Ideas for modular homeless shelter

A friend of mine convinced me to finally visualize something that I've been kicking around in my head. I always see homeless sleeping in tents on the side of the road or under an overpass and think to myself, "there's got to be a better way", so I finally built something.

I wanted to design something that could be used as temporary shelter. Not something that someone would really prefer over a real home, but something that would be safer than a tent on the freeway. Something that could house all kinds of small families, drug users, mentally challenged people safely, be easy to clean, be something that someone could call their home and provide some basic infrastructure for those less fortunate.

In the images on this page, I've designed a modular homeless shelter made of concrete that provides partial shelter, lighting, power, heat and water and is easily cleaned. The modules can be lined up herring-bone-style and in the rain, they'd even self-clean their neighbor. The entire collection of modules could all drain freely. To clean a module, it would only require a hosing out of the module. In the images, green represents a grate-covered drain. Red represents a heater. Blue is the sink.

There would be a community bathroom with showers elsewhere in the camp and it might be enclosed with a wall or fence to keep people out who haven't qualified for the shelter or who is potentially violent.

This is how the modules would "stack"

This shows the heater on the "bed" side of the shelter and the sink on the "drain" side.

I'm sure that not much would come of my design but I figured that I'd put it out there just in case...