Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in March that California would supply a total of 1,200 small cabins to Los Angeles, San Diego County, San Jose and Sacramento to house homeless people.
Amy King, CEO of Washington state-based Pallet Inc., said she was thrilled in September to sign a contract with the California Department of General Services setting pricing and construction standards for the tiny shelter homes her company makes.
Not having received any orders for months, however, King loaded her company’s latest prefabricated offering, designed to meet the state’s specifications, onto a truck and launched a tour of select Bay Area cities — including San Francisco — in hopes of finding future business.
“We’re proud of it,” said King, who parked across the street from Civic Center Plaza last week to show off a 120-square-foot cabin that had a bed, a shower and toilet, storage, heating, air conditioning, a window, a lockable door and a price tag of $48,500.
King, a former health-care administrator, said she founded Pallet as a public benefit corporation in 2016 with her contractor-builder husband. Their goal is to help displaced people, ranging from natural disaster victims to migrant workers. Many of their 80-plus employees have experience with homelessness, substance-use disorder or the criminal justice system.
Pallet was one of a half-dozen companies — including Vallejo-based prefabricated housing maker Factory OS — that signed state contracts in the fall setting terms in connection with the 1,200-cabin program, which had an initial estimated budget of $30 million.
A governor’s spokesman did not specify when cabins would be purchased.
After California has bought its 1,200 homes or waived its first-buy option, local governments can take advantage of the state-negotiated prices and standards.
King was accompanied by various staffers as well as Theo Ellington, a local public-affairs consultant who has helped make her case in City Hall, and Mark Perutz, a San Francisco-based partner at the venture capital firm DBL Partners, which invests in companies it believes will produce social and environmental benefits, as well as make money.
Pallet’s other stops last week were in Sacramento and San Jose. Stops scheduled for this week include Oakland, Monterey and San Rafael.
Oakland has already purchased 144 of Pallet’s older cabin models, which do not have bathrooms and which the company will stop making, King said. To date, Pallet has produced more than 4,000 shelters in roughly 121 villages in 86-plus cities around the country.
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San Francisco has been funding one operation with about 70 small cabins, and The City is currently developing two more sites that will have a combined 120 more. Sixty of the new residential cabins on one project are BOSS Cubez units, a Department of Public Works spokeswoman said. Those are sold by a Los Angeles County company.
Pallet is not a vendor to The City, but Public Works officials went to King’s demonstration and were evaluating her company’s offering.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman stopped by Pallet’s demo. He said later he thought the company could play a role in The City’s homelessness strategy.
“We really have not done much around tiny homes, and I have to say that is a mistake,” Mandelman said.
“Pallet could be part of a better approach to ending unsheltered homelessness in San Francisco, which I think is possible and important, as opposed to ending homelessness altogether, which is what the city bureaucracy is trying to do, which I do not think is possible for a municipality,” Mandelman said. “I really just think we cannot allow the level of public camping that we have.”
Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing spokeswoman Emily Cohen said her agency is committed to providing interim solutions like shelters and cabin communities and long-term housing solutions to address homelessness.
“This is a crisis that cannot be addressed with an either/or approach, we must pair the immediate interventions with long-term solutions so that people have a place to go once they are off the streets and in shelters,” she said via email.
Cohen’s department has a strategic plan that calls for adding 1,075 new shelter beds and 3,250 new units of housing, she said.
The 2022 federally mandated Point-In-Time Count in San Francisco showed total homelessness had decreased 3.5 percent from 8,035 in 2019 to 7,754, while the number of unsheltered homeless people had decreased by 15 percent from 5,180 to 4,397. The next count is scheduled to occur the night of Jan. 30.
Despite the positive numbers, controversy over encampments in public places has continued, with some citizens and business operators angry about unsightly street conditions and others offended by city efforts to remove homeless people and tents from public property.
Last week, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals largely upheld a preliminary injunction issued by a federal judge in San Francisco that bars The City from moving homeless encampments off public property without offering alternate shelter.
