After selling his company for eight figures to a competitor, one Canadian entrepreneur is using his profit to build a community of tiny homes for those who need it most.
In the New Brunswick city of Fredericton, his factory is now churning out 1 tiny home every 4 business days in a bid to create the 12 Neighbours gated community of 99 homes and an enterprise center to give homeless Frederictonians a real second chance.
12 Neighbours founder Marcel LeBrun had a successful social media monitoring company which he sold to an American competitor, and is now putting his new money where his mouth was—every time he used to say something needed to be done about the homelessness problem in the city.
Around 1,600 people in New Brunswick found themselves homeless for at least a day last year, reported CBC.
“I see myself as a community builder, and really what we’re doing here is not just building a little community, but we’re building a community in a city, like how do we help our city be better?” LaBrun told CBC.
He has invested $4 million dollars of his own money on the project to build 99 homes, and he’s currently three-quarters of the way there. With grants and support from the provincial and national government, the 12 Neighbours community has received $12 million in total.
The tiny tomes have everything: a full-service kitchen, living and bedroom areas, and a full bathroom. They each have a small deck, solar panels on the roofs, and an aesthetically pleasing coat of paint.
They were pre-built in a warehouse in which LaBrun employs skilled volunteers to assemble the homes which are then moved by heavy machinery onto concrete blocks that make up the foundation.
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While LaBrun believes the problem of tackling homelessness isn’t as hard as people make it out to be (for example, he suggests building a tiny house is a great start) he does have a particular strategy in mind—namely welcoming those who may suffer from any of the maladies that homelessness is generally accompanied by to a place where ownership of property can give them a new sense of responsibility, and a community of people who understand what they are going through.
LaBrun has critics who believe it’s better to introduce them back into a functional society rather than sequester them together.
In any case, the millionaire understands the baggage, emotional and societal, that some of the residents may bring along, so the 12 Neighbours community is equipped with state-of-the-art security and gates to stop unwelcome visitors.
“I live right behind the security gates. There were cars coming in all the time, at three o’clock in the morning, waking me up,” said resident Samantha Seymour. “The gates have set boundaries.”
Along with the houses, the community comes with an enterprise center, where a coffee bar that will be run as a business by the residents is being put in, in addition to a “teaching kitchen,” and a silk printing business where Seymour has a job printing texts and graphics onto shirts and totes and things.
Part of the idea with the enterprise center is to make 12 Neighbours a community that Fredrictonians can and will visit—for a cup of coffee—for a good deal on shirt printing.
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