Inspired Self-Managed Tiny Home Village for Formerly Homeless

My name's Andrew Heban, I'm currently the project director at Square One Villages, a non-profit creating self-managed communities of cost-effective tiny homes. We're here at Opportunity Village, which was a pilot project that opened in 2013. There's 30 tiny houses here, we have both Conestoga huts and what we call the wood-framed bungalows that are 8x8 and 8x10. So really it's designed to be an intermediate solution to the problem of homelessness, provide a place to be in the absence of more permanent solutions. So we're providing people the opportunity to have a stable, secure place to be, off the ground with a lockable door that they can keep their stuff during the day. The small houses are supplemented with common facilities, so there's a bathroom that has restrooms, shower, and laundry. There's a common kitchen which residents can cook and prepare their own meals. And then we have a 30-foot yurt which sort of serves as the village living room. There's computer access, a pellet stove, and then also an office up front. So the idea is kind of combining quite small private space, you know, a place to lock the door and to, you know, just recover, I think that's a huge thing. Otherwise, you know, if you look at the issue of homelessness, people are pretty much forced to live their entire lives in the public realm and that can really wear a person down. Even though it's a small space, I think it's an infinite improvement in terms of not having any private space. Connecting that with the common buildings, I think, balances that out and creates a decent place to live. Well, I pulled it out from under my bed and off the shelves. So I moved it out here so I could move around inside to do the painting and not worry about it getting on there. See my tiny house in progress. Taken and started painting it to make it gray so that I can have a fresh, clean look. Square One Villages, to do this and be so willing to help is unusual as far as I'm concerned, because you don't see that kind of care about those of us who are unhoused. Most people just go, oh, them. And you're just kind of ignored or put down or ridiculed. And this makes it a whole different. You're no longer one of those people that everybody puts down. It gives a sense of pride. And helping out around the village and everything gives you that sense of ownership. So you take more pride in your own place and the place you're living. And it's a great way to help those who need that step up to get to where they can take the next step and do the things they need to do to get their life back into order so that they can make that transition into permanent housing and back into society. And I think it's very, very important for people to have that. Yeah, I am trying to freshen my place. I'm painting the inside and I've got materials to make some insulated curtains so that I can block out the light and the cold. And just want to get it fixed up and make it homey so it feels comfortable and reflects my personality. So that's what I've been doing. The open house that we're having here on Saturday, my house is a tour house. So I've really got to get busy and get it done. From the state about getting similar projects going, we really hope to expand this to make it not just this area, but statewide up and down the West Coast. Welcome to my little tiny house. I want to make it more my own to reflect my personality and how I feel about things. And so I have been purchasing little items over a period of time. And I like the idea of the color gray because you can put any color with it and it looks good. So I went ahead and I bought the lavender sheets to make the bed skirt and then I used them to make the padded drapes so that it insulates in the wintertime to help keep the cold out. I put up shelves so I'd have more storage space. Got the little baskets and they were white and I wanted lavender so I spray painted them, made them lavender and just put my little knickknacks up and around. So it says more Alice than homeless. I think the biggest thing that it provides is its physical stability in that it gives those of us who are transitioning from having to survive every single day just be in survival mode to living comfortably in a safe structure and paying bills. It's not necessarily an easy transition and I feel like if nothing else this is a it's like the perfect in-between for that. It sort of builds you up to get back in that the frame of mind you need to be to be successful when you do get to have your own housing again. So I think the self-governance of the community is a huge reason why we've had the success that we've had. So we opened in 2013 here at Opportunity Village and there were a lot of concerns at the time when we first presented the idea. Neighbors and city officials I think had the assumption that it would really result in an increase in crime and violence in the area but we persuaded them to give us a chance and they gave us a one-year pilot project. After that pilot project the police reported that it hadn't been an impact in terms of crimes. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that in a self-governed community you have a say over how your housing is operated and managed which I think is a rare thing not just for somebody that's coming out of homelessness for people in general. You know a lot of us live in rental housing where you know you don't really have any input in your housing and I think even though you know people don't financially own these structures here because they're involved in a process. They go to a village meeting to discuss policies and procedures and they don't you know if they are if this place wasn't to exist they'd have nowhere else to go and so what I found in my research here and throughout the country is that if you give a group of people that ability to have a sense of ownership over the place in which they live they tend to take pride in it and protect it just like any anybody else would in their neighborhood and that's what we've seen here and I think that's really kind of the thing that's broken down a lot of the stereotypes that you that you think of. I somewhat tongue-in-cheek but seriously say this is a gated community for the homeless you know the rich get gated communities why shouldn't the homeless have a gated community and when they have that ability to control their borders and who's allowed in and so on and so forth it works just in and of itself. By having people living here 24-7 the the front desk of their staff 24-7 by our our residents has added actually more eyes on the street and more eyes on the area which has resulted in a safer area. We've actually had one of our residents was on a front desk duty overnight and the building across the street a single family house caught on fire there was a woman in a wheelchair on the second floor and the the person at the front desk was able to see that call the 911 and the fire department was able to come out and rescue that woman and was credited with saving two lives so I think that's just an example of you know how it can actually create a safer environment not only not create a violent situation. I try to do my best to help out around here I'm on the council and I'm also on the vetting committee who sees who we let in and don't let in and then I also work with the oversight committee or they're now called the village support committee which is members of the board from square one and we work together to try and decide what's best for the village the whole idea is making the village capable of running itself and dealing with the problems that arise personality conflicts that kind of thing and they give us guidance but they let us make the decisions just kind of cool and kind of hard at the same time sometimes. So some of the fears that you have like communicating as a group sharing other people's ideas being on a council or some type of committee it shows you that maybe there's some skills that you left behind in the rest of development you know that you didn't really know you had the way I used to do things is just kind of like bulldoze through everything and then whatever's left over when I get to the other end I'll use it and so here they teach you how to be diplomatic and be like human you know treat everybody you know with respect and sometimes you deal with difficult issues but you still it's part of it's part of society and it's the way society functions you have to be diplomatic so I think it's helped out a lot in various ways The thing that I think people tend to overlook when they hear that we're you know we have to always be dealing with interpersonal relationships and conflict resolution and that stuff the thing that people tend to overlook is just how successful a self-governing community of homeless people can actually be you know we're not telling them what they have to do they've agreed to certain rules community rules that they're going to live with and they govern with those rules and we stand to support them in that I think there's something a nugget in this no matter how good we get at tiny housing I think there's a nugget in this about how we help people learn to live with other people again after they've gone on for such a long time not doing that and I think it's a really important human thing to do so I don't know how we this will play out in the world but it's more than the housing it is having shelter and a safe place for your belongings but more than anything it's having other people around you feel feeling safe and being able to think about how you can put your life back together again and and having people support you in doing that and if we're all quiet for a second it's like this all the time it's quiet there's not a lot of chaos going on and it's hard you can't find a quiet place most of the time anywhere you know so I appreciate that too but you know like we say we know that we all wound up here somehow we all came from somewhere and so we all have a story to tell nobody just like woke up and left their big house and applied at opportunity village that didn't happen so you got to understand that everybody's in the transitioning and you know and it just makes us more compassionate again there there is the issue of being in the survival state of mind every day which can make it very difficult to allocate the time and energy needed to actually successfully become stable again because not only does that just not magically happen when somebody decides I want to get a job it because there's a lot more nuances than that but also there there is a lot of it seems criminalization of being houseless a lot of really arbitrary city policies have became enacted and have certainly made it more difficult for generally houseless people to find safe places to sleep and not be bothered or just generally be free to move around October of this year would be two years since I lost my apartment and we didn't know where to go you can't live outside on the streets and and expect to go to work or know that your stuff's going to be okay and so we applied for this place and we were accepted a couple of times the first two times we didn't make it but on the third go around we just pushed it and it's kind of scary to to be in a community environment you know where you have freedoms some people need a lot of structure so I was you know basically I was kicked out of my parents house when I was 18 and that had to do with of course like my sexuality and I wasn't even coming out as trans then I haven't done that to them yet but oh boy when I do that to them oh I don't know how that's going to go down I I feel as though people just folks like myself who have gender dysphoria we need to get a certain kind of support for that and I feel like we we have a unique kind of niche of difficulty with getting her getting that getting everything that we need to be emotionally healthy when we're just surviving out on the streets I don't know what to expect from all this going forward but it's yet another little portion in which I'm really grateful that I at least have this safe space for for right now so that I can kind of work on myself and get to where I'm really comfortable wherever that is so I think it's interesting we use the term homeless that was a common thing that I asked folks at the tent camps that I visited was do you consider this home and most everybody I asked did and so I think home is more than just a physical structure it's a place to be it's a place it's a sense of belonging I think is what a lot of people talk about when they talk about home safety security yeah what we've discovered is that probably a third of the folk on the street do not need a lot of other assistance other than just shelter just basic shelter and and that's first of all the the easier group to serve because you don't have to invest a lot of money into staffing and to you know you can give them a place to live and they can do fine on their own and then you have a third of your folk who do have significant mental health issues addiction issues those folks also need to be served and what we have learned and that this is no secret nationwide is that the model of housing first that you can't expect someone living on the street to deal with their mental illness or their addiction issues before you give them housing doesn't work and so the only way to address those issues is to give them housing first and then you work harm reduction try to lower the drug use or alcohol use you work on the mental health issues and help them to become healthier so that they can remain stable and in the process you actually save your community money because now they're no longer being arrested they're no longer going to er you know using all of the resources so it's a win-win the problem is is finding the money to get it started like with everybody else stereotypes don't work very well and you may you you may have read something in in the media or seen something in a public square that is an example of some kind of behavior that you don't like but to attribute that across a population is really not a very good idea and one that's one of the learnings out of Opportunity Village is that there are people here with a lot of skills a lot of capability they've had some hard luck along the way but many of them could be in the place of house people very easily and have been housed people previous to to some bad experience in life and that helping people to transition into a you know into a stable living environment I think is critical for every community every community needs to see that this can be done and it can be done without you know pumping billions of dollars into it I believe that our program is one of the most cost-effective shelter programs in the country because we built this with just a little over $200,000 only half of that was cash half of it came in in kind contributions so for less than $100,000 but even if you take that I think it's $212,000 that to build this project and you amortize those expenses over five years and then include all of our utility costs and operation costs and very minimal staff because it's a self-governed village we do have a little bit of staffing that we provide and support that comes out to five dollars a night per person and the villagers themselves pay a dollar so our net cost is four dollars a night per person so find me any other shelter in the country that is running on less than four dollars a night per person I'd be surprised if it exists anywhere and then this here is a black cherry tomato and then of course lavender and then two different kinds of strawberry plants and then my raspberries it's hard to find a place with only making approximately nine hundred dollars a month and it's like the housing prices are so outrageous and they want first last and all kinds of deposits and whatnot it's just I'm so grateful for having Opportunity Village and then being able to move over when Emerald Village finishes getting built I'm excited about that excited not to have to share a bathroom with 35 people I mean don't get me wrong I am totally grateful for this place it was just a stepping block to help us get on our feet per se and save a little bit of money and yeah well this is such a crisis in every community in fact I was just reading some articles in Seattle and Los Angeles and so many places that are in a crisis and here's the what I've come to learn as the real kind of the core essence of this crisis when we built you know first of all there's a homeless crisis in most cities and Eugene has one of the highest per capita unsheltered populations in the country so we have that crisis of just individuals living on the street but there's also the larger crisis of just not enough affordable housing and when we built Opportunity Village our intent was only to do transitional housing we were going to concentrate on getting people off the street never occurred to us that we needed to build affordable housing after we had moved people into Opportunity Village helped them stabilize their lives people now were able to get jobs line up other sources of income but couldn't find any place to rent Emerald Village we came up with the concept shortly after finishing Opportunity Village there was a lot of excitement and we found Opportunity Village to be a big success and rather than duplicating this model we wanted to sort of create the next iteration of this model and so while Opportunity Village is designed to be transitional housing we wanted to create a more accessible and sustainable place to transition to and so the vision for that kind of evolved into Emerald Village which would be permanent tiny houses built on foundations each house would have its own bathroom and kitchen and would meet the international residential codes definition for a permanent dwelling and then we'll also have a larger common building with a meeting space laundry room and other stuff like that it's a great way i think to help those of us who are extremely low income be able to afford a place that is nice and that you're off the streets you get to have the heat and you've got your own bathroom and you've got a small kitchenette to cook in and having that security and knowing that i can stay there for the rest of my days unless you've been out there and had to live that never knowing from one day to the next where you're going to be who you know what's going to happen to you once you live that this is a major improvement and that's like a giant leap forward homelessness didn't exist forever you know it wasn't until the 1980s until it really started to exist on the scale it did and that was because of a shift in the way that we built housing and the way that we funded housing and it's really sort of a structural issue and so i'm interested in how can we create more types of housing for different types of people currently we have the single family house and the apartment building and i think there's a lot of interest in different types of housing i see the tiny house movement as an opportunity to really blur the lines between the housed and the unhoused so that's what i write about a lot in my book and so i think you first had the popularization of the tiny house movement as a means to downsize from a larger single family house either for economic reasons or for just a desire to live simply and what i've been more involved in is the other side so a tiny house is actually a step up for a number of people in our country currently living in tents or on the streets and so i think there's been a little bit of resistance to that you know in the in the whole conversation of like well you know the some people in the tiny house movement might not want the stigma of homeless people associated with the tiny house but i think you know as we're showing with the emerald village project there's ways to do it in which i think it can be an example of attractive housing that would be of interest to anyone in the years that opportunity village has been operating i think all of our hopes and our dreams for that model have happened and more not only have a number of folks been through the opportunity village model and transitioned out into other kinds of housing employment and self-sufficiency which is exactly what we wanted that to do but the model has continued its self-sustaining self-governing role which i think is important so we would love to be able to do more opportunity village models but once again with an eye toward the continuum is moved from the budget bungalow opportunity village model into more of the self-contained hooked up to electricity being able to provide water and plumbing emerald village model which is built more around the tiny house concept and we're all working together to create a vision for a more humane society that makes it possible for people to live decently who do not have you know the six-figure incomes we've got to figure out a way to do this as a society or we will fail and and so it's just exciting to be a part of this process and to discover new models to create decent shelter for people all across the spectrum thank you for watching our video and for stopping by tiny house expedition i'm alexis and i'm christian don't forget to like comment and subscribe and for more tiny home tours and stories click the videos below and join us on patreon for bonus content including face-to-face conversations with us we hope to see you there all right thanks guys have a good one