Hello. I started considering the idea of Pod Home sometime in the late 1990's after seeing a minor story about what a pod hotel is. My concept is using Japanese pod hotel style housing for the homeless. It really is as basic as that. The pods are secured against annoyance, cheap (there's some as little as $6 USD per day, which with all things combined could be as little as $200
A Walkthrough Of A Pod Home.
The Three Wise Men.
per month). This is not a fund raiser. I am not the sort of person who could build a Pod Home. You could give me $10 billion and I wouldn't know where to start, it'd just sit on a shelf somewhere and nothing ever happen. What I am asking is two fold; First, share the page (this post is a good option) to your friends and family. Second, go to your local elected officials and say "This is a good idea and we should try it." Some interesting applications are the 2025 Los Angels fires; With 16,000 people made homeless in hours, we need to do something. This the size of some COUNTIES are now homeless including 5 in CA alone (Trinity 15,670, Mono 13,066, Modoc 8,500 or just over half, Sierra 3,200, and Alpine 1,141), and a big chunk of Delaware and Rhode Island's state populations in 2024 (1.05m and 1.112m respectively). The crisis is so bad that it is interfering with yearly homeless counts. Walkthrough Video (if someday I can take this page to professional I will also upload that video to the page). It's crude because I had to do it on a budget of $0. An engineer friend of mine did it as a favor one night. He works on Nuclear Power Plants (to give context, $500/hour is the fair market value for his labor), and he was willing to do this for me so thank you Mr Oz. I hope someday I make that up to you.
One aspect of Pod Homes is the inclusion of a food service system; My ideal would be extraordinarily basic fare, though some advocate for better conditions.
Another is a lowering of the rules most homeless shelters have; 99% have rules prohibiting drugs and alcohol and while they can't be used on site, residents can be under the influence provided they are quiet; If nobody knows you're intoxicated then it didn't happen. If everyone knows, you will be asked to leave until you sober up enough to be quiet. People ARE trying to sleep. do not disrespect their sleep.
One goal that to ME is absolutely critical is "The Three Wise Men." The wise men is the nickname I gave to the Social Services desk in the lobby; While making the walkthrough video I asked my friend who built the video part to add "a few" markers (people) to the desk. He put three there, and I honestly don't remember which of us said it first but one of us blurted out "three wise men" and it stuck.
The need for the Social Services desk is overwhelming; We might be able to cut food services (possibly to the relief of residents), we could scale down the cages to lockers (my original idea didn't even have lockers because it just didn't occur to me), you can add almost anything other than the pod themselves here, but if we cancel the Social Services desk these people will inevitably become trapped in the cycle of the Pod Homes and never get out.
The desk can't be manned 24/7, that's not even an appropriate option under the best of circumstances. Depending on the size of the pod home, even manning it with three people might not be possible- It might be one person with a general access to multiple services at the same time (Veterans Services Officers often can access multiple agencies at the same time to get assistance for vets). But they are necessary for a pod home resident to be a success.
One of the Social Services residents may have to accept in the end is job assistance, and by that I mean General Assistance- Work projects cleaning city and county properties mostly to pay their rent. How General Assistance works varies from county to county, so we will leave the specifics for the counties to decide. Those that already have jobs as they walk in that door are so much the better off; Those that can get private sector jobs through the Pod Home are also that much better off.
An unfavorable comparision of Pod Homes to the Roman insula was made recently. The comparison isn't entirely unwarranted. The idea is to provide the most basic housing possible, and unfortunately the Romans didn't quite have the ability to go to to this level (the comparison was that "Rome treated thier poor better"). However, I have been there and done that. Even this would have been an improvement over being kept awake 3 days in a row every week, and in winter even more as rain poured on the roof of my car making sleep a very difficult option.
A comment I saw; "You cannot simply house people in the throes of addiction." This makes several assumptions that are not strictly true; First is either assumes all homeless are drug addicts or that all drug addicts are homeless (or both); That is not correct. Second it seems to assume that drug addiction leads to homelessness; The reality is about half of homeless drugs addicts become addicts after homelessness. They get high either to 'check out' a while, to stay awake for three days straight (particularly meth addicts) so they don't get beaten and robbed in their sleep1, or simply to kill themselves1. A significant number start using in order to get drug addict homeless benefits, but once they compete the treatment process they're back on the streets, no better off then when they started (because our supposed betters CUT holes in the safety net big enough for an elephant to safely run through). Given a chance, 95% will return to society; Indeed, the real number is around 105%, but 95% of addicts will versus the 10% of those who started using as a way off the street. The only metric here of interest is "Can you be a QUIET addict? Can you climb into your pod and be quiet for your neighbors who may be asleep?" If the answer is yes, then the Three Wise Men table will be open in the morning. You should use it.
