Tiny Houses Get Big

Starting small — literally — Memphis organizations like Hospitality Hub, Homes for Hearts, and My Sistah’s House are helping to create dwellings for folks who might not otherwise have their own homes.

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The headquarters of the Hospitality Hub sits on Washington Avenue heading towards downtown, right on the spot where Memphians used to line up for the motor vehicle inspection station in years past.

Walk inside and it’s buzzing with intention as staff, volunteers, and unhoused people give and receive help. This building is the nerve center but the action extends to locations around town, with clusters of housing units fulfilling different missions such as the Hub Hotel for women and Hub Hall for young adults. Hub Studios fills in the gaps that have long prevented home ownership for people in tough — although not uncommon — situations, including couples, families with older children, and individuals with severe PTSD. And Hub workers on the Street Outreach team go to where many of unhoused Memphians live, whether that’s parks, underpasses, or abandoned buildings.

The Hub has designed various housing solutions to meet the various needs of the unhoused, but one of the important answers now comes in the form of tiny houses. A tiny house has the advantage of providing shelter and safety, while also being economical.

Most people who are aware of tiny houses have seen them for sale online or for rent on vacation-booking sites, in a variety of sizes and prices. Some are barely more than sheds, but others boast amenities and heftier price tags. If you acquire one, you’ll need a place to put it and a way to connect water and electricity. The smallest tiny houses, of around 400 or 500 square feet, may work fine if you can hook up a water hose, an extension cord, and provide for wastewater. Some are mounted on a trailer but aren’t a traditional mobile home. Going much larger may require more substantial connections and will draw the interest of city or county inspectors.

But it may be worth it for homeowners who need a separate structure for short-term rentals, guests, extra room, or whatever they require. The Memphis and Shelby County’s Develop901 Permit Guide says a dwelling to house a second household on the same lot as the main house — called an Accessory Dwelling Unit — would require separate utility meters and is only allowed on lots more than 10,000 square feet.

Lower-income people might find a tiny home brings an economical benefit as a primary residence if they don’t need space for a lot of belongings. Options to acquire a tiny home kit can be delivered fairly quickly and put up easily. That flexibility is contributing to the increased interest in tiny houses, but much of the activity going on locally is being done by organizations seeking to provide shelter for the previously unhoused.

People end up homeless for a wide variety of reasons: Health issues, job loss, a broken relationship, addiction, poverty — any of these may be a factor. Government response is typically to offer some sort of temporary shelter, but often regulations are rigid and not comprehensive enough to meet the problem, tending to triage the situation rather than address root causes.

This is where organizations like Hospitality Hub, Homes for Hearts, and My Sistah’s House Memphis come in. They each work a bit differently but all have been able to build or acquire small homes to house those in need. Some may be for an emergency situation, some for transitional purposes, and some offer more permanent housing.

Hospitality Hub was founded in 2007 by the Downtown Churches Association to address the needs of the homeless. Kelcey Johnson, who has been executive director since 2018, has long been involved in working with the homeless as well as providing addiction counseling. He graduated from Memphis Theological Seminary in 2013 with an M.A. in religion and a graduate certificate in addiction counseling. He projects competence, patience, and kindness while being entirely no-nonsense.

Asked about the role of tiny homes, he says the Hub doesn’t use them as a solution to housing.

“For us, these structures — we call them Hub Studios — are used as non-congregate shelter. It’s a way to be able to shelter by yourself or with your child or with your husband, loved one, whatever. We’ve had one studio that had a mother, a daughter, and a granddaughter all living together while we waited for them to get into permanent housing, which took us about 60 days.”

Johnson says the Hub also took in a married couple although, he says, “In Memphis, there’s almost zero shelter for married people — you have to separate.” It’s those sorts of limiting conditions that Johnson wants to overcome with the Hub’s variety of options. One such is the planned Hub Village community of what will be 20 studios and larger cottages, with a shared kitchen, bathhouse, and laundry facilities. It will also have dedicated, on-site case management and support services to make sure residents can move on to permanent housing rather than being put back out on the streets.

“With many shelters here in Memphis,” he says, “you come in at 3:30 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon and you eat, shower, go to bed, and about 5:30 or 6 [in the morning], they wake you up and by 7 o’clock you’re out the door. You have to find something to do with yourself during the day. The rationale is you should be working on your case, you should be working on getting a job. We don’t believe in that. How productive is that going to be? You don’t have money. Do you have clothes to interview in? Who do you know that’s going to give you a job?”

The Hub helps close the circle by providing an outreach counselor and a housing navigator. The organization helps with job placement, because, as Johnson says, “Income is the way out of homelessness.” Whether someone is staying in a transitional space or is in the Hub’s main shelter, they can take classes from yoga to life skills, from cooking to financial planning. “There’s all these things that you can take part in that are going to help you when you leave here.”

Johnson says the idea of small housing units evolved in his discussions with Jarad Bingham of Dragonfly Collective, which handles the Hub’s compliance, HR, grant writing, and much more. Bingham was pastor of Shady Grove Presbyterian Church for many years and founded Dragonfly in 2016. His mission statement is plain and revealing: “I like to build solutions for complicated problems.”

“Jarad and I both have always been amazed at the container houses out in California, Oregon, and Washington,” says Johnson. “They’re all over the country now because there was this glut of shipping containers. We didn’t have money, but we had good ideas and we always thought we could get a dozen of these containers and turn each one into a two-bedroom apartment. But the city frowns on using containers for humans to live in. You’ll never get it permitted in Memphis.” So, instead of containers, Bingham sketched out his ideas for small houses on a cocktail napkin and hired a crew to build units that would pass muster. “He and his friends built five of these right here in our parking lot.”

The Hub, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, gets funding from various sources, including city and county governments, churches, and foundations including the Kresge Foundation, Assisi Foundation, and Community Foundation of Greater Memphis among others.

Hub Village is a concept of developments that would form a neighborhood with common spaces, amenities, and larger units for families. It has been funded and Johnson is hoping to find a place to put them. The Hub had proposed putting them in Scenic Hills in Raleigh, but ran into opposition from nearby residents. “They’re very proud of their community but they associated homelessness with crime and drugs,” he says. “But of course they would be for women and children. There are close to 4,000 homeless children in Shelby County.”

The perceptions remain, although Johnson says the Hub has “a 91 percent success rate of our people getting housed and them continuing to pay their landlords.” 

It’s an ongoing challenge, but Johnson persists. “We do everything one person at a time. Everybody’s story is different. There’s no cookie-cutter solution for this.”

Tracy Logan lives in the Buntyn neighborhood in a small, comfortable home. It was not always so. She’s there now thanks to Homes for Hearts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 2020 by Zach Waters, who was determined to help Memphians get out of homelessness and move toward homeownership.

Waters developed partnerships with Room in the Inn, Dwayne A. Jones Construction Company, Arch Inc., and Binghampton Community Land Trust to build single-family tiny homes in accordance with city regulations throughout the Memphis area, while also offering supportive services to each of their residents as they transition toward homeownership.

Logan was one such person in a dire situation. “I got diagnosed with cancer,” she says. “I had stage-three breast cancer, and at that time I became homeless because I could no longer work.”

She stayed in her car a while and then lived in a tent in a friend’s backyard. “Through that journey, I ended up at Room in the Inn and met Zach. He described to me the program and I put my application in and was approved.”

She remembers the date she moved in after waiting for the home to be built — February 10, 2023. Logan is telling her story on her front porch overlooking a neat garden, and her dog, Marley, wants to be part of the interview. He has to stay inside, though, so as not to aggravate a medical condition.

“I’m adapting to it quite well,” she says. “There wasn’t cabinetry in the kitchens, but I told them not to put anything like that in so I could just adapt it to my scale of things the way I wanted it.” Logan began working at Sprouts as a cashier when she was staying at Room in the Inn, a ministry involving dozens of congregations to provide temporary shelter. She has since been promoted to manager at the grocery and is grateful for where she is now. “I thank God every day that I’m cancer-free now and have the opportunity to wake up every day.”

But she remembers the worst of it, when she had cancer and no place to stay. “I didn’t have chemo or radiation,” she says. “I just chose to have the surgeries instead. Two weeks before my last surgery, I had to call my surgeon and tell him I had nowhere to live and that I couldn’t have the surgery.” She had her service animal, so wasn’t eligible at the first place her doctor reached out to, but Room in the Inn accepted Logan and Marley. She was able to have her surgery — her fifth in four years — and stay at Room in the Inn while recuperating.

Meanwhile, she’d made arrangements with Homes for Hearts, which partners with Dwayne A. Jones Construction and Room in the Inn. And she would visit the site as the home was being built. “When I found out they were framing it up, I came over and I parked in the middle of the street because I wasn’t sure where to park,” Logan says. “I didn’t have the driveway at that time or anything. A lady asked, ‘What are you taking pictures of?’ I said, ‘That’s going to be my house.’”

Logan wasted no time in making the most of her new abode. She points around her small, neatly arranged yard. “I dug all this. All my flower bed and all these rocks are what was in the back that I dug up and brought up here. And I built a fire pit in the back and I cleared the entire backyard pretty much. I’ve got one little corner that I’ve been working on clearing. I stay busy.”

Inside, Logan has created space for living, sleeping, and storage. “Each room, I have created little nooks for storage and for entertaining here in the living room, and a portion of it is a dining area. And then a portion of it is where I do my painting and my artwork. I’ve a created a nice little space.”

She’s been rebuilding her credit, has acquired a vehicle, and is planning to start paying on the home this summer. “I’m prepared to move forward and begin buying it so it can be my home. I just turned 56, so I’m good with the moving around and things. I want to be stable and settled for the last portion of my journey.”

It is her outlook that gives her strength. “It’s kind of hard to present yourself to go face the world each day when you’re living in a tent and don’t have a home,” she says. “But I did it, got through it. It definitely taught me that I can survive, I can handle it, I can take care of myself. But going through things like that let you know really your inner strength. As long as you have the will to continue living, I think you can do anything you would like to do.”

Zach Waters is eager to talk about his passion for providing homes for the homeless. And the smaller houses fit the need well. “We’ve found it to be quite habitable, quite incredible for one individual, especially with our demographic, we’ll say 50 and older. When people are aging in place and when they’re getting older, they don’t seem to have as much need to take on an average-size home.”

It certainly helps that a tiny house and small lot size make taxes, utilities, and insurance more affordable. Plus, agencies offer zero-profit, zero-interest mortgages. Dwayne Jones, who builds the homes, is committed to the work as well. Waters describes how it is in another house he built.

“Dwayne had the idea immediately of nine-foot ceilings, so that makes a huge difference,” he says. “You come in and it feels very open. It feels a lot bigger inside than you would imagine. For instance, in the living room, our resident has a recliner that he’s able to fully recline on, and he’s got a little entertainment area set up with a TV and a little desk area with a couple of shelves, and it all fits in. We’ve actually extended the kitchen into the living room a bit. So, he has more cabinetry for kitchen items and it’s a lot more space than one would think.”

Jones brought a lot of experience to the project. “He grew up in Orange Mound, so he is extremely passionate about rebuilding Orange Mound, although he’s built homes in North Memphis, South Memphis, and all over,” Water says. “I started talking to him and I said, ‘I’ve got this idea for this really tiny house.’ And he said, ‘Me too, and I’ve got the plans for it already.’ We were raising money, so I founded Homes for Hearts. We raised a few thousand more dollars, and we built the first house. Dwayne built this house, and a resident moved in the day after Thanksgiving.”

My Sistah’s House is led by Kayla Gore and provides services for primarily Black and Brown transgender and non-binary individuals. The organization offers a variety of programs such as case management and mental-health resources, but Gore has found that many of the people her group aims to help are homeless or experiencing housing insecurity.

Gore got involved working at the first trans program at OUTMemphis: The LGBTQ Center for the Mid-South. “I realized that I was just turning trans adults away who were looking for shelters,” she says. “At that time, Memphis didn’t provide housing. There were only maybe 71 to 81 beds in Shelby County and Memphis.”

Eventually, she got a grant from the Trans Justice Funding Project and was able to start My Sistah’s House. “We did an emergency shelter for two and a half years and now we’re doing transitional and permanent housing,” she says. “We’ve been doing that for two and a half years, and we’re at house number 10 now.”

Gore says, “There’s a significant need; my phone blows up all day with people needing housing, whether it is trans people, non-binary people, cisgender women and their children, or men. There’s a huge population of people who are houseless, but there’s not enough housing stock.”

While explaining these circumstances, Gore is standing on a block in the Glenview neighborhood where some of the properties stand. And she knows the area well — this is where she grew up. She remembers how busy it once was with shops and bus service and activity. It’s not nearly as bustling now, and she’s getting accustomed to the new vibe of the neighborhood. Gore will tell you she’s learned that what she’s doing is not just building houses, but creating spaces, interacting with the community. That’s where the value comes in. More than simply providing shelter, she’s revitalizing the neighborhood, including the development of a community green space.

The size of a house determines its building cost. Gore wanted to keep the houses affordable, but also make sure that they were high-performing and aesthetically pleasing homes that would meld well with the neighborhood.

“People will start off in tiny houses, and they’re 400 square feet,” Gore says. “We have another one in Orange Mound that’s also 400 square feet. We’re sticking with the guidelines when we’re building the biggest of tiny homes. We’re not building out in Shelby County where we can build as small as 240 square feet, but for adults, we want to give them a little more space to be able to grow.”

The role of the tiny house can be as flexible as the needs of people everywhere. It’s not just the homeless who can benefit, but people of varied means, interests, and pursuits. With relatively lower costs and simpler construction, they provide a way for people to adapt to a wider set of circumstances.

They’ll be appearing more and more in areas around the city and county if local governments will allow for code alterations. And the payoff is a wider population living comfortably in secure homes, while offering the personal touch that has so long been out of reach.

As Waters put it: “It is just incredible to see a resident take it on themselves to have the initiative and say, you know what? I’m going to throw a couple of hundred dollars together to make this mine and to make it something that I really value.”