Thinking small

OLYMPIA — Everybody knows there’s a housing shortage, especially for very low-income people and solutions are hard to come by. State Sen. Jeff Wilson, R-Longview, thinks he may have the start of one, however.

“A hundred years ago, people bought houses from the Sears catalog – they came in a boxcar, you found a local crew to build them or you did it yourself,” Wilson wrote in a press release announcing the introduction of Senate Bill 5657. “We see prewar kit bungalows standing proudly today in every community of the state. As prices of starter homes skyrocket, we ought to take another look at kit homes as a solution for today.”

A kit home, Wilson explained to the Herald, is purchased as a complete package of materials – lumber, fixtures, the whole works – delivered to the home site and assembled there by either the homeowner or a contractor. SB 5657 would ease permitting and zoning restrictions on kit homes in Washington, specifically for residences under 800 square feet, like the structures sometimes referred to as accessory dwelling units or mother-in-law cottages. Currently, there aren’t very many dealers in Washington for really small, inexpensive kit homes, but Wilson pointed out that the legislation could smooth the way for another advance in affordable housing – transitional shelter for the unhoused, who sometimes aren’t ready to make the move to a home of their own.

“If you've been living on the streets for six years, in a community of people all who were suffering the same thing as you and you feel supported and cared for," said Katya Hill, spokesperson for Everett-based Pallet Shelter, "you feel very unsafe that first night in your new apartment, where it's quiet, where there's no one to talk to."

That discomfort can be alleviated by transitional housing options such as kit homes, she said. The pallet homes can provide a place to store property and be safe while remaining connected with friends in the community with whom the new resident has a connection.

Hill was quick to stress that Pallet Shelter never refers to its structures as “homes,” because they’re not meant to be permanent residences. Rather, she said, they provide a safe, clean, quiet place for a person to call their own while they’re dealing with the other issues that drive homelessness. Currently, there are nine sites in Washington where Pallet Shelter has put up communities, Hill said, all of them on the west side of the state. The largest, according to Pallet Shelter’s website, is in Tacoma, where the company put up 58 shelters in partnership with Catholic Community Services. One 60-unit community was built in 10 days in Sonoma County, California, where the median home price is more than twice that of Grant County. The ideal space, Hill said, for 25 shelters is a quarter-acre, and an individual 64-square-foot unit starts at about $7,500.

“Our product in itself is rapidly deployable,” Hill said. “It comes on a pallet, hence the name. We can build a shelter village in a day, as long as the services are there such as access to sewage, access to electricity. Each of the shelters comes with storage, it comes with a (carbon monoxide) alarm, smoke alarm; it comes with a bed with a mattress. It comes with heating or air conditioning depending on where you are. It comes with a lockable door.”

Unlike traditional shelters that house people in a communal space, Hill added, a pallet home village allows residents to keep their pets with them and store their possessions safely. Cooking and bathroom facilities are shared, Hill explained, so the individual units don’t need plumbing, which would slow down the building process considerably.

“We need homes yesterday,” Wilson said. “And this is probably one of the fastest ways out of the gate to say the home is in the mail, the home is on its way. And it's very quick. This is one way to put water on the housing crisis fire.”

Joel Martin may be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com.

Editor's note: The original version of this story misstated Wilson's party affiliation. It has been corrected above.