San Francisco building tiny homes for homeless people

quote:

---

After years of resistance, San Francisco is finally jumping onto the trend of sheltering homeless people in tiny homes, with plans to install them on two parking lots about nine blocks away from City Hall.

The lots at 33 Gough St., between Market and Mission streets, have been used since December as a city-sanctioned “safe sleeping village,” holding 44 tents for unhoused people while they get counseling aimed at routing them into permanent homes. Those tents will be replaced by late fall with 70 tiny homes, dubbed cabins, similar to those already in use for years in Oakland, the Peninsula and San Jose.

Each 64-square-foot cabin will have a steel frame, 2-inch-thick walls, heat, a desk, a bed and a window. The revamped village will get improved bathrooms, storage spaces and a dining area.

The cost of up to $1.7 million for building and installing the cabins, along with the dining and other facilities, will be paid for by the nonprofits DignityMoves and Tipping Point Community. The cabins will remain for 18 months, when the lease the city signed for using the parking lots as outdoor shelter spaces runs out.

The cabins are a pilot program, and this test is just the latest new technique the city is trying in light of the spike in homelessness during the pandemic. Bolstered by new tax, state and federal funding that will bring San Francisco’s homelessness funding to about $800 million for each of the next two years, officials are considering buying more properties for homeless housing, placing people in vacant apartments around the city, and opening a safe RV site for 150 vehicles.

---