A few days ago I talked with a retired modular home factory owner who said he and his wife visited Seattle. WA recently and were totally disgusted by the homeless situation. Thousands of people living alongside just about every street they traveled with garbage piling up and people wandering around aimlessly.
That’s the problem many cities on the West Coast are facing, tremendous housing shortages for their homeless population. However, when a local housing authority or non-profit organization builds a tiny house homeless village, the usual building codes for safety and structural integrity are eased in order to get the homeless off the streets and into internment camps.
A recent fire incinerated several tiny-home shelters at Oakland, California-run transitional-housing site at E. 12th Street and 2nd Avenue, across from Lake Merritt.
Oakland’s tiny-home village uses buildings from Pallet Shelter, an Everett-based company that builds modular, aluminum-framed structures with plastic walls and roofs meant to be quickly deployed as transitional housing.
The 64-square-foot buildings are modeled after emergency shelters that go up in the wake of hurricanes, tornados and other natural disasters. Each Pallet Shelter building has a bed, shelf, window, electricity, heat, air conditioning and a locking door.
Each unit has a smoke detector, carbon monoxide detector, fire extinguisher, emergency exit through the rear panel and is inspected by the local fire marshal before occupancy.
The tiny-house village model has grown in popularity in recent years as a way to provide transitional housing to people exiting homelessness. Traditional shelter space offers little to no privacy, nowhere to safely store belongings and often doesn’t allow people to bring pets or stay with their partners and families. By contrast, tiny homes give people privacy, a locked space for storage and often allow pets, making them a far more appealing option for someone leaving an unauthorized encampment.
In spite of fires at these villages, their popularity continues to grow and hopefully, they may soon see improvements to not only the structural integrity of the homes but also the aesthetics.
There has to be a better way to house the homeless than garden sheds and plastic-based tiny buildings. Maybe it’s time for the mainstream offsite industry to take a hard look at supplying affordable, safe and good-looking homes for homeless villages.
My friend agrees that it will take more than garden shed shelters to house the thousands of people he and his wife saw living in squalid conditions everywhere they looked. We have the factories to build them and the ability to answer the call. Now the offsite industry just needs to jump in and begin to help.
Related Articles:
- Fire Destroys Part Of Tiny House Homeless Village – Video
- Wisconsin Winter Could Prove Challenging For Tiny House Village
- Garden Sheds For The Homeless? We Can Do Better
Gary Fleisher is the Editor in Chief of Modular Home Source and Offsite Builder. Email at [email protected]
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