I volunteer at two housing non profits in Seattle, Sound Foundations NW, which is focused on temporary emergency housing, and Facing Homelessness’s BLOCK Project homes, focused on sustainable permanent housing.

I’m a Team Lead / Lead Volunteer in both organizations, and I love being able to contribute something meaningful back to the community. This post is going to cover the amazing work that Facing Homelessness do, with the generous help of volunteer hosts in Seattle.

How does the BLOCK Project work?

The BLOCK Project builds permanent housing as an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU, aka “granny flat”) in a willing host’s backyard. The BLOCK project builds and pays for the ADU, including permitting and setting up utilities; they are also responsible for maintaining the home throughout its lifetime.

After the BLOCK home is built, Facing Homelessness reach out to vetted agencies to connect the host with a new tenant experiencing homelessness. The home owners are integral to this process and become part of a support network for the new tenant, which also includes case management and regular contact from Facing Homelessness for maintenance and check ins. The BLOCK home project has a 95% success rate of tenants remaining in permanent housing.

Each home costs $75k in material and site costs, which is significantly cheaper than the next-cheapest permanent housing option, at $300k.

The New York Times recently profiled the homes and the organization. I helped to build the house pictured in that article, and we’re also constructing that same house in this video.

What are the homes like?

The BLOCK homes are sustainable, fully contained tiny-home sized dwellings measuring 8’ x 16’ ft (or 2.4m x 4.8m, a total area of 130 sq feet / 12 sq metres) with a kitchen, bathroom and living area, plus an additional deck and storage room outside. They’re built for a single occupant and designed small, to fit into as many backyards as possible.

BLOCK homes are connected to the electricity grid and water utilities, but also have solar panels (net zero!) and rainwater collection. They are built with highly sustainable materials including Juniper – an invasive wood in the Pacific Northwest – for decking and siding, and they use sheep’s wool for insulation. The windows are triple-paned and European-style tilt-opened for insulation and temperature regulation. Facing Homelessness recently achieved Living Building Challenge certification for the BLOCK homes, which is the greenest and most sustainable certification possible.

In addition to all of their sustainable features, the BLOCK homes are just beautiful to look at. The Juniper wood siding has lots of stunning character, and everything is stained rather than painted. Each home installation includes hardscaping and landscaping, a stone patio and a beautiful garden of native plants. This is block home 15 nearing the end of its assembly phase.

How are they built?

The homes are built in two phases: the first is constructing prefabricated panels in a factory, and the second is prepping the site and assembling the house. That includes prep for electrical and water utilities, moving all the prefab panels to site, assembling the home together, and landscaping.

Both phases are heavily reliant on volunteers; there are only two (!) paid construction managers at Facing Homelessness who are often managing multiple jobs, such as coordinating volunteers, prepping tilt up days, conducting home inspections and repairs, and managing the factory.

The assembly is described as “IKEA on steroids” and is often done by groups of volunteers with no construction experience. The instruction guides for each panel are full of helpful diagrams. Volunteers are guided by a Lead Volunteer who trains them on various tools (e.g. nail guns, screw guns, domino) and checks for quality control. The panels are built on jigs, or templates, which allows each group to create identical wall, floor, ceiling, deck or siding panels that will later be assembled on site. The houses are reasonably complex; there are dozens of different jigs used in the factory, and there’s a set of booklets to describe how each panel is built and how it all fits together onsite.

My experience volunteering with the BLOCK Project (and how you can volunteer!)

I really like volunteering at the BLOCK Project because it shows how complex a house is to build, with so many moving parts that all need to be precise. They’ve somehow made it straightfoward for people with no experience to build meaningful parts of a house, which is impressive when the house needs electrical systems, plumbing, ventilation, insulation, fixtures, and forms a tight, weatherproof envelope.

I’m currently a Lead Volunteer at the BLOCK Project and I help to guide groups of volunteers through building on the jigs. A lot of people are new to construction when they volunteer, and it’s fun for them to see a wall or section being built. We get volunteers to sign their name on the inside of a panel when they’ve finished building it.

I also spend extra time weekly with additional Factory/Shop support – helping to clean, reorganize, build new shelving, sort & catalogue materials, and random maintenance.

There’s a cyclic nature to the BLOCK home; there will be periods of a few months where the factory in Georgetown is active building all of the home components, then other times where the focus is on a new housing site, in prep or assembly. If you’re in the Seattle area, you can sign up for volunteer slots on their website.

I love the community-minded drive behind the BLOCK Project, and I’m fascinated with the potential to construct lots of permanent housing in an area where housing is expensive and scarce. I am eager to see where Facing Homelessness and the BLOCK Project go from here.