In the Pacific Northwest, people with nowhere else to go are forming micro-communities with communal kitchens and toilets but teeny, individual sleeping units. Could tiny homes, once the provenance of design blogs, help curb homelessness nationwide?
A steady rain beat down outside, but in the small, cluttered stand-alone structure that serves as the administrative office for Dignity Village — a 14-year-old tent city turned semipermanent experimental housing community on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon
He fingered an unlit cigarette he’d just pawned from his girlfriend, Debbie, with whom he shares one of 43 roughly 10-by-12-foot “tiny homes” at Dignity. Grubic, a handsome, ruddy-faced 51-year-old, was recounting how he went from being a California carpenter doing high-end residential work to living in his Ford Bronco with his two dogs and $1,400 to his name, desperately seeking pickup work along the Oregon coast.
Turns out, how Grubic got from that particular A to B wasn’t too different from how many of his Dignity neighbors got there: After Grubic’s dad died in 2007, Grubic remodeled his dad’s Northern California house and sold it, buying his own place nearby. But then the 2008 recession hit, his work dried up, and he had to let go of his new house. He built himself a low-cost hunting lodge but ran afoul of local authorities regarding permits. So he sold most of his tools and drove north, into Oregon.
“I went begging for work,” he recalled. Finally, in Seaside, he found it — as a glazier, making $12 an hour. He’d park his truck in Fort Stevens State Park, showering there and sleeping in yurts. But come fall, his work vanished, and the area had scant services for homeless people, so he drove to Portland. “I was parking and sleeping on the city streets,” he said, hitting the employment office or the library during the day to look for work.
Eventually, by 2010, he found an isolated, mostly industrial part of town out near the airport to park and sleep at night. Little did he know that he was not far from Dignity Village, where homeless people and their supporters had started building cottages three years before.
To read more of this article follow the link and see how Tiny Homes can be the solution for Portland's homeless population.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/timmurphywriter/tiny-homes
