Tiny homes are increasingly California cities’ shelter option of choice — but how far they go in solving homelessness is a contentious question.
Erik Villanueva, an architect with the City of Los Angeles, walks through new interim tiny home housing at Branford Village in Sun Valley on Thursday, February 9, 2023. The site, a former homeless encampment along San Fernando Road, can house 161 individuals. Despite moving in to her new digs just a month ago, Darlene Pizarro and her white dog, Angel, are already regulars at the local dog run.
The site of Pizarro’s tiny home, on Guadalupe Parkway in the city’s downtown, opened in May as the newest of San Jose’s six sites that aim to fill the steps between traditional, congregate homeless shelters — think “room full of bunk beds and cubicles” — and an apartment of one’s own.Laundry and kitchen facilitiesOther elements that emphasize residents’ dignity, like the dog run and weekly community events.
“Non-congregate tiny homes are better than congregate shelter, but people are still homeless when they live there,” said Jennifer Loving, CEO of the nonprofit Destination: HOME, one of the primary agencies coordinating Santa Clara County’s response to homelessness.
While California cities have been installing tiny homes for at least the past five years, it was the pandemic that thrust the potential solution into the spotlight. The 67-year-old has been homeless five years and did not trust traditional shelters, where she said “you have to sleep with one eye open” to evade theft. With a stable place to sleep, Pizarro says she plans to look for retail work and apply for a housing voucher to get her own permanent place.
Rojo, a former janitor, said she’s recovering from leukemia and depression and working on getting her IDs after most of her documents were stolen.The more each tiny home feels like a real one, the more it costs — and the closer it inches to the “real housing” that advocates say is what actually solves homelessness. In San Jose, plumbing and utilities for the Guadalupe Parkway site drove the cost of each unit from $30,000 for the structure itself to more than $175,000.
She said she didn’t expect the controversy she sparked. A group of advocates pushed back on the bill, arguing that, as Alex Visotzky of the National Alliance to End Homelessness put it, “it blurred the line between housing and shelter.” Sharon Rapport of the Corporation for Supportive Housing pointed out that certain shelters already can bypass permitting restrictions.
“I am not a supporter of this type of housing becoming a substitute for permanent housing,” King said.
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