• Conflicts with other Residents
• Unauthorized Visitors during temporary housing
• Bans from Shelters
• Violent Behavior
• Serious Mental Illness
• Inability to sustain employment
• Mental illnesses and addictions that would prevent them from being able to comply with traditional shelter rules.
• Lost I.D. (Caught in loop of not having enough ID to recapture lost IDs)
• DUI / OWI (Driver’s License Issues)
• Private landlords refuse to accept tenants that rely on Housing Choice Vouchers and document-intense annual recertification process with the local public housing agency
• Criminal Recidivism
• Restraining orders preventing further contact with family

• Communities with No Approach/Resources
• Leaving it to Religious Organizations
• The low-barrier / Housing First philosophy

Governmental interference and NIMBY public outcry is the downfall of most attempts to improve the lot of homeless people.  To prevent this, it is SO important to choose your location properly.  An ideal location:

• Is not immediately adjacent to existing residential neighborhoods
• Is government-owned land – in other words, the government agency running the Cubbie Home program cannot be renting the land from someone who will quickly buckle to attempts to shut the subdivision down
• Is close enough to be walkable or a short bus ride from all the retail and services of the town/city

• It has to be understood that homeless people do not have an inherent right to sleep and live wherever they want in a society based on private property and public thoroughfares meant for walking and safe passage from one place to another.
• A homeless person who wants to make their plight a public spectacle or protest is going to do so at the expense of all homeless peoples’ rights. The “publicness” of many modern homeless people has bred contempt which is very unproductive to solving the problem.
• Using drugs in public view is going to lead to the subdivision being shut down
• Public urination and defecation is going to lead to the subdivision being shut down
• Hoarding and litter will lead to the subdivision being shut down. It is important that the subdivision be kept clean and orderly.  Other than bicycles and a few other items, all possessions need to be stored inside the Cubbie Home.

• Increased expense of individual bathrooms would significantly raid the price point of the Cubbie Homes
• On most sites, installing sewer lines would dramatically increase the complexity and cost of getting the subdivision up and running
• From a public health perspective, segmenting the water and sewer elements of the subdivision into public restrooms and showers allows the sponsoring organization to control hygiene and provide for regular cleaning and disinfection. The inside of a Cubbie home is meant to be private space but if tiny house plumbing and sewage management was not handled properly it could create odors and sanitation concerns for the whole subdivision.

The best case scenario is government-owned land (city, county, state or federal) that is close to existing electricity and utilities.
Also, in almost every city there is also long-vacant or defunct industrial property that is more distant from NIMBY residential neighborhoods that government or non-profits can acquire.

The government needs to setup up whichever utilities are used and fund them on an ongoing basis.  It is expected that the units will be installed adjacent to existing homeless shelters or the sponsor of the program will include funding for portable restrooms, restroom trailers, shower trailers and laundry trailers to centralize the need for plumbing and sewer.  The Cubbie Home is intentionally designed NOT to include an integrated bathroom due to the expense and maintenance concerns associated with having many individual plumbing setups.

Every individual is responsible for their own behavior and the government is charged with the responsibility of enforcing laws.  To the extent that there are criminals or mentally ill individuals in the homeless population, it is incumbent on law enforcement and the government to deal with these cases individually.  One might present the argument that putting a roof over someone’s head and giving them the dignity of private, secure space will lessen criminal tendencies in cases where people are inclined to return to a more normal lifestyle.  To the extent that someone is actively creating liability situations or participating in illegal activity, it is easier for law enforcement to find and hold accountable people that have a real address.
Not enough is being said about dispersed “liability” activities which unhomed individuals can spread over an entire community when they do not have a “home base”.   For instance, if a person is defecating in public, or shooting up drugs in public, the community is not doing any better because these activities are spread out and random.  It would be better to instruct unhomed individuals to safely live in a specific area of Cubbie Homes, where individuals creating liability situations can be identified and given services to curtail the behavior.  If a person is defecating in public only because there is no 24/7 restroom available to them, you would assume that if they are living and sleeping 25 feet from a maintained portable restroom or restroom trailer that they would choose to use that restroom.  If they choose not to, that is a different problem – and it is a public health problem that public health officials need to deal with.

Yes, and the Cubbie Home concept is based on the idea that the #1 service an unhomed individual needs is a safe, secure, climate-controlled place to live and sleep.  Telling a person to take medication consistently every day, keep a wound clean, practice safe-sex or look for a job is an extremely tenuous expectation if they do not have safe personal space.    In public health, we can buy harm reduction supplies – so we buy them and give them out.  We can buy condoms – so we buy them and give them out.   We can get medications – so we buy them and give them out.   But why can’t we “give out” the #1 thing these people need…the security of a personal space.  Now you can, you just have to write a grant to buy them and find a place to drop your Cubbie Homes.
Once you know where your homeless people “live” – it is so much easier to deliver all the other services they need!  And of course, it is much better for services to go to them, then expecting them to “come and get” the services – often when situations have already progressed to being a bigger problem.

The Cubbie Home is built to hit an easy-to-understand and easy-to-write-grants-for number of $10,000 each.  Our goal, starting with this price-point is to put a number on fixing the “home” part of homelessness.
To use an analogy, let’s say it was a social crisis if people didn’t have cell phones.  If in your community you had 50 people that just really couldn’t get their own cell phone and were constantly suffering for not having one, no matter what services you gave them, you would say that the cost of solving that problem is the cost of giving them a cell phone (say $1,000) and the ongoing cost of the data plan, say $40 per month each.  So if you run a health department and it is a public health risk when people don’t have a cell phone, you write a grant for $50,000 for the 50 phones and $24,000 per year for the data plans.   Immediately, you would see a decrease in the costs of your other services to these people, because all of the workarounds to help cellphone-less people you were previously funding are no longer needed.  If you document and measure the cost saving along with the increased benefits to the community, it should be straight-forward to get more money to fund those data plans in subsequent years.
So the idea of the Cubbie Home is to sell a “Home” that you can plug in like a big cell phone!   The “data plan” is the electricity bill to power the homes and fees to maintain any restroom/shower/laundry facilities.   So if you have 50 critical homeless situations in your jurisdiction (people that are not candidates to move to transitional housing or rental assistance) you can “home” them for a one-time cost of $500,000 for the homes, say $50,000 for electricity hook-up, $150,000 for restroom/shower/laundry trailers.  So your one-time costs are about $700,000 and let’s say your ongoing utilities and restroom maintenance contracts are $50,000 per year.   That means you’ve “fixed” homelessness for your 50 most critical cases for a one-time fee of $14,000 per person with an ongoing fee of $83 per month per person.   Estimates from across the country peg the cost of homelessness services at between $22,000 and $50,000 per person per year.  California spent nearly $1 billion per year for four years and during that time the problem got worse, not better.
Keep in mind, in an environment where affordable housing is very scarce, the Cubbie Home puts a critically homeless person in a home without taking an affordable unit off the market.  The Cubbie Home adds housing to the community rather than using government money to take an affordable unit off the market – likely taking it from someone with a job who would pay on their own for it.

No, of course not, nothing is.  If you are in a community susceptible to high winds, there are various methods for securing the Cubbie Home to the ground so that it will resist high winds.

Yes, and rightfully so!  People are furious with the government for leaving our nation’s most destitute individuals in plain sight so we get the privilege of BOTH paying very high taxes on everything and having to have daily encounters with some of humanities most embarrassing digressions of social norms.  It is time for all of us to recognize that the first choice you have to make is whether you want a tent on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood and human waste on the sidewalk – or whether it would be better for a local vacant lot in an old industrial park to be set up as a structured form of basic free housing for the worst situations.    Governments and non-profits have to be so careful about where they set up Cubbie Home subdivisions.  You can’t put them right on top of other neighborhoods.

Another factor to consider is that you should limit your program to helping homeless people in your immediate area.   If your program pulls homeless from miles around, you are going to have a problem.  You have to start your program with a census that triages your homeless population, dividing them into ones that are transition-able up and out of your program, versus cases that are likely to linger and even die in their current situation before any meaningful transition can be made.

The Original Cubbie Home does not include a bathroom, so it is intended for projects where multiple units will be setup in one location, sharing trailers with bathrooms, showers and laundry.  In 2024 we will be launching additional floorplans including a unit with an integrated bathroom and a handicapped-accessible unit.

There is a lot more land in our nation then people realize, and over 20% of the land area in the USA is owned by some government entity (city, county, state, federal).  A good exercise to go through is to drive up and down every street in your area actively looking for situations where you would have space, minimal NIMBY problems and access to electricity.   If your homeless are currently congregating under a viaduct, who owns the vacant land closest to that viaduct?  (because presumably the NIMBY problem is not going to get any worse by moving the people a few hundred feet to a much cleaner setup).