Tiny Home Designs Offer Big Community

As urban dwellers adapted to living and working behind closed doors in the early days of the pandemic, life for those sheltering on the street became even more isolated and precarious. In response, the city of Newark assembled a pop-up village, a cluster of mini-apartments fashioned from six shipping containers, to house them. They quickly found takers.

“People who had rejected everything else — as many as 200 times that year — said yes. A lot of them didn’t like sharing space in congregate shelters. They valued the safety, peace and privacy of Hope Village,” recounts Luis Ulerio, director of the Mayor’s Office of Homeless Services. The 20-person community, initially intended as temporary shelter, was built in three months. Mayor Ras Baraka quickly called for more supportive housing communities, with instructions to improve upon each new iteration.

The ad hoc community piqued the interest of architects Erin Pellegrino and Charles Firestone, adjunct professors at NJIT’s Hillier College of Architecture and Design, who were moved by the initiative, and decided to pose the challenge to their Fall 2021 studio design class to build a prototype with an even smaller budget. Within 15 weeks, the class unveiled a light-filled, energy-efficient cabin with a sleeping loft, sitting area and storage spaces that felt larger than its 120 square feet. Built for $10,000 donated by Tom Wisniewski of Newark Venture Partners, it cost roughly half the price per unit of the container housing.

Their tiny house in turn got the attention of Newark planning officials and an ambitious new mandate for the Fall 2022 studio: to design a community of Federal Housing Administration-compliant dwellings for a vacant, city-owned lot that would offer more services, amenities and comfort than the original Hope Village. They were urged to make it “a model for future villages.”

To guide the design, the class established a set of principles gleaned from a questionnaire put to Hope Village residents and conversations with city officials: privacy, storage, safety and dignity. They added community and connectivity.

The resulting “Resilient Hope” includes 12 two-bedroom homes situated around a ring of open space with plantings, tables and benches, and communal buildings at the center, including a pantry, a clinic with privacy for telehealth meetings, a counseling room, a laundry and a multi-resource room with computers. There’s also a large kitchen, a meeting space and a lounge to encourage social gatherings.

“We wanted to build something that would feel more like a typical home to people who may not have had one in a long time. Dignity was the driving force, which is something we often take for granted,” says Cooper Schipske, a fifth-year student who said he was struck by the care Hope Village residents took for their apartments.

The units, clad in wood and corrugated metal, expanded upon the more rudimentary Hope Village by providing separate bedrooms with doors in place of bunk beds, a bathroom, a kitchenette, a small living area and even more storage. Inside the units, the students used “a lot of natural wood to create a warm, welcoming feeling” and neutral palettes throughout “for a brighter, more open feeling that encourages mental wellness,” notes Nicolas Boneta, a fifth-year student. “Accented walls in the unit provide a splash of color, and by varying the color choices in each home, a sense of individuality and ownership.”

 To connect people inside the community, the students included covered porches on the houses that face each other and large glass walls on the communal buildings. In designing the compound, they also considered how the residents — individuals, paired companions and couples, many over 50 years old with chronic health issues who would stay varying lengths of time — would be seen by the neighborhood, as well as their consciousness of public perceptions.

They tucked the security desk behind a wall so the residents would not be viewed checking in, for example. They treated the fence around the village, which Hope Village residents had called an essential security feature, as an aesthetic and protective element. Aiming for a look that projected “more mediation than barrier,” they came up with a thin mesh screen overlaid with spaced wooden slats, on which artwork could be painted.

“We want the village to allow people to live and build their lives in the community,” notes Elizabeth Kowalchuk, a fifth-year student, who says the next step would be “to engage the community to discuss ways to integrate the village into the neighborhood aesthetically and socially.”

Pellegrino and Firestone laud the class for also tackling what they called the “unglamorous” features of any development: budget, security, waste management and accessibility, noting that one student immersed himself in dumpster design.

After the presentation to city officials this past December, Baraka pronounced the design “brilliant, beautiful, efficient and effective.” He commended the students’ efforts “to make people feel comfortable.”

“My goal is to make this happen,” says Ulerio. “The city has committed the land and funding, and we need to leverage private dollars to fill the gaps.”

Caption: The undergraduate designers of “Resilient Hope,” a community of FHA-compliant dwellings for unhoused residents of Newark, N.J., presented their plan to city officials last December. They are flanked by adjunct professors of architecture Erin Pellegrino (far left) and Charles Firestone (far right) who oversaw its design.

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