Seattle has been trying to solve homelessness for a long time. After the Great Fire of 1889, tent camps emerged as people struggled to find shelter. In 1915, shacks went up on the city’s tide flats. During the Great Depression, shantytowns sprang up across the country as unemployment and poverty left people unable to afford housing. These settlements became widely known as Hoovervilles, named in criticism of President Herbert Hoover. Seattle’s own Hooverville, built by hundreds of displaced men on the tide flats, persisted for years before the city demolished it in 1941.
Throughout this history, our region has been indelibly shaped by the fortunes of commerce in Puget Sound: the end of wartime shipbuilding after World War II, Boeing’s massive layoffs in the early 1970s, and today’s concentration of major employers like Amazon, Starbucks and so many others. A major corporate decision can send shockwaves through the Seattle community, eliminating jobs and increasing housing insecurity for families already struggling to keep up. In 2005, King County adopted a concerted Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness. In 2015, the mayor declared a civil emergency. More than a decade later, that emergency is still in effect, and the 2026 Point-in-Time Count found 18,365 people homeless on a single night in King County, a 9% jump from 2024. Every year, about 17,000 households exit the homelessness response system. About 18,000 enter it.
Homelessness is a housing crisis, but it is also a test of how a community treats its most vulnerable members. Ann McAlister, of First American Title Homebuilder Services (VP and PNW Sales Manager) and a HomeAid Puget Sound board member, has spent over 15 years organizing volunteer meal teams for unhoused young people in Seattle’s University District. When she began, the teams served around 35 young people a night. Today, they expect around 100. Ann has seen how easily people experiencing homelessness can be reduced to a statistic or a stereotype, and how something as simple as sharing a meal can begin to change that. “There’s a stigma around homelessness, but by and large, the young people who are on the street are often there because that is the safest option for them at the moment,” she says. “Homelessness was an improvement to their prior situation. They’re making choices that make the most sense based on the options available.”
Barb Oliver, who served as Director of Operations and Volunteer Coordinator for Sound Foundations NW from 2019 to 2025 and now advises cities on homelessness solutions, sees a persistent gap between existing housing and the support people need. She estimates that high-acuity housing accounts for around 40% of existing inventory, yet the need continues to outpace available resources. As she explains, “The population and the need have definitely evolved even in the last five years. We have a huge need for housing connected to trained, skilled case managers and security where people can re-learn community.”
For Barb, the challenge extends beyond the number of units built. “Homelessness is about a lack of community, not just housing. This is about individual people. To start, we have to care.”
For Seattle musician Billy Joe Huels, the stakes are personal. His brother Matt was trapped in a heartbreaking, decade-long cycle of homelessness & institutional living. As a young man, Matt was incredibly gifted, self-motivated, and charismatic — second in his high school class with an MBA by age 22. But when paranoid schizophrenia took hold, his life completely fell apart, and he eventually ended up on the streets. For years, he cycled continuously between homelessness, jail, Harborview, and Western State Hospital. His family struggled to keep him housed until Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), a Seattle nonprofit providing housing and ongoing clinical and case management support services to people experiencing homelessness since 1979, helped him move into a small apartment with ongoing professional support nearly 20 years ago. “It gave him his dignity back and allowed him to live a simple, stable life,” Billy Joe says. Matt passed away on December 17, 2025, after spending his final years with greater peace and dignity.
Billy Joe and his band, The Dusty 45s, continue to play DESC’s annual Gimme Shelter fundraiser, now in its 17th year. He has watched public understanding evolve alongside the event. When it began, many people struggled to understand why someone still living with mental illness or addiction deserved permanent supportive housing. Today, he sees a wider recognition that a stable, safe place to sleep is the foundation for healing.
“When I look out at the room and ask if anyone has a friend or family member affected by mental illness or addiction, almost every hand goes up.” He adds, “Seeing Seattle music fans, neighbors, and people from all walks of life come together for so many years straight to support these services reminds me that this work doesn't just change the lives of residents. It brings peace of mind to the families who love them, too.” Getting people off the streets, he says, takes “a massive amount of patience, specialized care, and a community that treats people with basic human dignity rather than criminalizing them for trying to survive.”
Meeting these needs requires not only the right services, but also partnerships that make appropriate housing possible. Briony Ball of DESC sees an opportunity for the building industry to be part of that community response. The question, she argues, is not simply how to build more homes, but how to build housing that works for the people who will live in it and sustains the services they need. As she explains:
“For builders, that means the work may extend beyond construction itself: understanding what providers need, helping make projects financially viable, and considering what it takes to keep housing safe, functional, and sustainable long after the ribbon cutting. Much of what keeps permanent supportive housing running for the long term, including operations, maintenance, and the on-site services residents rely on, depends on public funding. That makes builders’ voices valuable beyond the job site. When industry leaders tell their state and local elected officials that permanent supportive housing is worth sustained investment, they help make sure the homes they build keep working for the people who live in them.”
Seattle’s history shows us that homelessness is not a problem any one organization can solve alone. Addressing homelessness takes all of us. Builders, service providers, community partners, and state and local governments each have an important role to play in creating permanent supportive housing and ensuring the ongoing investment needed to sustain it. That is the community HomeAid helps build, connecting the construction industry with the service providers on the front lines of homelessness. When builders join this work, they bring more than their skills and resources. They become part of a network of people working toward a shared purpose, learning from one another and building solutions that no one could deliver alone. The crisis is complex, but the invitation is simple: there is a place for you in this work.