Building Tiny Houses for the Homeless - Interview with Josh Castle

Finding the Future - Innovations in Land Use and Sustainability

In cities across the country, the pandemic has brought home the plight of the homeless. Rising home prices, job losses and economic disparity have left more and more people without viable housing options. Communities everywhere are struggling to find alternatives to the tent cities that have sprung up in public parks and along highways.

One solution is gaining national attention – the construction of tiny house villages. A housing nonprofit in Seattle has had great success pioneering the concept and now manages tiny house villages in Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia and King County. The organization is known as LIHI, which stands for the Low Income Housing Institute.

Recently, I had the chance to sit down with Josh Castle, the Community Engagement Director for LIHI. It’s his job to run the gauntlet of community and church organizations, building support for the construction of tiny house villages and seeking volunteers. Josh has seen volunteers’ attitudes shift from concerns about the impact of the villages on neighborhoods to “tell us what residents need.”

A little over five years ago LIHI started partnering with the city of Seattle on the tiny house village project. Castle explained, “There was a huge homelessness epidemic in the Puget Sound region with encampments popping up all over the city. Seattle was trying to find a solution, so they started authorizing these encampments, allowing them to be in place as long as they had some kind of an organized structure, some management and a fiscal sponsor.” LIHI stepped in to serve as fiscal sponsor working with other organizations to address homelessness.

LIHI has been around for 30 years and owns or manages nearly 2,400 units of housing in six counties. About 20 years ago, the organization opened its first urban rest stop in downtown Seattle providing laundry services, showers and bathrooms for people experiencing homelessness. Eventually, that experience and working with the City led to the creation of the tiny house village concept.

“We realized that if you build a structure that is 120 square feet or less, it falls below the limit for the International Building Code so it’s not considered a dwelling unit, and it makes it much quicker and easier to build the structure,” said Castle. “So, we started building tiny houses that were 120 square feet or less and very cost-effective, about $2,500 to build.” The cost has gone up with the spike in lumber prices but it is starting to come down again.

Now, LIHI manages a total of 14 villages, eight in Seattle alone, two in Olympia and three in nearby Tacoma. Recently, they added a village in Skyway which is an unincorporated area of King County near the airport. Castle adds, “It’s the first one that the County has funded.”

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Bill Griffith practices real estate and municipal law and is the host of Finding the Future, a podcast that explores innovation in land use and sustainability. If you have a story about innovation in land use and sustainability, please reach out to Bill.