Helping homeless in San Francisco by building transitional housing

Marcus Rosenthal
Aug 28, 2017 · 7 min read
Sean P., a homeless veteran formerly living in a tent in San Francisco with the new transitional home we built for him

Since I was very young, I have always wondered about the best way to help homeless people. Through some of my volunteer activities, I am starting to figure it out and I am finding that it was incredibly rewarding to gift a simple transitional home to someone in need and have them so appreciative for our hard work. Yesterday, we gave a transitional sleep and storage shelter to a homeless person who was previously living in a makeshift tent in SOMA district in San Francisco.

This was the first transitional sleep and storage shelter that I designed and led a team of volunteers to build with Saint Francis Homelessness Challenge. Here’s a video where I introduce Sean Pico to the new home that he will get to stay in until he finds permanent housing and shares a bit more about his background.

We have resources to build about 7 more units, but in order to truly be able to support the large number of homeless in San Francisco beyond these, we need:

  1. Additional contributions (to donate money, to donate gift cards for materials, or to learn about volunteer opportunities go to saintfrancischallenge.org)
  2. Approved or sanctioned locations for the transitional homes. Since these transitional homes can be RV certified, a person can live in them on private property in San Francisco (if the property owner approves) or, what we prefer, is that the City provides space for sanctioned ‘villages’ of these transitional homes that we can help to coordinate the success based on what we have learned from our placements so far. We believe that we can get the support of the City of San Francisco by showing them that in fact by investing to build and place of these transitional homes that it will reduce the overall costs to the city, clean up unhealthy, unsafe, and eyesore encampments, and improve the lives of thousands of homeless people and their neighbors.
  3. Build and storage space. We were able to work with Asian Neighborhood Design for us to use their shop in their off hours to do our builds. Their mission to “reduce poverty and revitalize neighborhoods in the Bay Area by building healthy communities and providing opportunities for low-income residents to become economically self-sufficient” is well aligned with the mission of SFHC, so it was a great partnership. Unfortunately, the logistics of using the same space and shop that Asian Neighborhood Design runs their programs became a bit complicated, so we are in search of a good new space to build, store materials, and store sub-assemblies in process. Please reach out to SFHC if you have any potential locations.

To give a little background about how I got involved with Saint Francis Homelessness Challenge (SFHC), last September I got inspired to get back to figuring out how I could help make a positive impact on homeless peoples lives. First I came up with the idea of ‘$100 For Homeless’ where I did mini crowdfunding campaigns to support homeless people. The concept was that I go find a homeless person and ask them if they would be interested in me recording a quick interview with them where I ask them 1 simple question, “If I could get people to donate you $100, what would you do with it?” Here’s the initial campaign for $100 for Homeless that I posted on GoFundMe.

I successfully got 3 homeless people $100 which they were very appreciative for, but it ended up being tough to get them the money and to continue to track and follow up with them because they were typically not in the same location, often either did not have a phone, their phone was not charged, or their phone number changed. The work was rewarding, but it seemed that going in on it alone was going to take a lot of effort that would not be as productive as if I joined forces with someone else or another organization serving the homeless.

I searched for organizations that aligned with what I thought would be a successful solution, and I connected with Amy Farah Weiss who founded Saint Francis Homelessness Challenge (SFHC) and who is tirelessly passionate about helping support homeless encampment residents with secure transitional housing. Her motto is “Do what’s necessary, do what’s possible, and soon you will be doing the impossible.” Her unique approach of working with the encampment residents and the housed neighbors to sign good neighbor agreements seemed like a real workable solution to help solve this shortage of housing for homeless. As I learned more, I realized that this direct support to each individual to give the a lockable sleep and storage transitional shelter was one of the only paths to support the over 6,000 homeless people to get off the street. Here’s a short interview I did with Amy last October as I was starting to get involved.

With only about 1,200 beds in homeless shelters, there is a definite gap. After SFHC successfully raised over $10,000 in a HandUp crowdfunding campaign for 15 transitional homes for homeless in San Francisco, I started trying to figure out how I could volunteer to help get these built. Saint Francis Homelessness Challenge worked with Moksha Osgood from Moksha Woodwork Designs to build a few different designs of simple and beautiful ‘dwellings for the unhoused’ that met RV code standards so that it could be legally parked and inhabited on private property. This one Moksha called the Japanese Salt Box.

‘Japanese Salt Box’ Transitional Home for Homeless by Moksha Woodwork Designs

After they completed 5 units and it was going a bit slower than they hoped and Moksha was starting to get busy with other projects that he needed to build, I stepped up my support in order to help scale up the production of the units. I started by looking at the current design and assembly process to figure out how we could document the design, come up with instructions and make it relatively easy to leverage teams of volunteers interested to help and empower others to build units on their own as well. I plan to publish these drawings and instructions online soon for others to use. I came up with a modular design I called the Simple Salt Box (an iteration of Moksha’s Japanese Salt Box) where the 4 walls, the floor and the roof could each be pre-fabricated as a sub assembly and then later assembled as an entire unit once all of the pieces were completed.

Overview of Simple Salt Box transitional home design

This made it much easier to transport and to leverage teams in different locations or with different skill sets. Here are a few photos of the Simple Salt Box getting unloaded and assembled. The 4 walls got installed within about 15 minutes. With securing and sealing the entire unit, installing the roof, and building the bed and shelving inside the shelter it took about 4 hours onsite to complete the Simple Salt Box.

Stack of all 4 completed pieces of one transitional home on small pickup truck (total stack height only 26")
Walls getting attached to floor
Completed Unit

Here are a few links to photos from a few of our build days:

On Saturday August 26th, Sean P., moved out of a tent on the street and into this Simple Salt Box. He is currently in the unit at ‘Box City’, an encampment on 7th Street at Innes that SFHC has been helping coordinate with between the encampment residents, neighbors, and city officials (DPW & Department of Homelessness). And, the second unit is planned to be completed within a week or two.

In addition to the funding beyond our first 15 units and finding a location to build, we are still working to find more approved locations for placing the shelters. So far, the Impact Hub has allowed us one individual to live in a shelter in their parking lot (which is approved because the shelter meets RV code). Please reach out if you know of any locations where these transitional shelters can be placed that people in transition can live in. SFHC will get all occupants to sign good neighbor agreements to ensure that they are adhering to the rules defined with the owner or property manager and SFHC can get a porto-potty installed and serviced to help keep the location clean and pleasant for all.

Learn more and follow the project at https://www.facebook.com/saintfrancischallenge/ or saintfrancischallenge.org

Thanks to everyone who helped make this possible, especially the founder of Saint Francis Homelessness Challenge, Amy Farah Weiss; builder, designer, and formerly homeless for 6 years Dave Tompkins; Moksha Osgood who designed beautiful transitional home designs for us to base the Simple Salt Box on and who taught us how to build his Japanese Salt Box; Jamie Fountain and the rest of the staff at Asian Neighborhood Design; Melanie Alves for your beautiful mural; and the volunteers who came to help on the various build days Jim Kinsinger, Jason Blalock, Edson Veizaga, DL and others.

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Marcus Rosenthal

Written by

Entrepreneur with passion for #cleantech #sustainability & #skateboarding. Organizer of #PreciousPlasticLA Co-founder @RevolveRobotics & Artificial Muscle

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