(The Center Square) – A few days after a video that went viral was posted on X showing a taxpayer-funded tiny house in Seattle’s Interbay neighborhood being used as a safe house for drug use, the operators of the village have kicked out the nonprofit founder who helped to expose the situation.
The video, posted by We Heart Seattle Founder Andrea Suarez, shows a resident of the Interbay Village Tiny Home Community showing Suarez around the property, focused on an empty tiny home with a few chairs inside. The resident tells Suarez that is where other residents go inside to use hard drugs, including fentanyl, often with the drug dealer. According to the resident, the dealer also lives in the village.
“And in the name of keeping people alive, never using alone, we’re making sure people don’t overdose and die inside their houses,” said Suarez in an interview with The Center Square. “And it’s just really defeating and morally wrong in my opinion.”
We Heart Seattle has spent the last five-and-a-half years cleaning up Seattle parks and other drug infested areas, building relationships with users and helping many of them get into treatment toward turning their lives around.
“The definition of harm reduction is to give people a place to live, to stabilize, and put the oxygen mask on so that they can have a better chance at accessing resources, treatment, mental health care, versus a tent,” she said. “But what we saw there, and what we’ve always known, is that drug use is allowed inside the tiny house villages. They just often turn into trap houses and drug dens and places to have your friends over and use drugs.”
After the video was posted to X this week and viewed by more than 100,000 people, operators of the village, run by the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) told Suarez she was not welcome back.
“That film was actually taken a few weeks ago, and when I went back to visit my client at that village a couple days ago, I had four or five staff come out of the woodwork and tell me, ‘oh, by the way, you’re blacklisted, you’re not allowed to come here anymore,’” Suarez said, adding the village managers told her she was no longer allowed on the property because someone filmed without their permission.
She explained she’s not trying to get on anyone’s bad side, but thinks most taxpayers have no idea that they are funding these tiny villages and homeless housing projects. She said they are low-barrier or no-barrier, meaning drug use is openly permitted and treatment is not required.
“Instead of actually helping people and spending their time working with people on a pathway to self-sufficiency, they are more concerned about blacklisting me because I was just trying to show and educate people, what is really going on in there,” she said. “And I think people should know what’s going on there. Why hide it? Show the world. Show the world that these tiny house villages are places where people use.”
LIHI, Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who recently announced plans to expand tiny home villages in the city and King County Regional Homelessness Authority did not respond to The Center Square’s requests for comment.
Suarez said there is a “drug crisis” in the housing.
“That person never gets treatment, and they don’t realize that that person has to do sex trade, siphon gas, flip their stamp cards, porch prowl,” she said. “Car smash and grab, retail theft, broken windows in these small businesses. They don’t realize what are they doing all day to get the drugs? They are wreaking havoc in our communities.”
She said that users have been telling her that with stores cracking down on thieves with items in locked cages and barricaded store fronts, addicts are turning more often to the sex trade to get cash to feed their habit.
“People are more and more going to prostitution, Suarez said. “People are doing $10 tricks to get an hour’s worth of drive. It’s rampant. Men and women, and there’s perverted people that drive through these parks, waving money out of their car, and they know exactly what they’re doing when they get in the back of that car or go down the road or go to the massage parlor. They’re doing this very dark side of sex work. It fuels the drug market. It’s the supply chain element of the drug market.”
On Friday, Governor Bob Ferguson signed a controversial bill that takes away city and county local control over where these types of low-barrier housing projects are located.
“Permanent supportive housing, emergency housing, transitional housing, supports our most vulnerable Washingtonians,” Ferguson said. “Expanding it is an important step to ensuring more residents have a safe place to call home. House Bill 2266 creates clear statewide standards for permitting and treating those housing types like any other residential housing.”
As reported by The Center Square, the new law means transitional housing or permanent supportive housing will be allowed in any zone in which residential dwelling units or hotels are allowed. Indoor emergency shelters and indoor emergency housing would be allowed in any zones in which hotels are allowed.
