Alexandria Park Tiny Home Village in Los Angeles is a development of 103 micro units that serve as
temporary homeless shelters. They offer people and families a safe and dignified place to live
before they transition to permanent housing. The modular units are designed by Pallet Shelter,
a social purpose company based in Seattle. They measure 8’ by 8’ and are composed of a simple,
steel frame and lightweight insulated panels of varying thicknesses.
These components can be flat packed for easy storage and transportation. 30 shelters can
fit on a single truck. The parts are durable, lightweight, portable, customizable and easy
to assemble. They don’t require a foundation because they have an in-built sub structure.
They can be assembled in under 1 hour with minimal tools since the parts lock together with nuts,
bolts and pins. The entire Alexandria Park Village was built in 13 weeks.
The units can withstand winds up to 110 miles per hour, snow loads of 25 lb/ft2, and temperatures
as low as -40 F. If a panel is damaged, it can be easily swapped out for a new one. These units
can be connected to the city’s power grid, a generator, or solar panels.
The interiors are utilitarian, but purposeful. They can sleep 2 people, and hold their belongings
under the bed and on a shelving unit. Each unit has a smoke detectors, carbon monoxide monitor,
egress door and fire extinguisher. These temporary shelters can be quickly deployed
to a site in case of emergencies. Most people and families live in these units for 3 months
before moving on to permanent housing. The units are easy to clean and maintain. They can be set
up on any flat land, including leftover spaces next to highways. More importantly,
they have onsite security, shared bathrooms, dining areas, and laundry services, counseling,
housing placement, job training, mental health services. I find it very impressive that Pallet
Shelter, the company that designed these units, asked the homeless for input during
the design process. Moreover, all employees who build these shelters are formerly homeless,
addicted or incarcerated themselves, and have found stability through meaningful employment.
The flat pack nature of these units is very important because the more you can transport on
a single journey, the lower your costs are going to be. One of the many hurdles of using shipping
containers as emergency or temporary housing is their size and weight. These units remind
me of the bare bones, utilitarian, emergency hospitals that popped up in China last year.
Hope of the Valley, one of the organizations behind this project, regularly receives criticism
about their efforts to help the homeless. To help the community fully support
and understand their projects, they offered a “Tiny Home Sleep-over” experience back in
April. For a donation, you could stay at the site overnight, enjoy a dinner, live music, comedian,
and a breakfast. One of their sleep overs catered to business owners and community leaders,
while the other sleep over was designed for couples and partners,
what they called, the Ultimate Date Night. It’s an interesting approach to community engagement.
While I appreciate their work and effort, there are some drawbacks. The gaudy, childish colors
are a questionable design decision. I’m sure the architects chose to do that. When a person is in
such a tough, challenging situation in life, the last thing they want is for their shelter
to stand out and attract attention. They want to fit in, but these colors do just the opposite.
Humans also need a sense of ownership, a feeling that something is theirs. It might be beneficial
for them to work on their housing unit, build it themselves, or engage in community projects,
even if it’s for a short period of time. Additionally, this design is lacking vertical
density, which, in turn, increases the cost per unit dramatically. If you’re paying to run
utilities to a particular site, water, electricity, sewer, etc. The more units
you can comfortably fit on the site, the people you house, the more cost efficient
a project like this is going to be. Hope of the Valley claims that “Unlike traditional shelter
or affordable housing projects, tiny homes take a fraction of the time to build and assemble,
at just a fraction of the cost.” The Alexandria Park Tiny Home complex cost $8.6 million to build.
At 103 units with 2 beds per unit, that’s around $42,000 per bed. The cost to operate the campsite
is $3,300 per person per month. These tiny homes cost more than the monthly mortgage payment
on a median-priced LA home. So, what’s going on?
The units themselves are relatively cheap. LA is paying Pallet Shelter about
$8,600 per unit. = $885,800 Land acquisition is only about 11%
of the budget, about $1,000,000 Underground utilities cost $122,000
Concrete foundations cost $253,000 Office and staff restroom cost $312,000
Mechanical, electrical and fire alarms cost $1,100,000
Permits, fees, designs, project management,
inspection cost $626,000 Initial site work $1,500,000
The rest goes to “soft costs” including consultants and financing.
This project is not an isolated case. In Los Angeles, voters approved a $1.2 billion bond
in 2016 for building housing for the homeless. Proposition HHH was supposed to have moved 10,000
homeless people off the streets into new housing and included funding for counseling services.
Delays and bloated budgets have reduced the 10,000-person goal by more than 20 percent, down
to about 7,300 persons. According to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s website, only 14 of the 111
total HHH projects are in-service. 804 out of the 7,300 people have been housed.
The average cost of homeless shelters in California is $700 per square foot, as much
as luxury housing costs. Something is terribly wrong. I’m not being heartless by critiquing this
situation. We should help people that have fallen on hard times, and assist them in taking care of
themselves. But as a tax-paying citizen, I have a right to be concerned about the misuse of my tax
dollars. These bloated projects are supported by local, state and federal funding. If funds
are being misused, we can’t just dismiss public outrage and we can’t be afraid to raise questions.
Frustrated Californians believe that the local and state government must be held responsible
for their failure to complete projects on time and within a reasonable budget.
Props to Pallet Shelter for creating these sturdy, reliable $8,600 units
and for all the community work they do. They’re making a difference, not just talking about it.
Homelessness is an extremely complex problem that obviously can’t be solved by just throwing money
at it, as we’ve seen. Let me know what you think about this growing issue.
If you have any additional information on Proposition HHH, leave a comment below. I’ll
link all my sources in the description and I’ll also link my Patreon page.
Don’t forget to hit the like button and subscribe to my channel. Thanks for watching. See ya.