A Roof in the Rain
...113 days to go...
Last week I attended the grand opening of a new Tiny Home Village in Tukwila, and the weather couldn’t have been more fitting. It was pouring. Not a light Seattle drizzle, but the kind of rain that soaks through your coat in ten minutes and makes you wonder if you parked too far from wherever you’re going.
For those of us there to celebrate, it was a minor inconvenience. For the people who will actually live there, it was the whole point.
I’ve been building tiny homes with Sound Foundations NW for a few months now, showing up on weekends to frame walls, insulate, paint, and generally make myself useful in ways that don’t always require actual carpentry skills. But I’d never seen the finished product — a real village, up and running, with people about to move in. The Tukwila opening gave me that chance, and I’m glad I finally went.
The village has 40 brand-new tiny homes. Each one has a bed, a dresser, a heater, an air conditioner, a window, and a door that locks. There’s power, an outlet to charge your phone, and an electric light. The village is fully secure, with a guard shack and a fence running its perimeter. There’s a shared kitchen with refrigerated storage, and restrooms and showers.
Three additional tiny homes serve as offices — one for the village administrator (run by the Low Income Housing Institute), and two for case managers whom residents are required to meet with periodically as a condition of living there.
It’s not luxury. But standing in the rain, watching the water run off those roofs, it was hard to argue with what this place offers: everything you need to get back up on your feet.
This village accepts single residents as well as couples, families, and people with pets. That’s relatively relaxed compared to most shelters and many other tiny home villages, which often impose restrictions that make them inaccessible to people with complicated living situations. A rule that sounds minor on paper — “pets allowed” — can be the difference between someone accepting help and sleeping outside with their dog instead.
The land is provided by Church by the Side of the Road, a humbly named ministry whose senior pastor I had the chance to speak with. He described their role as “keeping an eye on the village” — not intrusive oversight, but the kind of quiet stewardship that makes a place feel like a community rather than a facility.
The Tiny Home Solution - a Big Puzzle Piece?
I’ll be honest: when I first heard about Sound Foundations NW — and its incredibly energetic leader, Barb Oliver — I was a bit skeptical. It was just so much less expensive than all the other solutions! I was sure it was a piece of the puzzle. But, as one year-old Rosie is learning, puzzles have a lot of pieces (ok - hers have between 5-10 pieces, but she’ll learn this soon).
But as the year has progressed, I’ve come to believe that the tiny home puzzle piece is a disproportionately large one, at the least. The homeless people I’ve met and talked with — at shelters, at food banks, during outreach — have consistently mentioned tiny homes. Not as a distant policy concept, but as something they actually want. A place of their own. A door that locks. Most of them follow that up with something like: yeah, but the waitlist is impossible. Demand dwarfs supply, and most people I’ve spoken with don’t realistically expect to ever get in.
Seeing a village up close made me understand the appeal viscerally in a way that talking about it never quite did. These are not tents. They’re not cots in a gymnasium. They are small, private, secure, and — crucially on a day like last Wednesday — dry.
I don’t think tiny homes are the solution for every homeless person. But I do think that with enough of these villages, we could dramatically raise the floor of what homelessness looks and feels like for a lot of people. That’s not nothing. That might actually be quite a lot.
How many people could tiny homes help?
Well, four tiny home villages opened in 2025 — three in Seattle and one in Tacoma. Sound Foundations expects up to six more to open in 2026. Taken together, that’s close to 400 new units of housing over two years.
In a city with nearly 10,000 homeless residents, 400 units doesn’t solve the problem. Tiny homes are also, almost by definition, temporary. These villages have leases, typically for 2-3 years, after which the land is often used for other purposes like building a permanent structure.
Still, 400 units for three years is 438,000 nights, and that’s a lot of shelter.
Know Anyone with a Vacant Flat Lot?
Standing there in the rain at the end of the ceremony, I found myself wishing I owned land I could offer for something like this. Church by the Side of the Road has a rare combination: space, willingness, and proximity to the people who need help most.
If you happen to own a vacant, flat lot (or know someon
e who does), and you’re open to exploring what hosting a village might look like, let me know. Mayor Wilson has made expanding tiny home villages a clear priority, and the operators — like LIHI and Sound Foundations — know how to move quickly when land becomes available. I’m happy to connect the right people.
