Tiny-home village for veterans plans to open next year

By this time next year, veterans could be living in a new tiny-home village planned in northwest Sioux Falls.

The Veterans Community Project officially is kicking off its development this week, though it has been in the works for months since city officials connected with the Kansas City-based nonprofit and thought it might be a fit in Sioux Falls.

“I say this everywhere: Sioux Falls has been a model of what we would want from a potential expansion site,” CEO Bryan Meyer said.

“It’s because there is active engagement, they’re reaching out and wanting us to come, and every time we made a request, the response was an immediate, ‘Yeah, we can get that done.’ And the community response has been nothing short of amazing in terms of support for the idea conceptually and people really wanting to get their hands involved.”

The village

The village will be built on a vacant nearly 2-acre parcel with the address of 316 N. Western Ave. that fronts Willow Avenue and sits north of the track for Axtell School. As a bonus, it’s close to the South Dakota Military Heritage Alliance, which can offer additional resources.

Phase one will include 15 of 25 homes – all designed for 260-square-foot single units. While the exterior design will be determined and unique locally, the floor plans are consistent across Veteran Community Project homes.

“They’re a fully functioning home,” said Ben Hendershot, vice president of national construction. “It’s safe, it’s secure, it’s laid out in a way that you can see all the egress points and have good field of view.”

No houses look directly into others, which supports mental health concerns, he said.

“When a resident moves in, they acquire ownership of everything inside the home,” Hendershot continued. “From furniture to silverware, a full bath and kitchenette, and when they transition to their permanent housing solution, they keep ownership of all that. So we try to set them up for success.”

Phase two would include 10 320-square-foot family units and a village center where a case management team will provide everything from financial literacy, income stability, education and training to job placement and health and welfare services. Case managers also will help connect veterans to existing resources.

“Tentatively, the goal is to start getting homeless vets off the street before next winter,” Hendershot said.

“In the interim while we’re building the village center and the remaining homes, we will not have residents without a case management team. They will work in a job trailer or off-site location, but they will still have day-to-day interaction with the residents.”

The fundraising

First, though, a capital campaign aims to raise $1.7 million in addition to in-kind support from industries, including construction.

A leadership committee of Sioux Falls residents will be reaching out to prospective donors.

“The community has already been so supportive. Before we made the public push, we’re well over half a million dollars,” Meyer said.

The complete project is estimated at $5 million, though final design and construction costs could play into it.

“Part of the programming is to get the community involved, get their sweat equity,” Meyer said.

“We make a very concentrated effort to open up a lot of volunteer opportunities for individuals because it builds ownership. It becomes Sioux Falls’ project. Because these houses meet code, we do have to use a lot of skilled labor, but wherever we can, we want to get the community out there, and we want them swinging hammers.”

The need

An initial analysis by the city found that there are 43 self-identified homeless veterans in Sioux Falls. Most of them are in an emergency shelter, five were in transitional housing, and six were unsheltered. The Veterans Community Project considers anyone with discharge papers and supporting documentation to be a veteran, regardless of the duration of service or whether any tours were completed.

“Our organization takes a more expansive view to the terms ‘veteran’ and ‘homeless.’ We don’t require someone to be on the street to be considered homeless,” Meyer said. “If they’re couch surfing or in a slumlord situation or have a couple months left of rent, they’re homeless. They just don’t know it, and they’re not street homeless. All those would qualify for our program, so we know there’s a higher percentage of need.”

Sioux Falls will be the fourth community to receive a village from the nonprofit. The original location in Kansas City opened in 2018. Communities are under construction in Boulder, Colorado, and St. Louis, Missouri.

In Kansas City, more than 100 veterans are no longer homeless because of the program, Meyer said.

“It’s almost hard to describe the transformation you can see,” he said. “On an individual level, stories of people and their background and us being able to kind of reawaken their pride in themselves and see them thrive never gets old.”

Meyer served in the Marine Corps for five years, had his own struggles when he left the military “and was fortunate to get steered back on the right track,” he said.

He became an attorney, and while offering free legal services to veterans, he linked up with future co-founders of the Veterans Community Project who saw the issues facing homeless and low-income veterans and decided “we’re just not going to wait on somebody else to fix this,” he said. “We’re going to take a leap and try to fix it ourselves.”

The founders left their jobs and “literally dumped their savings in and mortgaged their homes to kick-start this thing,” Hendershot added.

The villages are not meant to be permanent housing but rather a stop in a process that leads a veteran to a self-funded apartment or home.

“We believe the sweet spot (for staying at the village) to be right around 14 months,” Meyer said. “But we don’t put a hard cap on it. As long as they’re working through case management, we’re going to stick with them as long as it takes.”

In Sioux Falls, the hope is to finish design and start construction as soon as possible, moving the first veterans in late next year and continuing to build until both phases of the project are done.

“We wouldn’t be making a public announcement like this if we weren’t confident we were going to get this done,” Meyer said. “I don’t want to sit here and say it’s going to be easy. What we do is hard work, and it can take awhile, but we’re so confident in the program and what we do that we know the hard work is worth it.”

Tiny-home village for veterans planned in northwest Sioux Falls