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| Photo Credit: AP. |
A number of churches across the U.S. are building tiny homes for homeless people in a bid to tackle the growing homelessness in the country.
Congregations
are building everything from fixed and fully contained micro homes to petite,
moveable cabins, and several other styles of small footprint dwellings in
between them, The Associated Press reports.
Rev. Lisa
Fischbeck, former Episcopal vicar and the board chair of Pee Wee Homes, an
affordable housing organization building tiny homes in Chapel Hill, North
Carolina said “It’s just such an integral part of who we are as a people of
faith.”
According to
the Associated Press, Fischbeck led the Episcopal Church of the Advocate when
it added three one bedroom units on its 150 acre campus and admitted the first
residents including the organization’s namesake, Nathaniel “Pee Wee” in June
2019.
Lee who is
78 spent many years sleeping in alleys, cardboard shelters and cars after
medical issues ended his masonry career.
Fischbeck
said tiny homes can fit nearly anywhere and when it is built on church properties,
residents can enjoy electricity, water and other infrastructure in place.
“I just feel
so passionately that churches have space,” she said, according to The Associated
Press. “Just consider it. It’s a dire need.”
Other churches
are also building homes for the homeless as a way of solving the massive
homelessness in the nation. The Church of the Nazarene congregation in St. Paul
Minnesota is building a tiny house community for chronically homeless people
with local nonprofit Settled.
“We do not
have a lot of property,” said Jeff O’Rourke, lead pastor of Mosaic Christian
Community in St. Paul, according to The Associated Press. “We have just strived
to use every square inch of property that we have to be hospitable.”
Firm
Foundation Community Housing in the San Francisco Bay Area was launched by the Rev.
Jake Medcalf, the former lead pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Hayward.
It is a tiny housing built by the congregation in its parking lot.
The First
Christian Church of Tacoma in Washington State became a host site for a tiny
home community set up by the nonprofit Low Income Housing Institute in 2020.
“We don’t
have a lot of money. We don’t have a whole lot of people … but we care a lot
about it, and we’ve got this piece of property,” said the Rev. Doug Collins,
the church’s senior minister, according to The Associated Press.
The
Associated Press reported that a nationwide survey, the last conducted without
being impacted by the pandemic, found that 580,000 people were homeless on a
night in January 2020, according to the Department of Housing and Urban
Development Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress.
Although the
tiny homes does not far gar enough but it is helping to reduce the problem no
matter how small the impact.