Duluth tries out new tiny house for homeless

Sitting along an alley in Duluth, the tiny house has a small porch, a narrow kitchen, petite heaters. It boasts big windows, though, as well as a grand goal: housing the homeless.

A nonprofit developer, Center City Housing Corp., built the 28-by-12-foot house as a prototype. It was designed for free by an architectural firm and constructed by volunteers. In March, its first tenant — an elderly, homeless woman who had been living in a shelter — moved in.

"We want to see if it makes sense to use a tiny house as a positive alternative for people who are struggling with homelessness," said Rick Klun, Center City Housing's executive director.

Over the next 18 months, three consecutive tenants will provide feedback on what it's like to live in the 336-square-foot house. Center City will weigh its $60,000 cost. Community leaders will consider where similar houses might be located.

Tiny houses for the homeless are popping up in cities across the country — including Madison, Wis., Austin, Texas, and Eugene, Ore. — in village-like clusters. Duluth's first is perched on a private lot in the Central Hillside neighborhood. The property owner, like the tenant, has asked to remain anonymous, Klun said. The house is allowed to share the lot under the city's zoning rules as an "accessory dwelling unit."

"If you think about Duluth, there are a lot of old, large mansions, built in the early 1900s, and they had carriage houses," Klun said.

While other tiny houses are built on wheels, this one is meant to stay put, and is hooked up to sewer and water. Those hookups accounted for $13,000 of the house's $60,000 price tag. That total is far less than the average cost to build a unit in an apartment complex, Klun said.

But it doesn't include design services, done for free by Wagner Zaun Architecture, or labor, donated by a crew of volunteers.

John Miller and his crew — men ages 50 to 82, many of them retired — started building the house in late June, working three mornings a week, tallying 1,800 hours. "And of course, we're not that fast," he said. Working together inside the tiny house was tricky, he said. "Doing the inside was a little like, how many guys can you get in a closet?" The house sits atop posts, making construction "a challenge for us, but the guys never complained."

He wonders whether it might make sense to build a 20-by-20-foot house on a heated slab. "They go up a whole lot faster," he said.

Putting on the steel roof, Miller got to meet the new tenant, who told him she loved the home, which has a full bathroom.

A new report from the Wilder Foundation counted 617 homeless people in St. Louis County on one night in October. Almost half were not in shelters.

Each year, about 1,000 people stay at CHUM's shelters in Duluth, said Lee Stuart, the nonprofit's executive director. About a third have been homeless for less than a month, she said, and "getting those folks housed is relatively easy." Another third are chronically homeless. The last third are "somewhere in the middle," she said.

"When I think about the small home, I think about the people in the middle," Stuart said.

She dreams of a cluster of eight to 10 homes circling a community center that offers "the right kind of social service support."

While there is no single solution to homelessness, Stuart said, Duluth needs more affordable housing, priced between $350 and $400 a month. "And our current market can't produce it without heavy subsidies."

Other Minnesota cities have weighed whether to allow tiny houses on lots. In St. Cloud, homeless advocates got a tiny house, a tenant and a location — St. John's Episcopal Church. But last year, the St. Cloud Zoning Board of Appeals denied a request to amend the church's conditional-use permit.

The church, which owns the tiny house, got advice legal advice saying that under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, it is free to have the tiny house occupied on its property, said Alexis Roy, senior warden of the church's vestry.

"I understand the need for standards," she said. "But at this point, we have the home, we have a man ready to move in."

Jenna Ross • 612-673-7168