Jul. 17—A 30-unit tiny home village for homeless people transitioning out of emergency shelters likely will be built in the West Hills neighborhood on a Sunset Boulevard property owned by the Waters Meet Foundation — formerly known as the Empire Health Foundation, according to President Zeke Smith.
While the shelters already have been purchased with funds from a state Department of Commerce grant, they haven’t arrived yet, and it’s not immediately clear what organization will operate the transitional housing project, nor how operations will be funded. Smith said he assumed Spokane’s elected leaders will see it as a worthy investment.
He believes the tiny homes will provide a stable place for people to live relatively independently for upwards of six months as they prepare to transition out of shelters and into permanent housing, providing capacity for a midway step on the path out of homelessness.
He also anticipates the move will be controversial.
Many in the neighborhood felt blindsided and concerned in 2022 when they discovered Catholic Charities Eastern Washington would be converting a former hotel on Sunset Boulevard into an 84-unit professionally staffed shelter, learning about it only after the plan was underway and fearing it would bring the crime and disorder that many believed had characterized the Camp Hope homeless encampment.
A year after the facility opened, most of those fears appeared to be waylaid, with no significant rise in crime accompanying what became known as the Catalyst Project and many former skeptics telling The Spokesman-Review that the facility had been either a neutral or net positive addition to the community. A small but vocal minority, however, continue to argue the facility has scared off development and warn others to “stay vigilant” so they’re not “ambushed” by another shelter.
Some of the pushback to the Catalyst Project was rooted in a belief the city and the nonprofit colluded to keep the project quiet until it was off the ground. Catholic Charities Eastern Washington CEO Robb McCann has previously said silence was a requirement of the sales agreement with the hotel owner, who wanted to avoid disruption to staff and hotel operations if word leaked.
The Waters Meet Foundation has courted its own accusations of secrecy. The organization was the key partner in selecting locations for Mayor Lisa Brown’s transition from large congregant homeless shelters to smaller “scatter site” shelters, and has faced blowback at times for a perceived lack of outreach with neighborhoods before launching those new shelters.
“Public outreach on shelters, new sites to house homeless folks, is complicated … neighbors who don’t have any sense of what is really going to happen get up in arms and start to organize against it,” Smith said in January, following the launch of a shelter for the medically fragile near downtown. “We didn’t want that to happen.”
But now, with plans already underway to launch the tiny home village later this year, Smith says he wants to better and more proactively communicate with neighbors to assuage their concerns.
“We’re approaching this differently,” Smith said. “Partly because of city requirements, partly because we’re the landowner, and partly because I’m hoping there’s an opportunity for a productive conversation with neighbors.”
“But we’re also taking a risk,” he added. “There’s enough pieces that we don’t have clarity on yet, and until we can be clear about those, I suspect it’s going to leave open space for people’s fears. But we’re trusting there’s an opportunity to engage folks up front, address any real concerns and help land this community in that neighborhood in a productive way.”
In addition to whatever outreach Waters Meet does in the coming days, the service provider that ends up managing the space likely will be required to come to a “good neighbor” agreement with the city and the West Hills Neighborhood Council. The Spokane City Council approved a law in June requiring these agreements, meant to be a guarantee that the neighborhood won’t be negatively affected if the city is funding the shelter. Critics say that consequences for violating the agreements are not guaranteed and depend on the terms that are negotiated.
It remains to be seen how the neighborhood will respond to yet another homeless shelter being placed within its borders. Notably, the tiny home village will be located not far from a billboard that sprang up when the Catalyst Project was launched, which read: “Reclaim West Hills: The next Kendall Yards or the next Camp Hope?”
Robert Thompson, chair of the West Hills Neighborhood Council, said that while some of the community’s concerns about prior shelters have been assuaged, there remains a perception the city is doing little to invest in the neighborhood but quickly turns to placing new shelters in the West Hills.
“The neighborhood is feeling underinvested in and feeling like some problems are being pushed out of downtown into our neighborhood and that there are opportunities slipping away because of some of the use of these spaces,” Thompson said.
In addition to the existing Catholic Charities Catalyst Project, Thompson noted that Catholic Charities is also planning to break ground on a permanent supportive housing project dubbed the St. Agnes Family Haven just a block away in August, another at the northern tip of the neighborhood, and has discussed plans to build its own tiny home village in the neighborhood.
“Again, Catalyst is not nearly as big of an issue as people had feared,” Thompson said. “St. Agnus, they’ve also tried to be very transparent about what they’re hoping to do with that property. But folks still have that image of Second and Division…it only takes one negative thing to stick with folks.”
Smith is eyeing the city’s portion of settlements between the state of Washington and opioid distributors and the pharmacies that sold the addictive pills. On Monday, the Spokane City Council approved appropriating $400,000 of those funds for “outdoor outreach and navigation” homeless services, which Smith believes the tiny home village could qualify for.
While many details still need to be hammered out, Smith said that each of the 30 tiny homes will have heating and air conditioning. There also will be plumbed bathrooms — the lack of which had plagued the former Trent Avenue shelter — and at least two community buildings.
Whichever service provider operates the project would not have to lease the land from Waters Meet, Smith said, which he anticipated would lower costs.
In a Wednesday press release, Brown said the project fills “a real need.”
“The funds behind this project were set to be returned to the state, but through innovative partnership, we are keeping them here in Spokane so they can make a direct impact for people who need support most,” Brown said in the statement.