The Minneapolis City Council this month passed a proposal to build tiny houses for the homeless.
Dubbed ‘Indoor Villages’, the project seeks to create a community of tiny homes inside an empty warehouse in the North Loop neighborhood.
The council approved $2 million in CARES Act money for the facility, which will see 100 units constructed.
The indoor format will provide proctection from winter while also assuring privacy and security.
The project is led by Avivo – a local outreach group, and will include drug and mental health treatment, employment help and assistance finding permanent housing.
“Our hope is people move into Indoor Villages and then move out because we’ve been able to help them find secure permanent housing in the community, and then we can move more folks in,” Avivo’s Emily Bastian said.
City Council member Lisa Goodman argued for the approval, saying they should be seeking new ideas to deal with homelessness.
“It’s incumbent upon us in government to embrace new ideas, to embrace ideas that can be implemented fast and in a cost-effective way. “Indoor tiny shelters is a new idea and we should embrace that idea because it meets our goals of getting people out of the cold, out of parks, into shelter that they’re willing to go to.”
The project is a pilot program and the hope is to have it running by November.
“It’s an aggressive timeline but the goal is to move people in by the end of the year and today tells us why we need to really pursue this aggressively,” Avivo CEO Kelly Matter said.
