Pallet shuts down after nine years of taking on homelessness with its durable micro-shelters

Nine years after setting out to tackle unsheltered homelessness with rapidly deployable, hard-panel micro-shelters, Everett, Wash.-based social purpose corporation Pallet is closing its business.

In a post on its website, Pallet said the landscape surrounding the homelessness response has evolved significantly since the company was founded in 2017.

“Communities understand the challenge differently,” Pallet’s statement says. “Customer needs have become more complex. Funding environments and political priorities have shifted. And through nine years of working alongside communities across North America, we have learned an extraordinary amount about what works, what doesn’t, and what is needed next.”

Since launching, the company deployed over 100 transitional villages across North America, providing more than 6,000 temporary beds and serving an estimated 30,000 individuals. To support that scale, Pallet raised more than $18 million in venture and impact funding — including a $15 million Series A round in 2022.

Pallet was founded by husband-and-wife team Amy and Brady King, who grew the social purpose company out of their work in general contracting and a desire to build fast, dignified, individual emergency shelter alternatives.

The pair designed modular, panelized shelter units that could be assembled on-site in under an hour without specialized tools — incorporating climate control, lockable doors, and cleanable hard surfaces to serve both natural disaster relief and city homelessness responses.

Pallet was the Hardware/Gadget/Robotics of the Year winner at the 2022 GeekWire Awards.

“We exist because communities cannot quickly build enough affordable, permanent housing to meet the needs of their residents,” Amy King, Pallet’s CEO, said in 2022.

GeekWire reached out to Pallet for comment on Tuesday and we’ll update this story when we hear back.

In a report on the closure, Seattle news outlet PubliCola noted that Pallet’s plastic and fiberglass panel units ran roughly $20,000 each — nearly five times the cost of a traditional wooden tiny home built by the Low-Income Housing Institute.

In Seattle, where the city recently partnered with Pallet on a 75-unit shelter in Interbay, the contract budget with the city’s Human Services Department roughly tripled from $1.3 million to nearly $4 million as the scope expanded, PubliCola reported.

With Pallet shutting down, operators of existing sites will now be left to perform their own ongoing maintenance and source replacement parts independently.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who pledged to open 1,000 new units of shelter and emergency housing during her first year in office, called Pallet’s closure unfortunate.

“My understanding is that Pallet shutting down is really due to shifts in the availability of public funding,” Wilson told PubliCola. “They just don’t have the demand, in terms of purchasing their shelters, that they need to keep them in business.”

Pallet noted that its team members plan to carry their operational experience into new initiatives within the homelessness space, while pointing to lasting systemic changes — such as updated building codes and policy shifts — that helped legitimize rapid-deployment shelter alternatives.

“Our goal was never to defend one solution. Our goal is to solve the problem,” the company wrote on its website, framing the closure not as a retreat, but as a necessary evolution.

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