Volunteers of America representatives present to the neighborhood at a meeting about the shelter plans held the evening of Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2023 in Northshore Church in the neighborhood.
Photo by Michael Whitney.
EVERETT — A group of neighbors seek to prevent the placement of tiny home shelters for homeless people at the corner of Glenwood Avenue and Sievers-Duecy Boulevard. They say it’s land that was deeded to the city with the obligation to be the expansion of the Phil Johnson Ballfields.
The shelter site would house women and children in homelessness for short-term periods of up to one year. The Volunteers of America Western Washington (VOAWW) intends to place 20 Pallet shelters on the undeveloped half-acre.
This January, city planners authorized the shelter proposal.
It’s been held up in appeals since.
The appeals escalated to a court case filed in late June into Snohomish County Superior Court.
The lawsuit came shortly after a city hearing examiner rejected their appeal that the Pallet shelter would not conform to being a recreational use of the site.
The group fighting is named “Friends of Phil Johnson Ballpark Phase II,” which organized itself as a nonprofit.
At a November 2023 public information meeting in Northshore Church’s chapel, quite a few neighbors in general had raised concerns about the site’s presence. In court, though, the Friends nonprofit is fighting through the strictest sense of zoning code: They say the allowance is being misapplied for the site’s underlying zoning. The site used to be the CEMEX quarry, and the zoning is for light industrial.
City planners have rebutted homeless shelters can be approved administratively within this zone.
While the site was promised to be the expansion of the Phil Johnson Ballfields, city officials said Everett has no immediate park development plans at the November 2023 meeting, which is one reason why it is offering half an acre for the Pallet shelter.
The city purchased the tiny home shelters for the project. It would become its third Pallet shelter site operating.
The wider area was once a huge mining quarry for the Associated Sand and Gravel company, which opened in 1939. Its company owner later became CEMEX.
The start of the Phil Johnson Ballfields came through an earlier sale of one of the parcels in 2001. In the late 2010s, CEMEX arranged to transfer its remaining acres to the city as it closed this plant. The company had almost 60 acres fronting Sievers-Duecy Boulevard, plus 35 at the north corner.
—Tribune archives were used for this story.
