Transitional Housing Development and Shorewood High Robotics Club featured at January meeting of Richmond Beach Community Association

By Tom Petersen and Marcia McLaughlin

The January public meeting of the RBCA will be both serious and seriously fun! Representatives of Richmond Beach Congregational Church and Hopelink will make public their plan to convert church property along 15th Avenue NW to 24 units of transitional housing. Also, the Shorewood High School Robotics Club will be on hand to show their creations and tell of their work and the clubs achievements in competitions over the past year.

The meeting is Tuesday, January 10, at 7:30 p.m. in the basement of the same church, at the corner of 15th NW and Richmond Beach Road. All are welcome.

In October 2011, Richmond Beach Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, voted to partner with Hopelink to develop 24 units of transitional housing on the site of two houses on the northeast corner of the churches property. These houses are directly north of the church on 15th NW. While this construction will not actually take place for a couple of more years, they want the community to know what they are doing and to have an opportunity to ask questions.

Some history: One of these houses was the parsonage; the other was purchased by the church in the late 1970s. The parsonage has been primarily rented over the last 50 years, except for a couple of brief times when the pastor lived there. The other house was rented out for a while; since 1993, however, it has been in a transitional housing program through the Church Council of Greater Seattle. Since that time, 14 families have lived in that house.

Over the last several years, as part of the RBCC’s long range planning process, they looked at the usage of the property. The congregation overwhelmingly wanted to continue to use the property as a form of outreach but to increase that usage. The congregation chose Hopelink as its partner because Hopelink is a well-established local agency and because they provide supportive services to the residents. RBCC will continue to own the property, giving Hopelink a long term lease (50-75 years) for use of the property. Actual development of the properties will not be until about 2014.

The Shorewood High Robotics Club is under the direction of teacher Wesley Proudlove. Students with a mechanical, technical, or inventive bent build robots and enter them in competitions, in which the contraptions carry out various feats and functions. The new “season” will have just started, but the team will bring last year’s robots for a demonstration.

The RBCA will be inviting a different school or youth group to each meeting this spring.