Penticton company building 60 tiny homes for Kelowna's homeless
One of Penticton’s longstanding construction contractors has landed the contract to build 60 “tiny homes” to house the homeless in Kelowna.
Greyback Construction Ltd. landed the contract with the City of Kelowna and BC Housing several months ago and began building the 60 tiny homes about three weeks ago.
“To build the homes, BC Housing selected Greyback Construction through a joint Request for Proposal process with the City of Kelowna,” said Shrief Fadl, a senior communications officer with BC Housing. “The total project cost, including manufacturing the tiny homes, is approximately $6.7 million.
“Everyone deserves to have a safe and secure home in British Columbia, and we know there are people experiencing homelessness across the province who need a safe and secure place indoors.”
To help the urgent and ongoing need to provide housing for people at risk of or experiencing homelessness in Kelowna, the Province, through BC Housing is building 60 temporary tiny homes at 3199 Appaloosa Rd.
“The tiny homes are scheduled to open in mid-2025,” said Fadl. “This is the final homeless encampment response temporary housing solution created between the Province and the City of Kelowna under the Memorandum of Understanding.”
The other two, Step Place and Trailside Housing, opened in early 2024 with 120 units in total, he said.
“The Province and BC Housing will continue to work across government to address the root causes of homelessness to prevent people from becoming homeless in the first place,” he said.
Jacquie Wilkins, a senior project manager with Greyback Construction, said the company landed the contract to build the 60 tiny homes, as well as two larger washroom facility buildings - one for men and one for women - at the Appaloosa Road site.
Greyback secured the contract to build the five dozen tiny homes in late fall and then it took several months of planning to get ready to do the actual construction of the homes in a new facility they recently opened in a former Structurlam timber building on Government Street in the city’s south end, she said.
“We have a pre-fabrication shop set up at a new indoor production facility in the old Structurlam warehouse,” she said. “We’ve been starting to pre-fab some of our jobs from this new location. This one came up and we were able to meet the tight schedule and build the 60 tiny homes pretty quickly.”
The tiny homes are small enough to transport to their new location on flatbed trucks, she said.
“A lot of the other options were modular solutions built on site and then you would have to dismantle them to move to another location,” she said. “Every time you build and then dismantle there would be some wear and tear on them and that obviously wasn’t ideal for this kind of contract.”
A talented crew of half a dozen longtime employees are responsible for building the tiny homes and shipping them off to Kelowna, she said.
“We’ve got an automatic saw that is computerized and cuts all the wood to specifications and then they can put them together pretty quickly and efficiently,” she said.
Structurlam was a tenant in the warehouse building Greyback has owned for some time and is now using for pre-fabrication of the tiny homes, she said. They left the building last summer.
With homelessness well recognized as a serious problem not only across the Okanagan and many other parts of B.C. and Canada for that matter, tiny homes are being discussed more and more as one of the ways to tackle this multi-faceted problem, she said.
“It seems to be a popular solution,” she said. “There have been a lot of Requests for Proposal coming out that are similar to this contract and we would definitely be interested in more business like this.”
All 60 of the tiny homes are expected to be delivered to the City of Kelowna by June or July, she said.
More information regarding these homes including timelines can be found here.
— This article was originally published by the Penticton Herald
