With the homelessness crisis mounting across the United States, California is in a particularly challenging uphill battle, with the state comprising nearly 30% of America’s homeless population.
This massive need, DignityMoves founder and CEO Elizabeth Funk said, requires creative solutions.
Funk’s nonprofit focuses on providing interim housing for homeless California residents, calling its efforts “a stop-over between the streets and permanent housing.”
These supportive housing communities consist of prefabricated, relocatable “tiny homes” that are 3D printed using cost-effective and upcycled polymer waste. Each “tiny home” structure provides individuals with their own room and a door that locks.
The homes are placed on temporarily vacant land, where residents can access service providers as needed for case management and transitional support.
“As a new model, interim supportive housing is proving to be a lynchpin solution to homelessness,” Funk wrote recently for Fast Company.
Of the 610 formerly homeless individuals DignityMoves has housed in its first four communities, 307 have transitioned to more permanent housing. The organization’s website shares that it now has seven interim housing communities with 496 total beds.
Each community also includes a dining building and multi-purpose space, a computer lab for residents, pet relief areas, decks and outdoor gathering areas, and, when space allows, community gardens.
For an initiative that was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the speed at which it has come to fruition is impressive — and strategic.
Part of the innovation, Funk said, is that DignityMoves identifies “vacant or underutilized land that we can borrow for a few years, rather than purchasing permanent property for the communities.”
The organization relies on FEMA building codes that are utilized in times of disaster relief — and the loan of an unused piece of land (maybe an odd-sized parcel or parking lot) — to build swiftly to meet an urgent need.
“Using emergency building codes to cut through red tape and modular materials to build quickly and at scale,” Funk wrote, “our communities are designed to be temporary and transportable; they can be moved to a new neighborhood in need when the time is right.”
Interim housing like this is on the rise in California. In September 2024, the state signed into law an Interim Housing Act, which aims to streamline the approval process for projects like these to more urgently address the state’s housing shortage.
DignityMoves helped sponsor the legislation, not to seek funding, but to offer proof of concept and help make it easier for organizations like theirs to get small dwellings built more efficiently.
“It does a lot of things that make it a cost-benefit payoff in spades,” Funk told Capital & Main in 2024. “The cost of leaving someone on the street is twice what it is to get them indoors in treatment and perhaps returning to self-sufficiency. That seems very logical, and yet it has been contrary to policy.”
According to a 2022 report, a single “affordable apartment unit” in California costs between $800,000 and $1 million to build. For that money, Funk said, DignityMoves can build between 16 and 20 units of housing quickly, with an estimated cost of $50,000 per unit.
DignityMoves’ website posits that delivering outreach services to people still unsheltered and living on the street has a “very low return on investment.”
Offer them stability through interim housing, on the other hand, and “the vast majority of them will be able to find their own paths out of homelessness.”
The DignityMoves model has been proven in its existing locations, and Funk is working with leaders in nearly a dozen other cities and counties in California to bring more to life.
“Imagine the possibilities this model can create,” Funk wrote for Fast Company. “By combining technological advancements, supportive legislation, thoughtful partnerships, and dedicated funding, we have the power to make significant strides in reducing homelessness.”
Header image courtesy of DignityMoves
