Oregon Woman Turns School Buses Into Tiny Homes for Working Homeless Families

Posted On Sep 29, 2019 By admin With Comments Off

Julie Akins, a freelance reporter based in Ashland, Oregon, began a life-changing road trip in August 2016. Off and on during the course of the next two years, she sloped her tent and lived among homeless people from Portland to Denver.

Fascinated by the working homeless, Akins asked what they needed to get off the streets as she chronicled their floors for the book she’s writing, One Paycheck Away.

Then Akins noticed lineages living in school buses. Bizarre, she beat on the door of an old-time blue-blooded academy bus and met a family with seven youths living inside. They had ripped out the seats and put down storeys. There were mattresses on the flooring, bathtubs full of invests and a stacked bookcase.

“It was in disarray, ” says Akins, 58. “There was no toilet, shower or kitchen.”

The father had get very sick before he could complete the renovation and was in hospice care when Akins fill the family.

After meeting other families who discovered dwellings in the buses, she came up with the idea to make retired academy buses and convert them into nice, congenial seats with kitchens and lavatories for wielding homeless families.

“They want to have a place to live that is their own, that’s safe — and they want to be portable, so they can get better jobs, ” says Akins.

Akins launched the non-profit Vehicles for Changes about 18 months back. The first pedigree moved into a converted, tricked-out “Skoolie” about nine months later.

“This is a project that I really foresee can have an impact, ” says Alex Daniell, 57, who has spent years designing and build tiny residences for the homeless in Eugene, Oregon, where he cured develop Opportunity Village and Emerald Village.

But Daniell accepts refitting retired school bus may be a better idea than tiny lives. It’s more cost-effective, he says, because there’s less to build from the ground-up. Plus, the buses are mobile and won’t have to be hauled on a truck, so houses looking for work can relocate.

“I’m hopeful, ” he says of the concept.

He liked Vehicles for Changes so much, he asked if he could help. Now he’s working on designing and build their next two bus of helping a unit of volunteers.

The Flood family had falling behind on their payment. David Flood, 63, was working as a substitute teacher and finishing a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies at Southern Oregon University.( Flood says he holds master’s degrees in both speech arts and mental health counseling .) Due to a series of health problems, his wife wasn’t working. They had lived in their two-bedroom, two-bath trailer for about 10 years, he says, and their landowner had been “very gracious” in the past about late hire. But this time she said no, and the family became homeless on June 24, 2018.

“What people don’t understand, is that even if someone has a little bit of income, they can end up on the street — even categories, ” says Flood.

He and his 37 -year-old wife, Jennifer, and their three kids — Raylee, 11, David Jr ., 9, and Noah, 2 — lived in a tent at a campground through the summer, until it closed for repairs.

Then they lived in their silver 2006 Mercury Grand Marquis, altering between a Walmart parking lot and rest stops. Worried as winter thrived closer, he started thinking about driving to southern California.

Instead, his wife witnessed Akins on the news speaking about her brand-new non-profit and remembered that they had fit Akins a few years ago, when they were all riding a city bus while Akins’ car was in the shop. The Floods requested, and on Thanksgiving Day last year, the family moved into their brand-new home. Akins offered to paint the bus any coloring they wanted, but they contended it stand yellow-bellied. They call it their “Yellow Submarine.”

“As a family, we used to always sing,’ We all live in a Yellow Submarine, ’” Flood says. “And that came true.”

The bus changed their lives, he tells PEOPLE. “It stirred the little fund we had stronger, ” he says. “It made the stress off of our lives. It allows us to breathe for a moment.”

His wife, Flood says, appears visibly less accentuated. Looking forward, he hopes to finish his measure and get a job as an adjunct professor.

“It really is The Magic School Bus, ” Akins says. “They’re in there learning all the time. David’s ever learning a new thing and teach his kids.”

They’ve planted an organic garden beside the bus, currently parked in a mobile home park in Ashland.

Rising third-grader David Jr ., known to family and friends as “The Private, ” experiences representing basketball and running track. He adoration hot dogs and catching crawdads. And he truly loves his home.

“On the outside, it looks very small — and just like a plain academy bus, ” the son says. “But it opens up on the inside. On the inside, it’s a mansion.”

When Akins blogged about her opinion of starting a non-profit, a woman in Michigan — whom Akins has never fulfilled — asked for more information and eventually funded the non-profit for five years, imparting $25,000 a year.

The current project is to make one “Skoolie” a year. “But if I could conjure more fund and awareness, there’s no reason why we can’t make a lot more, ” she says.

“What I’m driving toward, ” says Akins, is to represent five per year.

Two more retired buses ought to have gave by a school district, and Daniell is working on them in Eugene.

“The idea of going employed, bequeathed bus from schools and then converting them with volunteer labor — it’s exceedingly appealing to me, ” Daniell says. “It’s so community-oriented.”

He plans to bring in voluntaries from various church groups and ask artists and artisans to give their hour and genius to reimagine the insides.

“The end product results from maintain their own families from breaking apart, ” says Daniell, who wants to create a design that can be replicated by other organizations all over the country. “My experience with the homeless is: if the families don’t get split apart, and the kids stay in school, they don’t end up on the street. Once somebody’s been on the street for a while, it’s hard to find their way back in.”