Thirty-one tiny homes for people who are homeless are set to open on Capitol Hill this week. The shelter, sandwiched between apartment buildings along Belmont Avenue near East Olive Way, will be the neighborhood’s first tiny home village.
According to the Low Income Housing Institute, which will operate the shelter, Belmont Village will have a case manager helping people get jobs, apply for benefits and sort out their identification. The nonprofit is also promising an on-site specialist to refer people to mental health services and addiction treatment.
The new Capitol Hill tiny home village is a replacement for a shelter the Low Income Housing Institute closed in North Seattle to make way for senior housing and is not part of Mayor Katie Wilson’s goal of adding 1,000 shelter beds by the end of the year. It could also be temporary because the land for Belmont Village belongs to the Downtown Emergency Service Center, which had planned to build long-term housing with services for people coming out of homelessness. The nonprofit had to delay those plans after the Trump administration announced its intentions to limit federal funding for that type of housing, according to its website.
Wilson’s team has announced plans for another Low Income Housing Institute shelter, including 100 tiny homes, to open in South Park this year.
Before that, Wilson greenlit a new shelter in Interbay with roughly 75 small units from the Everett-based company Pallet. While similar to tiny homes, Pallet shelter units are made up of composite panels and more closely resemble disaster-response housing. Bayside Enhanced Shelter has been accepting people since early June.
Seattle now has about 700 tiny homes or Pallet shelter units in villages across the city in neighborhoods including the Central District, Ballard, Lake City and Rainier Beach.