In The News - 7/17/2025

The Spokesman Review

Tiny home village for homeless planned

Proposed West Hills project raising mixed feelings from residents after Catalyst Project placement

A 30-unit tiny home village for homeless people transitioning out of emergency shelters likely will be built in the West Hills neighborhood on a Sunset Boulevard property owned by the Waters Meet Foundation – formerly known as the Empire Health Foundation, according to President Zeke Smith.

While the shelters already have been purchased with funds from a state Department of Commerce grant, they haven’t arrived yet, and it’s not immediately clear what organization will operate the transitional housing project, nor how operations will be funded. Smith said he assumed Spokane’s elected leaders will see it as a worthy investment.

He believes the tiny homes will provide a stable place for people to live relatively independently for upwards of six months as they prepare to transition out of shelters and into permanent housing, providing capacity for a midway step on the path out of homelessness.

He also anticipates the move will be controversial.

Many in the neighborhood felt blindsided and concerned in 2022 when they discovered Catholic Charities Eastern Washington would be converting a former hotel on Sunset Boulevard into an 84-unit professionally staffed shelter, learning about it only after the plan was underway and fearing it would bring the crime and disorder that many believed had characterized the Camp Hope homeless encampment.

A year after the facility opened, most of those fears appeared to be waylaid, with no significant rise in crime accompanying what became known as the Catalyst Project and many former skeptics telling The Spokesman-Review that the facility had been either a neutral or net positive addition to the community.

A small but vocal minority, however, continue to argue the facility has scared off development and warn others to “stay vigilant” so they’re not “ambushed” by another shelter.

Some of the pushback to the Catalyst Project was rooted in a belief the city and the nonprofit colluded to keep the project quiet until it was off the ground. Catholic Charities Eastern Washington CEO Robb McCann has previously said silence was a requirement of the sales agreement with the hotel owner, who wanted to avoid disruption to staff and hotel operations if word leaked.

The Waters Meet Foundation has courted its own accusations of secrecy.

The organization was the key partner in selecting locations for Mayor Lisa Brown’s transition from large congregant homeless shelters to smaller “scatter site” shelters, and has faced blowback at times for a perceived lack of outreach with neighborhoods before launching those new shelters.

“Public outreach on shelters, new sites to house homeless folks, is complicated … neighbors who don’t have any sense of what is really going to happen get up in arms and start to organize against it,” Smith said in January, following the launch of a shelter for the medically fragile near downtown.

“We didn’t want that to happen.”

But now, with plans already underway to launch the tiny home village later this year, Smith says he wants to better and more proactively communicate with neighbors to assuage their concerns.

“We’re approaching this differently,” Smith said. “Partly because of city requirements, partly because we’re the landowner, and partly because I’m hoping there’s an opportunity for a productive conversation with neighbors.”

“But we’re also taking a risk,” he added. “There’s enough pieces that we don’t have clarity on yet, and until we can be clear about those, I suspect it’s going to leave open space for people’s fears. But we’re trusting there’s an opportunity to engage folks up front, address any real concerns and help land this community in that neighborhood in a productive way.”

In addition to whatever outreach Waters Meet does in the coming days, the service provider that ends up managing the space likely will be required to come to a “good neighbor” agreement with the city and the West Hills Neighborhood Council. The Spokane City Council approved a law in June requiring these agreements, meant to be a guarantee that the neighborhood won’t be negatively affected if the city is funding the shelter.

The Washington Post

Selling public land won’t solve the housing crisis. Here’s what would.

Creative solutions to build more affordable housing in the United States can be found in places such as your state and your backyard.

(Note: Paywall, contact dsimonson@mac.com for full text)

Congress has removed the “for sale” sign from the American West.

A proposal to liquidate millions of acres of public land was struck out of Congress’s massive tax and immigration bill after unifying the left and right against it. Even Republicans admitted the provision wouldn’t deliver on the promise of more affordable housing.

The United States needs 4 million to 7 million more homes to meet demand. The shortage is most acute in the American West, where an ever-growing share of Americans can barely afford to put a roof over their heads. In theory, converting just 1 percent of the federal land portfolio, or about 3 million acres, into new developments could provide housing for millions of people.

But many housing experts say a lack of land is not the problem (and that the vast majority of federal land is unsuitable for housing anyway). The problem is a lack of homes near jobs and services. Restrictive zoning laws, high construction costs, permitting complexity and inadequate financing for builders and buyers have all been implicated.

In the West, the favorite villain in this story is California. It pretty much invented discretionary permitting and exclusionary single-family zoning (now covering 96 percent of the state’s residential land) so only expensive single-family homes are built in these neighborhoods. Over time, the death-by-bureaucracy of affordable multifamily units has helped pushed the state’s housing costs to some of the highest in the nation and sent people fleeing to neighboring states.

“We call this the California blast zone, because of the inability to build housing,” said Ed Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute. “No matter how fast [other states] build, they can’t keep up with the outflow of people.”

But California didn’t export its housing crunch so much as reveal it elsewhere, said Andrew Justus, a housing policy analyst at the market-oriented Niskanen Center. In Atlanta, where prices are spiking, building codes are almost identical to those in Los Angeles in the 1990s before changes. “It’s not a unique set of challenges,” Justus said.

Simply selling off land won’t fix the system that created the U.S. housing crisis. I spoke with experts across the West — and across the ideological spectrum — about how the region can pull itself out of this morass. Creative solutions exist in your state and your backyard. Here’s how we can build affordable homes again.

An in-law suite doesn’t need to be for in-laws

An “accessory dwelling unit,” sometimes called an in-law suite, granny flat or ADU, is a small home on the same lot as a single-family home, typically in a basement, backyard or garage. Western states including Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Utah and Washington have guaranteed most or all property owners the right to build ADUs. While not cheap, you can finance them (sometimes at no cost, since the developer purchases the development rights). Several studies suggest they not only generate income, they significantly increase the value of your home in tight real estate markets such as the Bay Area. Since California passed its ADU law in 2017, the number of ADUs permitted annually has shot up from 1,000 to more than 20,000, roughly 20 percent of the state’s starter homes. Soon they may even be zoned as condos.

Give manufactured homes a second look

Prefab homes are not the flimsy trailers of yesteryear. We can wait (and wait) for high-quality 3D-printed homes — or embrace single-family manufactured homes. In Pennsylvania, a manufactured home rolls out of Eagle River Homes’ cavernous factory every three days with many of the amenities of conventional homes and nearly indistinguishable aesthetics. All for half the cost or less.

Starter homes represent just 10 percent of all new homes in the United States, down from 40 percent in the early 1980s. Although we can now mass-produce higher-quality, low-cost manufactured homes, they’re still not welcome in many neighborhoods. Jurisdictions exclude them through zoning barriers (which are falling) and state housing titling laws that make securing financing harder. Dispelling the stigma and embracing mass-produced homes could unlock hundreds of thousands of starter homes.

Seek out a community land trust

Community land trusts are nonprofits that create permanent affordable housing by purchasing land or property and then selling or renting the buildings back to residents, locking in low rents forever. The tenants of the Pigeon Palace in San Francisco banded together in 2012 to create their own affordable housing. They crowdfunded $300,000 and gave it to the nonprofit San Francisco Community Land Trust, which secured $3 million in favorable loans to outbid speculators for the property. The trust now rents spacious two-bedroom apartments for $1,400 to $3,000 per month, well below the market rate. With the property permanently off the market, it plans to create a resident-owned cooperative.

You can do this, too. Reach out to one of the more than 300 community land truststhat have provided tens of thousands of housing units nationwide (it even works for community gardens, small businesses and public spaces). Other affordability programs include city-run lotteries for first-time home buyers, sales of city-owned vacant homes and lots for low- and moderate-income residents (sometimes for as little as $1), and down payment assistance loans.