San Francisco Upgrades Tent Village to Tiny Dwelling Group

Officials hope the new community will provide a safer alternative to shelters, but it brings its own challenges.

Allison Artzer has been homeless for over three years, much of it on the streets of San Francisco. Ten months ago, while sitting on a curb with all her belongings, the 36-year-old was approached by a member of the San Francisco homeless outreach team and given them a tent in one of the city’s “safe sleeping villages” at 33 Gough Street offered. on Marktstrasse.

Artzer, who often had their belongings stolen on the streets or thrown away by police officers, said yes.

She found it was a big improvement over the street as it had a central place to store her belongings and a separate room for them. But the tent has some drawbacks. When it rains, her things get wet and some are destroyed no matter how many tarps she throws over them. At night the temperature can drop to almost 45 degrees and she has to snuggle under blankets to fight the cold. She shares a tent with her partner and because the tents are so thin they cannot have private conversations.

So she was excited when she heard that the city would replace her tent with a small hut with a lockable door, bed, desk, and space heater.

“My life has changed for the better in the last 10 months, I only have one place to call home even though it’s a tent,” she says. “Now I want to start looking for a job again and be a normal person again.”

San Francisco officials announced in September that they would build a tiny hometown on Gough Street, which is currently allowing tents to be assembled with on-site security. The 44 tents will be replaced by around 70 tiny homes, each with around 64 square meters, in two parking spaces that the city has rented.

The apartments are part of a pilot project that will run for 18 months. After that, the city’s lease for the Gough Street parking lot will expire. The project is coordinated by the city, but funded by DignityMoves – part of an umbrella organization that pools private capital for social issues – and a non-profit donor called Tipping Point. Urban Alchemy, another non-profit organization, is already providing social services to the tent community and will continue these services for the tiny homes. (Urban Alchemy also provides services to two other safe sleeping villages in San Francisco.)

The project is one of several announced earlier this year when the Mayor of San Francisco London Breed invested more than $ 1 billion in the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing over two years, an investment that includes an RV park .

Elizabeth Funk, CEO of Dignity Capital, which formed the group DignityMoves that will fund the property, says the city has spent relatively little on temporary housing until recently. The tents and Tiny Home model are designed to provide a more hospitable alternative to street homelessness, offering privacy and security not available in dormitories.

“We really believe that the fact that people have their own private space is going to be a game changer,” says Funk.

The sites are also designed to help people transition into a more stable mental state after the trauma of living on the street.

“I can tell you firsthand that everyone experiences trauma while they’re homeless,” said Andrea Urton, CEO of HomeFirst Services in Santa Clara County, who says she used to be homeless.

“You are in an elevated state of panic and crisis,” she says. “Your health deteriorates, your mental problem-solving abilities deteriorate over time.” Urton says that it takes three to six months in stable housing for people to clear their heads.

HomeFirst will be a consultant for the San Francisco Tiny Home Project and will bring their experience building San Jose’s first Tiny Home community. In addition to the lessons learned there, Urton said, it is critical that staff are available to help with a speedy relocation.

While Funk with Dignity Capital isn’t sure how long the stays will be, they’re modeling their approach to Life Moves, which is funded by Project Homekey, a nationwide program designed to convert unused spaces into apartments, a small house community in Mountain View has erected. Average stays on the Mountain View site range from 90 to 100 days. This site also has on-site psychiatric care, nurses, and social workers, which the Gough Street site does not.

The expectation of a quick relocation for the tiny San Francisco community may be related to the desires of their financiers. DignityMoves is a coalition of business owners across the Bay Area who wanted to solve the street homelessness problem. Funk admits that some business owners have “selfish reasons” to want to help, probably out of fear that street homelessness has reduced spending in commercial corridors.

Urton says if the San Francisco location is moving quickly, having staff available to handle housing issues is critical. “If the units aren’t linked to rapid relocation services, it will take a long time to relocate people permanently,” she says.

However, Lena Miller, who runs Urban Alchemy, says that expecting a quick relocation of residents to the Gough Street site may not be realistic because there aren’t enough permanent housing units to move people quickly. She also believes that many residents have basic issues, such as mental health and substance abuse, that need to be addressed.

Artzer says her attempts to find an apartment in the sleeping village on Gough Street have been unsuccessful. She was interviewed twice for accommodation but failed to qualify. She says the apartments offered are primarily for people with mental health problems or physical disabilities that she does not have. “My only problem is that I’m homeless,” she says. In the 10 months she was in the sleeping village, she said that only 6 people she knew were placed in permanent shelter.

Urban Alchemy has two “Care Coordinators” at Gough Street each day who connect residents to outside facilities when they need social workers, plus another 5-6 people who work throughout the day to resolve conflicts and on day-to-day tasks help. Miller says the nonprofit will likely hire another care coordinator once the tiny homes are built, as it will get more funding to deal with adding two dozen people to the population.

Officials in San Francisco claim the tiny home project will have a cheaper cost per person than maintaining 44 tents across the property. Most of the cost of the tent village is security and other staff costs, as the tents themselves cost a little over a hundred dollars each. The city reckons that by increasing the population density with tiny homes that are closer together than the tents, they can lower the cost per person while spending more money.

It is unclear whether this prediction will come true. HomeFirst’s Urton says one of the lessons learned from the San Jose project was that the cost was higher than expected.

“We budgeted a lot less for electricity than planned,” she says. “It’s a lot more expensive than we thought.” She also pointed out the need for licensed therapists, social workers and drug treatments in small shared apartments to help people transition into society.

But Urban Alchemy’s Miller says it’s unlikely either the city or private donors will want to cover those costs at the Gough Street site, even with the city’s $ 1.2 billion homeless budget.

“There’s probably more than can be done,” she says, “you need therapists, drug treatment, it’s extremely urgent.” While most people are homeless due to economic hardship or a lack of housing, the residents of the safe sleeping villages have San Francisco has an above-average number of people with addictions and mental illnesses, according to Miller.

“An extremely high percentage of the villagers have a double diagnosis,” she says. “If you add up the addiction services that people really need to recover and thrive, the price will be astronomical.”

For Artzer, who says that she has neither addiction nor mental illness and describes herself as healthy, a safe tent in the sleeping village is an immeasurable help. She became homeless for the first time three years ago while working as a waitress. When a number of housing situations went wrong, she lost her deposits and could not afford a new apartment. She ended up renting nightly hotels, but the distance from work resulted in her missing her shifts and eventually losing her job. She soon found herself on the streets with no income.

“It was so quick to be a normal person working inside being outside, it was scary,” she says. “You get used to it, I think.”

Roshan Abraham is Next City’s Housing Correspondent and a former Equitable Cities Fellow. He is based in Queens. Follow him on Twitter at @roshantone.