Salinas >> A vision for the first Tiny House Village in Monterey County will be unveiled Wednesday by students, educators and leaders in the battle against chronic veteran homelessness.
But when Monterey Peninsula College’s Green Building Design course participants presents their collection of Zero-net Tiny House Village Designs for the Veterans Transition Center at Fort Ord in Marina, it will launch a much broader dialogue for confronting not only homelessness, but also the affordable housing shortage in Monterey County.
Students, faculty and supporters will address the housing crisis at the MPC Art Gallery from 1 to 3 p.m. Wednesday when they present the visionary design proposals for a low-cost sustainable housing community for designated vacant land in Marina.
“I’ve been collaborating with the VTC for about fours years now,” said Thomas Rettenwender, principal architect at Ecologic Architects in Carmel. “In parallel, I’ve been developing education programs at UC Santa Cruz and also several local community colleges including MPC, Hartnell College and San Jose City College.”
Between 2013 and 2014, the Pocket House was built as a new, innovative model for sustainable living and involved interns from local high schools, interns and instructors from Hartnell College, Interior Design students from MPC and graduate students from UC Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering.
“We built and designed the pocket house over a summer. It’s a portable building that we can move around,” said Rettenwender. The Pocket House is currently at the Hartnell College east campus in Salinas where Rettenwender was talking about the tiny house program.
The architect included the Pocket House into a book he put together titled “The Zero-net Energy Tiny House Manual.”
“For over four years we’ve been teaching tiny house construction and building them, … reaching out to communities to look for locations to install these portable homes,” said Rettenwender.
A tiny house is a custom-built, small dwelling unit built on a trailer to enable portability and flexibility, according to the “Tiny House Manual.”
The tiny house movement is an architectural design trend advocating a simplified, energy efficient and flexible lifestyle.
Tiny house communities already exist in states like New York, Wisconsin, Texas and Washington and have begun to take root in California cities such as San Jose, San Diego and Fresno.
A Zero-net tiny house is designed for self-sufficiency in electrical power, water and other resources that allows for a portable off-grid lifestyle.
Labor for the Tiny House Village program is done by the students, homeless vets and Monterey County Jail inmates using donated materials and grant funding to build the structures and are being built in different locations by a mix of the populations it will help.
The cost for each is about $25,000 and the homes are about 400 square feet using smaller, more efficient spaces designed to be off-the-grid.
The land for the pilot Tiny House Village project at the Veterans Transition Center, is part of the agency’s housing for homeless veterans and their families that ties in nicely with the organization’s mission to provide veterans not only with services but with transitional housing and case management programs to help them become employable, productive members of the community.
Located in the Hayes Circle area of the former Army base, the pilot program could see three to four designs that can be integrated into the existing community of housing for veterans who are going through the Veterans Transition Center program.
This Tiny House Village project will give vets the tools they need to help themselves by including them in learning basic construction skills, providing practical application of those skills to build homes for themselves and others in their community, and supply them with bankable knowledge and skill sets for real-world jobs.
“That’s what we love about education and private partners,” said Kurt Schake, executive director of the Veterans Transition Center. “The pilot program can be used as a template or model to be assessed and then move forward with it in the local community.”
The Veterans Transition Center head said Marina needs to be OK with the pilot program, and that verbally the city likes the idea as it presents one viable solution to the affordable housing crisis and chronic homelessness in Monterey County. “But our land operates under planning permits from Marina.”
Agreements between the city and the Veterans Transition Center would have to be formalized before the village could be designated as a temporary or permanent site.
The long-range goal of the pilot program is to educate city leaders and the community of the benefits of a Tiny House Village.
“It takes a village to build a village,” said Jennifer Suttie, education program specialist. “This will allow leaders to see how it could work.”
According to Rettenwender, when trying to find solutions to the current housing crisis, many turn to the tiny house. The smaller size, lower reliance on site infrastructure and the ability to “do-it-yourself” are factors that can contribute to cost savings.
Given a smaller footprint these units can be easily arranged into villages to house a larger number of people, allowing them to share resources and support each other in many ways.
Schake said tiny houses can provide safe, secure places for people to live with ownership possibilities in jurisdictions that are open to the concept.
But seeing Tiny House Villages sprout up in other communities will take political will and a curbing of a “not-in-my-backyard” mentality.
“We are very excited at every level,” said Schake. “In building a healthy community, we’re coming at it from the top and bottom.”
A Tiny House Village at the Veterans Transition Center in Marina would provide more housing for vets near the services they receive with the organization, and the VA-DoD Clinic close by, and could become a reality for the Veterans Transition Center by the end of 2018.
James Herrera can be reached at 831-726-4344.