Homeless Veterans Find Homes Through Tiny House Project

ST. PETERSBURG, FL — A small grassroots organization is making steps providing tiny homes to homeless veterans in the St. Petersburg area.

There are 329 veterans who spend each night in Pinellas County without housing, according to Celebrate Outreach.

Tiny Homes for Homeless Veterans is a project created four years ago through Celebrate Outreach, an organization that helps the homeless population, and in partnership with University of South Florida School of Architecture & Community Design.

After overcoming a number of challenges and learning the best ways to help homeless veterans, the project has completed more than half of its first tiny home, 3516 Third Avenue South in St. Pete.

The organization is striving for partnerships with social service organizations that help homeless veterans. These partnerships will help the organization find homeless veterans who are on the journey of finding permanent housing and place them in a tiny home.

"Wednesday, I'm actually organizing an open house, and I've invited all the providers I could think of to come and see the house, which is a little over halfway done, and see if they can envision one of their clients living there, taking care of it and owning a home," project lead Sabine Von Aulock told Patch.

Individual and organizational contributions along with volunteers have allowed the project to construct its first of many tiny homes. It's similar to the Habitat for Humanity model, where they rely on their residents to apply for down payment assistance, take first-time home buyer counseling and acquire a mortgage through Veterans Affairs.

"It has been a learning process because we're not social workers, so we've been learning a lot of the challenges homeless veterans face," Von Aulock said. "We are all confident that there is going to be one veteran for every house we build."

A city program, Disposition of Foreclosed Properties, allows nonprofit organizations to purchase foreclosed properties for reasonable terms, and the Tiny Homes for Homeless Veterans Project is utilizing this to purchase plots around Pinellas County to build each tiny home on.

“We have someone we're working with who is willing to work with our population and assist them in cleaning up their records and credit issues to help them get a mortgage," Von Aulock said.

The homes are designed by students enrolled in the University of South Florida School of Architecture & Community Design that is overseen by Professor Josue Robles Caraballo.

“Lack of affordable housing in an acute need in the community, and this is one small step for alleviating that," said Reggie Craig, president of Celebrate Outreach. "We're hoping to gain some momentum, we're a really small grassroots organization, but we've had good support from the community, and we're hoping to expand our abilities as time goes on.”

Von Aulock said they are going to build one home at a time, and will build as fast they have capacity for.

For more information about the Tiny Home for Homeless Veterans Project, click here.

If you would like to get involved helping this small roots organization provide housing for homeless veterans or connect them to eligible homeless veterans, contact Sabine Von Aulock at 973-768-3256.