Pallet Shelters at Clare’s Place.
Pallet, the Everett-based maker of tiny shelters that started in 2017, has officially shut down their business. Much of their business was in the Pacific Northwest, but they had shelter locations in California, Florida, Hawaii, Texas, Minnesota, Missouri, and a few on the East Coast as well.
The company benefited from over $3 million in purchases from the City of Everett using ARPA funds, including a pilot project of 40 shelters purchased for $477,391 in 2021 that was added to the 21 Behind the Everett Gospel Mission that took 3 years to come to fruition.
$348,000 was spent on the shelters at Clare’s Place, but costs were split between Snohomish County and the City of Everett.
$2.79 million in ARPA money was spent on the “Palisades,” 40 shelters on Sievers Duecy Boulevard, launching in December 2025.
Here are a few snippets from the explanation from Pallet about the closure:
The homelessness response landscape has evolved significantly since Pallet began. Communities understand the challenge differently. 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.
Those lessons have led us to an important decision: we are closing this chapter of Pallet.
This decision is not a retreat from our mission. It is a commitment to it.
Together with our partners, we helped create an entirely new category of emergency shelter and demonstrated that communities could respond to unsheltered homelessness differently.
Since 2017, Pallet villages across the United States and Canada have created more than 6,083 beds and provided safe shelter to an estimated 30,000+ people. Along the way, we helped change policies, building codes, legislation, and perceptions—creating new pathways for communities and for people experiencing homelessness. And through our fair chance employment model, we created meaningful employment, training, and opportunity for people too often overlooked by traditional employers.
The shelters may have been built by Pallet, but the lasting impact was created together.
We believe the next phase of this work requires us to take everything we have learned and apply it differently. Members of our team will carry nine years of experience, relationships, lessons learned across North America, and a deep understanding of the realities of implementing homelessness solutions into what comes next.
We are not walking away from the problem. We are changing how we help solve it.
Pallet was created to make an impact. And while Pallet the business is coming to an end, the communities created, the skills and opportunities gained through fair chance employment, the policies and perceptions changed, and the thousands of shelters still serving people will carry that impact forward.
This is the end of Pallet as we have known it.
But it is not the end of the work.
September 12, 2026
Everett