Innovative Solutions That Are Changing Homelessness with Ashley Garcia

Homelessness is a complex crisis—one that can't be solved by temporary fixes alone. It takes compassion, innovation, and the courage to rethink how we support those in need. What if we could build communities that restore dignity, stability, and hope? In this episode, I’m joined by Ashley Garcia, founder and executive director of Tiny Villages Inc. We dive into the deeper issues behind homelessness and explore bold, community-centered solutions. Ashley shares how her team is building small, self-contained homes and community spaces that give people not just a place to live, but the support they need to move forward. It’s a reminder that even small ideas can lead to big change. --- Listen to the podcast here: Innovative Solutions That Are Changing Homelessness with Ashley Garcia Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about addressing some of these major societal issues. Now, we all have our different reasons for why we’re taking on the initiatives we have, but some of us are really moved by things that we see in the world, some major issues, and, sometimes, it could be pretty daunting to think about something that has been an issue for sometimes decades, centuries, even millennia, and really dig in and take it on. My guest today is Ashley Garcia and she is the founder and executive director of a Colorado nonprofit called Tiny Villages, the address is tinyvillages.org. --- Ashley is taking on a major societal issue and, Ashley, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen, for having me today. I’m excited to talk a little bit more about Tiny Villages Inc. Let’s start out by, first of all, describing your story about the issue that you were moved to address and what made you decide that you have the capacity, have the talent, everything else to dive into it. So, Tiny Villages Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Colorado nonprofit corporation where we’re providing permanent housing solutions to citizens in the United States, and this includes safe housing with high quality of life and we’re folding that into three different parts so there’s housing, agriculture, and innovation. And with that, there’s going to be things like solar panels being used, there’s going to be over 110 acres on each of the tiny villages where we will provide agriculture that will give food to the villagers when they move in. And, with that, right now, we’re focusing on the unhoused population. The reason being is, back in 2021, one of my businesses is real estate investing, and so with that company, myself and several of my business partners went and traveled the United States because we’re looking for property so that we could have landing strips and have resorts and have gated communities, 24-hour security so that all the elitist in the United States could come, or actually in the world, could come and mastermind and just figure out and collaborate how to solve big world problems. And, the reality is, when we went and did this trip, we found out that there’s a lot of land, and every single state that we went to, there was the unhoused population. So that’s when I flipped all of this around and started Tiny Villages Inc. So you noticed a lot of land, and another part of your mission is related to agriculture so did you notice a lot of land not only, and I’m specifically thinking about some places I’ve been to or used to live in like Illinois and Iowa where there’s a lot of land but I just imagine a lot of it being corn fields, soy fields, and stuff like that, but I’m guessing you observed a lot of land that wasn’t also already being used for agriculture? That is correct. There’s a lot of undeveloped land or there’s a lot of like little towns and cities that have folded up because the people have actually left and went to the major cities where jobs are and so it was just eye opening to even see that. But one thing that I did notice is that the government was building a lot of highways even in those areas and so it’s a good place to at least start to develop something like this. So are you talking about what people sometimes refer to as a ghost town and you can probably drive through, see six abandoned buildings and maybe there’s a person or two living there still, I don’t know, but you know what I’m saying, right? Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what it is. And then there’s a lot of land that’s just for sale but nobody’s trying to buy it or anything because it’s out in the middle of nowhere. So when you’re talking about like out in the middle of nowhere or in a ghost town, now, we both live in Denver where there is a lot going on, so in a situation like this, thinking about, say, from downtown Denver, what would be the nearest place where there would be this undeveloped land and area for these housing units to be placed? So, a goal of ours is that we are within 45 minutes to an hour of major cities, and so here in Denver, we’re actually looking out by DIA because there’s a lot of land out around DIA that’s undeveloped and for sale. And then what constitutes a major city, like with something, say, middle of the road like Wichita, Kansas, or even something, say, much more tiny, I don’t know, like Fayetteville, Arkansas, still count as a major city? Well, it depends on each state because we’re going to have a village in every single state, and so, depending on that state will depend on what we classify as a major city, but, hopefully, or similarly, it would be within like near the capitals of each state. When I first started this program, there was about half a million people that were unhoused according to the survey that the United States does every single year, and so we tailored that to those numbers, meaning that we want 10,000 people in each village in all 50 states so that would have made that possible. Now, since then, mind you, this was founded in 2022, since then, we are up to 750,000 people that are unhoused. Okay. So it’s gone up a lot in the last few years, 250,000 people more. And so, yes, we’re going to have one in each state but we might like in several other states, just to try and get as many people as we can to be in permanent housing situations instead of them being in temporary shelters, we might have a few states like California and Texas, things like that, have more people, more unhoused population, and we’ll have several different villages throughout. We have four states that are way bigger than most states in the country, California, Texas, Florida, and New York, and they’re just going to have more of everything because they just have such high populations. That is very, very true. And so in those situations, we might have several. And, obviously, then we’re not going to have them both next to the capital, we’ll have them in different areas, especially with like California being how big it is, there might be several throughout, like a north, south, and a central. Yeah. And New York, Florida, and Illinois are all states where the capital is not even close to the biggest city in the state. Right. So those are all the different factors that we’re going to have to take into consideration when we go to each state. And then, obviously, the villagers are going to have a say in where we place the villages if we have several different opportunities. And then you’ve also done extensive design work on what these actual houses are going to look like. That is very correct. You can actually go on our YouTube channel and see a mockup of what we have as a design for the villages. The idea is that every single block is going to be similar so they’re going to have a city center –– or we have our city center which is where the external meets the villagers and that’s going to be your main hub where people come and we have our emergency rooms, urgent care, we have a retail, car repair, and then event center so that the villagers can meet with anyone in the entire world if they want to or anyone that wants to promote to the villagers or vice versa. And then inside the villages, we’re going to have a community center and then tiny homes around and the cool thing is is that each of the villages will have green space all around the tiny homes. There’ll be gravel with solar panel carports and then the tiny home which is self-contained so what that means is that there’s going to be a wet room, a kitchenette, and a sleeping area at minimum for each of the tiny homes. Because of how we designed it, it’s a cookie cutter so we’re able to just keep reproducing blocks. And the cool thing about the community centers, the villagers, once they can get to the community center, they can get out to the city center, because these are going to be large, we’re requesting around 440 acres of land for each of the villages. So 440 acres, how many homes is that? Roughly, depending on how many families we have, it’ll be about 7,400, depending on families. But if there is, let’s say, less families or more families than that could vary with the number of houses, but the idea is max capacity 10,000 per village. So we can say like maybe 5,000 to 10,000 units per village. Correct. What is the experience going to be like for someone in these villages? Because I’m assuming the most people moving into these villages are going to be people who currently don’t have a home. You talked about permanence, but if, say, someone is brought into the villages but then later they get a job and then they buy a different house, how is that all going to work? Okay, so how we –– the cycle of life for a villager is they start as unhoused, and this is, again, this is our first phase of our project so we’re starting with the unhoused population,...