Homelessness in America is a rampant problem, being worsened by the epidemic of opioid addiction. The problem has long been a fixture of our larger cities—New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle—but it is increasingly becoming a big issue in more rural areas, including places like Brattleboro, Vermont and Keene, New Hampshire.

The good news is that even as the homeless problem is growing in many areas, so too are innovative solutions. In this article I’ll introduce a very promising model for housing the chronically homeless that is gaining traction in a few places around the country, mostly in the West. Over the coming months my Resilient Design Institute colleague Stephen Dotson and I will describe this model for housing the chronically homeless in more detail, but here I want to introduce the concept and describe an initiative we’re just launching at RDI to address this issue with the added focus on resilience.

Finding a model for housing the homeless

Some of the most exciting initiatives for housing the chronically homeless in the U.S. today involve creating villages of tiny houses clustered around central community buildings that include restrooms, laundry facilities, and kitchens. The houses themselves are typically very small—often just 8’ by 12’—and inexpensively built without plumbing.

In some of these tiny house villages, the individual houses are diverse in design and configuration, while in others the units are pretty much all the same, with minor customization through color or entry designs. Key features include a safe space for sleeping and a secure place to store belongings; unlike tent structures, these homes cannot be broken into with a utility knife.

Below I describe one of the nation’s best-known tiny house villages created for the chronically homeless.

Community First! Village in Austin, Texas

In late January, 2018 my wife and I were in Austin for a meeting, and we had an opportunity to visit a remarkable village that is housing previously homeless people from the Austin area. Community First! Village is located in northeast Travis County, just outside the Austin City Limits and about eight miles from downtown Austin. The 27-acre, master-planned community includes a mix of tiny houses, recreational vehicles, and canvas tent-cottages. The first units were occupied in December, 2015.

Community First! Village is a program of the organization Mobile Loaves & Fishes, which Alan Graham launched in 1998 to serve meals to the homeless in Austin. This organization, with an annual budget today of about $5 million, has served over 5 million meals over the past two decades, and they have branched out into housing and micro-enterprise.

As described on its website, Community First! Village “provides affordable, permanent housing and a supportive community for the disabled, chronically homeless in Central Texas.” The housing is considered permanent, rather than transitional, and all residents pay rent—though rent can be very low, and supported through job opportunities in the Village that enable residents to earn a dignified income. While Mobile Loaves & Fishes is a Christian, faith-based organization, residency at Community First! Village is not limited to those of Christian faith.

The philosophy of Community First! Village is that the crisis we face is mostly about lack of community—as reflected in the name of the village. Graham told us that “housing alone will never solve homelessness, but community will.”

Roughly the western half of Community First! Village is an RV park with 100 self-contained RVs (see map). The eastern half of the village houses roughly 120 tiny houses and 20 canvas tent-cottages. It is this tiny house section of the community that we explored.

The tiny houses vary widely, many designed by leading architecture firms in the region that have donated their design services. Area home builders donated the construction of many of the houses, which are interspersed among the oak trees on the site. The homes do not contain plumbing.

The tiny house portion of the village includes four community buildings with restrooms, showers, and laundry facilities. Close to these buildings are small, open-air, community kitchens. Community First! Village also includes a market, a portion of which displays crafts made by Village residents; a community library; a health resource center; offices with meeting spaces; community grilles; playground; gardens; an outdoor cinema; and a cluster of tiny houses and Airstream RVs for visitors that are rented through Airbnb.

The Resilient Design Institute’s initiative to design resilient tiny houses

RDI has received initial funding from the Jeffrey Cook Charitable Trust to develop prototype, resilient, homeless shelters for a cold climate. Like Community First! Village, the idea will be to design tiny houses that could be clustered around community buildings with plumbing, while the tiny houses themselves will not be plumbed.

A key aspect of the project will be to develop tiny houses that will provide passive survivability—an ability to maintain habitable temperatures if power or heating fuel is lost for an extended period of time. In other words, these houses will be highly insulated and incorporate features like passive solar heating, summertime shading, and natural ventilation. These features will not only make the homes safer during power outages, but also more comfortable and more affordable to operate during normal times.

These passive design features were all advanced by Professor Jeffrey Cook, who taught architecture for over 40 years at Arizona State University—and who established the Jeffrey Cook Charitable Trust to carry on his legacy after his death in 2003. Jeff was on the Board of Directors of the New Mexico Solar Energy Association when I worked there in the late-1970s, so it is especially gratifying to have the initial funding for this project come from the foundation he established.

Unlike the tiny houses at Community First! Village, we are planning to develop standardized designs with a key focus low construction cost, replicability, and ability to utilize waste materials (for example from panelized or modular home builders). We will develop designs that can be delivered as modular structures, as kits for site building, as panelized components, or as detailed designs that can be used by builders or do-it-yourselfers. We plan to build at least one prototype with instrumentation for evaluating the performance in our climate.

In the coming months we will pull together at least one design charrette to brainstorm how to accomplish our goals, which are articulated in this two-page project description. Peter Temple, P.E., a professor at Keene State College and practitioner of low-energy, passive design since the 1970s, will be working with me and Stephen Dotson on this initiative.

A long-term vision for supporting the homeless

If all goes well with our initial work developing prototype tiny houses that can serve the chronically homeless, our hope is to expand this work over several years to serve broader needs of the homeless, including families, and versions of these tiny houses that can be deployed quickly as emergency shelters following natural disasters.

We are hoping that out of this initiative one or more businesses will emerge in our tri-state region to manufacture kit or modular homes using the designs we develop. This manufacturing capacity would be an initiative developed in concert with the Ecovation Hub—an economic development program that is seeking to replace jobs lost through the closure of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant with jobs in the so-called “green economy.”

To fully carry out this vision, RDI is looking for additional funding over a three- to five-year period: foundation grants, personal donations, and corporate donations. RDI is a 501c3 organization, so donations are fully tax-deductible.

Along with reporting on our progress with this tiny house initiative, future articles will profile other tiny house villages serving the homeless population, including several in the Pacific Northwest. Most such villages currently in operation around the country are in fairly moderate climates; a big challenge for us will be creating designs that work well a cold climate and that achieve the goal of passive survivability.

Feel free to contact me for more information or to offer technical or financial support: alex@resilientdesign.org.

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Along with founding the Resilient Design Institute in 2012, Alex is founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. To keep up with his latest articles and musings, you can sign up for his Twitter feed. To receive e-mail notices of new blogs, sign up at the top of the page.