1 day Ago By [email protected] (Matthew P. Barker)
Sleeping cabins are stepping stones. That’s what Modular Energy Solutions is saying about the cabins it manufactures, and which give people experiencing homelessness dignity and respect as they work to get back on their feet. The Niagara Falls company works with sanctioned encampment operators outside of the Niagara region.
Municipalities such as Hamilton have looked at sanctioned encampments as a way to centralize unhoused people on publicly-owned properties while better providing them housing, mental health and addictions supports. Sleeping cabins are small single-room residences that provide a personal safe space. Having experienced success in other communities, centralized cabin system could provide better Modular Energy Solutions units are each a standard eight by 13 feet, are customizable and typically assembled using six pieces.
“The walls are one piece, so no thermal bridging and no wood in these units, no nails,” said president John Gamble. “It’s all just our fibreglass material all glued together.” The units are excellent at holding and retaining heat in the winter and staying cool in the summer, Gamble said, adding they require very minimal upkeep and are difficult to damage.
“Our material has a one-hour fire rating built into the material, so it self-extinguishes.” People living in sleeping cabin communities have the added security provided by a locking door. “If they’re in encampments, they can never leave the encampments because people will steal their stuff,” he said.
Each of his company’s units costs about $23,000, he said. Among sanctioned encampments Modular Energy Solutions has served is Kingston’s Our Livable Solutions Sleeping Cabin Community. Jan English, 55, spent more than four years struggling with her health and bounced from shelter to shelter.
She said moving to the sleeping cabin community changed her life. “It was a touch and go situation, as it was getting bad in the winter. I’m not always well and my health wasn’t doing good, and I was getting to the point where I was just ready to give up,” she said.
A Niagara Falls-based sleeping cabin manufacturer is working with sanctioned encampment providers across Ontario and Canada, offering solutions for the homelessness crisis that has escalated since the COVID-19 pandemic. English, who lived with cancer before moving into her Kingston unit, said her health outcomes changed drastically. “It made it so that I could go to appointments and things, because when you’re out on the street, you can’t leave your tent or your belongings,” she said.
“It has improved my mental health. I’m fighting cancer, and when I first came to the cabins I went into remission almost immediately.” English said she feels safer and has relearned skills she forgot she knew.
“It helps gets you from being who you are on the street back into ready towards moving into an apartment,” she said. The turnaround time for someone leaving and another person moving into a unit sleeping cabin is days rather than weeks between, said Chrystal Wilson, executive director of Livable Solutions Sleeping Cabin Community. “The fibreglass walls are very durable, so all we’ve ever had to do for repairs is fix nail holes, where people hang things, and paint,” she said.
“We haven’t had to do any major repairs,” she said. “We’ve never had to fix a wall or get new fibreglass.” “It made it so that I could go to appointments and things, because when you’re out on the street, you can’t leave your tent or your belongings” Jan English Jeremy Tisi, technical operations manager for Modular Energy Solutions, said a benefit of providing these communities is that people become acclimated to housing through a welcoming environment.
Unlike traditional shelter spaces that can feel institutional, sleeping cabin communities provide a sense of belonging, ownership and pride, while also giving security and structure to people living in them, he said. Of traditional homeless shelters, he said, “When you start looking at that type of thing, it feels a little bit colder, feels a little bit more like ‘I’ve been put in this place.’” With sleeping cabins, “They look at it as ‘That’s my home,’ and you can see it.
It’s got a roof just like a home, it makes you feel that way and psychologically a lot of that changes people,” he said..
