Local Opinion: Tucson's homelessness boom

Re: the May 14 article “Metro leaders unite for our streets, neighborhoods, businesses.”

City of Tucson and Pima County leadership state that they are worried about booming homelessness and substance abuse crises and are working to solve them. Unfortunately, their efforts to date have been woefully inadequate. The results of January’s annual Tucson Point-In-Time count indicated a 60% increase since 2018 in people experiencing homelessness in Tucson. Simply put, city and county leaders need to do more to reverse this trend.

What can they do? Since November, I have been volunteering with Hope Factory Production, a nonprofit organization of volunteer architects, engineers and designers, to establish a new Tucson Tiny Home Coalition. Volunteer-built tiny homes, placed in well-managed tiny home villages, have been proven around the country to be an effective and highly desirable transitional housing solution. I travel north during the summer to Seattle to volunteer at the Hope Factory, joining over a thousand other volunteers to build tiny homes. We build six days a week. We are joined most days by local businesses, churches and clubs, who see tiny home production as a highly successful team-building opportunity. We have a relationship with Lowe’s, which provides low-cost materials. Lowe’s has also donated extensive tooling to our operation. The result is temporary housing at a fraction of the cost of other solutions.

Tiny homes are placed in effectively run tiny home villages. Nationwide experience has proven-out key characteristics necessary for a tiny home village to be successful in helping people get back onto their feet and into permanent affordable housing. A key element for success is having social workers located onsite to provide residents with needed support, including healthcare and addiction support, obtaining critical documents, education support, food assistance, job training and placement, and other services. Tiny home villages provide social workers a safe working environment, allowing them to be productive in their efforts. A tiny home is safe, warm and dry and has a door that locks, allowing formerly homeless individuals basic needs to help them move forward. The transition rate into permanent housing from tiny home villages is many times higher than from shelters and helps to make neighborhoods safer. For this, tiny home villages receive strong support from local public safety departments, including police, fire, and public health.

Our Tucson Tiny Home Coalition has grown to include many local agencies, organizations and individuals involved with working to solve Tucson’s growing homeless crisis. We have been exploring potential projects with local governmental agencies and departments, as well as private organizations that provide social services and affordable housing. Extensive enthusiasm exists for this solution, and multiple potential proof-of-concept sites have been identified.

But city bureaucracy seems intent on keeping solutions like this from happening. Rigid building codes and zoning laws inhibit new, innovative solutions such as ours. City leaders wrote in their OpEd that they are committed to solving Tucson’s homeless crisis, but their actions, or rather inactions, show they are more concerned with keeping solutions out of their backyards, or rather out of the Ward they represent. The volunteer efforts of Hope Factory Production resulted in a new eighty-home village recently being approved for Little Rock, AR, with more land designated for hundreds of additional homes. Volunteer-built tiny homes, placed in effectively run tiny home villages, have been proven effective in 15 states and 25 cities across the country. We want to add Tucson to this list. To make this a reality, the leaders of Tucson need to move from words to action. In the meantime, Tucson’s homeless crisis continues to boom, and with it, we continue to see human suffering at many levels, from those experiencing the dreadful experience of being homeless to burgeoning crime rates and citizens and business owners feeling unsafe in their own neighborhoods.