Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson announced that she is going to add 1,000 shelter beds to lessen the city’s homelessness crisis, but details on how that will all be executed and paid for are scant.
Wilson says she wants to lean heavily on tiny home villages, introducing legislation to ease the permitting for those sites, reduce restrictions around their size, and encourage Seattleites to volunteer at one of the places that make the homes.
“For many years, and through multiple mayoral administrations, we have not treated this crisis with the urgency that it demands,” Wilson said.
Wilson is forwarding three pieces of legislation in an effort to move more quickly.
The first would allow the City to enter leases more easily. Another bill would allocate $4.5 million of Department of Human Services funding that Wilson says is unspent, though her staff said it’s not enough to cover the entire plan.
The last piece increases the size of tiny home villages from 100 people to 150 and states each city council district can house up to one shelter with a 250-person capacity.
The announcement was held at the Low Income Housing Institute, which currently does not operate a village with more than 74 people.
“Even the most successful shelters that do the best work and have the best relationships in their communities are currently limited to serve just 100 people. This is a very low limit, which is out of step with national best practices and what cities like LA, Tampa, and Austin are doing now. And it just doesn’t make sense when we have so many people sleeping outside with nowhere to go.” Wilson said of the current cap.
A man who only wanted to be identified as Warren, said that there are two tiny home villages with a combined population of 57 people down the street from him in the Central District.
He and several other people living near the villages say they would support the expansion.
“I think anything we can do to help the housing problem, it’s kind of out of control for people,” Warren said.
Warren said he hadn’t heard or seen any issues related to the camp.
“I think that they have to make sure that it is a safe area and that they do have guidelines put forth that people that life there are safe, as well as the surrounding area,” Warren said.
That legislation would also exempt the projects from environmental reviews. The City’s emergency declaration would also remove a requirement for a public hearing before City Council adopts the measure, saying the homelessness emergency “justifies the adoption of the ordinance without a pre-adoption public hearing.”
Mayor Wilson left the announcement before the speakers had finished and before taking any questions. KIRO 7 had hoped to ask Wilson questions about outstanding details, like what throughput/housing placement goals are, what defines a successful shelter that would qualify it for expansion, what new sites are being explored, what outreach has been done in potential areas, and what the final cost is today.
Despite follow-ups, the mayor’s staff still could not answer those questions, though they did say tiny home villages are not the only shelter that will be added.
RV sites, micro-shelters, and leasing buildings are also being considered.
“You put yourself out there as the leader and CEO of our city to be able to answer questions on the fly and prove to the public, build trust, that you do know what you’re doing.” Andrea Suarez, the founder and director of We Heart Seattle, an organization working to move people out of homelessness by getting them into addiction treatment first.
Suarez has worked with people at the Ballard encampment Wilson visited earlier and disputes the Mayor’s claims that their homelessness was solved.
Another encampment has grown a block or so away, and Suarez says the woman whom the Mayor celebrated is living back in it because the tiny home village didn’t work for her.
“What I heard today was from the old guard, which has been in place for decades during this emergency and the emergency has gotten worse,” Suarez said.