In Our Backyard board chair Julie Greene-Graham stands in the future location of the nonprofit’s six interim housing shelters near Central Lutheran Church in Anchorage on August 6, 2024. (Marc Lester / ADN) A man lay curled on the pavement in an alcove near the front doors to Anchorage’s Central Lutheran Church, sheltering from a steady rainfall on an early August afternoon. At the west end of the church’s large property along West 15th Avenue, church member Julie Greene-Graham pointed out the site where she and other volunteers with fledgling nonprofit In Our Backyard plan to soon build six tiny home shelters for adults experiencing homelessness.
Adjacent to the site is a sprawling symbol of why the small project is needed: Clusters of sodden tents and tarp shelters dot the grassy landscape in a stretch of municipal park land, just behind a row of trees separating the properties. “People need to be housed, but there’s just a gap between being on the street and living in your car, which isn’t safe, to getting into permanent housing,” said Greene-Graham, who chairs the local nonprofit’s board. The tiny homes will provide transitional housing for adults, aged 50 or older, on a 60-by-90-foot area the church is dedicating to the shelter village.
As homelessness has surged across the country in recent years, dozens of cities and counties have erected similar villages of tiny homes, “Pallet” shelters and other modular structures in order to temporarily shelter o.