Tiny homes coming to Kelowna have proven track record: Manufacturer

Tiny home villages are positioned as a humane bridge between homelessness and permanent housing.

Outcroppings of small, shed-like shelters have been popping up in large U.S. cities for the better part of a decade but are relatively new to Canada.

Tiny home villages, as they’re called, have become an increasingly commonplace way to address homeless populations, spilling beyond shelters and into streets, and are positioned as a humane bridge between homelessness and permanent housing.

There are a number of companies creating the structures that form these villages and the company bringing roughly half of the 120-unit supply to Kelowna, B.C., is Pallet Shelter, based out of Washington.

The company put its first tiny village into action in 2018 in Tacoma, Wash. Since then, it’s built 121 villages in North America, and Kelowna is its first significant foray into the Canadian market.

“The pallet shelter is sort of that interim stepping stone of ‘we, as a society, should not let the streets be the waiting room for this problem,'” said Sammi Anderson, the vice-president of regulatory and legal operations.

“You need to get under a roof and you need to be warm and you need some help getting back on your feet and then the governments with whom we work and the smart people who are dedicated to this cause with whom we work think about post-pallet housing.”

That, she said, is in many cases something more permanent that hopefully comes with some kind of integrated services to help people in their recovery. It’s a process that challenges existing thinking.

“The narrative here in the United States was along the lines of ‘essentially because people are declining services that are available to them, they must be choosing to be homeless — this must be their personal choice,'” Anderson said.