Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson unveiled a new 75-unit tiny house shelter in Interbay over the weekend. It’s the first opening in the mayor’s ambitious program to open 4,000 shelter beds by the end of her term. But the new shelter still fell well short of her first goal: building 500 new units before the World Cup comes to Seattle.
Bayside Shelter cost $3.95 million in city funds and is made up of rows of 70-square-foot pre-fabricated tiny homes on a triangular plot bordering a Whole Foods and self-storage facilities on 15th Avenue West. The site has easy access to the D and 32 bus lines, laundry facilities, shared showers and toilets, a community room with a kitchen, and 24-hour staffing.
Residents will also receive wraparound services, housing navigation, and on-site treatment for mental health and substance use disorders. The shelter will be operated by the brand new nonprofit Everyone Deserves Housing (EDH), which was founded earlier this year by two veterans of Catholic Community Services and is fiscally sponsored by Immanuel Community Services.
Dan Wise, co-executive director of EDH and a lecturer at UW’s School of Social Work, said she expects Bayside Shelter to welcome its first 50 residents this month, and another 25 in July. Wise framed Bayside as low-barrier but high in support, catering to homeless people who have more complex needs. The goal is to keep people who tend to get kicked out of shelters off the streets.
“If folks are struggling to maybe get along with other folks that are staying here in shelter, we have a care review process … we try to keep people engaged in care and services,” Wise said.
In addition to Bayside Shelter, Seattle will open a new 90-unit Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) Cloverleaf Village shelter and expedite three other projects. Over the summer the city expects to open 165 brand new units and 138 units of shelter that were already in the pipeline when Wilson took office, for a total of 303 units. One of those projects opening this June is Nickelsville’s 14-unit Brighton Village, which was infamously canceled by Bruce Harrell’s administration after neighbors complained.
Even with a generous interpretation that extends the timeline through the summer, the city is on track to miss its target by about 200 units.
At the press conference, Mayor Wilson admitted her failure to reach her self-imposed shelter goal. But she argued that having ambitious targets and failing is still better than making no progress at all, a not-so-subtle dig at Harrell.
“Obviously, we’re not going to be meeting 500 units in the first half of this year, but we are going to be opening hundreds of units in the coming months,” Wilson said. “Now, in the last four years, before I stepped into office, the city opened a net addition of 13 units of shelter. So I could have come into office and said, ‘Well, my goal is 13 units of shelter,’ and we could have been standing here today celebrating the fact that we blew past that goal by more than five times. ‘Let’s all go home, we’re done.’”
It’s not the first time Seattle mayors have set lofty shelter targets but failed to deliver on them. In 2022, Harrell set a target of securing 2,000 new affordable homes and shelter. Later reporting revealed only a small fraction of those promised units materialized.
There is some indication Wilson is making strides in reducing barriers to shelter production. Earlier this year, her office backed legislation passed by City Council that made it easier for the city to lease properties for homeless shelters and expand the capacity of existing ones.
Although Bayside wasn’t opened in time for Wilson’s World Cup target, some speakers noted how remarkable it was for a city famous for its “Seattle process” to develop the shelter, from conception to opening, in just five months. Amy King, CEO of the company Pallet, which built and installed the property’s tiny houses, said it was one of quickest timelines she’s worked on—just two months from signing a lease to receiving a permit to finishing construction.
“I have never received permits that fast ever,” King added. “I’m not sure anyone has.”
In March, Wilson’s office set aside $17.5 million for the shelter acceleration program, cobbled together from different sources such as underspent federal grants, unused downtown development fees, and funds already allocated to homeless shelters that hadn’t been used. That money went into developing Bayside Shelter and maintaining it, which will cost approximately $3 million a year.
At about $17,000 a unit, Pallet shelters used at Bayside are about triple the cost of wooden stick-framed shelters used by other tiny house villages such as those managed by LIHI.
King explained that there were a number of factors contributing to this difference in prices, including the material costs of building with fiberglass panels instead of wood, the inclusion of mini split air conditioners and the use of paid labor instead of volunteers. She also claimed that Pallet shelters are able to last for 20 years. All the units come fully furnished and will provide amenities such as multiple double-paned windows, a keypad door lock, and wifi.
By making shelter development policy such a key plank of her mayoral administration, Wilson is taking a gamble. Applying a quantitatively measurable target to the politically-thorny issue of homelessness is not necessarily a vote-winner. But Wilson believes it is worth defining her mayoralty over it.
“As long as there are thousands of people sleeping unsheltered on our streets, yes, we are failing,” Wilson said. “We are failing collectively. We are failing in Seattle, we are failing in King County. We are failing across the private sector to meet the urgency of the need. So, we need to talk in big numbers like that, because we need to talk about the urgency of that need, and we need to keep reaching for it—and that is what we are doing.”
There will be a number of challenges to achieving Wilson’s shelter bed target, especially money. In April, the city forecasted an $18 million decrease in tax revenue in 2026 compared with estimates in October 2025. Negotiating a budget with the city council to include more shelter funding will take nimble diplomacy, especially due to a tense relationship between the executive and legislative branches which culminated with now-fired mayor’s officers staffers overstepping and telling council members what to do on the shelter legislation. There is also the matter of fixing the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, a mess that no one wants to touch but has to be dealt with.
One area where Wilson could find more money for shelter is undoing another of Harrell’s legacies: the Unified Care Team (UCT). The $33 million interdepartmental agency is responsible for thousands of homeless encampment sweeps every year and was one of the most prominent policies of his administration. Last fall, a proviso sponsored by Seattle City Councilmember Rob Saka barred the city from moving $30 million allocated for the UCT to other purposes.
In response to questions from The Stranger, Wilson hinted she would be engaging with councilmembers on diverting funds from UCT to her shelter acceleration program.
“The idea behind opening shelters like this is this allows us to begin navigating people into shelter instead of just moving people around,” Wilson said. “And so we are going to need to have a conversation with our city council in the context of the upcoming budget process to figure out what is the best way moving forward to allocate funding to the Unified Care Team and make sure that we have enough for continuing the shelter expansion.”
