Housing and accountability
Published 10:30 am Tuesday, January 20, 2026
Just over a year after its ribbon cutting, Island Center Homes is doing what it was built to do: putting doors, heat and stability between some of Vashon’s most vulnerable neighbors and a life outdoors.
In a community where housing is scarce and costs can be punishing, Vashon HouseHold has filled a gap that public systems and market forces have left wide open.
The complex represents years of fundraising, planning, county partnership and day-to-day management work that rarely makes headlines, but changes lives in the quiet, concrete ways that matter most.
Our front page story, “One year in, conflict emerges at Island Center Homes,” also makes clear that housing is only the beginning.
Island Center Homes sits at the intersection of compassion, accountability and limited resources and that intersection can be messy. Residents arrive with different needs and histories. Neighbors arrive with different fears and expectations.
A nonprofit developer arrives with legal obligations, staffing constraints and an imperfect toolkit for meeting human complexity on a small island.
Enter Hilary Emmer.
For more than a decade, Emmer has been one of Vashon’s most visible civic activists, known for pushing institutions hard and showing up, again and again, for the people most likely to be overlooked.
She has helped lead local point-in-time homeless counts and insisted the community look squarely at what those numbers mean in lived experience.
Through the Interfaith Council to Prevent Homelessness, she has described the unglamorous, practical work of keeping people housed: helping with rent and utilities, coordinating hot meals and finding basics like sleeping bags and repairs.
Her work has been recognized, too, including a King County Martin Luther King Jr. Medal of Distinguished Service for volunteer contributions. Even Vashon HouseHold honored her with its Broad Shoulders, Big Heart award in 2020.
Emmer can be polarizing. Pressure can be uncomfortable. But communities need builders and watchdogs.
Both things can be true at once: Vashon benefits from an intrepid critic who keeps asking us whether we’re matching our values with our action and the island benefits from Vashon HouseHold’s ability and commitment to deliver desperately needed housing to those who might otherwise be without.
— Aspen Anderson, Editor
