Pierce County needs new approaches to homelessness. Here are two everyone should support

Pierce County, like most communities, struggles to address its housing crisis. If we were talking about food, we would recognize widespread malnutrition with pockets of starvation. Talking about housing, we recognize that nearly half of county residents struggle to pay rent and a notable number of residents have no housing. All this is costing all of us. Homelessness is expensive. It uses public services, like health care. It makes them less effective. It blights public spaces — parks, sidewalks and storefronts. It blights the lives of people who experience it.

Pierce County has been addressing the crisis, with some good results. It is also time to try something new. For that purpose, the Pierce County Council is considering two related innovative proposals. Both feature in the county’s Comprehensive Plan to End Homelessness that the council adopted in March.

First, the council is reviewing the plan it requested from the Pierce County Executive to create a community village of tiny homes and services as permanent housing for nearly 300 chronically homeless county residents.

The proposal is fashioned after an exemplar in Austin, Texas. That model — known in Austin as a Community First Village — has succeeded in metrics of safety, stability, recovery, income progression and community acceptance. It presumes that housing alone will not solve chronic homelessness. It stresses that homelessness arises from the “profound, catastrophic loss of family.” In a restorative response, the village offers a community of permanent housing and the relationships that make a community. Residents contribute through the rent they pay and their investments in the community and in their own lives. The village model seems to work because, in its ethic and design, it shows how residents share in the work, that they are not alone in that work, and that they matter.

Developing the proposed micro-home village in Pierce County will encounter the challenges and risks customary for real estate development, especially for affordable housing development. For example, The News Tribune recently reported on some zoning puzzles to figure out. The plan must minimize the risks, and manage them, with adequate protections for the county’s investment. Those issues should be manageable, especially with formidable community partners like the Tacoma Rescue Mission. The development should be feasible in the proposed location or another, if necessary, especially with what the discussion now needs — the council resolve to get it done.

Second, the Council may shortly consider exercising the state option of a 1/10th of 1% sales tax for affordable housing. The City of Tacoma and other counties have already done so. This will create stable revenue for initiatives like the proposed micro-home village. It will also make the county more competitive for financing from other sources, public and private.

Pierce County’s micro-home proposal is not the only project at stake in this discussion. If these customary uncertainties defeat it, we should not expect success from the next proposal that would present the same type of uncertainties, but without the programmatic and financing advantages of the current proposal.

Defeating the proposed micro-home village would inflict a lingering discouragement on future projects, and on the county’s efforts to address its crisis of homelessness.

Michael Yoder has served as Executive Director of Associated Ministries since 2015. He currently serves on the Board of Greater Tacoma Community Foundation and the PC Human Services Coalition.

Michael Mirra served as the executive director of the Tacoma Housing Authority from 2004 until his retirement in 2021. Presently, he serves on Pierce County’s Comprehensive Plan to End Homelessness Advisory Board.

This story was originally published November 3, 2022 at 5:00 AM.