SEATTLE — With 60 days to go before the World Cup arrives in Seattle, there are still more questions than answers about Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to bring 500 new shelter units online, in what is seen as a first test of her goal to rapidly increase shelter throughout her term.

The Seattle City Council is set to sign off on new laws to speed up construction.

Shelter providers and city workers are surveying suitable locations.

Wilson announced the first 75.

But with 425 to go, city staff gauging her timeline as “unrealistic” and funding still short of the need, Wilson’s staff acknowledges her self-imposed deadline of June 15 is a stretch.

If she clears it, building the first 500 will only be the beginning in many ways. She will have to continue building thousands more to fulfill her ultimate aim of 4,000 by the end of her term, and she hasn’t yet had to contend with public response to a final cost estimate and where they will be located.

City council members and homelessness advocates are pushing for a version of shelter that’s more expensive, saying the city’s homeless population also needs intensive services attached to shelter to overcome mental health and substance use issues and prevent problems from spilling into surrounding neighborhoods. But the mayor’s staff acknowledged that can cost upward of $45,000 per unit. In a year of local budget cuts and continued threats to federal funding, it’s unclear how the city will pay for that.

Mayor Wilson has pledged to find a way, saying she knows shelter with adequate support is needed.

“We are very cognizant of that and committed to doing this right,” Wilson said. “And that means that we will find the resources that are necessary to do it right.”

Her team, advocates and council members agree: a lot is riding on these early examples.

The hunt for land

Wilson campaigned on the pledge of treating homelessness as an emergency, saying she would create 4,000 units of shelter during her term. Once she was in office, she said she would start strong by delivering 500 by the start of World Cup matches.

The hunt for land started early — reviewing available city-owned properties and hiring a broker to find privately owned sites. According to staff, they have reviewed 70 to 80 so far.

They have winnowed those down to fewer than 10 with willing landlords, buildable land, water and electrical hookups and a geographic location that made sense, mayor’s staff said. They have not said where the city is in the leasing process, where those properties are or what kind of shelter units they could include.

The only site announced is on privately owned land in Interbay along 15th Avenue and will have 75 “micro shelters”, which are similar to tiny homes but smaller, made of composite panels rather than wood and designed by the Everett-based company Pallet. The city has not shared how much the project will cost.

The micro shelters are set to be aimed at people who need more support than just a place to get out of the elements, with 15% of units accessible to people with disabilities.

They are also aimed at skeptical council members. Councilmember Dan Strauss, who chairs the city’s finance committee in charge of the budget, said he wants Wilson to succeed. He said the council wants to see shelter projects with intensive services that will make a visible difference in homelessness. Much of Seattle’s shelter is geared more toward people who need more basic services, such as navigating housing waitlists, getting ID cards or paying down fees and fines.

Seattle’s homeless population needs more than their basic needs met, said Strauss.

“If they have a plan of 1,000 tiny homes, I don’t think that council is going to support that,” he said. “If they plan for the higher acuity beds that wheelchairs can get into that’s more expensive, that’s what we’re looking for.”

High cost

But therein lies the greatest challenge to creating these projects, mayor’s office staff said.

They initially estimated each of the first 500 units would cost an average of $28,000 per year. But later acknowledged that higher support shelters could cost much more. An intensive program, for example, could cost close to $45,000 per unit per year.

That would exceed the typical cost per unit that King County has seen so far by between $10,000 and $20,000, according to the homelessness authority’s estimate of typical shelter costs.

The mayor has identified $17.5 million from different corners of the budget, including a chunk of unspent city funding in the control of the Regional Homelessness Authority. But even that wouldn’t cover 500 units if each had an annual price tag of $45,000.

A memo from city council analysts pointed out the mayor’s plan also didn’t explain how they would continue funding the shelter sites beyond this first year.

Wilson has said her team is working toward philanthropic support to fill in gaps.

In a community briefing last week, she announced a partnership with corporate leaders at Challenge Seattle – specifically mentioning Microsoft, Mariners majority owners John Stanton and Terry Gillespie, T-Mobile and Starbucks – but her team has not provided any further details.

In last week’s briefing, Wilson said they are weighing federal funding uncertainty in conjunction with their shelter plans.

Wilson’s hope is this first investment can serve as a proof of concept and therefore leverage during this fall’s budget deliberations.

Like much of the public, the City Council hasn’t seen a concrete plan for standing up 1,000 beds this year, said Council President Joy Hollingsworth. But the council Tuesday is expected to pass two bills anyway, as members insist on having a role in planning and implementation.

One allows the city to directly sign leases for host sites, bypassing a process previously handled by the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. Another allocates more than $8 million toward shelter construction. A third bill, still in committee, would increase the maximum capacity of shelters from 100 people to 150 and allow one site up to 250 people in each council district.

Those are higher density homeless shelters than exist in most parts of the city.

All shelter projects will have to come up with a good neighbor agreement and go through a community engagement process before they open but the mayor made it clear in last week’s briefing the whole city will have to play a role. But she has not said how the shelters will be geographically dispersed.

The new site in Interbay, which is a short distance from an existing tiny home village as well as a building with on-site services for people coming out of homelessness, may be rare in that it has few residential or industrial neighbors.

Other sites likely won’t be so isolated.

Council members and advocates hope that shelter units with more hands-on programs will lead to fewer spillover effects in the neighborhoods surrounding them.

It could also be the key to getting people to agree to go inside once they are built.

'Number one issue'

Wilson and her administration have identified her shelter promise as her office’s top priority and view the rest of her agenda as flowing from there.

Sharon Lee, CEO of the Low Income Housing Institute, which operates more than 500 tiny homes across Seattle, recounted a recent visit to a potential site with the mayor’s staff, in which all city departments were in attendance – water, sewer and electricity – a level of coordination that was previously unheard of.

“In all my years of doing affordable housing or even tiny house villages, I've never seen this,” Lee said.

The expansion effort is a test of more than speed, though. If done well, providers said the mayor’s plan can demonstrate what it takes to reach people who’ve been left out of the shelter system in the past.

Chloe Gale, vice president of policy and strategy at Evergreen Treatment Services, said workers with its outreach program REACH have already done the groundwork, coordinating with the city to build relationships with people in encampments and getting to know their needs and histories.

She said what most need now is an offer of shelter that matches their situation.

“I would say most of the people we encounter have had some experience with the shelter system and it's not been a good fit,” Gale said.

At recent City Council Committee meetings weighing the mayor’s plans, providers and advocates emphasized the opportunity before the city – while also cautioning against potential mistakes.

Lisa Daugaard, co-director of Purpose Dignity Action, highlighted the city of Portland, whose mayor led a similar rush to build 1,200 shelter units over the course of a year. The mayor succeeded in building the units but 80% of people outside declined them, a report showed.

Daugaard told the council she believes that’s because the entry to access wasn’t low enough and the help wasn’t great enough once inside.

“People have choices about whether to work with any particular program. We have to ensure that most people can and will say yes,” she said in a statement after the meeting.

In Seattle, standing up large amounts of new shelter has been promised before.

Former Councilmember Sally Bagshaw was the first to call for 1,000 new units in 2016. Most recently, Former Mayor Bruce Harrell promised 2,000 new units only to downgrade the pledge to “identifying” 2,000 units once in office.

The results have never quite followed the pledges.

“I have a hard time imagining we're going to get a lot of the rest of our agenda done if we can't demonstrate momentum on the number one issue to most of the people living in Seattle,” Kate Brunette Kreuzer, Wilson’s chief of staff, said.

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