On the outskirts of Austin, Texas, what began as a fringe experiment has quickly become central to the city’s efforts to reduce homelessness. To Justin Tyler Jr, it is home.

Tyler, 41, lives in Community First! Village, which aims to be a model of permanent affordable housing for people who are chronically homeless. In fall 2022, he joined nearly 400 residents of the village, moving into one of its typical digs: a 200-square-foot, one-room tiny house furnished with a kitchenette, bed and recliner.

He arrived in rough shape, struggling with alcoholism, his feet inflamed by gout, with severe back pain from nearly 10 years of sleeping in public parks, in vehicles and on street benches.

At first, he kept to himself. He visited the clinic and started taking medication. After a month or so, he ventured out to meet his neighbours.

“For a while there, I just didn’t want to be seen and known,” he said. “Now I prefer it.”

In the next few years, Community First is poised to grow to nearly 2,000 homes across three locations, which would make it by far the nation’s largest project of this kind, big enough to permanently house about half of Austin’s chronically homeless population.

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Since 2019, the number of these villages across the country has nearly quadrupled, to 124 from 34, with dozens more coming, according to a census by Yetimoni Kpeebi, a researcher at Missouri State University.

Mandy Chapman Semple, a consultant who has helped cities such as Houston transform their homelessness systems, said the growth of these villages reflects a need to replace inexpensive housing that was once widely available in the form of mobile home parks and single room occupancy units, and is rapidly being lost. But she said they are a highly imperfect solution.

“I think where we’re challenged is that ‘tiny home’ has taken on a spectrum of definitions,” Chapman Semple said. Many of those definitions fall short of housing standards, often lacking basic amenities including heat and indoor plumbing, which she said limits their ability to meet the needs of the population they intend to serve.

But Community First is pushing the tiny-home model to a much larger scale. While most of its homes lack bathrooms and kitchens, its leaders see that as a necessary trade-off to be able to creatively and affordably house the growing number of people living on Austin’s streets. And unlike most other villages, many of which provide temporary emergency shelter in structures that can resemble tool sheds, Community First has been designed with homey spaces where people with some of the highest needs can stay for good. No other tiny-home village has attempted to permanently house as many people.

In 2019, the progressive City Council lifted Austin’s ban on public camping in an effort to decriminalise homelessness. But when people set up tents in more visible places, many residents and business owners felt that homelessness was swelling out of control. Soon, a local political action committee gathered enough signatures to put a new camping ban on the ballot, which voters overwhelmingly approved just two years after the old one had been lifted.

In October, the official estimate put the number of people living without shelter at 5,530, a 125 per cent increase from two years earlier.

Meanwhile, outside the city limits, Community First has been building fast. In a mere eight years, this once-modest project has grown into a sprawling community that the city is turning to as a desperately needed source of affordable housing. The village has now drawn hundreds of millions of dollars from public and private sources and given rise to similar initiatives across the country.

This rapid growth has come despite significant challenges. The next few years will be a test of whether these issues will be addressed or amplified as the village expands to five times its current size.

For Alan Graham, the expansion of Community First is just the latest stage in a long-evolving project.

In 1998, Graham, now 67, became a founder of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, a nonprofit that has since amassed a fleet of vehicles that make daily rounds to deliver food and clothing to Austin’s homeless.

One day while delivering meals, Graham met Ellis Johnston, a broad-shouldered, soft-spoken man who was living in a tent near a flood-prone creek and surviving on day-labour jobs.

Johnston, 58, grew up in Austin. He was a star high school football player until an injury ruined his college prospects. In adulthood, he ended up working service jobs, drinking, using drugs and eventually serving time in prison on drug-possession charges. With a felony record and no close family or other support, he wound up on the street.

Graham helped Johnston with basic needs and finding random jobs. But after seeing him and others remain on the streets year after year, Graham began buying used recreational vehicles and over the course of a decade helped Johnston and more than 100 other people move into private mobile-home parks around Austin.

In 2006, Graham pitched an idea to Austin’s mayor: Create an RV park for people coming out of chronic homelessness.

The City Council voted unanimously in 2008 to lease Graham a 17-acre plot of city-owned land to make his vision a reality.

When residents near the intended site learned of the plan, they were outraged. Not a single one of the 52 community members in attendance voted in favour of the project.

After plans for the city-owned lot fell apart and other proposed locations faced similar resistance, Graham gave up trying to build the development within city limits.

In 2012, he instead acquired a plot of land in a part of Travis County, just northeast of Austin. It was far from public transportation and other services, but it had one big advantage: The county’s lack of zoning laws limited the power of neighbours to stop it.

Graham raised US$20 million and began to build. In late 2015, Johnston left the RV park he had been living in and became the second person to move into the new village. It grew rapidly. In just two years, Graham bought an adjacent property, nearly doubling the village’s size to 51 acres and making room for hundreds more residents.

And then in fall 2022, he broke ground on the largest expansion yet: Adding two more sites to the village, expanding it by 127 acres to include nearly 2,000 homes.

Everyone at the village pays rent, which averages about US$385 a month. The tiny homes that make up two-thirds of the dwellings go for slightly lower, but have no indoor plumbing; their residents use communal bathhouses and kitchens.

Like Johnston, many residents have jobs in the village, created to offer residents flexible opportunities to earn some income.

But about 4 in 5 residents live on government benefits such as disability or Social Security. Their incomes average US$900 a month, making even tiny homes impossible to afford without help, Graham said.

For about US$25,000 a year, Graham’s organisation subsidises one person’s housing at the village. (Services including primary health care and addiction counselling are provided by other organisations.) So far, that has been paid for entirely by private donations and in small part from collecting rent.

This would not be possible, Graham said, without a highly successful fundraising operation that taps big Austin philanthropists. To build the next two expansions, Graham set a US$225 million fundraising goal, about US$150 million of which has been obtained.

Dennis Culhane, a social-science researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent decades studying modern homelessness, said he understood the desperate need for housing, but was wary of relying on tiny homes as a permanent answer.

“It’s better than shelter, but not what we expect as a country of our resources and size, and we do have housing standards and it doesn’t meet them,” he said. “In a way, it’s a step backward.”

Graham said that with a doctor’s note, people could secure an RV or manufactured home at the village, although those are in short supply and have a long waiting list. He said the village’s use of tiny homes allowed them to build at a fraction of the usual cost when few other options existed, and helps ensure residents aren’t isolated in their units, reinforcing the village’s communal ethos.

“If somebody wants to live in a tiny home they ought to have the choice,” Graham said, “and if they are poor we ought to respect their civil right to live in that place and be subsidised to live there.” But he conceded that for some people, “this might not be the model.”

“Nobody can be everything for everyone,” he said. NYTimes