The city council of Eureka, the largest town in Northern California’s rugged Humboldt County, voted 4 to 1 last night in favor of creating a temporary village made of shipping containers to house part of its growing homeless population.
An innovative approach to sheltering those who do not have any other options, tiny house villages are popping up all over the United States, with communities like Dignity Village in Portland, OR and Occupy Madison, in the college town of Madison, WI leading the movement.
Unlike these two villages made of shed-like houses however, the Eureka village will be made from metal shipping containers, the kind used to haul cargo over long distances on sea-going vessels.
This innovative solution has been used in places like Geneva, Switzerland, where the “Noah” Container Village currently houses a dozen formerly homeless individuals.
Even though the Eureka container village, which will be located on private land right in the city’s downtown area, is supposed to be temporary, the plan still drew fire from some of the local business owners who claim that it will hurt their livelihood.
Eureka has seen homelessness grow over 25 percent in just the last year alone, and the city’s bayfront marsh area, designated as a wildlife sanctuary, has become a de facto tent village where hundreds of individuals and families camp out.
While the marsh area has been raided and dispersed several times, outcry from local human rights groups like Friends of the Humboldt Houseless have made the rather obvious point that simply clearing out the area while there is no other solution in the works is waste of time and energy as well as a form of hassling people who are already suffering considerably.
The new shipping container village will be up in a matter of weeks, according to the Betty Chin Day Center and the Humboldt Coalition for Property Rights, the two organizations behind the container village, according to local new-source the Lost Coast Outpost.
The project is not intended to be permanent, but is a response to the “crisis” of homelessness and the sanitary problems the camp site in the Eureka Marsh presents.
But the city does intend to adopt a “Housing First” model that will seek to provide housing to the homeless in the future, as many studies have shown that housing people is much less expensive that dealing with the costs, everything from medical emergencies to garbage collection, of dealing with an unsheltered and under-serviced population.
