(bright, upbeat music)
- Hey everybody, I'm here with Nate at Eden Village,
tell me about Eden Village. - Yeah, Mark,
Eden Village is a master plan community
in Springfield, Missouri
for people that are chronically homeless
to be able to come up off the streets and live permanently
in the housing and in the community that we provide.
- What do you mean master plan?
I usually, I get this vision of Bel Air
and gated communities, so. - So it is a gated community,
it'll have 31 furnished tiny homes
that they're able to rent at a low cost,
it's a low entry point, it's $300 a month,
utilities included, no deposit.
It's a gated community, it's limited to the residents
and their registered invited guests,
so it's a safe place for our formerly homeless residents
to have a place to call home.
So the way that they get in is, it's not a card,
it's not a code, they put their thumbprint down
and the gate opens up for 'em,
so we won't have the bad guys
or the people that prey on our friends
that have a disability and maybe get a check
coming into the community, so it's a safe place for 'em.
- Why don't you give us a tour?
- Yeah, absolutely.
So this is our community center,
this is the all-purpose community room
where we can host a variety of events,
whatever the community wants to come in
and host for our homeless friends.
We can serve meals here, but we won't be serving
and shoving food across a window anymore
and then high-fiving each other when we leave
then going to eat somewhere that we really wanna eat.
It'll be more Thanksgiving style,
you'll sit down, you'll eat with the residents,
but this isn't a soup kitchen, we can have AA meetings,
NA meetings, we can have Bible studies, movie nights,
Bingo nights, whatever the community wants
to come in here and do, but to live here
you don't have to come to these events.
These are a couple offices, we have two like this
where caseworkers, mental health professionals can come in,
visit with their clients, maybe once our clients are housed
they're not gonna wanna get on the bus
and take the hour-and-a-half ride to their caseworker,
but we built some locations where they can come in
and be mobile, and meet with their current clients,
and sign up other residents that need
the services they need.
Right next door we have a medical clinic.
People that are chronically homeless
in Springfield, Missouri cost us as a city
about $30,000 in social services, sleeping under bridges,
on sidewalks, and hidden campsites.
We think that we can eliminate that
by upwards to 70% of that $30,000
by building a great community center,
filling it with amenities they need,
and putting an on-site medical clinic.
So this'll be linked up to a local hospital,
we'll be able to tele-med in,
we'll have a registered nurse on-site,
and we can triage a lot of things
that our homeless friends
would end up in the emergency room for
and save us as tax payers a lotta money that way.
(bright, upbeat music)
We have a greenhouse that's under construction here,
this'll be a community garden,
we'll grow the ingredients to salsa
and the residents can can it
and that'll become a micro-enterprise,
they'll get all the profits for that,
give them an opportunity to earn a dignified income.
And then this is the beginnings of the tiny home,
there are 14 homes on site right now,
the rest are coming in October, November, and December,
everybody'll be in, and the village will be finished
by Christmas Eve, we'll have 31 people renting space
and living in the community.
- [Mark] It'll be a fun Christmas.
- It will, it'll be, last Christmas,
whether they knew it or not when they applied,
was their last Christmas outside,
so this'll be a pleasant surprise for 'em.
So we had different businesses, organizations,
churches, families, got to sponsor a different home,
and they didn't just get to name it,
they got to pick out all the colors,
the interior flooring, kitchen cabinets, countertops,
so they got to make a lotta choices,
and that's how we end up
with so many different housing styles.
They're all the same floor plans,
but we can give 'em all their own little theme
and their own little look, and customize 'em
to the future residents.
So I'll show you some of the houses,
this is a house that a bank sponsored,
and so we didn't just ask people for their money,
we asked them to befriend our residents.
And so the unique opportunity
is that they get to be on a home team with the resident
with other volunteers from the community
and walk through life.
We say to the resident once they're settled,
now you're free to hope and dream again,
you're out of struggle and survival mode,
you're kinda the CEO of your own life
but we're gonna provide you with a board of directors.
So the lady that's gonna live here, her name's Nancy,
she's been homeless living in her car
for eight years in Springfield.
She's 74 years old, her husband went into a nursing home,
she spends the day at the nursing home,
when he had to go in they took all of his social security
and his money which left her with, she's deaf,
and it left her with her disability money, 800 a month,
and she had to choose between the house and the car.
She needed the car to go see her husband
at the nursing home every day,
so she's been sleeping in her car for eight years.
And so now she'll have this beautiful home,
she'll move in in a couple weeks,
it's been fully furnished and it's ready for her,
it's customized for her.
This is our version of, and our way of ending homelessness
in Springfield, Missouri, we think in the next 10 years
we'll build enough Eden Villages in Springfield
where we can house the 210 to 215 people that sleep outside,
so our goal is Springfield becomes a city
where no one sleeps outside.
(bright, upbeat music)
Any time we look across the country
we see tiny homes and then we mix the word homeless in,
people fall in love with a piece of property
that's never zoned correctly.
We go try to rezone it and neighbors get letters
that say maybe you should come to this meeting,
maybe you should be angry,
maybe you should come to city council,
maybe you should create a Not in My Backyard movement,
and so we've been through that before
and we wanted to do something where there was no
Not in My Backyard movement.
So before we raised our single first dollar,
we went around and read all through the city zoning,
we found out that if we could find
an abandoned mobile home park
or we could find something zoned highway commercial,
we had every legal right to build an RV park,
and technically and legally our units are considered RVs
because they're under 400 square feet.
So we were able to buy an abandoned trailer park,
which is what this was, we were able to move homes in,
hook up electricity, every trailer park gets a clubhouse,
we were able to build a great community center,
without a Not in My Backyard movement,
without having to ask permission,
or having to vote at a county commissioner
or a city council level,
we were just able to start construction.
So the difference was instead of an 8 to 10-year project,
this was a two-year project,
we raised our first dollar in August of 2016,
we moved our first resident in three weeks ago
in August of 2018.
And so that's been how we've been able to do this
in a way that can be easily duplicated
for a variety of different social services
throughout America.
Yeah, so in between every house, with one set of neighbors
you'll have a picnic table and a grill,
then with your other neighbor on the other side
you'll have a raised community garden bed,
we'll have permaculture that runs
all down the sides of the property
where we're growing fruits, vegetables, peaches, pears,
we've already started some of that.
It just provides a good atmosphere
for them to get out into the community,
we're gonna bring in close to 1,000 different volunteers
a month to help us with landscaping, planting, gardening,
and so they'll have lots of friends
and lots of community within their smaller community.
- This place is awesome. - Yeah, thanks,
it's been two years in the making
but we feel like God's really blessed it,
it's happened really quick for us.
- The whole tiny homes conversation
has been interesting, because some places
are just doing tiny homes because tiny homes are sexy,
they're not thinking about these are people
and you need community, and you need,
it's not about putting people in boxes.
- Right, yeah, yeah, they need a home
that feels just like our homes.
When you see the video or you see the pictures
you're gonna look inside that home that we just looked at,
and Mark, you're gonna say I could live here.
I'd have to get rid of some stuff I don't really need,
I'd have to put some of the sentimental stuff in storage,
but at the end of the day I could live here.
Our homeless friends don't have stuff
they don't really need,
and they don't have any sentimental stuff left,
so this is a perfect thing, it's just like our homes,
it's got the oven, the refrigerator, the bathroom,
the bedroom, it's just smaller than our home.
- My mind has changed about tiny homes a lot,
and one thing that just hit me,
and I've been around these before,
I've always been looking for a way
for people to get involved.
So the reason charity such as feeding people in the park,
public feeding is so big, is 'cause people wanna feel good,
there's nothing wrong with that.
But how do we do that in a way that ends homelessness
and not just maintain it?
And community involvement in places like this
where you're not just building the house,
you're adopting the person, and then as you just said,
even the local school is using you as--
- As their official relocation center,
so something happens that's bad at the public school
next door we can lock down and secure our facility quicker,
so I think this is the first time in America
that a tiny home community with the word homeless involved,
a public school has come and said
if something bad happens on our campus
we wanna be able to move those four and five-year-old kids
to your property, 'cause we can keep 'em safer,
and the parents can pick 'em up there in a better way.
And so it was a huge compliment to us,
and it was all about skirting
the Not in My Backyard movement.
When there isn't a Not in My Backyard movement
everyone's excited about tiny homes,
they're excited about giving people a second chance,
and homeless people moving in.
- No, it's really great.
A link down below if you wanna contact Nate
for any information.
I know people are coming in, checking this place out,
looking out how to do it in their neighborhood.
Everybody, if you enjoyed this video click Like,
subscribe, support us on Patreon
so we can continue telling these stories,
and thank you very much. - Thank you.
(slow, peaceful music)