Tag Archives: Unhoused

Village welcomes 310 new micro-homes to its community designed and built for formerly unhoused people!

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Community First! Village’s Tiny Victories 2.0 rollout welcomes 310 new micro-homes to the bustling community designed and constructed for unhoused individuals.

In East Austin, Texas, the Community First! Village is comprised of 230 micro-homes designed, constructed, and priced for unhoused individuals. Developed and run by Texas nonprofit Mobile Loaves & Fishes, Community First! Village started welcoming 310 new micro-homes designed and built by award-winning architecture firm Chioco Design. Created for unhoused individuals to find security and comfort in the community, the rollout of new micro-homes, also called Tiny Victories 2.0, is the start of a new community.

Tiny Victories 2.0, orchestrated by Chioco architects, rolls out 200-square-foot micro-homes that strike the perfect balance of privacy, functionality, and personality. One of Community First! Village’s residents, Sheila, collaborated with Chioco Design to build her micro-home with all three aforementioned elements in mind. To incorporate enough privacy into the small living space, the architects purposefully offset the home’s interior construction to achieve privacy through wall partitions and interior design elements.

Exposed framing walls are perhaps the most distinctive interior design element in the home, adding built-in storage options for momentos like family photographs and heirlooms. Shelving units are built into the exposed framing walls throughout the micro-home to create storage space without compromising the tiny living space. Outside, Sheila can find privacy in the micro-homes small front porch or screened-in patio.

The exterior of the micro-homes that make up Tiny Victories 2.0 find low-maintenance and long-lasting siding in stucco and corrugated metal facades, giving each home a modern profile. Each tiny home also comes with two entrances for micro-homes that are replicated and positioned in opposing solar orientations.

Jamie Chioco, a founding architect at the firm, says of the offset layout, “We created separate living and sleeping areas by offsetting the plan elements in hopes of fostering a greater sense of privacy with multiple rooms.” Like many residents of Community First! Village, Sheila is eager to pass on the sense of community and support offered by Chioco Design and Mobile Loaves & Fishes.

Designers: Mobile Loaves & Fishes and Chioco Design

The post Village welcomes 310 new micro-homes to its community designed and built for formerly unhoused people! first appeared on Yanko Design.

This tiny convertible A-frame structure is a part kiosk + part shelter designed to aid Ecuador’s unhoused population

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Natura Futura Arquitectura, an architecture and design firm based in Babahoyo, Ecuador builds structural solutions that redefine community engagement. Committed to finding and bringing to life solutions for unhouse individuals who face societal challenges in everyday life, Natura Futura Arquitectura conceived The Ambulantito.

Conceptualized through the lens of those experiencing poverty in Ecuador, The Ambulantito was designed to be woven into the urban fabric of Latin American cities. The mobile kiosk provides privacy and a canopy with its A-frame structure for times when the weather requires shelter. Mounted on wheels, The Ambulantito is as much a stationary shelter as it is a traveling kiosk from which unhoused individuals can sell goods to generate income.

Designed to be protective, yet simple, The Ambulantito’s frame is built from welded metal rods, which are then overlaid with panels of locally sourced timber. The structure’s A-frame roof is complete with two eaves, one that unfolds to reveal The Abulantito’s storage shelf, where goods can be placed and sold, and the other fixed. The versatile frame of The Ambulantito at first provides a sort of mobile safebox, where folding lattice doors secure people’s belongings and goods intended for sale and then transform to become a traveling kiosk or bed with an overhead roof come night.

The changing personality of The Ambulantito was created by Natura Futura Arquitectura to adapt to the mobile lifestyle of unhoused individuals in Ecuador. With indigence rates steadily growing, the mobile shelter functions as a first step towards more permanent solutions for the societal struggles that overwhelm unhoused communities across Latin American cities.

Speaking on the design and its intended purpose, Natura Futura Arquitectura remarks, “The Ambulantito is a first small step towards raising awareness of urgent needs such as shelter, productivity, and human safety, seeking to be an engine of consciousness that opens up new possibilities and reflections on our role of responsibility regarding the realities of the city.”

Designer: Natura Futura Arquitectura

Mounted on wheels, The Ambulantito was designed to integrate the mobile lifestyle of unhoused individuals living in Ecuador.

Designed to be versatile and inconspicuous, The Ambulantito changes and blends in with the urban framework of Ecuador.

A foldable lattice wooden door provides protections for goods intended for sale and unhoused individuals’ personal belongings.

One eave folds up to reveal storage space that functions as a sales shelf for goods to purchase.

The Ambulantito comes complete with a chalkboard where the goods can be advertised for sale.

Come night, unhoused individuals can transform The Ambulantito into a sleeping space with coverage from the natural elements.

This modular furniture system was designed to provide privacy and organization for co-living spaces!

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Humans are creatures of habit, so they say. We each have our own special ways of finding comfort and peace of mind. More often than not, that sense of comfort is exhibited most obviously in the spaces where we live. We know our homes better than anyone else because we design them ourselves and simply know what we like. Each of us feels the need to design and organize our spaces, and considering our differences in design preferences and modes of organization, we have that in common. Building a household room divider that lends itself to that common need, designers Giulia Pesce and Ruggero Batista created Patchwork.

Patchwork is Giulia and Ruggero’s proposed creative design solution for depersonalized home spaces such as reception centers for unhoused individuals. Their home organization project offers a wide range of functionality in regards to privacy, space demarcation, personalization, and organization of personal belongings. In collaboration with design agency Hans Thyge & Co., Giulia and Ruggero’s Patchwork is meant for use in cohabitation spaces like hostels, school dormitories, or reception centers for unhoused populations.

Patchwork is comprised of different, interchangeable panels that fold and expand like a traditional room divider. Patchwork panels provide plenty of different uses for each individual and function as a typical divider, work station, headboard, or some combination from the above. Patchwork incorporates a built-in closet space where users can hang their clothes and, thanks to a concealed padlock accessory, can also stow away personal possessions for secure storage. Patchwork also comes with supplemental shelving units, individual mirrors, and handy hooks so that the additional panels can be outfitted according to each user’s unique needs.

In order to create an effective solution that offers privacy and the chance to personalize any space one might call home, Giulia and Ruggero committed to field research that took place in a wide array of co-living spaces. Following their visits to unhoused population centers and refugee camps, the designers say, “During field studies in reception centers for homeless people and refugees in Italy, we observed as the facilities used often do not provide the possibility to organize and hang clothes in a functional way.” Upon discovering this deficiency, Giulia and Ruggero created Patchwork, their micro-solution for our shared need to find privacy and individualization no matter where we might find ourselves living.

Designers: Giulia Pesce & Ruggero Batista

Through the use of modular panels, designers Giulia and Ruggero were able to create room dividers for co-living spaces that also function as storage units for personal belongings.

The nondescript padlock offers both security and peace of mind for users who hope to stow away their more prized personal possessions.

Different forms of hooks and shelving units can be added to each Patchwork unit so that users can design their spaces according to their unique needs.

“The different panels are interchangeable and they can be accessorized so as to create different personal units in the shared cohabitation space.”

This tiny home in the Community First! Village is built for previously unhoused individuals

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Beginning in 1998, a mobile food truck based in Austin, Texas, with the help of thousands of volunteers, has helped serve food to unhoused individuals seven days a week and 365 days a year. That food truck has since transformed into Mobile Loaves & Fishes, a social outreach ministry responsible for the development of “the most talked-about neighborhood” in Austin, Texas, Community First! Village. The village is one of MLF’s three core programs that were started to serve the unhoused population of Austin, Texas, and offers permanent and sustainable housing for an affordable price in a mutually supportive community.

Teaming up with Bailey Eliot Construction, McKinney York Architects, an architecture firm based in Austin, recently designed and constructed a micro-home for one of the residents of Community First! Village. In order to meet the new homeowner’s tiny housing criteria, McKinney York Architects planned to design a micro house that met both the homeowner’s requirements for privacy and the village’s commitment to community support. The home’s final design incorporates a butterfly roof, which implements the use of a central valley where the two pitched roofs meet to collect rainwater for further irrigation use. Additionally, installing a butterfly roof allows for plenty of natural lighting to enter through the windows without having an impact on the homeowner’s privacy.

Taking full advantage of the 200 square foot area limit for each micro-home, McKinney York Architects also installed a screened-in sunroom for the homeowner to have the option of either opening the screens up to the rest of the community or keeping them closed for optimal privacy. Inside the home, original pine timber lines the walls, giving the feel of a blank canvas for the homeowner to leave as is or design as they’d like. The tiny home manages to include a bedroom with room for a twin-sized or larger bed, a modest kitchen, a relatively spacious working area, dining space, and a cozy den for relaxing.

Community First! Village is a 51-acre development planned by MLF over the course of two phases which spanned over four years and has expanded to include a total of 500 tiny homes as well as community amenities such as gardens and behavioral healthcare facilities. In 2014, the first phase of Community First! Village commenced after Tiny Victories 1.0, a design competition in partnership with Mobile Loaves & Fishes and AIA Austin DesignVoice, invited firms to design sustainable, tiny housing solutions that take up no more than 200 square feet. Following the first phase, which culminated with a 27-acre master-planned community for the “chronically homeless” population of Central Texas, the village’s second phase kicked off in 2018. Today, Community First! Village offers permanent housing and encourages a safe, uplifting community space for more than 250 formerly unhoused individuals.

Designer: Mobile Loaves & Fishes, McKinney York Architects, and Bailey Eliot Construction

This self-cleaning hoodie was designed (in part) for the homeless

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The hoodie is the ultimate piece of clothing when it comes to a carefree lifestyle. They’re the kind of clothes you can wear for over a week without washing, and honestly, who hasn’t wiped their Cheetos-crumb-coated hands on them every now and then? Don’t give me that holier-than-thou expression, I know you have. It isn’t an extremely flattering comparison, but that hoodie-wearing socially stagnant lifestyle sort of applies to the homeless too, and social impact startup Unhoused believes its clothing can knock two birds with one stone.

Meet the World’s First Self-Cleaning Hoodie. It’s comfortable, robust, and fuzzy, like every hoodie ever made… but it’s also near impossible to get dirty. Made from a fabric coated with the company’s proprietary Freshtech™ nanomaterial, the hoodie repels sweat, stains, dirt, and most liquids and fine solids. In short, whether you’re at home spilling wine on yourself while watching Too Hot To Handle (we’ve all been there), or whether it’s a homeless person spending weeks in the same clothing, the Self-Cleaning Hoodie always remains looking brand new. Oh, and it repels body-odor too, so you rarely need to wash it.

The hoodie comes with a social angle too. Developed by Varun Bhanot and Anisha Seth, the hoodie hopes to provide the homeless with secure and warm clothing. “A record 726 homeless people died in the UK last year — mostly due to cold and rough sleeping”, said the founders of Unhoused. The hoodie comes with the word Hope printed on it, as a symbol of solidarity with the underprivileged. Besides, for each hoodie bought on the Unhoused website, a free hoodie is given to a homeless person. Click on the link below to grab your own and help someone in need!

Designers: Varun Bhanot & Anisha Seth (Unhoused)

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