This site just off Northeast 65th Street is well on its way
to becoming a cluster of cottage homes.
Reserved for people exiting homelessness.
So the Sandpoint Cottage Community is a cluster
of 22 cottages around a couple of courtyards.
We have a commons building that is basically a medium sized home
that has a large kitchen and large living space for people to gather.
Dining area.
These cottages are clustered around courtyards
to help foster community in this very beautiful park like setting.
But the whole idea is
to have your front porch, be able to sit out on your front porch
and say hi to your neighbors.
We developed the idea a few years ago and I put money in the state
budget to actually get it going and pay for the construction.
The idea was to provide low cost cottage housing with full utilities.
This is a big step up from tiny home villages.
I strongly support tiny homes, but there's no utilities.
Cottage communities are a rare housing type in Seattle.
And besides a few historic examples that were built before
zoning laws were created in 1923,
very few of them exist.
(Calm music)
But architect Karen DeLucas specializes in these unique homes.
Having trained under Ross Chapin, the architect
who literally wrote the book on what he calls pocket neighborhoods.
15 years of doing this type of cottage development gave me
the experience needed to to work on this project,
because it's not just about the cottages, it's about how you design for community.
What's really exciting about the cottage community, especially for people
experiencing homelessness, is that they will have kind of shared resources.
They'll be able to meet people
that have have similar experiences and kind of grow together.
You know the design of the cottage was very intentional with the pitched roof.
It's a very sheltering gable, almost iconic form.
And that was the one thing that everybody recognizes as a home.
To tell the story of how this cottage community came to be,
we have to go back to 1970,
when Naval Air Station Sandpoint was decommissioned
and much of its land transferred to the city of Seattle.
Most of the land was used to create Magnuson Park,
but 18 acres were set aside for affordable housing.
The biggest project on the site was completed in 2017. When Building Nine,
the barracks, were converted into 148 affordable apartments.
In 2019, the Low Income Housing Institute, or LIHI,
was chosen as the developer for the site where the cottages now sit.
LIHI brought in Karen DeLucas and together
they took their design proposals to the surrounding community.
The community said, This is a really nice design.
This fits into the community.
So as a result of that, we then got their support
from the community to then go to the City Council.
The City Council approved the project.
LIHI secured funding from a number of sources,
including the Washington State Department of Commerce.
The project then moved on to the construction phase,
using an innovative construction technique
that helped speed the project along and also keep costs down.
The cottages were all constructed offsite
in modular units. The living room and bathroom and kitchen modular,
the roof modular, and the bedroom modular.
Having these as modular allowed us to be kind of ahead of the game,
once foundations were poured and set and all the site work was done.
So after many years of work and much collaboration between city, state, private
and nonprofit partners. These 22 cottages
will welcome residents in early 2023.
Christina Comer is the program manager at LIHI
who will help oversee the process of getting residents into their new homes.
It's very exciting to bring someone into a space
that they have not had access to before.
Just alone, having shelter and electricity
and a place to put your items gives people so much space to do other things
that they want to do and need to do.
It kind of takes a village to run a village.
It takes a village to support and care for a family,
and so it would be nice to be able to have the space to do that here.
This cottage village, we hope, is a model
for other cottage villages to be built across the state.
And so this particular one is focused on formerly homeless people,
but across the state where there is more available vacant land.
We need to promote this as a way of providing starter homes
for first time homebuyers, student housing, farmworker housing.
These are the kinds of homes that can be a home for for all people.
Well I must say, this is it's been a dream project for me.
You know, this is something that is unique in Seattle.
I wish that we were building more cottage developments.
We should be looking at kind of the smaller footprint.
There's a big step going from a tent
to a tiny house, and then there's even a bigger step
from going to the tiny houses to this cottage development.
But what's something that's similar between the tiny house villages
and the cottages, is again, this sense of community,
not just giving them a home, but giving them that community.