HOME AT LAST
An unusual project provides safe shelter for needy veterans
MIDWAY CITY, Calif. — Last fall, right around the time Dean Harrell rolled a sleeping bag on the hard ground of the newly opened Courtyard homeless shelter in Santa Ana, a crane was dropping shipping containers into place on a dirt lot in Midway City.
There’s no way Harrell could have known it then, but he was destined to live in those steel boxes.
If you had told him that at the time he wouldn’t have believed it.
And he still didn’t, right until the morning last month, when he actually moved in to his own studio apartment created from three containers. By then, that dirt lot in Midway City had been transformed into a landscaped village for formerly homeless military veterans like Harrell.
Nobody can say, yet, how Harrell might be transformed.
Potter’s Lane, the name of the 16-unit micro housing project on Jackson Street, bore no resemblance to what Harrell imagined a few months ago, when he first heard about the idea from people at the Veterans Affairs Community Resource and Referral Center in Santa Ana.
Then, the words “iron coffin” popped into his mind.
He later saw that Potter’s Lane is far from that.
How they were made
When 64-year-old Harrell moved in a little over two weeks ago, the containers had been reborn as bright and comfortable living quarters — insulated, airconditioned and fully furnished, and with floor-to-ceiling windows to let in the sunshine.
Constructed and managed by the nonprofit American Family Housing, whose headquarters is right next door, Potter’s Lane has attracted wide attention as an innovative approach to a stubborn problem: quick and affordable housing for people who are chronically homeless.
It’s the first permanent housing complex for the homeless in California created from modified shipping containers, and possibly the only one nationwide.
“I am willing to give anything a shot,” Harrell said. “And I’m definitely willing to give this a shot.”
In the eyes of many, Potter’s Lane has come to symbolize the power of transformation.
The company that turns the containers into building blocks for homes, GrowthPoint Structures, typically uses its factory near Dodger Stadium to modify one-use shipping containers into custom homes and schools. Potter’s Lane is the firm’s first foray into multiunit housing.
“Our goal is to do this everywhere on a bigger scale,” said Lisa Sharpe, GrowthPoint’s senior vice president.
More to come?
Proponents of using containers to build affordable housing expect costs to come down as more companies like GrowthPoint compete in that market. The price tag for Potter’s Lane has yet to be revealed. The original estimate in December 2015 was $1.9 million. American Family Housing has declined to release a final figure until it finishes an analysis, and would not confirm a $6.3 million figure cited by one news outlet.
“There were a lot of lessons learned,” said Steve Harding, communications director for American Family Housing, noting that Potter’s Lane is a first-of-its kind. “I guess you could say we kind of over-designed it.”
But those who champion shipping container housing note that the building process is much cheaper and faster — about half the time — than traditional home or apartment construction.
Last summer, the 54 Potter’s Lane containers spent about a day each being processed at GrowthPoint’s factory, each emerging shrink-wrapped and ready for delivery.
On four dates in September and October, they arrived at their final destination in Midway City, in a neighborhood that includes both light industrial businesses and older stucco homes. A 180-ton crane topped with a fluttering American flag lowered each box onto a foundation where construction workers then welded them in place.
In early March, the first veterans moved in.
Lives changed
It remains to be seen if the residents will be transformed so dramatically. Early signs indicate that having a safe, calm place to sleep works wonders.
Emil “Kurt” Carson said that during his first night in his second-story unit, March 3, he slept nine hours straight.
That compares with the two-hour catnaps he’d take during the six years he spent living under a bridge that crosses the Santa Ana River in Anaheim. The 54-year-old Marine Corps veteran of Desert Storm and missions in Somalia and Eritrea, who was homeless for 11 years, said he didn’t sleep much under the bridge because he was wary of thieves.
Now, in Potter’s Lane and its 480-square-foot studio apartments, Carson is more trusting. “I’m not uncomfortable with these guys, like I was with those people under the bridge.”
Harrell, too, had grown wary for similar reasons: He lost three cellphones in three months while sleeping at the Courtyard shelter.
A few weeks ago, while still at the Santa Ana shelter, he packed in haste for his move to Potter’s Lane, stuffing cookies and other snacks into a suitcase.
“Are you leaving now?” a woman asked him that day. “Well, God bless you. I’m trying to find a way out of here. I’m glad for you.”
A bit later, after he wheeled his belongings and his walker a few blocks over to the veterans center, he said he was tired of living at the shelter, a former bus terminal. “I gotta get the hell out of here.” He was talking as much about how he lived as where.
Rebuilding lives
The people connected to Potter’s Lane — promoters and residents alike — know that rebuilding lives is more complicated than merely providing shelter.
Income is part of the problem. About half the veterans have housing vouchers issued by the VA, and rents are subsidized on a sliding scale, depending on income. The Orange County Housing Authority paid for security deposits.
But all of the veterans at Potter’s Lane have led post-military lives fraught with other trouble — some of their own making and some they never asked for. At Potter’s Lane, case managers from the Veterans Administration and the Illumination Foundation, another Orange County nonprofit that works with the homeless, are around to help the men remain stable with whatever assistance they might need.
Still, limited housing options add to their dilemma, and solving that is a huge step forward.
On move-in day for Harrell, Jean Willis, services coordinator at the veterans center that guided Harrell to his new home, called out to the man she’d helped.
“Dean,” she said, “I can’t believe the day has finally arrived.” He could. After spending most of the past three years scraping up money for motel rooms and, more recently, sleeping amid the miseries of nearly 400 people at The Courtyard, he was eager for better surroundings.
“To get stable,” Harrell said, “you need your own residence.”