Port Orchard's Pacific Building Shelter Wins National Award After Housing 198 People

A 75-bed shelter in Port Orchard that opened 18 months ago in a former fitness club has won a national award for reshaping how Kitsap County responds to homelessness. The Pacific Building Housing Navigation Center received a 2026 Achievement Award from the National Association of Counties, the organization announced this week, citing the facility's integration of behavioral health care, medical services, housing navigation, employment support and pet co-sheltering into a single emergency shelter model. Since opening on Jan. 27, 2025, the center has served 198 individuals, sheltered 17 pets, moved 72 residents into permanent housing and helped 26 secure jobs. Kitsap County Commissioner Katie Walters, who represents District 3, called the recognition "a testament to our staff, our partners, and the volunteers who come in every day to support our guests." The award lands as the county's own annual count shows 551 people experiencing homelessness in Kitsap as of January, a number the Pacific Building alone cannot resolve but was specifically designed to chip away at.

From Empty Fitness Club to a $6.4 Million Shelter

The building at 4459 SE Mile Hill Drive in Port Orchard used to house Olympic Fitness Club. Kitsap County bought the 20,000-square-foot property on April 14, 2021, for $1.5 million, using state grants earmarked for emergency housing and homeless shelter development. Construction to convert the gym into a congregate co-shelter began in March 2024, and the doors opened to guests on Jan. 27, 2025. The full project, from acquisition through build-out, carried a budget of $6,410,270, funded through a combination of federal, state and local sources, according to Kitsap County's Department of Human Services. That two-and-a-half-year gap between purchase and opening is typical for county-run shelter conversions, which have to clear zoning, permitting and construction timelines before a single bed is available. It is a lag that matters in a county where the need was already documented years before the ribbon-cutting, and it is one reason homelessness response plans tend to lean on existing overnight shelters and motel vouchers while a facility like the Pacific Building works its way through design and construction. The $6.4 million figure is worth sitting with: it works out to roughly $85,500 per bed for a facility built to run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, a cost structure closer to a small medical clinic than a traditional overnight shelter, and one county officials have pointed to when defending the price tag against critics who favor cheaper, lower-service alternatives.

Eighteen Months, 198 Guests, 72 New Addresses

In its first year and a half, the Pacific Building served 198 individuals under a model built around 24-hour, 365-day wraparound services rather than the overnight-only shelters that dominated the county's response for decades. Of those guests, 72 transitioned into permanent housing and 26 secured employment while staying at the facility, figures the county and NACo both cite as the core evidence for the award. Carl Borg, who manages Kitsap County's Housing and Homelessness Division, said the facility is built to help residents "re-build and re-balance their lives" through structured safety, support and services aimed at stable, permanent housing rather than a temporary bed for the night. The 72-person permanent-housing figure represents more than a third of everyone the shelter has served since opening, a conversion rate county officials point to as validation of the wraparound approach over a pure emergency-bed model. It also means roughly two-thirds of the 198 people who have come through the Pacific Building have not yet moved into permanent housing, a gap that reflects both the ordinary length of a housing search in a tight Puget Sound rental market and the reality that some guests arrive needing months of behavioral health or substance treatment before they are ready to sustain a lease on their own. County officials have not published an average length of stay, so it is not possible to say from public data alone whether that two-thirds figure represents people still actively working through the program or people who left before completing it.

Why Guests Can Bring Their Dogs and Cats

The Pacific Building is designated a "co-shelter," a distinction that matters more than it might sound. Traditional shelters routinely turn away people with pets, and outreach workers across the country have long identified that policy as one of the more common reasons chronically unhoused people refuse an available bed. Kitsap's facility instead allows men, women, families and their companion animals to stay together, and has sheltered 17 pets alongside their owners since opening. The building also houses on-site access to medical care, mental health treatment and substance abuse services, so guests are not required to leave the property and navigate a separate appointment system to get treatment that keeps them housed. That combination of pets allowed, treatment on-site and no overnight-only curfew is what NACo's award citation specifically flagged as innovative among the "18 categories" of county programs the association recognizes annually. It is also the combination outreach workers most often cite when a chronically unhoused person turns down an available bed at a conventional shelter, which makes the design choice as much a practical engagement tool as a comfort. Seventeen pets is a small number against 198 human guests, but it is not a trivial one for a county government to accommodate. Housing a dog or cat inside a congregate facility means additional cleaning protocols, liability considerations and staff trained to manage animals alongside residents in crisis, costs that a conventional 75-bed shelter without the co-shelter designation would not carry at all.

A Non-Competitive Award, Real Numbers Behind It

NACo's Achievement Awards program has run since 1970 and is explicitly non-competitive. Counties apply, and any program that meets the bar in its category can win, rather than facilities being ranked head-to-head against each other for a single title. That structure means the award itself carries less weight as a comparative honor than a program that beat out rival applicants would. What it does confirm is closer to a national quality-assurance check, the kind an outside association with decades of county-government case studies runs against every applicant before signing off. NACo looked at Kitsap's model, measured it against the standard set by prior winners across its 18 categories, and found it met the bar for what the organization considers exportable best practice. For a county the size of Kitsap, with roughly 275,000 residents, that kind of outside validation is also a practical asset the next time the Department of Human Services applies for the state and federal grants that funded the building in the first place, since grant reviewers weigh a program's track record as much as its design on paper. The award also arrives at a moment when several county-level social service programs nationally have faced tighter federal funding scrutiny, making an independent, third-party endorsement from the national association representing county governments more valuable to a small county's grant applications than it might have been in a less competitive funding environment.

What the County's Own Numbers Say About the Job Still Ahead

Kitsap County's most recent Point-in-Time count, conducted Jan. 29, 2026, found 551 people experiencing homelessness countywide: 230 unsheltered and 321 in some form of shelter, split between 227 in emergency beds like the Pacific Building's and 94 in transitional housing. A year earlier, the 2025 count had logged roughly 250 people in Bremerton alone, with about 50 in Silverdale and 70 expected in Port Orchard. Those city-level figures and the 2026 countywide total are not directly comparable, since one is a partial city breakdown and the other a full county census, but neither shows the kind of decline that 75 new beds and a nationally recognized program might be expected to produce. County survey data shows why a bed count alone will not close that gap: almost 70% of unsheltered respondents cited mental health issues as the main reason they became homeless in 2022, and while that share fell to 57% by 2024 as substance abuse and other health issues took a larger part of the blame, mental health has remained the single biggest driver every year the county has asked the question. That is the case for exactly the kind of on-site behavioral health access the Pacific Building was built around, even if 75 beds cannot on their own absorb 230 unsheltered residents. It also explains why the county's messaging around the shelter emphasizes services over square footage: a building that only offered beds without treatment access would likely see the same guests cycle back onto the unsheltered count within months, which is the outcome the wraparound model is specifically designed to prevent.

The Model the County Wants to Repeat

Kitsap's Housing and Homelessness Division describes its goal in three words: make homelessness "rare, brief and one-time." The Pacific Building is the most visible test of whether that goal is achievable with the co-shelter, wraparound-services approach, and the county has treated it as a template rather than a one-off. The division's public materials already frame the facility as a South Kitsap solution within a broader countywide strategy, funded through the same braided federal, state and local grant streams that built it, with a five-year homeless housing plan approved by the county in December 2025 setting the direction for what comes after the Pacific Building. Whether NACo's recognition translates into faster grant approvals or additional shelter capacity elsewhere in the county is not yet answered, but the award gives Kitsap's Department of Human Services a stronger case to make the next time it goes looking for the money to try the model again. For a county that has spent years fielding public frustration over visible homelessness in Bremerton, Silverdale and Port Orchard, a national award attached to a specific, countable outcome, 72 people in permanent housing, is a different kind of evidence than the county has typically had to offer when defending its approach at budget hearings. It does not settle the broader argument over how a mid-sized county should spend limited housing dollars, but it does give commissioners a concrete answer the next time a resident asks whether the Pacific Building's price tag actually produced anything.