New Unity Commons homeless shelter provides some ‘room in the bottleneck’
Guests moved into Thurston County’s first new homeless shelter in seven years last Friday.
Unity Commons, located at 2828 Martin Way, boasts common spaces, outdoor decks, computers, even a turf area for pets to relieve themselves.
It’s a huge step up from the church basements that Interfaith Works has traditionally operated out of, where residents had to go elsewhere to shower.
“We are ecstatic to partner with LIHI to design a safe, clean, beautiful, and accessible facility that will fully realize the dignity and respect our current and future shelter guests deserve,” wrote Meg Martin, executive director of Interfaith Works, which partnered with the Seattle-based Low-Income Housing Institute (LIHI), a nonprofit developer responsible for nearby Billy Frank Jr. Place and Plum Street Tiny Home Village.
Years in the making, the five-story building combines a 58-bed shelter on the ground floor with 65 units of permanent supportive housing above, which will be filled in the new year.
It marks a number of firsts for a county that has the least permanent supportive housing in the state and with a shelter system that only serves about half of the unsheltered population.
It also represents a massive scale-up for Interfaith Works, which first opened their overnight shelter in 2014 in the basement of First Christian Church. It was the first “low-barrier” shelter in Olympia, and faced steep blowback from homeowners in Olympia at the time.
During the pandemic, the shelter system lost hundreds of beds, as social distancing measures reduced capacity at many shelters.
According to Thurston County’s homeless coordinator Keylee Marineau, there are currently 347 shelter beds in the shelter system, if you include Olympia’s downtown homeless mitigation site (which began as a tent encampment but now hosts microhouses). That’s not nearly enough to accommodate the need: at least 639 unsheltered people were located by the 2021 Point-in-Time count, an annual tally that is widely understood to be an undercount.
Capacity for permanent supportive housing is even lower. Thurston and Mason counties combined have the least supportive housing units (139) of any region in Washington, according to a 2018 analysis of behavioral health facilities by the state Office of Financial Management (OFM). That’s the smallest number of units for any of the 10 regions the OFM studied, and by far the least per capita.
“This is the first time that we’ve actually had a viable option for permanent supportive housing for folks to move into,” said Martin.
When the 65 apartments open in the new year, Unity Commons will increase the number of permanent supportive housing beds in the region by nearly 50%. Martin is hoping many of the shelter guests, some of whom have been with Interfaith Works since they opened in 2014, will get spots in the apartments. Spots are filled through the county’s Coordinated Entry system, which sorts people based on their level of vulnerability.
“We’ve been doing vulnerability-based placements since 2014, and so a lot of our folks have been at the top of the master list with no options of where to go,” Martin said. “I am very hopeful that it will open up some room in the bottleneck.”
About half of the units will rent for between $376-$669, depending on the tenant’s income. The other half will cost less, being further subsidized by project-based vouchers from the Housing Authority of Thurston County, which are a type of Section 8 voucher that’s attached to a specific building.
In 2018, the city of Olympia purchased the land at 2828 Martin Way and sold it to the Low-income Housing Institute.
The $20.7 million building is funded mostly with federal Low-income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC); the Washington state Housing Trust Fund, Thurston County, and the city of Olympia also contributed funds.
Unity Commons is the first project built with funding from Olympia’s Home Fund, which voters passed in 2018.
This story was originally published December 22, 2021 at 2:47 PM with the headline "New Unity Commons homeless shelter provides some ‘room in the bottleneck’."
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