Tiny Homes for the Homeless – 9 years later
As I put in some volunteer hours to help Greenovation move to a new home I’m reminded of a project I launched there years ago. In 2012 Rochester Greenovation, then on East Main Street, had just opened to the public and I had some grand ideas about how we would showcase various reuse projects to the community. The blueprint I was working with took cues from Finger Lakes Reuse in Ithaca and Reuse Action in Buffalo, but there was a voice inside me begging to go bigger. I wanted to show the world that not only was reuse environmentally responsible but we could solve big societal problems by diverting useable materials from the landfill. Tiny Homes for the Homeless was born that year, and below is an article written about our project. Thanks to Jay Creighton at Small Scale Homes for letting me reprint this.
NOV 13, 2012
Tiny Home for the Homeless: Project Update.
Back on October 6th, I began a blog post about a project I am involved with through Rochester Greenovation, in Rochester, NY. I loaded the post up with so many photos, videos, links, new developments, and so on that I thought it best to start a new post about it instead of adding more to the original one. If you’d like to follow the story from the beginning, you can click here.
Just as a quick refresher… The idea behind this tiny house project is to build a prototype tiny home for a homeless person using mostly materials that would otherwise wind-up in a landfill. The tiny house prototype itself is a work in progress, but the progress thus far has been more in the exchange of ideas between group participants than in the actual building of the structure. The merits of various materials, sizes, shapes, heating methods, and amenities have been the focus of a lot of the discussion. The initial idea of building on a trailer has been scrapped for a couple of weeks now.
We learned that pallets vary a great deal in size, and that it can take a while to gather and sort through a bunch to find several that are similar enough to actually work with. Currently we have four 40″ x 48″ pallets arranged on the floor forming an 8′ x 6′-10″ rectangle, and sitting atop three parallel 100″ 2x6s. There are a few pallets sitting upright around the edges suggesting walls for the tiny home-to-be. Next to the house there is a bin with materials gathered for possible inclusion We will likely cover the pallets that make-up the floor platform with 4×8 sheets of 1/2″ OSB cut to size as our finished floor material. We may use hollow core doors as our roof sheathing material, and discarded corroplast signs as shingles for the roof and side walls. The walls, ceiling, and floor will need insulation of course, and materials ranging from crumpled plastic bags, denim scraps, rags, and fiberglass ceiling tiles are all being considered.
At this point, I’m just going to give you a little tour around the Rochester Greenovation building where we are meeting and building the tiny house. I took a bunch of photos inside to give you an idea of some of the resources already within the Greenovation building. Depending on when you view this, there may or may not be more added to this post after the photo tour.
A week later, and there is a bit more progress on the tiny home…
I measured-up what has been built so far, and got some input in terms of the group’s current thinking about door placement, sleeping loft, and general layout. I guess I had better start thinking and drawing something up. Keep watching…
We had managed to create a prototype that was displayed at Rochester Regional Community Design Center for some time. And then we hit a roadblock: zoning. Outside of our warehouse we had nowhere to build or utilize finished homes. The project remained on the backburner after that. I had attended a meeting some years later (2017?) about Peace Village and an attempt to build some Tiny Homes there, though a grant was written to build sheds on-site. Village residents would occasionally use pallets to construct various forms of shelter, but to my knowledge the spirit of this project was never realized. I’ll update this if I hear otherwise.
Some of the comments I got about the project were discouraging. “It’s demeaning” or “it’s disrespectful to the homeless”. I look at it from a different angle: let the user decide. I think everyone deserves four walls and a roof over their head, but for some that means plugging in to a system that they don’t want to use. Some people want to be 100% independent, and that might mean not depending on social services. To some that might mean living in a tent, collecting scrap metal for income, and wanting nothing to do with a homeless shelter. Offering those people a blueprint for a shelter that can be built with discarded materials maintains their independence, which in itself offers more dignity than forcing them to utilize a system they’re not willing to participate in.
Eventually the idea caught on in places like Detroit, Nashville, Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, and more. I won’t pretend for a minute that this idea was originally mine; Portland actually predates our project by twelve years, and if there was a model among all those cities that I would’ve aspired to, Portland’s Dignity Village is it (though, sadly, I just learned about it today). Rochester got Peace Village and that was that. I’m proud of our attempt – we showed the public that we could tackle two societal problems at once. Our homeless residents got a “long-term temporary” solution. Maybe some day someone will take our proof of concept and run with it, and save more lives and landfill space in another town.