This story is part of Southwest Michigan's Second Wave's series on solutions to affordable housing and housing the unhoused. It is made possible by a coalition of funders including Kalamazoo County, the city of Kalamazoo, the ENNA Foundation, and the Kalamazoo County Land Bank.
 
KALAMAZOO, MI – The three new houses at North Street and Westnedge Avenue are small in size but huge in terms of being a new alternative in the ongoing effort to develop more affordable housing in Kalamazoo.
 
"This is the time where we can get excited and say, 'You know what? We're going to have three houses available for people who are normally at the bottom of the list for housing,'" Gwendolyn Hooker says of those who are trying to improve the lives of people who have been incarcerated or are recovering from substance abuse disorders.
 
The chief executive officer and founder of HOPE Thru Navigation, the nonprofit organization spearheading the development, says, "And we're going to have a building that exclusively serves that population."

A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Tiny Houses of HOPE Development is expected this month.

Al JonesConstruction work on the Tiny Houses of HOPE Development at North Street in Westnedge Avenue is nearing completion.A "tiny" house is defined as one with less than 450 square feet of living space. The idea to build them to provide needed housing for a hard-to-place population was chosen in 2018. It is expected to be a time-effective and cost-effective way to build affordable and energy-efficient housing to serve HOPE Thru Navigation’s target population.
 
HOPE Thru Navigation is an advocacy organization that works to help people return to productive lives. HOPE stands for Helping Other People Exceed. 

About $130,000 was spent on site work and things necessary to start the Tiny House project, such as environmental testing and marketing. About $390,000 has been spent on the actual construction of the houses. Another $350,000 is expected to be spent on the construction of a support services building on the site.

The money for the construction work has included about $300,000 from the Kalamazoo County Housing Millage and about $125,000 from the City of Kalamazoo. Additional funding has come from the Local Initiatives Support Corp., private donors, and the Kalamazoo Community Foundation.

Renters can expect to pay about $1 per square foot each month. That is about $410 per month, utilities not included. The cost of utilities is expected to boost any tenant's monthly housing bill to about $450.

Each house is to be leased to a working adult who is living without dependents.

“We don’t have a waiting list. We don’t want to have a waiting list. We want to have hard applications when the units are available for rent,” says Hooker. “… We’re going to take the applications that we get. We’re going to go through them, and the first three people out of those applications are the first three people who will go into those houses.”

The rest will go into a file and will be contacted when additional housing is built. 

HOPE Thru Navigation broke ground on the project on April 2, 2024, using a small plot of land it purchased from the City of Kalamazoo at the southeast corner of North Street and Westnedge Avenue. Designed by architectural firm Abonmarche Byce and built by Adam Garland Construction, each of the one-story, 410-square-foot dwellings is designed to be energy-efficient and will include high-end finishes. 

Al JonesConstruction work on the Tiny Houses of HOPE Development at North Street in Westnedge Avenue is nearing completion.Construction of an 800-square-foot support service building to help Tiny House renters do such things as remain substance-free and get job training, is the next step of the project. It will be located on a small patch of land in front of the three houses. 

Construction of that "wrap-around" services building is expected to start before the end of this year after HOPE secures the correct permits. It will include a loft-style apartment to house a staff person.

The organization also hopes to begin construction before the end of the year on three additional tiny houses and a commercial services building on the northwest corner of North Street and Westnedge Avenue. They will be across from the first Tiny Houses, which are on the southeast corner of that intersection. 

“I hope to start building those almost in tandem with the wrap-around building,” Hooker says.

"There's going to be three more houses and there's going to be a commercial building," Hooker says. "Basically, the six (houses) are going to mirror each other. There's going to be three houses on each side and there's going to be commercial buildings sitting in front of them. The commercial building on the other side of the street will be the property-management building for the Tiny Houses as well as a community space where people can come in and get on the Wi-Fi (or) they can do resumes. It's going to be a resource center."
 
She says it will be the Northside Recovery and Resource Center "in front of the tiny houses on that side as well as our property management office."

Hooker says the tiny house concept surfaced as she searched to find a way to provide affordable housing for her clients. She and a 10-person steering committee for the project were inspired by a 24-house community of tiny houses being built by Detroit-based Cass Community Social Services to allow low-income individuals a means to own homes. 

Al JonesEach of the three houses is approximately 410 square feet.The houses, which the committee visited in May of 2018 in the northwest part of the Motor City, were being occupied on a rent-then-own basis, part of a program with qualifiers to participate that is not open to simply anyone looking to rent. 
 
Hooker says she and others in Kalamazoo were excited by the Tiny House concept after visiting a thriving, 24-unit tiny house complex in Detroit in May of 2018. More information about the Tiny Houses of HOPE is available by contacting HOPE Thru Navigation at 269-775-1221 or visiting its website. 
 
Housing development efforts by HOPE Thru Navigation join those of several other organizations as Kalamazoo County looks to provide some 7,000 additional housing units that authorities say are needed. The Northside Association for Community Development is set to host an informational session for its four new Ransom Street homes from 6 to 8 p.m. on Nov. 19 at its 612 N. Park St. meeting room. The session is intended to provide prospective home buyers what they need to do to submit bids on any of the four houses located in the 400 block of West Ransom Street.
 
Each of the two-story houses is about 1,700 square feet and has a separate garage. They were completed in March but access to them has been waylaid until very recently by summer road re-construction work.
 
Speaking of new housing in Kalamazoo's Northside Neighborhood, Hooker says, "This is the part where everybody jumps up and down." Of the Tiny Houses, in particular, she says, "These are exciting times for Kalamazoo because it's something that's new, that's never been done. And we're going to continue to build. This is just the beginning. We've only just begun."
Al JonesEach of the three houses is approximately 410 square feet.