City Council gave the go-ahead Tuesday evening to revive Peace Village, the city’s only sanctioned homeless encampment.
The unanimous vote came three years after a decision to buy a series of prefabricated pallet shelters to replace what was a shanty village of tents and sheds. And a month after the shelter manufacturer shut down, meaning the city will be on its own for replacement parts and maintenance.
Person Centered Housing Options will serve as the contractor for the site, providing outreach services and case management to transition people into long-term housing. Residents would need to apply for one of the 18 units on site and would have to follow rules for living in Peace Village.
The initial funding for Peace Village is set at $1.2 million and will come from money the city received from state settlements with opioid manufacturers. That money would carry operations through June 2027. The annual operating cost going forward is estimated at $1.9 million.
The project was spearheaded by Council President Miguel Meléndez in 2023, after the city cleared a large homeless encampment on Loomis Street the previous fall.
“This has been an incredible journey to get to passing this piece of legislation today,” Meléndez said in an interview after the vote.
Peace Village was established in 2018 on Industrial Street just north of downtown after the city cleared an encampment of the same name on South Avenue. Residents lived in squalid conditions. Rat burrows dotted a berm around the site, trash and needles were strewn along the ground, and portions of the site’s sheds were either totally or partially burnt.
But it was still a place where people who had nowhere else to go could call home.
Council bought the small, heated and cooled shelters from Everett, Washington-based Pallet in 2023 for $750,000, and razed the tent village the next spring. But issues with nonprofits tapped to oversee Peace Village and an inability to secure a contractor to operate the site left the shelters sitting in storage for years.
The shelters were finally constructed last month, becoming one of the last Pallet villages to be erected.
In a statement, Pallet said the homeless response landscape has “evolved significantly” since the company launched.
“Communities understand the challenge differently,” the statement read. “Customer needs have become more complex. Funding environments and political priorities have shifted.”
Reports of the abrupt closure also noted that Pallet’s $20,000 shelters were now competing with wooden tiny homes built by the Low-Income Housing Institute for one-fifth that cost.
Those changes range from community understandings of the problem, more complex customer needs, and shifting political priorities.
“We believe the next phase of this work requires us to take everything we have learned and apply it differently,” the statement reads. “Members of our team will carry nine years of experience, relationships, lessons learned across North America, and a deep understanding of the realities of implementing homelessness solutions into what comes next.”
The bill establishing the new Peace Village originally was slated for a vote last month as well but was held pending last-minute amendments. The final changes were introduced and voted on during Tuesday’s Council meeting.
Councilmembers Mary Lupien and Chiara Smith proposed the last-minute amendments that sought to bar armed guards from the site, keep identities of residents confidential, and for Council to conduct a feasibility study for allowing tents to be set up on site.
The final language of the bill was not publicly released prior to the vote.
“I’m trying to separate how I feel about this personally, from my role as councilmember versus someone who lives in a community that is overrun by encampments,” Smith said. “I know that this isn’t the end-all be-all, but we definitely did need a pathway for members of the community who choose to live outside.”
Meléndez said he recognizes that the new Peace Village “is not a panacea.” But he said it is a critical first step in filling a gap in low-barrier shelters in the city.
“This is not going to solve, in every neighborhood, the challenges that we see with encampments and other things,” he said. “But it creates the opportunity for us to have conversations with our other partners in government. Monroe County, our state delegation, and others, and really look at what else could we be doing in this space.”
Meléndez did not put a timeline on when the site would officially open, with Person Centered Housing Options still finalizing its plans for the site. He set a hopeful date in mid-November.
