A tiny-home village that can house over 30 homeless people is the latest project from a California prefab company that quickly builds homes in factories and trucks them to their destinations

• Long Beach, California, made a $2.5 million deal to build tiny homes for people in need.
• The prefabricated-home designer Connect Homes is set to manufacture the modular units.

When the Harvard Graduate School of Design-trained architect Gordon Stott cofounded the prefabricated-home builder Connect Homes in 2013, he was fulfilling demand for something increasingly hard to find in California: affordable and luxurious single-family homes.

The company was buzzing along as the housing market boomed after it created more than 100 tiny homes in its San Bernardino factory and trucked them to destinations throughout the state, Stott said.

By 2020, Connect Homes was expanding the scope of its projects: It began manufacturing campuses of tiny homes across the state, contracted by municipalities desperate to shelter hundreds of people. The need for shelters has become more urgent in California over the past few years, with the number of homeless people hovering near 173,000 in December.

Next on the company's list is more than 30 tiny homes in the city of Long Beach, which approved a $2.5 million deal for the modular units earlier this month.

Providing shelter to homeless people "strengthens the original mandate of Connect Homes in a profound way that I could have never expected," Stott said.

The projects were funded through a California initiative to fight homelessness

Unlike the congregate shelters, which are often used to house America's roughly half a million homeless people, these 400-square-foot abodes will have private rooms.

The company is building a total of 11 structures that range from at $25,000 to $80,000 per unit. There will be three two-unit shelters with bathrooms compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act and eight three-unit shelters with an en-suite bathroom, according to Stott. All units have fire-suppression systems.

The total cost is a fraction of what a traditional shelter large enough to accommodate the same number of people would be, Stott said.

These projects were funded through the state's $3.75 billion Homekey program, which aims to expand affordable housing and temporary shelter. It's a key part of Gov. Gavin Newsom's social agenda.

Long Beach officials said they chose modular housing for its speedier construction, relative to traditional builds.

"The idea is that we would use modular homes as a way to expedite that timeline," Linda Tatum, an assistant city manager, said at an April City Council meeting of how quickly residents could be housed. Residents might be able to move in between 60 and 90 days after securing a grant from the state.

This is Long Beach's first tiny-home-shelter project, but it's likely not its last: The city has secured $45 million in state grants to build shelter for the city's homeless people, according to City Council documents. It's already looking at other places around the city where these structures can be built, officials said at the April meeting.

From luxury homes to shelters

For its private customers, Connect Homes builds 15 single-family-home models, ranging from a 460-square-foot home for $220,000 to a 1,960-square-foot four-bedroom home that costs about $700,000.

After they are built in the factory, the homes are trucked to their destinations around the Golden State — cities like San Francisco, where the median home costs $1.2 million, and Los Angeles, which has a median home price of $917,000.

In 2020, it manufactured a multiunit shelter for a boarding school that was expanding its space earlier in the pandemic. The tiny suites provided some of the school's most popular living arrangements until they were moved off campus to house foster children who were in between permanent homes, Greg Leung, Connect Homes' CEO, said.

The company has also transformed existing structures into shelters. Most recently, it increased the shelter capacity of Mountain View, California, tenfold by converting an old storage facility into 88 units, an undertaking that won it the 2022 Urban Land Institute award for excellence.

Since then, it has built another 60 units in the Sonoma County city of Rohnert Park and 110 units in Victorville, a 1 ½-hour drive from Los Angeles. It's now getting inquiries in other states about its tiny homes, Leung said.