Others’ trash turns into tiny houses for Oakland’s homeless
A phone call in the middle of the night usually means one thing to Gregory Kloehn: Someone is alerting him to a fresh pile of junk dumped in his neighborhood.
Come morning, he will climb in his truck and scour prime dumping spots, seeking material for his latest project, building tiny homes for the homeless out of things other people throw away.
“I didn’t set out to save the homeless,” said Kloehn, who has built and given away 25 of the minidomiciles on wheels, what he now calls the Homeless Homes Project.
“I am inspired by them. I was taking my skills and their source of materials and combining them.”
The homes, painted in various hues, fashioned from discarded flooring, refrigerator parts, plastic bins, headboards, broken chairs, even fish tanks, are mostly located near his artist workshop and home in a gritty western section of the city. Many sit on a small industrial road near the train tracks, in what has become an unusual nomadic housing site.
“It’s a lot safer and warmer than the street,” said Sheila Williams, who had been homeless for 20 years when Kloehn offered her the first house he built about two years ago.
Someone set it on fire and Williams – who was inside but escaped without injury – now lives in another home with her husband, Oscar Young, and their dachshund Bella.
Pale yellow, surrounded by coolers, a grill and a shopping cart filled with possessions that won’t fit inside, the house measures about 3 by 7 feet. In a city where rents and home prices have skyrocketed, as they have across the bay in San Francisco, the price was a rarity – free.
But Kloehn didn’t set out to make any political or symbolic statement. For as long as he can remember, he has loved building things. At first, growing up in Denver, it was forts. After getting his undergraduate degree at Evergreen State College, then attending California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts), he had a fantasy of building an “art utopia” in Oakland, filled with artist friends.
He bought a condemned building with a partner and went to work putting up a new one. Financially it was more trouble than he’d expected. “I was young and dumb and thought I could get my friends, some beer and some hammers and build something,” he said. “You realize pretty quickly it doesn’t happen that way.”
In the end, he built seven condos on the site and sold all except one, where he now lives with his wife, a performance artist and teacher, and two kids, 13 and 10.
One of his first notable creations was a dumpster home. Friends posted a YouTube video of the metal homestead that drew national attention.
Kloehn appeared on “Rachael Ray,” which paid for the dumpster to be towed to the East Coast.
It now sits on the grounds of an art foundation in Brooklyn, where he spends the summer working and demonstrating what can be done with discarded things.
The rest of the year he spends in Oakland satisfying his curiosity about different kinds of homes. He has studied nomadic housing in other parts of the world and documented the shelters made by homeless in his own neighborhood.
He also leads demonstration workshops that have been attended by activists from the Occupy movement and affluent residents of Orinda. He has given away a few homes in San Francisco, including his most elaborate, a tiny Victorian complete with turrets and a bay window.
So far there has been no official city reaction.
“We are in a gray area,” he said. “It’s a cart and not a permanent structure, and there is no motor so they don’t have to register with the DMV.”
When he drives down the street where many of his creations are parked, the owners wave and come to talk.
Katherine Seligman is a San Francisco-based freelance writer.
This story was originally published March 28, 2015 at 10:35 PM with the headline "Others’ trash turns into tiny houses for Oakland’s homeless."