Tiny homes could be the future of housing the homeless: The Other Side Village will do more than just provide shelter.

• Author: Manos, Diana

MORE THAN 3,000 PEOPLE ARE HOMELESS in Utah, but merely giving them a house to live in won't solve their problems, says Joseph Grenny, chairman of the board at the Other Side Village.

The Other Side Village, funded in part by a $5 million grant from the state, will provide 400 square-foot tiny homes to roughly 600 people who will live in an accountable, peer-led, self-reliant community, Grenny says. The village is to be built on a 37-acre parcel of land on Indiana Avenue owned by Salt Lake City and rented to the village at a deep discount.

But the homes are the least of what the project plans to accomplish, Grenny says. The Other Side Village will build on what The Other Side Academy (TOSA), a sister project, has learned and accomplished since its inception in 2015.

According to Grenny, TOSA takes 140 people with long criminal histories and concentrates them into one campus community in downtown Salt Lake City. It's a clean society that hasn't seen a single dirty drug test in its seven years, he says. The students of the Academy have built successful businesses, including the Other Side Movers, the Other Side Thrift Boutiques, the Other Side Storage, and the Other Side Builders. The students learn to overcome their weaknesses in the context of this self-reliant lifestyle.

"It's transformative," Grenny says. "They see themselves as respected in society, taking responsibility for their own problems, and they learn the skills needed to function in life."

TOSA's philosophy is that behavior change comes through a rigorous and extended experience of social learning in a community that models and expects honesty, humility, and personal responsibility from its members, Grenny says. By a process of each one helping the other, TOSA has solved problems that include generations of poverty, illiteracy, habitual criminal behavior, lack of job skills, gang affiliation, hardcore substance abuse, and homelessness, as well as perpetration of and victimization from abuse.

"What we know from social science, and what most of us know intuitively, is that the most potent source of influence for helping people to progress in their lives is the influence of peers," Grenny says. "People around us enable and encourage us, communicate norms, and help us to reach higher and see more in ourselves. So it's peers that really have a potential of helping people change more than anybody else."

According to Grenny, sometimes well-intended efforts to help the homeless give the...