Man and child on ladder stringing lights
Sacred Settlements like this one give the unhoused a home, and a community to share it with.
When you open the peacock-green door to the tiny house, you feel as if you’ve stepped into an HGTV show. The 140-square-foot pine-hewn home is simple, clean, and tastefully appointed with a gravity-fed ceramic water tank, down duvet, and wool blanket for the lofted bed. There’s even a “tinkerer’s workspace” beneath the bed, a wood-and-leather rocking chair, and an extra chair to have a friend over.
But this home wasn’t built to showcase trends in tiny home design. It’s one of six similar dwellings on some Maplewood church property that constitute a village to house people who’ve experienced chronic homelessness—and their neighbors, who act as resources.
The village, a “Sacred Settlement,” is part of the Settled project, and what sets it apart from other efforts to end homelessness in Minnesota isn’t the tiny homes themselves; it’s the community-first concept.
“We don’t have to keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them,” explains Settled co-founder Gabrielle Clowdus, who discovered the community-first tiny home model while researching affordable housing as a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota.
When Clowdus paired her vision with co-founder Anne Franz’s desire to better utilize church property, their dream of Settled was born. Their first crop of homes was funded by different churches, and each home cost between $25,000 and $40,000 to build, depending on size. The entire village will move to permanent land at Mosaic Christian Community later this year, when residents will move in.
Anne Mavity, executive director of the Minnesota Housing Partnership, says that in Minnesota’s current housing landscape, every effort is welcomed and needed—especially those that help the people with the very lowest incomes.
“We need to be overproducing housing, we’re so far behind,” says Mavity. “Everything that comes online is having an impact. We need to be creative and innovative and leaning in. There’s not going to be a single solution.”
For Clowdus and Franz, whatever the solution, it needs to build upon the housing-first model that has dominated policy for the past three decades and center on community.
“Unfortunately, the housing-first model, even if we were doing our very, very best job, it just really falls short,” Clowdus says, standing near a bonfire ringed by the tiny homes on the cold January day we visited their sample Sacred Settlement. “It neglects the fact that people are coming from broken homes and broken families. And you can’t fix broken families by giving someone a housing unit next to people that don’t know them and don’t necessarily care to know them.”
While there are about three dozen tiny home villages across the country, the only village that has housed and unhoused living together is in Austin, Texas.
“People who could otherwise live wherever they want, afford a single-family home, are choosing to come and live next to the chronically homeless and be a good neighbor,” she says, “in an attempt to live out this great calling to love our neighbor as ourselves.”
The key is finding people to live on-site—called “missionals”—who are eager to invest in relationships. The first crop Settled has found includes David, the tinkerer who will move into the house with the green door; Laura, a jewelry maker who has also experienced homelessness; a family of four; and Rose, an associate pastor of Church of the Open Door in Maple Grove.
Potential residents are identified through Settled’s partner ministry, Walking with a Purpose. Each resident is required to pay $200–$300 per month in rent, which can be earned through work opportunities in the village, such as gardening.
The homes themselves are constructed to be durable, well-insulated homes that will last 50–100 years. And the only reason they’re on wheels is because housing codes in Minnesota require it.
“They are all the things that home represents,” Clowdus says, insisting that the presence of wheels doesn’t imply impermanence. “This isn’t a temporary housing situation. People can live here indefinitely.”
“We want to see Sacred Settlements all over the metro,” Franz adds. “We think it’s a model that can work everywhere. There’s religious land that is available and communities that have people who can open their hearts. We’ve designed everything to be scalable and repeatable.”
Of course, sheer quantity won’t dictate success in a community-first model. It will be successful, Clowdus and Franz say, only when people feel like they belong.
