On August 8, the first handful of people began trickling into the prefabricated tiny home village located on the 1000 block of Santa Barbara Street. Several months later, the DignityMoves’ transitional housing project is humming along at full capacity, offering without incident or controversy a room of one’s own to 34 of some of the most chronically homeless and vulnerable individuals on the streets of downtown Santa Barbara.
“You can drive by 100 times a day and not even know we are there,” declared Jack Lorenz of DignityMoves, a nonprofit started by a group of Bay Area entrepreneurs seeking to move the needle when it comes to homelessness. So successful has the downtown project proved in its first few months of operation, Lorenz said at a forum hosted earlier this December by the Women’s Fund of Santa Barbara, that DignityMoves is now embarking on plans to build four more tiny home communities throughout Santa Barbara County. Translated into the number of units involved, that’s 300.
When all expenses are factored in, Lorenz said, the cost per unit at the Santa Barbara Street village is $50,000. When someone in the forum audience asked Lorenz what she could do to help, he said jokingly, “I could use $18 million.” But, of course, Lorenz wasn’t really joking.