Will county’s $12M modular housing sites solve homelessness crisis?

In the continual search for solutions to the homeless crisis, King County authorities are going ahead with a $12 million project testing modular housing units in Shoreline, Seattle’s Interbay neighborhood, and a third yet-to-be named site.

But as KIRO Radio’s Ron and Don discuss, are these modular housing units actually more housing problems without solving the issue?

“I know that they’re meant to be short-term, but so often times they end up being long-term,” Don said. What concerns him is the potential lax level of expectations on the people living there, and the underlying hypocrisy with regards to everyone else.

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“If some of these units are going to be low-barrier — in other words, you can do whatever the heck you want to do when it comes to substance and nobody’s going to arrest you — shouldn’t we just make a blanket statement that it’s going to be low-barrier for everybody across Seattle?”

The concern with many of these housing sites is that they sometimes house the problems without addressing the core issues behind them, including drug activity and mental health. For Ron, sometimes so-called double standards are necessary in these types of setups.

“I get the whole idea of having two sets of rules in this regard,” Ron said. “If you had a child that did not have the skill sets to do the same things as your other child, I think you might have two sets of rules for those kids.”

“If you had one set of rules for everybody, then that set of rules would be too permissive for the child that is sort of together, and too strict for the child that is totally dependent.”

Modular housing is cheaper and built faster

Approximately 170 people will be housed at the two established sites. The units they’ll be in can be stacked, quickly disassembled, and built faster and at a lower cost than what was previously used for housing sites, with estimates at $150,000 for each single unit. More traditional, similar housing ranges between $300,000 and $350,000, reports The Seattle Times.

“The goal seems to be: ‘Lets get people and move them up one notch, going from living in squalor under the bridge to most likely living in squalor inside of a 24 foot by 14 foot room that has its own bathroom,” Ron said. “My point is that the goal should be transitioning this person back into society.”

“Point B is not living in this modular house. The end of the line for me is getting someone functional again, getting someone capable of contributing to society, having a job, living on their own–basically, being an adult.”