Until recently, Willie Martin was homeless — couch surfing and staying in shelters.
“I tell people now, ‘Oh, I live in a gated community,’” he said, laughing.
He lives in one of six tiny homes that form a little neighborhood on a fenced-in corner of the Central Lutheran Church parking lot off a busy road near downtown Anchorage.
The home really is tiny. There’s a twin bed and a small fridge with a microwave on top, and with Martin’s suitcase of things, there’s not much standing room. There’s also no plumbing. The toilets and showers are separate, shared with the people in the other tiny homes.
After three months in the place, Martin’s looking for somewhere to rent. He’s also looking for a job. He has problems with his leg, so he’d love to work as a driver — in particular, a limo driver. But his aspirations don’t end there.
“I'm still looking for that rich widow,” he quipped, “but that's down the line.”
For now, the little house is a good start, he said.
Martin’s neighborhood off West 15th Avenue was the first effort in Anchorage to use tiny homes to address homelessness. A nonprofit called In Our Backyard opened the units for occupancy last fall. The project was meant to be a test case, to find out: Can this model work in Anchorage?
The answer: Absolutely. That’s according to Julie Greene-Graham, chair of In Our Backyard. And she believes this project can be duplicated. In fact, efforts to do so are already underway. The city of Anchorage wants to build a much larger tiny home neighborhood to serve a slightly different population.
Greene-Graham said the In Our Backyard project came together because so many people wanted to pitch in.
“We just can't live in a society where we look away,” she said. “So we have to face it, look at the people and say, ‘What can I do to help you?’”
Greene-Graham said the project is designed to serve as a bridge between homelessness and permanent housing. One key part of that transition is support from a case worker, who helps the residents with anything from replacing lost documents to signing up for benefits to looking for jobs.
Greene-Graham said another crucial part of the project is asking the question, “How can we lift you up so you feel human again?” She said part of that comes from feeling safe — the residents of In Our Backyard can lock their doors, a first for people used to camping or sharing space in shelters. Plus, they can come and go as they please. Greene-Graham said that freedom and independence gives them dignity — something that’s sometimes tough to come by in shelters, where curfews and bag searches are the norm.
Green-Graham said one tiny home guest told her he was delighted just to finally decide for himself when to turn the lights off and on.
“There's so many barriers that if you're housed, you don't think about it, you take things for granted,” she said. “Every time I turn on the light switch now, I think about that.”
Greene-Graham said she learned a lot of lessons over the last several months. For one, she said, In Our Backyard had to change the way it selects guests for the program, tightening up the rules about who and what to allow — no drugs, no alcohol, more thorough background checks.
Also, the group realized they’d made the homes just a little too tiny. The thick insulated walls made the living area even smaller, which was noticeable in such a tight space.
And they didn’t actually need the site manager they’d planned for, Greene-Graham said.
“What we realized,” she said, “is that as we got to know the people that were staying here and we had a relationship and a trust with them, they didn't need anyone watching things.”
Now Greene-Graham is passing those lessons on. She’s working on a manual to make it easier for others to replicate the project. And she’s been meeting with the city and other organizations that want to launch their own tiny home neighborhoods.
Thea Agnew Bemben, who’s in charge of the city’s project, said the information has been invaluable. She’s already made adjustments, like increasing the size of the city’s tiny homes.
The project itself will also be bigger — the city hopes to open somewhere between 16 and 30 units later this year. Agnew Bemben said it’s also a test project.
“We really need all of our community to come together, to be willing to try out these new approaches, learn together, bring their resources to the table,” she said. “That's really what In Our Backyard did, and we're really wanting to catalyze that even in a much bigger way.”
The city is planning to serve a different population with its tiny homes. All the requirements at In Our Backyard classify it as “high barrier.” But the mayor’s project is low barrier. Agnew Bemben said that way, it can help all sorts of people.
“Many people who are unsheltered are experiencing pretty severe behavioral health issues,” she said. “So that could be that they have a severe mental illness, it could be they have an addiction, it could be they have both.”
She said she knows the project may get pushback from people living and working in the area. A municipal project to create an area for authorized car camping got heated pushback from people who didn’t want homeless camping in their neighborhood. But, she said, the city needs to take action if people want things to change.
“The community can either decide that we're going to create some options that help people move out of that situation and into a more successful, permanent, safe housing situation for themselves,” she said, “or we can accept that people are going to be camping all around us.”
Like In Our Backyard, the city hopes its tiny homes serve as a space to help people stabilize and a stepping stone between homelessness and permanent housing. So far, In Our Backyard has moved just one person into permanent housing. Greene-Graham said that’s a success.
“He's just happy,” she said. “He's 76 years old, and he was homeless, and he's just happy and safe and walks a lot and watches old movies on the History Channel.”
Several other people are also close to making the transition, she said, and watching them work toward that goal makes her incredibly proud.
