Tag Archives: homelessness

Two dead after bus reportedly backs over smoking shelter in First Hill parking lot — UPDATE

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Two people were reported dead after a bus struck a smoking shelter in a parking lot near Broadway and Alder in the First Hill neighborhood Tuesday morning.

According to emergency radio updates, a 911 caller reported the horrific incident and said a bus had backed over the shelter occupied by two victims just after 10:30 AM in the parking lot behind the Hilltop House retirement community.

Original reports described the shelter as a tent but SPD clarified that the structure is a smoking area behind the building.

SPD says a third elderly woman barely escaped without injury. Continue reading →

Toxic politics? ‘Supportive housing’ project targeted by Capitol Hill mayoral candidate in line for state cleanup

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The Capitol Hill business owner turned candidate for mayor fighting a Belmont Ave supportive housing project from the Downtown Emergency Service Center has already cast herself as a Republican.

Now we’ll see if Rachael Savage is also an environmentalist.

Washington’s Department of Ecology may be wandering into a neighborhood hornet’s nest as it begins the public process on the Stewart House Cleanup Site under its affordable housing grant program.

The DESC and the department are entering into an agreement on a state funded cleanup of the site where decades of waste from oil furnaces has accumulated. Continue reading →

Officials celebrate groundbreaking of Constellation Center — and hope for affordable housing and jobs in the heart of Capitol Hill

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The groundbreaking ceremony took place inside the Century Ballroom which is undergoing some change of its own — the space is now the Reverie Ballroom under new ownership

Rendering of the Constellation Center and the new eight-story apartment building

“The next chapter of hope” is beginning at Broadway and Pine where construction is underway on the $37 million $79 million Constellation Center, a first of its kind project combining affordable housing and a youth education, skills training, and employment academy. To come together, the unique project has required the heft of two of Seattle’s most important Public Development Authorities and its leading provider of services to homeless youth.

UPDATE: No, the cost of the project has not soared. The $37 million figure represented a YouthCare fundraising goal for the project. Total construction budget has been established as $79 million — about $60 million of that is the projected cost of the new apartment buidling.

It also needed a champion. Longtime Democratic State Rep. Frank Chopp, who passed away only days before the ceremony, was remembered as officials gathered late last month to celebrate the Constellation Center’s groundbreaking.

“As we honor the indefatigable and moralistic example of Frank Chopp today, we are here to join forces on a project close to his heart,” Vivek Varma of the Schultz Family Foundation said in his remarks at the March 25th groundbreaking ceremony. “Not only join forces, but as Frank would say if he was here, we’ve got to get it done.”

The foundation is just part of the core of Seattle’s social safety net that has been required to get the Constellation Center plan off the ground. Continue reading →

Seattle taking ‘district’ approach to $6.1M in homelessness outreach spending

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The Seattle City Council’s Housing and Human Services Committee will be briefed Wednesday on the organizations handling some $6.1 million in city funding to perform outreach work hoped to help connect more of the thousands living on the city’s streets with shelter and services.

The city says in 2025 it is deploying a new “District Outreach Model.” In District 3 covering Capitol Hill and the Central District, the Salvation Army will handle both street-level and vehicle-based outreach.

The Downtown Emergency Services Center is handling behavioral health outreach in D3 and across the city.

The Salvation Army’s street work will also cover downtown and the rest of District 7. Continue reading →

Why the Broadway Center for Youth is coming to the center of Capitol Hill

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Weinstein A+U’s rendering of the now under construction Broadway Center for Youth at Broadway and Pine

By Matt Dowell

A planned two years of construction has begun on the Broadway Center for Youth, an affordable housing and workforce development hub at Broadway and Pine. Why develop the project here near the core of the neighborhood’s entertainment district on one of the most expensive blocks in the city and in an area experiencing some of the deepest pains of the city’s ongoing challenges around addiction and mental health?

Officials at YouthCare, the nonprofit behind the center, say they want to create this resource for the young adults they serve at Broadway and Pine for the same reasons anybody might want to live here — community, culture, transit, and jobs.

YouthCare has worked for 50 years to help address youth homelessness in the Seattle area. Their Constellation Center, a part of the Broadway Center for Youth, will connect to Community Roots Housing’s new eight story building with 84 affordable homes on the busy Capitol Hill corner. Imagined as a hub for young people aged 18 to 24 who need job training, case management, housing, and mental health services, the center will expand programs already offered by YouthCare.

YouthCare CEO Degale Cooper highlighted the advantages of the well-connected location. It is close to two local colleges, employers with jobs, and public transportation. And it’s near the healthcare organizations that provide care to those under YouthCare’s wing.

Plus, it’s close to those who need help.

“More young people who use YouthCare services are moving out of the downtown corridor as more condos and businesses go up. They are moving to Cap Hill,” said Cooper. Continue reading →

Opening in 2027, work begins on eight stories of affordable housing and homeless youth Constellation Center ‘education and employment academy’ at Broadway and Pine

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(Image: Community Roots Housing)

A rendering of YouthCare’s planned Constellation Center

By Matt Dowell

Construction is beginning on the Constellation Center, an affordable housing and homeless youth education and employment academy project planned for Broadway and Pine.

The development will bring months of heavy demolition and construction work to the core of Capitol Hill — and add what officials say will be a vital resource for addressing the city’s homelessness crisis while also creating new affordable homes above this busy intersection.

Meanwhile, Community Roots Housing, the Public Development Authority and local affordable housing provider behind the project, has also announced its plans to sell one of its most celebrated new projects — the mass-timber Heartwood building at 14th and Union — as it continues a multiyear process of paring down its holdings.

A spokesperson for Community Roots reported that construction of theConstellation Center began Monday, January 6 at Broadway and Pine. Continue reading →

Donna Jean’s Place — hope for helping 100 women a year rise from homelessness on Capitol Hill

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(Image: Operation Nightwatch)

The plan for growing a Capitol Hill women’s shelter began when Frank DiGirolamo of Operation Nightwatch and Rev. Steve Thomason, dean and rector of 10th Ave E’s St. Mark’s, met at a clergy dinner and shared their work with one another.

Operation Nightwatch has been active for 57 years and began through street canvassing efforts, which they continue to this day on Capitol Hill.

“We spend a lot of time listening and reminding people that they’re loved,” DiGirolamo told CHS. “We’re always responding to the needs we hear about from the people we visit.”

Thomason said St. Marks had been a site for women’s emergency shelter for over two decades, but then COVID-19 hit.

“It seemed the natural thing for us to consider again, even if it’s not a long-term solution for that location. We’re hoping that the City of Seattle and King County, all of the organizations that are committed to addressing the housing crisis, will be in a very different place three to four years from now than we currently are,” Thomason told CHS. Continue reading →

With 10,000 living without shelter, Seattle and King County have new plan for Regional Homelessness Authority

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(Image: YouthCare)

The City of Seattle and King County have agreed on restructuring the King County Regional Homelessness Authority in a move hoped to streamline the $250 million a year effort that will also likely undercut the organization’s ability to develop new solutions to the area’s ongoing homelessness crisis.

Last month, the Seattle City Council approved the plan already signed-off on by the county to transition the RHA “to a single oversight board to improve the agency’s coordination, accountability, and transparency.”

The new agreement creates a Governing Board “responsible for setting strategic policy direction, providing fiscal oversight, monitoring performance metrics, and ensuring the authority is making progress to fulfill its mission,” according to the city’s announcement.

The new 12-member board will include the King County Executive, the Seattle Mayor, two members of the King County Council, one representing a district in Seattle and one representing a district outside of Seattle, two members of the Seattle City Council, three elected officials from the Sound Cities Association, and three members representing individuals with lived experience each individually appointed by the City of Seattle, King County, and Sound Cities Association. Continue reading →

Operation Nightwatch a growing Capitol Hill presence with Broadway Street Ministry, plans for new emergency shelter at St. Mark’s

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An Operation Nightwatch volunteer (Image: Operation Nightwatch)

Capitol Hill’s St. Mark’s will add a new women’s emergency shelter facility from Operation Nightwatch as it moves forward with a plan for new affordable housing to be developed on its North Capitol Hill campus.

Plans filed with the city describe construction of a “limited use emergency shelter with 20 beds and limited hours of operation” in the 1950s-era addition to the 10th Ave E property’s landmarks-protected St. Nicholas building.

CHS reported here earlier this year on a planned development and adaptive reuse project envisioned to create more than 100 affordable homes in a transformation of the nearly 100-year-old building.

In the meantime, the new shelter from Operation Nightwatch will call the St. Nicholas addition home. Continue reading →

Downtown Emergency Service Center to hold open house on plans for new ‘supportive housing’ apartment building on Capitol Hill

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DESC’s North Star on N 143rd St

The Downtown Emergency Service Center is holding a community open house Wednesday on its planned project to build a new 120-unit “supportive housing” apartment building with onsite services for its residents on Capitol Hill’s Belmont Ave. There will be more than questions about the planned building’s height and unit count.

CHS reported this summer on the $6.5 million property deal that put a trio of former transitional housing building from Pioneer Human Services on Belmont Ave in the hands of DESC where the organization is planning to build  “a new Permanent Supportive Housing project” on the parcels.

The strip of properties planned for the new housing and services facility is a few blocks west of the new Capitol Hill Stay out of Drug Area approved by the Seattle City Council.

King County’s program to fund this type of project says permanent supportive housing is housing “for a household that is homeless on entry, where the individual or a household member has a condition of disability, such as mental illness, substance abuse, chronic health issues, or other conditions that create multiple and serious ongoing barriers to housing stability.”

The buildings represent some of the most needed housing in the region that continues to be rocked by an ongoing homelessness crisis. They also can face extreme challenges. Continue reading →