, they got burned—that initiative, spearheaded by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, fell apart when it proved harder to house people directly from the street than the homelessness agency anticipated, and funders pulled out, forcing the partnership to shut down in 2023.

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People who’ve been around Seattle’s homelessness system for a while say they’re hopeful about the mayor’s plan, but I’ve also heard concerns that it’s too focused on a single shelter type—tiny house villages—and too optimistic about the timeline for siting nearly 1,000 more tiny house units around the city in the next nine months. Another concern is cost—Wilson’s team has said the average tiny house unit will cost $28,000, all in, but that estimate seems low, given the higher cost of existing villages with the kind of wraparound services and 24/7 security Wilson has suggested will be available at each site.

All that said, you know who didn’t really even bother trying to add shelter in Seattle? Wilson’s predecessor Bruce Harrell, who promised to add 2,000 “shelter or housing” units by the end of his term but ended up using dubious math (taking credit for shelters that were underway by the time he took office, for instance) to claim he had actually added 3,000. (In reality, by the end of Harrell’s term, there were around the same number of shelter beds in Seattle as when he took office). In other words, even if Wilson gets no further than the initial 100 or so additional tiny houses she announced last week, she’ll have increased shelter more than Harrell did in his entire four years in office.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Wilson’s “Path to 500” New Shelter Beds: $17.5 Million, With First Units Opening In April
The Wilson Administration’s ambitious schedule for opening up 500 new shelter beds.

By Erica C. Barnett

On Monday, the Seattle City Council got its first, partial look at Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to build 500 new shelter units by the end of May, and 1,000 before 2027. The mayor’s office is waiting until later this month to announce the sites they’ve identified for the first few new tiny house villages, so the briefing was mostly an opportunity for the council to ask questions about the proposal—including how much new money it will require, how the mayor’s office plans to get buy-in from neighborhood residents, and why the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (KCRHA), which manages the region’s shelter contracts, has been effectively cut out of the proposal.

The biggest news to come out of the briefing was the total estimated price tag for the first 500 units. According to city Budget Director Aly Pennucci, the mayor’s office has identified about $17.5 million to pay for the first 500 units. That number includes$4.8 million Wilson’s team previously identified from an underutilized Community Development Block Grant revolving loan  ($3.3 million) and unused funds from a downtown development fee program dating back to the 1980s ($1.5 million), plus shelter funding from the city’s 2026 budget that hasn’t been spent yet. The average annual operating cost for each new shelter unit, according to Pennucci, will be around $28,000 for each new shelterbed.

That number is be lower than the cost of tiny house villages that feature the range of services, including case management, meals, and 24/7 on-site staff, that Wilson said would be among distinguishing features of the new shelters. For instance, the city allocated $5.9 million to the Low Income Housing Institute to add about 100 new tiny houses last year.

According to the mayor’s office, the $28,000 figure assumes that some shelters will cost less than the ones serving “high-acuity” clients, while some will cost more. In addition, some that are located on publicly owned land may end up paying essentially no rent, if the city can work out a deal with the owners.

At the same time, the legislation would allow the city to lease land at market rate, opening up more potential sites at a higher cost.

“We know that without services, these shelters are not successful, [and] because the people who cause the most disorder and have the highest impact on our community are people who have high needs and high acuity, we know we need 24/7 staffing,” Wilson’s chief of staff Kate Kreuzer said. “We want case management. We want integrated behavioral health support, so that when people come inside, they have the services they need, and then that is getting them on a pathway to housing.”

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In addition to a bill that would allocate the $4.8 million, Wilson’s office sent legislation to the council that would allow the city’s Human Service Department to select shelter providers directly and allow the department of Finance and Administrative Services to lease the property for new shelters itself. If it’s approved, this streamlined procedure would sidestep the KCRHA and bypass the usual 9- to-12-month process for siting shelters, which includes a competitive bidding process and requires providers to negotiate their own leases, permitting, and site preparation.

Nicole Vallestero-Soper, Wilson’s director of policy and innovation, said the first shelters could open as soon as next month. Wilson’s land use bills will likely go through Councilmember Eddie Lin’s land use committee, and the financing will probably go through Dan Strauss’ budget committee.

Councilmember Bob Kettle, seeming to conflate “housing first” with tiny house villages, said he supported the idea of “housing first” if it was a “photo finish with wraparound services” that would not include the kind of “actions that really allow [unsheltered people] to not be ready” to come inside. (Wilson’s plan is more “shelter-first” than “housing first,” in that it consists mostly of new shelter, not rapid rehousing for chronically homeless individuals).

“I really think that the services piece is key, and then setting [people] up for success is the encouragement piece, as opposed to making it easier to stay outside, for example, because there’s a lot of service-resistant folks,” Kettle said. Service providers generally reject the notion that unsheltered people are “service-resistant” or that people live outdoors because it’s “easy,” arguing that there are valid reasons people avoid shelter and services that have failed before, such as shelters that prohibit pets and programs that kick people out for failing to maintain sobriety.

As we reported earlier this month, Wilson’s office did not preview the shelter proposal for the council or secure support in advance, which has been the practice with previous administrations. According to Lin’s office, he has outstanding questions about how the Wilson administration plans to rapidly scale up shelter, how the mayor’s office will measure success, and what role the city will play in engaging with the people living near new shelter sites.

homelessness, Mayor Wilson, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Mayor Wilson Wants to Go Big on Shelter. Will She Succeed—and If She Does, What Then?

By Erica C. Barnett

This week’s episode of Seattle Nice was all about shelter—specifically, Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposal to allow larger tiny house villages, spend $5 million up front funding them, and—boring but potentially most significant—put the city itself in charge of leasing land for new tiny house villages, RV safe lots, and sanctioned encampments. Currently, any organization that gets city approval to set up a village or sanctioned encampment still has to get permits and approvals from a long list of city departments, which can add as much as a year of delay.

With the city itself in charge of stuff like approving and connecting utilities, signing leases with property owners, and making sure tiny house village locations are up to code, Wilson is betting the city can dramatically cut the timeline from a shelter proposal to opeming day.

Wilson, as we discussed this week, vowed during her campaign to add at least 1,000 new shelter beds in her first year, with a goal of 4,000 new beds by the end of her term. This ambitious goal marks a philosophical shift away from strict housing-first principles (the idea that people need permanent housing before they can tackle their behavioral health issues) toward a shelter-first approach that emphasizes mandatory case management and individualized services to stabilize people after they leave the streets.

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Listening back to our conversation, I was struck by how familiar much of the conversation sounded—not to our usual Seattle Nice bickering over whether Seattle NIMBYs treat homelessness as an aesthetic problem (but—last word—they totally do), but to the last 15 years of debate over how to fix homelessness. Over time, the political pendulum has swung back and forth between a focus on new housing for almost everyone (which costs millions and often takes years), housing vouchers for almost everyone (the concept behind the short-lived Partnership for Zero) and shelter for almost everyone (as a “front door” to housing). The pendulum currently rests on shelter, this time with mandatory case management and bespoke services that will, the Wilson administration hopes, be a more successful approach than past shelter efforts.

Wilson will probably propose a local capital gains tax, or some other kind of progressive revenue, to supplement $5 million her team found in two underutilized city funds. (Note/clarification: This post, and my comments on the podcast, were both a bit flip about the funding source. Around $3.3 million comes from two funds in the Office of Housing that were being underutilized. Both are revolving loan funds paid for by Community Development Block Grants.) And she seems likely to propose using unspent Office of Housing funds to pay for shelter, a prospect that could mean less money for permanent housing in the future, money being fungible. But actually solving homelessness—no one talks anymore about ending it, but making it “brief, one-time, and rare”—has eluded every mayor since Ed Murray declared an official state of emergency on homelessness in 2015.

My biggest concern is that Team Wilson will address unsheltered homelessness by getting thousands of people in shelter, and people for whom homelessness is primary an aesthetic problem—we have to clear those tents near my house, it isn’t compassionate to let them live that way!—will oppose efforts to fund housing for all those people in shelter because they consider the problem solved. My modest hope is that she’ll find a way to build all the shelter she wants and create more pathways to permanent housing, because no matter how warm or colorful, a 100-square-foot shelter is not a home.

City Council, homelessness, Mayor Wilson

Wilson Announces First Steps Toward 1,000 Shelter Beds: Simpler Leases, Larger Tiny House Villages, More Money for Shelter

By Erica C. Barnett

Mayor Katie Wilson introduced three pieces of legislation on Wednesday that she says will reduce barriers to tiny house villages—groups of small, freestanding shelters—by reducing bureaucratic obstacles, freeing up money, and removing a cap on the size of tiny house villages that Wilson called out of step with nationwide best practices.

Framed by tiny houses-in-progress at Sound Foundations’ 15,000-square-foot tiny house production facility in SoDo, Wilson said the legislation is just the beginning of a plan to dramatically reduce visible homelessness and get people into shelter as a step toward permanent housing.

“We have twice as many homeless people in Seattle as we have shelter beds, leaving thousands of people with nowhere to go,” Wilson said.  “We also have a responsibility to make sure that everyone can access and enjoy our parks, trails, sidewalks and other public spaces. But we can’t just keep moving people from place to place, and calling that progress. The single most important thing we can do to address our city’s homelessness crisis is to rapidly expand emergency housing.”

Wilson’s first bill would allow the city, through its Department of Finance and Administrative Services, to directly lease and prepare land for tiny house villages and other types of noncongregate shelter. Wilson said the 56-word amendment may seem like “a small and technical change,” but will relieve shelter providers of the obligation to negotiate their own land deals with property owners, prepare sites for opening, and connect new tiny house villages to electricity, water, and other utilities, a process that can push opening dates back months.

The second piece of legislation would significantly increase the cap on the size of individual villages. New villages, currently capped at 100 residents, could have as many as 250, with a limit of one such large shelter per council district (or nine citywide). Additional villages could have no more than 150 residents.

Wilson also announced that her office has identified $4.8 million in unspent city funding to help stand up new shelters, which the third piece of legislation would appropriate. The mayor has pledged to open up 1,000 new shelter beds by the end of her first year, 500 of those before the FIFA World Cup comes to Seattle in June.

Speaking to PubliCola late Wednesday afternoon, Wilson said she’s focusing on shelter because it’s a high-impact strategy that can be implemented quickly—unlike housing, which costs more and takes longer to build.

“Right now, the big thing is just that we need to make an impact fast. We’ve seen the number of unsheltered homeless folks going up and up and up, year after year, and it takes time to build housing,” Wilson said. “To me, the most important number is how many people are sleeping unsheltered in Seattle, and I think we’re going to be adjusting [strategies over time] to make more of an impact.”

Several supporters of Wilson’s plan who spoke on Wednesday sounded notably cool on aspects of “housing first,” the idea that people can’t recover from addiction and other behavioral health challenges until they’re in stable, permanent housing. Conservative politicians and talking heads have made “housing first” a bogeyman for all kinds of supposed giveaways to unworthy lowlifes, but the concept is also a matter of debate among homeless advocate themselves, and the pendulum in Seattle appears to be swinging toward a new kind of shelter-first approach—one where shelter (and mandatory case management) is a prerequisite for housing, at least for people with complex needs.

“Strong shelter programs with robust support services can be a game changer in achieving stable, permanent housing placements,” Fé LopezGaetke, co-executive director of Purpose Dignity Action (PDA), said. “In fact, taking three to six months to stabilize a person significantly improves outcomes for those who go on to permanent housing. Housing providers benefit when tenants come in with a lot more support and when a lot of obstacles to recovery and stabilization have already been tackled.”

This is a dramatic turnabout from the rhetoric of, say, 2020, when anti-shelter sentiment was thick in the air. The thinking at that time was that there is no such thing as a person who isn’t “housing-ready,” and that housing, not shelter, is the best way to stabilize a person with addiction or behavioral health issues that are exacerbated by living on the street. In a city without adequate permanent supportive housing (housing designed specifically for people with disabling conditions), people were getting stuck in the shelter system, and a renewed focus on housing was seen as a more effective way of addressing homelessness.

This focus on housing, rather than shelter, led to approaches like the Partnership for Zero, a pandemic-era public-private partnership that was supposed to rapidly “end” visible homelessness downtown. That program shut down in 2023 after housing 230 people.

At the exact same time, the PDA was launching its JustCARE and CoLEAD programs, which included hotel-based emergency shelter combined with  intensive case management, health care, and housing navigation. This model of shelter, proponents now argue, is more effective at getting people into permanent housing than either those that move people from tents into apartments or older, non-“enhanced” shelter models.

Chief Seattle Club director Derrick Belgarde, who spoke at Wilson’s event, told PubliCola Wednesday afternoon that the people who are most successful in CSC’s permanent supportive housing are the ones who’ve gone through mandatory case management at one of their shelters, which include two tiny house villages, first. “If ‘housing first’ is getting people off the streets, getting people in a safe room with a door, then it’s good, but when we’re talking about permanent housing, we haven’t been fans,” Belgarde said.

People can be kicked out of a CSC shelter for behavior that wouldn’t get them evicted from permanent housing, and as a result, they’re far less likely to start fights, blast music, or engage in other un-neighborly behavior once they move into a housing unit, Belgarde said. “In our shelters, it’s not even about shelter—it’s about a program to build community and get life skills and keep them safe, with a roof over their head.”

Wilson’s office suggested that the city will be ready to sign leases on several properties shortly after her legislation passes, assuming the city council approves it (more on that in a moment.) But they wouldn’t say yet where the properties were, or if they’ll include the very large villages Wilson’s proposal would authorize.

“Obviously, we don’t want to just put 250 people in a huge tent and be like, “OK, here you go!'” Wilson told PubliCola. “It’s going to be based on a case-by-case analysis.”

Belgarde said his organization is unlikely to apply to build much larger tiny house villages than the ones they currently operate. “I’m not opposed to other people trying it. I’m not an expert on anybody else’s community,” Belgarde said. “I know about our own unique trauma, and I know where the a chronically homeless person sits, as far as their acuity level and their needs. A 100-person shelter would be downright dangerous for us. We’re not going to entertain the idea of opening a shelter that large.”

Low Income Housing Instititute director Sharon Lee, who also spoke at Wednesday’s event, said if LIHI was to build a very large tiny house village, they would divide it into separate “neighborhoods” to prevent it from feeling dangerously large. Currently, LIHI’s biggest tiny house village has 73 units.

One group the discussion about enhanced shelter leaves out is people who don’t need intensive case management—those who are homeless due to economic circumstances like job loss and evictions for unpaid rent. During the campaign, Wilson proposed providing rent subsidies to some of these “low-acuity” homeless folks to move into tax-credit-subsidized housing units that are currently sitting vacant because there’s a glut of subsidized studio and one-bedroom units that cost about as much as market-rate apartments.

“You won’t be surprised to hear that we are going to be looking at ways to move low-acuity folks into some of the vacant units in our affordable housing sector with some kind of rent subsidy,” Wilson told PubliCola. “That will be a strategy that will take people who are hanging out in the shelter system, putting them into a housing situation, and hopefully freeing up some space in shelter that is set up to deal with higher-acuity folks.”

“Among the homeless population, there are a number of people who just can’t pay the rent—the working homeless person, the person who finally got into recovery and now is employed,” Lee said. “They can live in regular workforce housing. I think it’s a valid model, and it’s a lot cheaper to do it that way than to subsidize vacant units.”

Belgarde, echoing comments LopezGaetke made during the announcement at Sound Foundations, said his main concern about the new push for shelters is that shelter becomes a path to housing, rather than a final stop. “If there’s any worry, it’s a worry that it’s not the solution,” he said. We don’t want people to see there’s not any more tents on the sidewalk and think we’ve solved it, because you haven’t solved it if people are just sitting in a tiny house village.”

Wilson still has to get her legislation through the council. In a break from longstanding practice at City Hall, Wilson did not secure a City Council sponsor for her proposals, discuss the wording or sequencing of her legislation, or ensure that the legislation would get a committee hearing before announcing her legislation publicly. (She also left her own press conference shortly after she spoke without answering questions, prompting audible grumbling from reporters.)

This approach has raised some eyebrows in council offices. Ordinarily, the mayor and allies on the council work behind the scenes to draft legislation and secure support from council members before doing a public rollout; instead, the council has been left wondering who, exactly, is supposed to back Wilson’s bill and even which committee it’s supposed to go through.

“Now that the three bills have been transmitted to council, we need to determine which Councilmembers will sponsor each bill, whether they should move together or through separate committees, and which committee or committees are the right fit,” Council President Joy Hollingsworth told PubliCola Thursday. “We also need time for central staff analysis regarding the legislation and for the executive to answer initial questions as well. We will also invite and offer the executive an opportunity to come to a council briefing to discuss their legislation. Our goal as a body is to run a transparent and open legislative process.”

homelessness

Homelessness Authority Rescinds Tiny House Village Grant, Gives Money to Salvation Army Instead
LIHI Director Sharon Lee speaks at the opening of Rosie's Tiny House Village in the University District
LIHI Director Sharon Lee speaks at the opening of Rosie’s Tiny House Village in the University District

By Erica C. Barnett

The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has rescinded a $3 million grant it gave the Low Income Housing Institute to build 60 new low-barrier tiny houses outside King County’s youth detention center, claiming LIHI delayed the process by failing to secure a site in time.

Tiny houses are small, freestanding, heated structures that provide shelter for one or two people. Unsheltered people often prefer tiny houses to other kinds of shelter because they provide privacy and a door that locks.

The money will now go to the Salvation Army, which will use it to convert some of the existing transitional housing beds at its William Booth Center in SoDo into non-congregate emergency shelter beds, according to KCRHA. While the converted rooms are technically “new” shelter beds, they aren’t really additive, since the people living in the existing transitional housing will either have to leave or see their housing downgraded to emergency shelter.

“Without this funding, we may have had to close beds,” Salvation Army spokeswoman Sara Beksinski said.

KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said the agency “chose to prioritize speed of implementation in the competition for these funds,” KCRHA spokeswoman Lisa Edge said. “Because LIHI could not perform in the period clearly outlined for the second location, we proceeded with an award to the next highest rated applicant, the Salvation Army.”

The Salvation Army’s original application was for $1.1 million; we have a call out to find out if this is how much the KCRHA awarded them and, if so, what will happen to the rest of the funds.

The $3 million more than half the funding—nearly $6 million—LIHI worked to secure for tiny house villages in the Seattle’s 2025 budget. The other half is funding a new tiny house village in North Seattle called Olympic Hills, which opened last month. The second shelter was a joint project between LIHI and Purpose Dignity Action’s CoLEAD program, which provides temporary lodging and intensive case management to people with physical and behavioral health needs; now, CoLEAD will relocate its operation to the North Seattle village.

In late January, LIHI appealed KCRHA’s decision, pointing to the agency’s own delays in approving contracts that were funded back in 2024, and says they were blindsided by the agency’s decision to take back the funds less than three months after they sent LIHI a letter signing off on the county-owned site.

“We should ask why the KCRHA’s [Request for Proposals] process took so long, given the homelessness crisis,” LIHI director Sharon Lee wrote in her appeal. Although the city council approved the funding in late 2024, the city didn’t announce the awards until the following July. “We believe it is KCRHA, not LIHI, that delayed the overall timeline in creating two new villages.”

Lee acknowledged that LIHI experienced hiccups securing a location for the second shelter, but said King County Executive Girmay Zahilay had made it clear that securing the King County site was a high priority for his new administration. As backup, Lee said, LIHI also secured an agreement with Mount Baker Housing for a second site—the old Thunderbird Treatment Center in Rainier Beach, which the housing nonprofit plans to redevelop in about three years.

“We were excited to have the county commit to finally doing something” with tiny houses, Lee said.

The KCRHA didn’t let Zahilay know they were rescinding LIHI’s funding for the planned tiny house village at the county site,  his office confirmed.

“Our office was not aware that KCRHA was going to rescind funding and award it to another provider, and we expressed disappointment that they did not update or coordinate with our administration before making this decision,” Zahilay spokeswoman Callie Craighead said.

Zahilay is currently “having initial conversations with stakeholders about the potential to site a tiny home village at the juvenile justice center property,” Craighead said. “Before a tiny home village is sited, we would need to engage with staff at the facility, see robust neighborhood outreach plans and timelines, and understand how services would be prioritized for those in need in the immediate area.”

The city’s budget didn’t explicitly grant the $6 million to LIHI, because all large contracts must go through a standard bidding process. But it was LIHI that secured the funding, working with City Councilmember Bob Kettle to add the money in 2024, with the understanding that it would fund tiny house villages or some other form of new noncongregate shelter.

In a letter rescinding KCRHA’s funds, KCRHA’s deputy director, Jeff Simms, blamed LIHI for the delays, saying the homelessness authority had already granted one extension to give LIHI more time to nail down a location and that this violated the KCRHA’s “preference for applications that had a site located and prepared for operation.”

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But LIHI said the timeline was significantly more complex than the KCRHA was letting on, and pointed to another email from Simms, in October, saying that  “LIHI has met the requirements of the [request for proposals] to have located a site for operation of a second non-congregate shelter” at the juvenile detention center or the former treatment center.

That letter did note that KCRHA might “take steps” to reallocate the money to another agency if LIHI didn’t secure a site by December. Lee says LIHI signed a letter of intent with Mount Baker Housing to lease their Rainier Beach site and sent a copy to KCRHA in mid-December, but never heard anything back until the agency rescinded their funding in January. “For a whole month, there was silence, until they yanked the contract,” Lee said.

KCRHA CEO Kelly Kinnison rejected LIHI’s appeal earlier this month, and LIHI’s efforts to get city officials to intervene have been unsuccessful so far. Kettle, who got the money into the city budget back in 2024, told PubliCola, “We understand LIHI’s frustrations but also KCHRA’s need to press forward. We will work with both to move ahead on other important projects in [Council District 7] or that have important public safety impacts.”

A spokesman for Mayor Katie Wilson’s office, Sage Wilson, told PubliCola, “We’re not going to comment on the details of a dispute between LIHI and KCRHA. However this situation does underscore the importance of accelerating the development of emergency shelter, which is why the mayor has already issued an executive order doing just that.”

LIHI and KCRHA have long had a tense relationship, going back to the time of founding CEO Marc Dones, who frequently clashed with Lee over funding for her projects. Lee said she isn’t done fighting over the rescission, and she’s talking to KCRHA’s governing board about what she considers overreach by Kinnison and Simms.

Meanwhile, she said, “We are going to continue to develop tiny house villages, because we know that the mayor is very supportive and we think there are going to be other opportunities for us.” LIHI just opened a new tiny house village in Tukwila and is working to site a new RV safe lot, with tiny houses, in West Seattle.

homelessness

Tiny House Village in Southeast Seattle Remains Stalled as Winter Approaches
The vacant, overgrown lot on Rainier Ave. S that could be a tiny house village instead

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.”