In the thick of winter a few months ago, Matthew Stone was living in a tent encampment in the woods of a central Illinois city.
"It was very horrible, a very horrible experience," Stone said. "I was living in a tent with my dog. It was just, all in all, a horrible experience, very cold this winter."
Temperatures in central Illinois averaged 20 degrees Fahrenheit, with a low of minus 8 in January. But three days before temperatures dropped below zero, the city of Bloomington opened its first shelter village. The Bridge is a tiny house community that offers people experiencing homelessness private spaces for sleeping and storing their belongings.
A Housing shortage intensifies a homeless crisis.
Bloomington has a housing shortage that became dire in 2021 because more people had moved to the city looking for jobs at a new manufacturing company. There wasn't enough new housing in place to meet the demand and homelessness increased.
Matt Burgess, CEO of Home Sweet Home Ministries, a local nonprofit, says it was a crisis that was not visible to many of the city's residents until 2023. That's when people without permanent housing started living in a tent encampment in a downtown church parking lot.
"Literally hundreds of people would drive by it every single day," Burgess said. "And that's when the community started to say, 'you know, it's not okay that we have people who are stuck outside.'"
In Illinois, there can be extreme weather from snowstorms and cold snaps to tornadoes and flash flooding. Those conditions can make it difficult, even deadly, for people living outside.
"We started to say very loudly, 'it's not acceptable that our neighbors don't have any other legitimate options than to try and survive in a tent in a parking lot,'" Burgess said.
Even so, the city shut down the encampment and many of the people staying there continued to live outside, scattered across the community.
"We wanted to find a solution that has been proven to work in other communities across our country, that we could maybe try here," Burgess said.
An idea becomes a reality.
Home Sweet Home Ministries was in an ideal position to provide an alternative, Burgess said, because it had been serving people living on the margins of society in Bloomington for more than one hundred years.
Burgess came up with the idea for The Bridge after researching four communities, which had built shelter villages to combat homelessness– Burlington, Vermont; Denver, Colorado; Missoula, Montana and Austin, Texas.
"I actually physically visited the Missoula, Montana shelter village," Burgess said. "They call it a 'temporary, safe outdoor space.' And so, I got to see that in action, talk to the people that were running that program, personally, as part of our development of The Bridge."
Acquiring a location
As Burgess collected ideas for building a potential shelter village, one major obstacle stood in his way – finding a place to put it.
Accessibility was important. Residents needed to be in a prime location so they could easily ride their bikes to appointments or catch a bus. Zoning was also an issue.
"Truly the bigger of the challenges was dealing with hesitancy from the community about this being too closely located to where existing residential spaces were," Burgess said. "Of course, that's the classic concern that gets expressed by near neighbors: 'What's it going to do to my property values to have a place like that right next door?'"
After Home Sweet Home Ministries decided to buy a plot of land directly across the street from its building. The owner of the lot, the local transit company, was hesitant, at first, to proceed with the sale.
Burgess said they held public forums to ease concerns and eventually zoning issues were resolved. Home Sweet Home Ministries was also able to come to terms with the transit company.
The Bridge opened six months after the lot was purchased.
A (temporary) home at last
The Bridge is a fully enclosed campus with a bathhouse and community center. There are 48 tiny sleeping cabins, able to accommodate 56 adults. The shelter village cost $2.7 million. Two-thirds of the funding came from private donations, while the remaining third came from a county grant.
Unlike traditional shelters, there are few restrictions on who can live there. However, people convicted of sex offenses are prohibited. Housing advocates in Bloomington said last year about 100 people were living outside. Burgess says the ministry's street outreach team says they are finding fewer people in that situation.
Fifty-five people moved into the shelter during the first month.
They include Matthew Stone, who stays in one of the sleeping cabins with his dog Tank.
"We got our bed over on the far wall. We got our microwave and refrigerator behind the door. We got our armoire over here that we can put all of our clothes in, and then we got our desk and our chair."
Alarm clocks in each cabin help residents keep up with their appointments and stay on track, Stone said.
As he was getting ready to ride his bike to a doctor's appointment, Stone also praised the services offered by The Bridge.
CEO Burgess said by meeting people's basic needs, Home Sweet Homes Ministries provides the bridge people need to leave homelessness behind.
One person who was living in the village has already moved into permanent housing.
Burgess said, "We've seen people's attitudes shift from asking with dread, 'what am I going to do tomorrow?' To asking the same question with hope, 'what am I going to do tomorrow?' It's the same words, totally different type of question."
Burgess says it means people who don't have to worry about finding a safe space are looking forward to what they're going to be able to accomplish.
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