Tiny House Living

This story is a few years old but one of my readers mentioned it to me this past week so I thought I’d share it with you too. Jim Reid designed and built this tiny 10′ by 10′ house as a proof of concept for homeless housing. I’m not sure what ever happened to the project, but it was sure a good idea.

Jim Reid’s Tiny San Francisco Home

Photo credit Frédéric Neema.

I really love the ingenuity of this simple rolling homeless shelter designed by Paul Elkins. Paul has an amazing mind for coming up with incredible solutions for tiny mobile spaces and I highly recommend that you spend some time exploring his blog after checking out this latest homeless shelter concept.

Homeless Shelter in a box

Here’s a great story about a shed serving as an intermediate care unit for homeless in Clapham, London. It was setup by nurse practitioner Samantha Dorney-Smith. The services they are providing are already saving lives and reducing emergency calls and hospitalizations.

Shed Saves Lives

I’ve written about Dignity Village in the past on Tiny House Design but wanted to share an update I stumbled on this past week. This is a community of tiny houses located outside Portland, Oregon built and maintained by a group of people working hard to find their own solutions for homelessness. Really inspiring story and place.

Dignity Village Update

A fellow named Ed built this tiny house for $50 to use as a place to sleep while attending a 4-day music festival. He hauled it there in the back of his truck.

While Ed’s shed is a bit on the funky side I can see how something like this with just a little more time and effort could be a much safer place for someone to sleep and a big step up from a tent.

Ed’s Shed

This is a great story about several homeless advocacy groups getting together to create a tiny house village for the homeless in Sacramento, California. Bathroom and kitchen facilities will be centralized but people will have their own tiny houses to sleep in at night. This seems like a great step in the right direction. I really hope projects like this are successful and set a precedent for more communities like this.

Tiny House Eden

Some recent news about the Sacramento Police rousting a group of homeless folks from their temporary tent town got me a bit riled up last week. Being someone who likes to take proactive measures when trouble brews I set to work on publishing a simple panelized structure that could be built as temporary housing for all sorts of needs including homelessness.

In addition to working on the house for Khayelitsha I’m working to revise the plans of this smaller shelter so that the walls, floor and roof will also be made up of individual 4′ by 8′ panels. This size is ideal for transporting in a pickup truck with the main draw back being that it uses a bit more lumber to construct. Keep you eye on Tiny House Design this week for the revised plan.

Simple Panelized Shelter

The Mad Housers are an Atlanta based non-profit organization dedicated to showing people how to put a roof over their own heads. The end result are temporary tiny houses build with and by the folks that will live there until they get on their feet.

Read more on Tiny House Design

I was contacted recently by the folks at the Pavement, a free magazine for homeless people in London and Scotland. They wanted to do a story on the Tiny Free House I’m building out of pallets. The article is in the current issue and provides basic tips on how to construct a tiny house from pallets. You can read the complete article online at www.thepavement.org.uk.

This is an interesting concept, it’s a Chateau for a Homeless Artist. It’s the brain child of James Westwater and will initially be offered as guest living space in an artist in residency program. It measures 4′ by 4′ but 8′ and provides shelter from the heat of the day and rain. This will require you stretch your imagination to appreciate this out-of-the-box thinking.

Homeless Chateau up and running