New transitional housing for women in Lynnwood

Published 11:58 am Friday, February 22, 2008

Thanks to those who are able to afford to spend some time far away from home, many more families will have a place they can call home when they need it the most.

Rick and Anne Steves of Edmonds, who have been made a very well-to-do family by travelers who buy Steves’ European guidebooks and take his tours, are putting up $1 million to build 16 transitional housing units in Lynnwood for homeless women with children.

Given that during his teen travels in Europe Steves sometimes found himself sleeping in city parks or train stations, that he has seen crippling poverty in his travels in Central America and elsewhere, and that he now has a hugely successful business known worldwide, “it would be inconceivable for me not to think creatively about this (the issue of homelessness),” Steves told The Enterprise.

The project isn’t Steves’ alone. The Rotary Club of Edmonds lined up the contractor, put up $10,000 for the preliminary design, is ushering the project through city of Lynnwood channels, will help supervise construction and will donate labor for the project. The housing units, at 194th Street SW and 64th Avenue W., will be managed by Pathways for Women YWCA, a Lynnwood-based agency geared toward helping less-fortunate women in Snohomish County. The three-way partnership led to the project being named “Trinity Way.”

“We’re just thrilled about it,” said Rebecca Roby, regional director for Pathways YWCA. “It really is a great project.”

Bill Toskey, who served for eight years as executive director for the Port of Edmonds and has a background in construction, is managing the project on the Rotary Club’s end.

“We were looking for a project that would be a little bigger than normal and make a big impact on the community,” Toskey said.

The Rotary Club approached Pathways, which already had a long-established relationship with the Steves’. In the late 1980s, the Steves’ noticed that a small duplex next to their church, Trinity Lutheran in Lynnwood, was up for sale. They spent the $80,000 to buy it and donated it to Pathways. By the mid-’90s they had purchased three adjacent duplexes for a total of eight units in four duplexes.

Those units served as transitional homes to an estimated 100 families during their years in operation, Roby estimated. Those families are “on their feet and well on their way now,” she said. (For more information about Pathways, see related story).

An added benefit of the new units is that they will have room for larger families, which are sometimes difficult to place in multi-family buildings, Roby said.

As of last year, the original buildings had developed mold and were in need of upgrading. The Steves’ saw this as an opportunity to expand on their community service by tearing down the buildings and rebuilding twice the number of units.

“There was God in that mold,” Steves said.

The four lots had been zoned to allow no more than eight units total, so an amendment to Lynnwood’s Comprehensive Plan was required for the 16 units to be built, said Ron Hough, city planning manager.

The staff recommended approval because the property is located between lower density housing and a major commercial area (James Village) and is close to public transportation and Edmonds Community College, Hough said. These are the same reasons why it is a good location for the people it serves, say those involved.

“If there’s anywhere in the city that would justify higher density residential, this would be it,” Hough said.

The Planning Commission recently voted 7-0 to recommend approval to the City Council. The Council will have a work session on the project in July and a public hearing is tentatively scheduled for Sept. 8. Steves’ hope is to break ground in six months and have the buildings open in a year.

Though Trinity Way has yet to receive formal approval it’s already inspired the Housing Authority of Snohomish County to promise vouchers to Pathways to help cover the difference between what the project’s families pay – 30 percent of their income – and what is considered fair market rent, Roby said. This will essentially cover utilities and maintenance, she said. This is in keeping with the agency’s hope to make Trinity Way as self-sustaining as possible, Roby said.

For Steves, he will maintain ownership of the land with no risk, no expense and no income for at least 15 years – and have the joy of helping the homeless, which he says is much greater than the pleasure he’d get from a “car, condo at Whistler, yacht or whatever” that he could buy with the interest from the $1 million.

“It’s a vicarious sort of consumption,” said Steves, who also gives to several overseas-oriented charities along with local community schools, groups and the Edmonds Fourth of July Childrens’ Parade.

Steves hopes the project can inspire other individuals, businesses and charitable organizations to do more of the same, he said – “to think out of the box” about how to address society’s problems.

There can be an intangible but real multiplier,” he said.