Harger: Seattle put 260 shelter units in its poorest neighborhood. Laurelhurst can’t even handle a helicopter.

Early in elementary school, there were stretches where we didn’t have much. Food banks. Food stamps. When I was in kindergarten at Wedgwood Elementary, the high school booster club adopted our family one Christmas so there’d be a couple of presents under the tree. And when you’re in that situation, the last thing you want to do is rock the boat.

If someone’s hassling you, you look the other way. When you don’t have much, letting people with power or money walk over you is a given. It tells you who’s really looking out for you, and who’s looking through you like you’re invisible.

Seattle’s poorest neighborhood South Park just got its third major shelter site

Mayor Katie Wilson announced May 7 that the city secured a lease on a new 90-unit tiny home village in South Park. It’s the second site in her push to build 500 shelter units before the FIFA World Cup arrives in June.

South Park already has Camp Second Chance, a 79-unit village that has been operating for roughly a decade. Glassyard Commons, a 92-unit site with 72 RV spaces and 20 tiny homes, opens this summer. Now a third. That’s 260-plus shelter units in one neighborhood.

Median household income in South Park: $61,935. Seattle’s average: $105,391. South Park’s poverty rate: 25.1%. Seattle’s average: 10%. Nearly half the population is Hispanic or Latino. A third are foreign-born. More than a third speak a language other than English at home.

These are families doing everything right on not very much. Working two jobs. Stretching a grocery budget. Getting the kids to school. Keeping a humble home together in a city that gets more expensive every year. South Park residents spent the last decade building their neighborhood up. New small businesses. Community investment. Real progress, earned the hard way. The city’s response: a third shelter site.

Supporters say the homeless are already living in South Park. That’s the problem, not the justification.

There’s a good-faith case for why South Park was chosen. The King County Regional Homelessness Authority has documented a significant concentration of people living in RVs in the district. The argument: meet people where they are. Build services near the existing need.

I understand the logic, but the logic only flows in one direction. Nobody proposes meeting wealthy neighborhoods where their problems are. The fact that homelessness already concentrates in South Park is evidence of the pattern, not a reason to deepen it.

HB 2266 became law in 2026 to force equitable shelter distribution. Seattle’s first move: South Park.

Gov. Bob Ferguson signed HB 2266 in March. The law requires cities to allow shelters and supportive housing in any residential zone. Cities can’t use zoning to block these projects anymore. The whole point was to spread the responsibility so that no single community absorbs everything.

Seattle’s first major siting decision after that law took effect: the poorest neighborhood in the city. The law removed zoning as an excuse. What it revealed is that the real barrier was never zoning. It was political power.

Zero tiny home villages in any Seattle neighborhood above $145,000 median income

South Park: $61,935 median income, three villages, 260-plus units. Lake City: $90,952, one village, 45 units. Capitol Hill: $143,248, one village, 32 units.

Laurelhurst: $250,000+. Zero villages. Montlake: $216,000. Zero. Blue Ridge: $198,000. Zero. Windermere, View Ridge, Madrona, Madison Park, Phinney Ridge, Magnolia. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero.

That was the intent of HB 2266, after all.

Laurelhurst kept medical helicopters a mile from Seattle Children’s Hospital for 30 years. They can fight anything.

For decades, the Laurelhurst Community Council fought helicopter landings at Seattle Children’s Hospital. Under a conditional use permit from the early 1990s, only life-threatening emergencies qualified for rooftop landings. Everything else got diverted to a University of Washington helipad roughly a mile away. Sick kids, loaded into an ambulance for the last mile, because the neighbors didn’t like the noise.

It took a social media firestorm, a public protest, and national coverage before the Laurelhurst Community Council agreed last week to support ending the review process.

A neighborhood wealthy enough to keep helicopters away from a children’s hospital for three decades isn’t getting a tiny home village. Ever.

Some tiny home village residents are doing the work. LIHI’s rules don’t protect them.

Some people in these villages are doing everything they can. Lost a job. Lost a lease. Using the tiny home as a stepping stone, staying clean, working with case managers, and trying to get back on their feet. Those people exist, and they deserve the chance.

But they’re living next to someone smoking fentanyl in the next unit, and management isn’t doing much about it.

LIHI, the nonprofit that will operate the new South Park village, is accused of allowing drug use inside its tiny homes. No sobriety requirement or expectation of recovery. Near the Bailey-Boushay House shelter in Madison Valley, neighbors told KOMO News that people from the facility use drugs nearby.

In one incident, someone from the shelter allegedly threatened staff with a BB gun near children getting on a school bus. In another, a person reportedly told neighborhood kids he was going to take them from their parents. Good Neighbor Agreements exist on paper. Enforcement is another story.

In most towns, there would be an insistence on getting people better. Here, we put the person trying to recover in the same village as the person who refuses all help, with operators who look the other way on open drug use and obvious crime around the perimeter. Then we call it compassion.

It isn’t. Compassion would be separating the person who wants help from the person who doesn’t. It would mean standards that protect the resident trying to get clean, the family next door doing everything right on $61,000 a year, and the neighborhood that never got a say. Instead, we warehouse everyone together, demand nothing, and congratulate ourselves.

The person trying to recover deserves better. The neighborhood deserves better. The only people this arrangement serves are the operators who get paid either way.

In South Park, the bill always goes to the same zip code

The family in South Park making $61,000 a year didn’t ask for this. They’re being asked to endure something that a dozen wealthier Seattle neighborhoods have the money and the political connections to prevent. Reading the mayor’s press release, it appears the city signed the lease on the new village before holding a single community meeting. The announcement says a meeting will happen “in the next few weeks.” The decision is already made.

That’s not looking out for them. That’s looking through them.

If tiny homes are compassion, Laurelhurst should want one. They don’t. Funny how in South Park, nobody thought to ask.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

Follow @https://twitter.com/kirocharlie