Aiken’s lack of attainable housing is not unique. The city and county have the same housing troubles that every other community in the state have – escalating prices driven by tight inventory, which is in turn driven by an influx of new people moving in and a lot of longtime residents aging in place.
And that’s all counterweighted by the fact that, like most everywhere in South Carolina, there is not enough new housing going up. Where it is, the homes and apartments tend to be higher-end.
So, in short, Aiken’s housing market is squeezed, especially at the end usually dubbed “affordable” or “attainable” or “workforce” housing.
And then there is the matter of residents without homes at all, a population that has grown rapidly in the past five years. According to the Aiken County Homeless Coalition, which does an annual point-in-time count to measure the county’s unhoused population, the number of residents living on the streets has jumped from 21 to 150 since 2019.
A relatively new addition to this year’s numbers is Becky Phillips, a city resident who lost her house in a fire in 2022 and has not had a home since.
In January, Phillips addressed the Aiken City Council with her experience sleeping outside in 15-degree weather, because there was nowhere else for her (or a lot of other people) to go. And she implored the council on behalf of the city’s unhoused residents, “Please help us.”
Members of the council, such as Lessie Price, urged that the city government can do “something” to help, even if it’s “a starter program.” Something, in other words, to address the immediate needs of a growing population in need of help.
Phillips’ plea coincided with a push from a county-based nonprofit called Aiken County Homeless Housing (ACHH) to put a solution into motion – tiny houses.
In April, I attended a convention in Concorde, N.C., focused on the tiny home movement. Along with tiny home builders and enthusiasts, I sat among numerous regional government officials and advocates who are exploring whether communities of tiny homes, built by nonprofits and featuring managed social services aimed at addressing the issues that come with homelessness – mental illness, substance addiction, lack of job skills – is a viable solution.
“As we’ve advanced in this affordable housing crisis, we’ve realized we need to move from individual solutions to collective solutions,” said Jewel Pearson, the convention’s main organizer. “We can’t keep doing the same things over and over and expect to have some solutions. Tiny houses are an absolute viable solution for housing.”
That kind of sentiment seems to be getting through to the Aiken City Council, which, following Becky Phillips’ Jan. 22 public comment, unanimously directed the Planning Commission to prepare to rezone parts of the city to allow for communities of tiny houses, specifically for currently unsheltered residents.
The Planning Commission is expected to take up the matter at its June 11 meeting.
The push to build a tiny home community in Aiken, however, is not new. In 2019, Aiken County officials started work on rezoning for exactly this purpose. In 2021, the council agreed to allow for it, formally.
But there are no tiny home communities in Aiken yet. That’s because government buy-in is only one component of the process.
George Clare is the president of ACHH and the designer of the model tiny homes the organization wants to see make up small communities near public transit, jobs, stores, and medical facilities. Clare says ACHH is still looking to close on land for the community he wants to build, and still needs to find builders willing to put the houses together (he estimates at a cost of about $15,000 apiece).
At his home in Aiken, where he keeps a scale model of his tiny home design on a trailer to take to anywhere he feels people should see it, Clare shows off what would be 175 square feet of fully functioning house. Each would be equipped with a shower, a bed, and a kitchen area.
Residents would pay a small rent, but would only be allowed to stay for two years.
“This is not luxurious in any sense,“ Clare said. “We specifically intend it not to be luxurious, because the communities that we intend to build are specifically as transition housing.”
That means residents would need to have an exit strategy, to be able to move on to more market-rate housing within two years. To help make sure folks get through those two years, Clare says case managers would be on-site to see that various services were being used.
George Clare
/
Aiken County Homeless Housing
But while all of this sounds like something new to some people, it sounds like another “shiny diamond” to Lila Anna Sauls, president and CEO of Homeless No More in Columbia.
Homeless No More typically serves families dealing with extreme housing insecurity, so one of her main criticisms of projects like what Aiken is considering, is that domiciles designed to serve one or two people at most, for a short period of time, do nothing to address families in crisis.
Sauls’ biggest issue with such projects, however, is that they do not tackle what she sees as the main problem for anyone facing housing insecurity – affordability.
“If you do not build affordable housing, there is no place for any of these individuals or families to go, period,” Sauls said. "I don't care what classes you give them, I don't care how long they stay in a tiny house, if there is no place where they can afford rent, they're going to stay in this cycle.”
She calls such projects “shiny diamonds” because she said they get a lot of attention, but ultimately end up siphoning government investment away from more substantial housing reform, and from agencies like hers, which have spent decades working in the very space officials are looking to solve.
But what do folks who would possibly live in a transitional tiny home think of the idea? Would they consider it another pipe dream? A form of pandering? Worth considering?
I dropped by Bethel Shelters in Rock Hill to ask some of the day shelter’s visitors what they think of the idea. To a person, they all loved it. To folks like Barbara Clifton, who’s spent numerous days at the shelter with her husband, something private and with a front door to shut out the rest of the world would be wonderful.
“I’d like to have one,” Clifton said. “When can we have one?”
Danny Parker, who sat a table away, said that if tiny homes with low rent were available, it would help a lot of people reset, far enough to get back on their feet and be able to move on.
And Michael Baxter was so enthused by the idea, that he said he would “move to Tupelo. Miss.,” if it meant he could have his own home, even for a couple years.
“It [would] boost that person's ego up to say, ‘Wow, I got my own house,’” Baxter said. “’I get to sleep in my own bed. I can sleep [for] as long as I want to. I can take a shower when I want to, every day. In the day, in the night.’”
Yes, he said, a tiny house would be just fine. And he envisions a future in which former residents of tiny houses have reset their lives, saved up for something bigger, and moved on to make way for the next set of folks who just want to lay their heads in a place where the door locks … and no one else has the keys.
