Holst Donates Two Project Mock-ups to Tiny Home Villages

It is not news that Portland is in the midst of a housing crisis. According to the Tri-County Point-in-Time (PIT) survey completed on January 26, From 2019 to 2022, Multnomah County saw an increase of more than 1,200 unhoused people. Of the 5,228 houseless people, 3,057 were unsheltered, 1,485 were in shelter, and 686 were in transitional housing.

This crisis has driven the need to come up with creative solutions to help provide safe temporary housing quickly. Portland has been setting up villages across the city with tiny homes for people to live in. While the solution to homelessness is permanent housing, these villages provide a necessary stopgap in the form of immediate, safe housing. They provide individual sleeping pods, and shared kitchen, bathroom, and gathering facilities and have evolved over time and many now offer additional services to residents. To create structures for these villages, Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design (CPID) has been collaborating with architecture firms and contractors to donate their project construction mock-ups to be converted to sleeping pods as part of their Alternative Shelter project.

Construction mock-ups are an essential part of the design process. They give the architects and contractors a real-life look at how the important details of the project will be executed. Contractors and architects verify details of their project plan through the mock-up, and then typically, they are disassembled and the materials are either tossed or reused, depending on the circumstance. CPID saw construction mock-ups as an opportunity for reuse. They arrange for mock-ups to be donated to villages across the city. Holst partnered with CPID to arrange for two of our recent project mock-ups to be donated.

The Nick Fish Affordable Housing mock-up was donated to the Clackamas County Veterans Village, a transitional community for veterans, with additional services provided by community partners. Within the village, the Nick Fish mock-up serves as one of the pods. Their pods include a bed, interior storage space, operable windows, and a porch with seating as well as full electricity, built-in lighting, and radiant heat. Some of the pods have been adapted to meet ADA standards. They started with 15 pods in the village, but had goals to double that number. Currently the village has 26 pods.

The Fora Health Treatment Center Headquarters mock-up was donated to Creating Conscious Communities with People Outside (C3PO), which consists of three villages: BIPOC Village, which focuses on providing services to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, QA (aka Queer Affinity) Village, which provides services to people who identify as LGBTQIA+, and Old Town Village, a non-identity-specific village. The Fora Health mock-up serves as a “Gate Shack” or welcome center, for the BIPOC village. Community Organizer Dana Louis said, “Thank you so much for making the gate shack appear at BIPOC. Everyone is over the moon excited and appreciative of this. It's a gigantic upgrade to the village and a really honorable way for them to start at their new site."

These donations were made possible by the generosity of our clients and contractors. The Nick Fish mock-up was supported by Human Solutions, Edlen & Co, and LMC Construction. Fora Health paid for the initial cost of their mock-up, and R&H Construction donated an additional $20,000 in labor and materials. Through collaboration and teamwork, we were able to successfully create and transport these mock-ups to support their respective villages.

Holst believes that housing is a human right. While we work to provide quality affordable and permanent supportive housing for our community, we are glad to partner with CPID and support their vision for upcycling construction mock-ups to help, even if in a small way, to alleviate some of the urgent need for immediate temporary housing.