Our genius for
folly forgot that a real traditional family home always had a spare bedroom for
the family member in trouble. Even
better everyone was part of a living working family. Now our social experiment of the late twentieth
century has tossed a whole lot of people on the mercy of the commons. This could never work well and even these
solutions are only a good start at addressing the problem.
The main reason
it is even been tackled is because the victims are showing up on your street.
Yet this is all
a good start and they are actually a pack of important experiments.
Our real problem
today is that cities make money catering to developers who make their money
selling to the top third of the wage earners and delivering a substandard product
even then. That means that the rest must
make do in the aftermarket on properties decades old at least. This is a lousy equation although it
describes every city in existence.
A better
equation is to insist on a standard slab becoming the housing standard with
services factored in along with an upgrade cycle. Then weigh investment across a population with
the commons worth growing faster than the book value of the housing itself. That drives the decision process in a far
different direction. Done correctly we
can have superior outcomes.
The bottom line
is that homelessness is not caused economic failure, but by a combination of
urban design failure and a flawed social system that has actually regressed
over the past thirty years due to underinvestment.
Once again, the king
prints all the money, and uses it all to build a palace while the folks get to
sleep on the road and remain unable to pay taxes. This is design failure.
These present adventures
are actually a sound start and could just as easily be built into any condo
complex.
Tiny Houses for
the Homeless: An Affordable Solution Catches On
Sunday, 23 February 2014 14:06By Erika Lundahl,
A growing number
of towns and cities have found a practical solution to homelessness through the
construction of tiny-house villages - and housing officials are taking notice.
On a Saturday in September, more than 125 volunteers
showed up with tools in hand and built six new 16-by-20-foot houses for a group
of formerly homeless men. It was the beginning of Second Wind Cottages, a tiny-house
village for the chronically homeless in the town of Newfield, N.Y., outside of
Ithaca.
On January 29, the village officially opened, and
its first residents settled in. Each house had cost about $10,000 to build, a
fraction of what it would have cost to house the men in a new apartment
building.
The project is part of a national movement of
tiny-house villages, an alternative approach to housing the homeless that's
beginning to catch the interest of national advocates and government housing
officials alike.
For many years, it has been tough to find a way to
house the homeless. More than 3.5
million people experience homelessness in the United States each year,
according to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. Shortages of
low-income housing continue to be a major challenge. For every 100 households
of renters in the United States that earn "extremely low income" (30
percent of the median or less), there are only 30 affordable apartments
available, according to a 2013 report from
the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
But Second Wind is truly affordable, built by
volunteers on seven acres of land donated by Carmen Guidi, the main coordinator
of the project and a longtime friend of several of the men who now live there.
The retail cost of the materials to build the first six houses was somewhere
between $10,000 and $12,000 per house, says Guidi. But many of the building
materials were donated, and all of the labor was done in a massive volunteer
effort.
"We've raised nearly $100,000 in 100
days," he says, and the number of volunteers has been "in the
hundreds, maybe even thousands now."
The village will ultimately include a common house,
garden beds, a chicken coop, and 18 single-unit cottages.
"Camp Quixote" becomes a village
"The typical development for extremely
low-income housing is trending up toward $200,000 per unit. That's a lot of
bills," says Jill Severn, a board member at Panza, a nonprofit
organization that sponsors another tiny-house project called Quixote Village.
(The organization's name is a play on Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's sidekick in
Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel.)
Quixote Village opened in Olympia, Wash., right
before Christmas. But it began in February 2007 as "Camp Quixote," a
protest held in a city-owned parking lot. A group of homeless people assembled
there to oppose an Olympia ordinance that made it illegal to sit, lie down, or
sell things within six feet of downtown buildings. When police evicted the
campers eight days after the protest began, the Olympia Unitarian Universalist
Congregation stepped in to help, offering temporary refuge on their land.
For five years, the camp's location rotated, moving
and reassembling every 90 days at one of several different local churches.
Panza was formed by a corps of volunteers from the faith communities assisting
the camp, and the organization worked with the city council to secure and
rezone a parcel of county-owned industrial land near a community college and
create a permanent site for the village. In December of 2013, the residents of
Quixote Village settled into their new homes there.
Quixote Village has fostered a positive relationship
between its residents and local government and police, says Severn. Despite
this, the project was held up in court for a year by a local organization of
businesses and landowners called the Industrial Zoning Preservation
Association, which cited concerns over the potential impact on local businesses
in a nearby industrial park.
Panza used the time to fundraise and build an
outreach campaign to win over the public. They had the support of legions of
volunteers, mostly from local churches, who had staffed the camp.
"Having hundreds of [residents] get to know
people that were homeless made a huge difference in the success of getting this
off the ground," says Severn.
Today, the 30 structures that make up Quixote
Village are home to 29 disabled adults, almost all of whom qualify as
"chronically homeless," by the standards of the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development.
The residents also have a common space with shared
showers, a laundry, garden space, and a kitchen. By sharing these amenities, the
community was able to increase the affordability of the project and design a
neighborhood they believed would fit their needs and make them more
self-sufficient.
The shared space has also helped them create a
supportive community. The residents, who are self-governed, have developed a
rulebook that prohibits illegal drugs and alcohol on the grounds and requires
that each member put in a certain number of service hours per week. They
meet twice a week in the evenings to discuss problems or concerns and to share
a common meal that they take turns cooking.
The main complaint right now, says Raul Salazar, the
village's program manager and only full-time staff member, is that the postal
service still hasn't started delivering mail.
The cost of units at Quixote Village is
significantly higher than at Second Wind—about $88,000 per unit—but that's
still less than half the cost of the average public housing project, according
to Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.
Quixote has had access to state funding and local community grants, as well as
private funding from individuals, businesses, and two Native American tribes.
The project also received a Community Development Block Grant for $604,000 from
the State of Washington Department of Commerce and a $1.5-million grant from
the Washington State Legislature.
Two architecture and design firms, MSGS Architects
and KMB Design Groups, also contributed design services pro bono, and the
Thurston County Commission is leasing the land to Quixote for $1 per year.
Gaining acceptance
Many other tiny-house projects are just beginning to
get of the ground, raise money, find land, and gain approval from local
officials and members of the public. But the unorthodox nature of the small
houses presents unique legal zoning limitations and barriers that limit where
tiny houses can be stationed.
In Madison, Wisc., Occupy Madison has been facing
this very challenge, as the group forged ahead with plans for a tiny house
village.
In the spring of 2011, prior to the launch of the
Occupy Wall Street movement, a
series of protests at the Wisconsin State Capitol—focused on the
state's controversial anti-collective-bargaining bill—prompted additional
legislation that prohibited groups from gathering without a permit. When the
protests joined forces with Occupy in the fall of 2011, this created a unique
opportunity for the voices of the many homeless people in Madison to be heard.
"There were some great moments throughout the
Occupy movement where a lot of dialogue was going on between the people without
homes and the people with homes," says Allen Barkoff, one of the board
members of Occupy Madison, Inc., a nonprofit formed in December 2012 to address
the need for legal places where homeless people in Madison could congregate and
stay safe. The organization first looked into buying an apartment building or a
shared house for the homeless but ultimately settled on tiny houses as the most
flexible and economical way to create homes for people.
In this case, the cost of building the tiny homes
comes to around $5,000 each, funded by private donations and an online crowd-funding
campaign. The nonprofit also plans to apply for some city grants. Each
home will come with a propane heater, a composting toilet, and an 80-watt solar
panel array—and will be about 98 square feet in size, 99 if you include the
porch. (The volunteers enjoy the joke: "We are the 99 square
feet!")
But the question of where the houses can legally be
located is still up in the air. Volunteers are now building houses for six
people. Because of a recent ordinance change, the houses are allowed to sit on
church property in groups of three. City regulations also permit them to be
placed on the side of the road, as long as they are relocated every 48 hours.
But Madison's snowy winter makes the houses hard to move, explains Barkoff.
Now Occupy Madison, Inc., is in the middle of a
lengthy process to purchase a parcel of land on the east side of the city to
accommodate 11 houses, along with a central building (a converted gas station)
that can serve as a workshop for making more homes. This spring, they will
continue to hold neighborhood meetings about the project, talk with police, and
work with the Madison Planning and Development Department—and, eventually, the
city council—to negotiate zoning issues for the village.
The real cost of homelessness
Efforts to break through the red tape and raise
money to house the homeless almost always pay off for a community. Even the
most expensive tiny-house projects—such as a new, ambitious $6-million campaign
to build a 200-person tiny-house park this year in Austin, Texas—can't rival
the cost of homelessness to taxpayers, which was more than $10 million per year
in Austin, for example, as YES!
reported in December 2013.
"Chronically homeless people—people who have
disabilities and are homeless for long periods of time—can be very expensive to
systems of public care," explains Roman. In 2007, the National Alliance to
End Homelessness compiled three studies showing that it costs the same or less
money to provide permanent housing as it does to allow people to remain
homeless. In Denver, Colo., a housing program for the homeless reduced the
costs of public services (including medical services, temporary shelter, and
costs associated with arrests and incarceration) by an estimated $15,773 per
person per year, saving
taxpayers thousands of dollars.
Government officials and city planners are beginning
to see the tiny-house village as one viable solution for addressing
homelessness.
"It's certainly something that we would
encourage other communities to take a look at when it comes to creating
solutions for housing the chronically homeless," says Lee Jones, a
spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
"It's a very important step in terms of the kinds of services we should be
providing to people that need assistance."
Currently, the various efforts to house the homeless
in tiny-house villages comprise a small and pioneering movement: But each new
project helps create lessons and a model for other communities.
For example, Quixote Village, as a recipient of
state funding, is considered a "pilot" project: It is required to
report its progress to the state legislature in five years. In the meantime,
says Severn, the residents will be settling in, putting in garden beds,
building a carpentry workshop, searching for jobs, and simply living their
lives.
"One of our residents has been homeless for
about 25 years," Severn says. "He told me he's excited to start a
little rose garden. It really touched me to hear that."
1 comment:
I love this idea and if these villages had webpages there could be a really good way to donate 'stuff' that they might need or be able to use like tools and ladders and buckets and paint that are just being thrown out or discarded by others. There are natural born gardeners and painters and bird house makers and crafts people whose spirits could be lifted up some and I hope only for success as it is a sure thing that there is no place like a little home no matter the size it is the heart in it that counts.
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