Tucked between a bank’s parking lot and a four-story apartment complex off 15th Avenue Northwest, a nondescript fenced-off lot will soon be home to 16 “tiny houses,” capable of temporarily sheltering up to 20 women at a time.

The homes in what’s called Whittier Heights Village, north of 80th Street, are part of a growing trend in Seattle of using 100-square-foot structures to provide housing, security and stability to unsheltered people.

This tiny house village — funded through public and private donations — will be the eighth of its kind in Seattle but the first that will serve exclusively one gender.

“It’s a need in the community. There’s a lot of homeless women. Some of them feel more comfortable in a single-sex environment,” said Sharon Lee, executive director of the Low Income Housing Institute, an affordable housing developer that manages the city’s tiny house villages.

Lee said the village will welcome women who are mothers or are pregnant, seniors, veterans and same-sex female couples.

Whittier Heights Village should be completed by the end of this month, Lee said. Some of the first residents are already lined up.

Not only is the new tiny house community for women, it’s being built predominantly by women, too. Weekend work parties have drawn dozens of female volunteers skilled in trades — carpenters, electricians, plumbers, painters and more, Lee said.

With an estimated 11,600 people homeless in King County and no sign of the problem abating, the tiny house trend is just one tool among many to gradually help people return to permanent housing. “The idea is to get people in a safe environment, so they’re no longer living in a tent or in a sleeping bag on the street,” Lee said.

Residents of the tiny house villages use them more as a temporary solution. They have a safe place to live while they work with an on-site social worker or case manager to receive needed services and eventually move into long-term or permanent housing.

Lee said it’s “so cost-effective” given Seattle’s shortage of affordable housing, and she said Seattle’s tiny house villages are a “proven model” that’s being replicated in other parts of Washington state and as far away as Denver, Colorado.

National advocacy groups dedicated to ending homeless say it’s hard to gauge how prevalent tiny home villages are nationwide. But, they say, there’s certainly a lot of talk about using them, and villages are popping up in some communities, particularly on the West Coast. “It’s a good alternative to unsheltered homelessness and also has the effect of connecting people with permanent housing; that’s fantastic,” said Tristia Bauman, senior attorney for the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.