Written by by Danny Westneat at seattletimes.com
It was probably inevitable that the homelessness crisis would find its way back to the Hope Factory.
It’s known around Sodo and the Duwamish industrial district as the place where they make the tiny homes. More than 500 of them all told, hammered together by volunteers and sent out into the region as colorful, 100-square-foot missionaries, to “get people up off the ground.”
This past week though, homelessness came in. A woman living on the Sodo streets snuck into the factory’s back storage lot, where they keep a “show home,” complete with a made bed. She locked herself in and wouldn’t answer the door.
“I didn’t know what to do,” said Barb Oliver, who runs the factory for Sound Foundations NW. “Here I’m making shelter for the homeless, I’ve got a couple hundred idle, unused homes sitting in storage. And now people are breaking in to get a night’s sleep.”
It’s an absurd situation, if you stop to think about it — which nobody is.
The number of never-used tiny homes sitting in three storage lots in Sodo now tops 250. As I wrote nearly two years ago, when there were 71 in storage, some are “so fresh they still have that new-house smell.”
They’re lined up in rows next to the BNSF rail corridor, waiting to be put into service by a city, or a church, or anybody who needs stopgap emergency shelter to help get people off the streets.
Why haven’t they been? No one has a straight answer to that.
Some say it’s bureaucratic feuding, or clashing “fiefdoms.” Others say the 9-by-12-foot shelters aren’t dignified enough; they’re “shacks” in “shantytowns.” Or bare land is too hard to find, or money’s too scarce, or community support is too weak.
I’ve been told that the problem with tiny homes is that people like them too much. They stay in them too long, so the little huts aren’t as “efficient” as other types of emergency shelters which have higher turnover.
One social services official told me once he opposes them because he fears they’re not temporary — that Seattle over time will conclude they’re “good enough” to serve as permanent housing for a stuck underclass. They’ll be forever Hoovervilles.