Some might consider it too small for a home, but for Blair Racine, the 399 square-foot space in Austin, Texas is just right.
It consists of a front porch, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living and dining area. Pictures of people he met living here cover one of his living room walls. He’s lived here eight years. Before that he experienced homelessness.
Racine said the combination of housing, support and community connection is a lifeline out of homelessness — for him and for his neighbors.
"It’s about building community. That’s just so important,” Racine said.
The community also provides medical treatment, jobs and wraparound services.
Tiny home communities are now a celebrated strategy to decrease homelessness. Racine’s Austin neighborhood, founded in 2015, ignited the trend.
Tiny home community model
The Texas tiny home development is named Community First! Villages. It currently has more than 400 residents and it plans to expand to house more than 1,900.
An assortment of homes ranging in size and design give residents agency to choose what suits them best. They range in rent from about $350-550 a month based on size and amenities.
A golf cart bus system transports people to the neighborhood’s multiple facilities.
The community center is called the “Living Room,” and Racine said he spends most of his time there. The center is a place to hang out with neighbors, watch television, play games and connect with service providers.
The property also features an art center, cemetery, garden and amphitheater — which was showing a movie that night.
Racine said the community connection builds back the self-esteem people lose when they are homeless.
“The most important thing out here is be involved and have people go do things like that,” Racine said. “You can’t just put people in the house and have them stay there.”
With more than 10 years of success, it’s a blueprint for many addressing chronic homelessness across the country. Founder Alan Graham said Community First! Villages has around an 85% retention rate.
“The 15% turnover that we experienced, 40% of that is attributable to death. And the balance, the overwhelming, vast majority of the balance, would be nonpayment of rent,” he said.
That amounts to a retention rate excluding deaths of around 90%.
Studies show treatment-first models that require sobriety, mental health stability and employment before qualifying for permanent housing with success rates about 47%.
Sanctuary Indy
Now Sanctuary Indy hopes to recreate that success in Indianapolis. It broke ground on its first tiny home community, Circle City Villages in March, planned for 16 homes that share a community center and garden. It aims to follow with more communities, across the city.
Founder Michelle Shelburne said she explored the strategy after she worked to help veterans get out of homelessness. She saw they needed more than a place to live.
So she toured tiny home communities in other cities and said they have something in common.
“These models were Christ-centered models, and then they were equipped with what they called a missional, someone that is on the property, 24/7 just providing community. And then on top of that, having also wraparound services,” Shelburne said.
Sanctuary Indy is building the new neighborhood on land owned by Lyndhurst Baptist Church. The church has owned the vacant land for more than 16 years, wanting to use it to help people struggling with homelessness. Pastor Ben Wakefield said it took some time to find the right community partner.
“The timeline has not always been our timeline, but it continues to move forward. And I’m always reminded someone says that we have to move at the pace of God, which is about three miles an hour. So, but we've been moving, and it’s been very, very exciting,” Wakefield said.
Pushback
Tiny home communities routinely face pushback. Community First! Villages Founder Alan Graham said the Austin city officials were excited when he first pitched them his plans.
“They jumped on that like a duck on a junebug,” Graham said.
The city found and offered a long-term ground lease on about 17 acres of land.
But when Graham went to the community to share his vision and get support for the needed zoning approvals to build in the city, local support quickly vanished.
“Law enforcement had to be called and we had to be escorted out of there because we were being assaulted and spit on and that ended the commitment by the city on that tract of land.”
So Graham purchased land outside the city limits, where he didn’t have to deal with the zoning requirements.
Missouri State University Professor Krista Evans teaches geography and land use planning. As part of that work, she researches tiny home communities built to address homelessness.
She said residents frequently worry about property values declining.
“Or they associate the potential tiny houses with poverty themselves and all the problems that are associated with poverty. So they just assume that the inhabitants are going to have all these problems,” Evans said.
Evans said sometimes tiny home housing-first communities built on less desirable land have now increased property values in those areas.
Pushback also happened in Indianapolis. Pastor Ben Wakefield said some of Circle City Villages west side neighbors did not want the housing-first community near their homes.
“But overall, what I was really impressed with was how many people were really excited about it and put their support behind there,” Wakefield said. “And you know, we just have, we have a job to do, that [for] anyone who is still hesitant, to prove [to] them that this is a good thing.”
State lawmakers
Not everyone is on board. There are many critics of housing-first models, like the tiny home microcommunities.
As he signed legislation to ban camping on public property, Gov. Mike Braun told reporters housing-first initiatives are not working.
“Indiana’s approach to the issue of homelessness has focused on housing-first legislation that has demonstrably not reduced homelessness,” Braun said.
State data shows homelessness in Indiana increasing each year, from 2022 to 2025.
The law he signed in April aims to link people to resources through law enforcement and break up camps to keep people from dying on the street.
Under the new law, when law enforcement first encounter someone camping on public property they should assess mental health needs, give a warning and provide information about available shelter and services.
If someone continues to camp in the area for more than two days they may be charged with a class C misdemeanor for illegally camping.
Its author Cindy Carrasco (R-Indianapolis) said the strategy could also provide a better count of people sleeping outside, and she says that information could better direct federal funding.
“So we can have a better understanding of what is happening on the ground and have honest conversations about whether the dollars we are investing are producing real change in people's lives,” Carrasco said.
When the law was debated in the 2026 legislative session, advocates and people in recovery argued it would not provide additional support, and that the potential for criminal charges is high, which could create more barriers for those people to gain housing or employment.
Sanctuary Indy’s Shelburne agrees with that argument. She said she doesn’t think the new law can address the complex needs at the root of living on the street without a home.
“If not, then these are the individuals that will end up with the fine to pay the misdemeanor and spending time in jail, and not being able to have an opportunity to get out of that environment,” Shelburne said.
A small piece in a big picture
Indianapolis’ latest point-in-time count recorded found a 24% increase in chronic homelessness.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines chronic homelessness as someone with a disability and being homeless for 12 consecutive months or at least four episodes of homelessness over the last three years totalling 12 months or longer.
Chelsea Harring-Cozzi is the CEO of Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention, also known as CHIP. The organization works directly with the city to find and create housing solutions — including housing-first initiatives. She said tiny homes have a role to play but the city has a complex problem.
“While tiny homes can play kind of a small piece in this bigger picture, they aren’t positioned to kind of, or designed even to kind of, meet the scale of housing and stability that we are trying to address,” Harring-Cozzi said.
CHIP and Indianapolis’ most recent initiative is Streets to Home. It also targets people experiencing chronic homelessness and connects them with services and housing. So far, the initiative has helped 166 people.
For her part, Shelburne said her goal is to fill any gaps in need that she can.
Ten Circle City Village tenants are already selected and staying in a hotel while the homes are constructed. All of them have barriers that make it hard for them to succeed in other programs, including blindness and mental health challenges. Shelburne said individuals with complex needs should not have to worry about being left on the streets.
“We do not want anyone in our community having to live and die outside,” she said.
Future residents will be families referred from an Indianapolis prioritization list.
Sanctuary Indy plans to build the next tiny home community on the east side of Indianapolis.
Contact WFYI All Things Considered newscaster and reporter Samantha Horton at shorton@wfyi.org or on Signal at SamHorton.05
