Pallet Shelter, a company that manufactures freestanding, one-to-two-person shelter units that has been active in Seattle since 2022, is shutting down effective tomorrow—an abrupt closure that comes just months after the nonprofit Everyone Deserves Housing opened a 75-unit Pallet shelter in Interbay.
If you’re selling at 5x the price of your competitors, this’ll happen
Pallet’s shelter units, which are made of plastic and fiberglass panels that flatten for transport, are utilitarian—consisting of little more than a shed with narrow cots that fold down from the walls—but expensive, at almost $20,000 for each micro-modular shelter. That’s almost five times as much as one of the Low-Income Housing Institute’s “tiny houses,” which are made of wood, and almost four times as much as Pallet cited as a starting price for each unit when PubliCola covered their first Seattle shelter in 2022.