First Shift: Sound Foundations NW
...201 days to go...
OK, technically this is now a post about my first three shifts at Sound Foundations NW, a nonprofit that builds tiny homes for homeless people in Seattle. I’m having a blast: not only do I feel helpful, but I get to use a nail gun!
What Are These Tiny Homes, Exactly?
Each tiny home is 8x12 feet—basically a bedroom. Inside, residents get a bed, linens, a closet, an overhead light, electricity, a window, and both a space heater and an A/C unit. Not luxurious, but warm, safe, and dry. Which is saying a lot when you’re used to sleeping outside and worry constantly about theft.
The homes are placed in villages with shared community spaces: bathrooms with hot showers and flushable toilets, a community kitchen, laundry facilities, and a food pantry.
In theory, everything you need to get back on your feet. At least, if you’re homeless because of a pretty simple economic reason like a job loss or eviction. More complex cases (for instance, those with mental health or drug abuse issues) will likely require more help.
Volunteering Efficiently
Sound Foundations utilizes volunteers incredibly efficiently. I’m not what you’d call a handy person—the handyman actually laughed at me when I asked him to install hooks for our bikes in the garage—but they’ve put me to work painting (an entire house, inside and out, in a single five-hour shift), installing insulation, doing trim work (with nail guns!) and even erecting walls and roofs as part of a team.
I’ve almost never found myself standing around with nothing to do. The shifts are 5-6 hours, which makes much better use of my commute time than the typical 2-3 hour volunteer shift. You show up, they hand you tools and clear instructions, and you actually build something tangible. By the end of the day, you can point to a structure and say, “I helped build that.”
If you’re interested in helping—or just want to learn a bit about construction—I strongly encourage you to volunteer at Sound Foundations. Just sign up for their newsletter (here), and when it arrives on Wednesday evenings, you can sign up for shifts the following week.
The Economics Make Sense
Sound Foundations doesn’t just utilize volunteers efficiently. They utilize financial donations efficiently too.
Each tiny home costs $4,500 in physical materials. Compare that to roughly $300,000 for a unit of permanent supportive housing.
Sound Foundations doesn’t actually operate tiny home villages (they just build the homes), but operating costs are equally impressive. Each home costs about $20,000 per year to operate (covering the shared bathrooms, kitchens, utilities, and site management). Based on what I’ve learned about Seattle shelters, a bed night typically costs $100-150, which works out to roughly $40,000 per year for a shelter bed. And a shelter bed can only accommodate one person, whereas a tiny home can potentially house two.
So we’re talking about half the operating cost compared to shelter, and one-sixtieth the capital cost compared to permanent housing.
Better Than Congregate Shelter
The cost advantage is compelling, but it’s not the only reason I’m excited about tiny homes.
Tiny homes keep people safe, dry, and warm. Shelters aim to do the same, but they have a more dubious track record on “safe.” Theft and violence are not uncommon in congregate shelters (“congregate” shelters offer communal sleeping areas rather than locking, individual ones). For this reason, many of the homeless individuals I’ve spoken with have told me they would love to get into a tiny home village. I haven’t heard as much enthusiasm about congregate shelter.
The privacy matters. Having your own lockable space, where you can keep your belongings without fear of theft, where you can have a moment of peace, where you can feel like a person rather than a number in a bed—that’s not a luxury.
The Outcomes Speak for Themselves
Tiny home villages also have a dramatically better track record of transitioning people to permanent housing than traditional shelters. According to the Low Income Housing Institute (the largest operator of tiny home villages in Seattle), 50% of residents leaving tiny home villages transitioned into permanent housing. In contrast, only 16% of residents leaving congregate shelters found permanent housing.
This makes intuitive sense. Congregate shelter is certainly much better than the streets. But it’s still chaotic and distracting. Shared sleeping spaces, constant noise, lack of privacy, the stress of navigating communal living with dozens or hundreds of other people who are also in crisis—none of that is conducive to getting a job, advancing your education, or doing the focused work of recovery.
Can They Be Deployed at Scale?
One significant limitation to tiny home villages is that, like any form of shelter, they require real estate to be deployed. The real estate must meet several characteristics: it must be large enough to accommodate at least 20+ homes, must be reasonably close to services and transit, and typically must be available for at least 3 years (most tiny home village sites are temporary leases before the land is reclaimed for another purpose such as construction of a large, permanent building).
Given the density of Seattle and King County, there are very few sites that meet these criteria. Those that do must almost always overcome local NIMBY opposition to be approved. As a result, the current bottleneck in deploying tiny homes is not their construction but the real estate required to deploy them.
However, there is clear progress being made. Sound Foundations’ tiny homes will be deployed in four new villages in 2025, and the organization expects six new villages to open in 2026. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 150+ new homes each year greater than the ~115 homes the factory expects to turn out in 2025.
I believe most of the homes being built will be deployed within a reasonable timeframe, in part because the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (which controls the homelessness budget) has been increasingly warming up to tiny homes as a way to get homeless people off the street. This can be seen, among other ways, in its decision to hire Barb Oliver, the gregarious founder of Sound Foundations and a huge proponent of the tiny home solution, as its Senior Advisor on Special Projects.
And even if Seattle can’t deploy all the homes we build, they can be transported to other jurisdictions. Other cities face the same challenges we do. These homes are mobile solutions.
Three Brand New Tiny Homes
This holiday season, Jen and I have decided to sponsor three tiny homes for $13,500 ($4,500 x 3). Each tiny home gets a name, and the organization has graciously allowed me to christen them. I’ve chosen:
Rosie’s Retreat - At 18 months, our daughter Rosie is just beginning to understand what “home” means. Someday I’ll tell her that somewhere in Seattle, someone found shelter in a home that bears her name.
Nat’s Nest - Natalie inspired all of this when she was six. I’m starting to feel I finally have a better answer to her questions. If I can, I’m going to take her to see this home when it rolls off the line.
Jen’s Junction - When Jen married me three years ago, we pledged in our vows that “we will define ourselves by the welcoming home we create.” I hope this home will welcome someone and serve as the end of a difficult journey and the start of something as wonderful as ours.
If you’d like to sponsor a home, volunteer to build one, or just learn more about the work Sound Foundations is doing, visit them here.
If you’re looking for a way to make an impact this holiday season that’s both cost-effective and deeply satisfying, I can’t recommend this highly enough.
(I’ll be spending the holidays with family the next few weeks, so this will likely be the last blog post this year. Happy holidays to all and see you in January!)
Footnote: For my own purposes, and for those following my progress on the “Impact” tab of this blog, I’m choosing to account for each of these three tiny homes as 20% of a person housed, because the construction cost is about 20% of the full first-year cost of operating a tiny home. My hope is that this is conservative, since operating costs likely decline in years 2+ (you only have to construct kitchens and bathrooms once, and the villages last 3-5 years). I also want to be conservative because, while a tiny home is a heck of a lot better than being on the street, it’s also a far cry from what I’d consider a reasonable permanent solution. I may revise this assumption as I learn more in the coming months. But using this assumption, I’ll be adding 60% of a person housed (20% x 3) to my impact tab. This also implies a cost of about $22,500 per person housed, which is around a tie for the least expensive method I’ve found so far with Mary’s Place’s prevention efforts (which I’ve modeled at $21,000 per person).