Homelessness is a complex crisis—one that can’t be solved by temporary fixes alone. It takes compassion, innovation, and the courage to rethink how we support those in need. What if we could build communities that restore dignity, stability, and hope?
In this episode, I’m joined by Ashley Garcia, founder and executive director of Tiny Villages Inc. We dive into the deeper issues behind homelessness and explore bold, community-centered solutions. Ashley shares how her team is building small, self-contained homes and community spaces that give people not just a place to live, but the support they need to move forward. It’s a reminder that even small ideas can lead to big change.
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Innovative Solutions That Are Changing Homelessness with Ashley Garcia
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about addressing some of these major societal issues. Now, we all have our different reasons for why we’re taking on the initiatives we have, but some of us are really moved by things that we see in the world, some major issues, and, sometimes, it could be pretty daunting to think about something that has been an issue for sometimes decades, centuries, even millennia, and really dig in and take it on. My guest today is Ashley Garcia and she is the founder and executive director of a Colorado nonprofit called Tiny Villages, the address is tinyvillages.org.
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Ashley is taking on a major societal issue and, Ashley, welcome to the program.
Thank you, Stephen, for having me today. I’m excited to talk a little bit more about Tiny Villages Inc.
Let’s start out by, first of all, describing your story about the issue that you were moved to address and what made you decide that you have the capacity, have the talent, everything else to dive into it.
So, Tiny Villages Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Colorado nonprofit corporation where we’re providing permanent housing solutions to citizens in the United States, and this includes safe housing with high quality of life and we’re folding that into three different parts so there’s housing, agriculture, and innovation. And with that, there’s going to be things like solar panels being used, there’s going to be over 110 acres on each of the tiny villages where we will provide agriculture that will give food to the villagers when they move in. And, with that, right now, we’re focusing on the unhoused population. The reason being is, back in 2021, one of my businesses is real estate investing, and so with that company, myself and several of my business partners went and traveled the United States because we’re looking for property so that we could have landing strips and have resorts and have gated communities, 24-hour security so that all the elitist in the United States could come, or actually in the world, could come and mastermind and just figure out and collaborate how to solve big world problems. And, the reality is, when we went and did this trip, we found out that there’s a lot of land, and every single state that we went to, there was the unhoused population. So that’s when I flipped all of this around and started Tiny Villages Inc.
So you noticed a lot of land, and another part of your mission is related to agriculture so did you notice a lot of land not only, and I’m specifically thinking about some places I’ve been to or used to live in like Illinois and Iowa where there’s a lot of land but I just imagine a lot of it being corn fields, soy fields, and stuff like that, but I’m guessing you observed a lot of land that wasn’t also already being used for agriculture?
That is correct. There’s a lot of undeveloped land or there’s a lot of like little towns and cities that have folded up because the people have actually left and went to the major cities where jobs are and so it was just eye opening to even see that. But one thing that I did notice is that the government was building a lot of highways even in those areas and so it’s a good place to at least start to develop something like this.
So are you talking about what people sometimes refer to as a ghost town and you can probably drive through, see six abandoned buildings and maybe there’s a person or two living there still, I don’t know, but you know what I’m saying, right?
Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what it is.
So when you’re talking about like out in the middle of nowhere or in a ghost town, now, we both live in Denver where there is a lot going on, so in a situation like this, thinking about, say, from downtown Denver, what would be the nearest place where there would be this undeveloped land and area for these housing units to be placed?
So, a goal of ours is that we are within 45 minutes to an hour of major cities, and so here in Denver, we’re actually looking out by DIA because there’s a lot of land out around DIA that’s undeveloped and for sale.
And then what constitutes a major city, like with something, say, middle of the road like Wichita, Kansas, or even something, say, much more tiny, I don’t know, like Fayetteville, Arkansas, still count as a major city?
Well, it depends on each state because we’re going to have a village in every single state, and so, depending on that state will depend on what we classify as a major city, but, hopefully, or similarly, it would be within like near the capitals of each state. When I first started this program, there was about half a million people that were unhoused according to the survey that the United States does every single year, and so we tailored that to those numbers, meaning that we want 10,000 people in each village in all 50 states so that would have made that possible. Now, since then, mind you, this was founded in 2022, since then, we are up to 750,000 people that are unhoused.
Okay.
So it’s gone up a lot in the last few years, 250,000 people more. And so, yes, we’re going to have one in each state but we might like in several other states, just to try and get as many people as we can to be in permanent housing situations instead of them being in temporary shelters, we might have a few states like California and Texas, things like that, have more people, more unhoused population, and we’ll have several different villages throughout.
We have four states that are way bigger than most states in the country, California, Texas, Florida, and New York, and they’re just going to have more of everything because they just have such high populations.
That is very, very true. And so in those situations, we might have several. And, obviously, then we’re not going to have them both next to the capital, we’ll have them in different areas, especially with like California being how big it is, there might be several throughout, like a north, south, and a central.
Yeah. And New York, Florida, and Illinois are all states where the capital is not even close to the biggest city in the state.
Right. So those are all the different factors that we’re going to have to take into consideration when we go to each state. And then, obviously, the villagers are going to have a say in where we place the villages if we have several different opportunities.
And then you’ve also done extensive design work on what these actual houses are going to look like.
That is very correct. You can actually go on our YouTube channel and see a mockup of what we have as a design for the villages. The idea is that every single block is going to be similar so they’re going to have a city center –– or we have our city center which is where the external meets the villagers and that’s going to be your main hub where people come and we have our emergency rooms, urgent care, we have a retail, car repair, and then event center so that the villagers can meet with anyone in the entire world if they want to or anyone that wants to promote to the villagers or vice versa. And then inside the villages, we’re going to have a community center and then tiny homes around and the cool thing is is that each of the villages will have green space all around the tiny homes. There’ll be gravel with solar panel carports and then the tiny home which is self-contained so what that means is that there’s going to be a wet room, a kitchenette, and a sleeping area at minimum for each of the tiny homes. Because of how we designed it, it’s a cookie cutter so we’re able to just keep reproducing blocks. And the cool thing about the community centers, the villagers, once they can get to the community center, they can get out to the city center, because these are going to be large, we’re requesting around 440 acres of land for each of the villages.
So 440 acres, how many homes is that?
Roughly, depending on how many families we have, it’ll be about 7,400, depending on families. But if there is, let’s say, less families or more families than that could vary with the number of houses, but the idea is max capacity 10,000 per village.
So we can say like maybe 5,000 to 10,000 units per village.
Correct.
What is the experience going to be like for someone in these villages? Because I’m assuming the most people moving into these villages are going to be people who currently don’t have a home. You talked about permanence, but if, say, someone is brought into the villages but then later they get a job and then they buy a different house, how is that all going to work?
Okay, so how we –– the cycle of life for a villager is they start as unhoused, and this is, again, this is our first phase of our project so we’re starting with the unhoused population, and then they’re going to go to a temporary site, we’re going to have four phases within building the villages, so the first phase will be 1,000 people and then the next phase will be 2,000 then the next 3,000 then the next 4,000 so it’ll equal 10,000 people as we build out. And so when we’re building, they’ll be at a temporary site. They’ll move into their home for construction –– then we’ll construct the home and then they move in and then they do recover, rest, educate, find employment, and then, let’s say that they want, at some point, to leave the community, we have an option for us to help them find off-site land so they’ll have a similar setup where they’ll have the carport with the solar panels, gravel, a little bit of –– we’ll help them figure out their agriculture for their selves and then the tiny home. So they can take the tiny home with them. We are going to have a buyback program where we get first right of refusal on the tiny homes if they want to resell them, but the idea is we want all of our villagers here in the United States to have new and so they’ll have their own brand new tiny home when they first initially move in, unless they like –– we want to teach them estate planning, so with estate planning, they’re going to learn how to create wills, trusts, things of that nature so that they can actually will their tiny home to someone else or, if something happens to them, have an exit strategy for them.
And then, obviously, I’m assuming that these are people that can’t generally afford to pay for the home so where is that funding coming from?
That’s why I created this as a nonprofit is so that we can get donations. Share on XSo, any money that comes to Tiny Villages Inc. is actually a charitable contribution so it’s a tax write-off, so donations, and then also grants, and then, hopefully, with partnerships and things of that nature as well with different companies.
And the partnerships, tell me a little bit about how that would work.
So, currently, some of our partners, we are looking at solar companies and then figuring out how to get the price to a point where we can afford it and then, depending on how we are setting up, obviously, right now I’m looking for the land, and so setting up contracts to either do leases or we’ll do like an option where we buy it over time. A big idea is making money through the village. One of our partners that we’re going to be using that will help, it energizes water, what they created, and so it’ll help us actually mass produce agriculture.
Oh, nice.
And so it won’t just be for the villagers. And the idea is that it won’t just be for –– that we’ll have so much surplus that we’re actually able to sell those out into the city centers.
Oh, nice. And that’s where the opportunities kind of come in.
Correct. It’s creating opportunities wherever we can.
So, it seems like there’s a lot of creative, somewhat outside of the box ideas behind this entire paradigm here, even like how to obtain the land, how to make it economically viable, how to go about different avenues in which the construction and maintenance of these homes are funded and these people are being taken care of. How did you come up with –– are these all your ideas or are there ideas that you discussed in your own mastermind type of group? Is there some other trick that you found where you’re getting ideas from the community, discussions with people?
So I’ve done several. So I started with a napkin idea and then I was able to get a year membership to BNI from this chapter that I’m in, BNI Rocky Mountain Elite, and with that, the entire team of mine, they helped me create and figure out what I needed and how to tailor to my needs. And one of those things is bringing in a landscape architect who actually ended up being –– she’s now the president and she’s the one who created all the community designs and then we went and did research on what different animals we can have within the land, because we’ve learned there’s certain animals that actually contaminate soil so we can’t have them so those are things that she brought in and the knowledge of that in addition just from learning and growing and understanding what the unhoused population needs, because I live in an area where there is a lot of unhoused and so just asking them questions and getting to know them throughout my journey has been something in the last few years that has been eye opening and amazing for me, because this isn’t something that I just started, like I’ve been wanting to do something for the unhoused population for over a decade.
Okay. So it’s something that’s been on your mind for quite a while.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then over –– since COVID, it’s like, it’s insane how quick someone can become unhoused.
Oh, yeah. I mean, and I think we’re also kind of all aware of even the, I’m hesitant to the word “crisis” but I do want to say it, crisis around unaffordability of homes, how the price of homes have gone so high and there’s so many stories, like if you just go into Google or ChatGPT or YouTube and type in “Gen Z can’t envision affording a home ever,” you’ll get hours and hours, like thousands of hours of content instantly on that whole subject.
At the time, it was a necessity. So back in 2007, that’s when I started college is 2007, so we had the housing crisis, and then what happened is Warren Buffet and other hedge funders saw an opportunity to start buying, and I have nothing against him. What he did was really, really, really smart. They were able to get houses pennies on the dollar and then they turned them into rental properties, but they have very, very strict guidelines of who they will rent to and so, with that being said, they’ll let a property sit on the market for six months to get the amount of rent that they want to get paid for and the ideal clientele that they want. And so, with that being said, we were stuck in this realm because we’re propping up retirement funds with real estate right now and so –– but at the same time, there’s a bunch of land that’s undeveloped in the United States so we shouldn’t have to be fighting over the same homes because there’s so much land.
Well, there’s so much land undeveloped and one of the things I do know is that, at least here in Denver, I envision it’s pretty similar in a lot of other big cities, I have heard countless stories of people wanting to develop a building for any purpose and the building permitting process taking them an entire year.
That is 100 percent true but it’s really easy. I’ve actually done it for a general contractor here in Denver, and Denver is not easy to get permits through, and so we’ve done some rezoning in the past and so it’s not that difficult if you have the right people in place and know what you’re doing. Once you get the correct people in place, everything is pretty simple. It’s just the review process that takes a little bit of time because you need people, bodies reviewing, and those bodies have to have the knowledge of the codes and how to review the documents properly.
So it sounds like you’re saying is that when I think about this overall picture, and I’m not really necessarily going to be attached to one solution or even one place to point the finger, just the overall pictures that so many people are either unable to afford a home or the less extreme version of is like I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase house poor, about people who they got their home but they can’t really afford anything else because so much of their income, so much of their cash flow, is going into paying just like the mortgage payments that they need to pay. So, when it comes to all that, it sounds like what you’re saying is that, although it’s easy to look at this one-year permitting process and be like, “This is the issue,” there’s bigger issues than that and that, even if we were to fix all the permitting processes, that wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem.
That is correct, because it takes a lot of money to convert a commercial building into mixed use and so what I mean by that is you have all these, since COVID, you have a lot of commercial buildings, these are where there are office spaces and stuff like that that are vacant, but they’re just sitting on it because it costs a lot to convert those. And another phase within Tiny Villages Inc. is actually going in and converting those commercial buildings into condos, and, again, condos, not apartments so it’s permanent housing. We’re doing that with the same idea so there’s going to be agriculture, there’s going to be solar, renewable energy within these buildings as well.
What’s the time horizon on, I’ll just call it phase one?
So we’re trying to get our first village here in Colorado by 2028 and then, hopefully, from there on, depending –– obviously funding is that big issue. With the funding, hopefully, one village per year after that.
Okay, yeah.
So it’s going to be a little bit of a process. If we ramp it up, we can get the funding, we can do what we need to, then we have the processes in place to be able to do more than one village per year.
At this point in time, in mid-2025, it’s safe to assume then that securing that funding and developing a pipeline source of it is your top priority?
That is 100 percent correct. So we do a Cares Day campaign and last year, we were able to give out brand new backpacks, socks, blankets, water bottles, beef jerky, toothbrushes, toothpaste, all those different hygiene products out to the unhoused population here in Denver, and I’m still having people, they’re like, “Hey, what’s going on?” and we’re just at a little bit of a standstill right now because we need funding.
Yeah. Now, when it comes to people who don’t have homes that you’ve kind of encountered, you’ve gotten a chance to talk to, meet them a little bit, what is their most situation? Are most of them also unemployed or are there a lot of people who are, say, just wrapped up in the gig economy or racked up a lot of credit card debt and stuff like that?
So those are questions we didn’t ask. We asked more if they were on government assistance and things of that nature, because those are more important to us than them having a job. Because the reality is, we have to make sure that we’re placing these villages in counties where their human services can take the impact of their different needs, like being on Medicaid and stuff like that. So that was more important to us. But I like your idea.
I like that maybe going out and taking videos of the unhoused population and getting their stories and seeing if they’d be willing for me to promote it, that’s a great idea. Share on XYeah. I’m just wondering, because I even think about back when I was a kid, they still do it but I just don’t see it for some reason, but when I was a kid, they would have those commercials –– oh, it’s because I don’t watch commercials anymore. But the idea of a poor country somewhere else in the world, usually Africa but sometimes somewhere else and someone will say, “You can sponsor a child for $2 a day,” and then that child would, once every couple months, send you a letter, a note, some pictures of what they’re doing and creating sort of a personal connection to that particular person, a personal connection to what you’re doing with the money that you’re being generous with.
I like that idea. That’s something that we should incorporate. I do like that a lot.
Yeah.
As long as they’d be willing to do that. There are some vulnerable populations. The reason the tiny homes are going to be on wheels is because we might have a situation where someone finds out where the location is of like their estranged spouse and they’re trying to get into the village so we might need to move the villager to a different village just because of that situation. And so those are things that we have to –– we are considering when we do things, because, obviously, we’re going to have gated communities, there’s going to be separation of like the families are going to be separated from various different types of other people, for example, which all my team, they call it the satellite community, it’s going to be what I call them is the outlaws, these are the people that don’t always conform to society. They’ll have their own separate space away from the other villagers so that we don’t have any issues or anyone feeling uncomfortable where they live.
Yeah, because certain things are different for different people.
Exactly. And then we’re going to have assessments where people will go through. They’re going to have different things that they need to do every single week. For example, we’re going to help them get their social security cards, birth certificates, IDs, things to that nature that are really important that we need in the United States just to even be a normal human being is what –– and then they’re going to do little assessments. For example, the best idea is, when I went into college, before we had –– we were required to go in the dorms, we had to do all these little assessments so they could place the right people in the same rooms together. Similar to that.
Right dorm, yeah.
Yeah, exactly. So it’s similar to that where they would be placed in particular areas with similar people so that it’ll be easier for people to see who their community is and be able to relate to their community. And we’re hoping that’ll create less problems for us.
And then if someone goes into the village and they get their life together, they get a good job and start doing better, I’m assuming some of them are, in that case, are going to want to move out because they’re just going to want to have a bigger space, but let’s just say someone doesn’t want to move out for a while. They have the cash flow but they think that they can just do fine because a big house is not a priority for everybody, right?
Right.
Is this person going to be allowed to stay or are you going to have some kind of a cutoff where once someone’s on their feet, they’re going to need to be placed in a different home?
Nope, this is their home.
So, yeah, so ––
It’s permanent, and that’s one of the reasons we’re trying to create income for the village so that nobody can ever take the village away from the villagers, even after I’m gone in wherever I go after this. So we’re setting up things so that they will be able to stay where they want to stay their entire life. And then, let’s say that they get bored of the community and they want to be out on their own, then we have that off-site land opportunity as well where they can have their own land. We’ll still like monitor the land for tax purposes to make sure that every year the taxes are paid so that they don’t end up accidentally losing that land for something silly like that and so we’ll help them to just make sure that they’re dotting the I’s and crossing the t’s if they do go out on their own.
And then, do you ever envision this idea, and I come up with this idea based on the whole people starting businesses out of their garages idea that became so popular that there could be, given you’re placing people with similar circumstances and similar interests together, much like how they place people in dorm rooms and colleges and stuff like that, where people get to know each other and there’s an incubation where a few people co-found a business together based on a relationship they’ve found in these villages?
So not only do we want that, we are going to promote that, and we are going to help these people to make sure, like if they’re going to create a partnership together, we’re going to make sure all the right operating agreements and documents are put in place for them so that if they do, at some point, dissolve the company, what will happen? So there’s no arguments. And so those are things that we’re going to be putting in place.
We want the landscapers to be a village created company. We don’t want to be bringing all these outside sources. Obviously, doctors, you need a degree and a lot of training so those, they will be coming into the village, but we would love the villagers to create ideas and be very innovative. When we do our outreach, I’ve had the unhoused population be like, “Oh, we can help you build these and everything else,” and I’m like it’s amazing, just this will and drive they have if someone’s there to help them.
Yeah, and they’re probably making some good connections, given that new place, at least around people that are relatively similar.
Agreed. And, hopefully, we’ll seem what blossoms –– I’m excited. The goal for me is I’m testing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and seeing what really can be developed out of it. Their basic needs are met and they don’t have to worry about that and they have their security so they’re already on that second level and they just keep progressing to Nirvana. Let’s see what happens.
Yeah. Well, I’ve had a ton of thoughts about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs myself because, so what I remember, just for reference, anyone out there listening, the basic needs is your physiological needs and that, if you’re too hungry or don’t have shelter, you don’t really have the capacity to think about anything else. That’s just your base level. And then the next level is the security around no one’s going to come and shoot you or take your home away from you or something like that. And then my impression is that the third rung, that’s like the community, that acceptance, right? And then above that, you get like purpose and then self-actualization.
Yep.
Yeah. So here’s a statement, I think I’ve even possibly made this statement in other episodes of this podcast but I know I’ve made it around the community, and the statement really kind of is a critique of, say, latter 20th century and even more recent materialism in this country and my way of saying is that for a lot of people here, depending on your economic situation, we met those first two levels of need sometime between 1960 and 2000, depending on where you are, yet the materialistic culture represents us continuing to go after that second rung as opposed to moving on and focusing on the higher rungs of Maslow’s pyramid.
And I would say yes and no just because we have such a high population of unhoused now.
Yeah, having the rungs.
Yeah, there’s something that’s not being met somewhere and so, at this point, I want to see if we can get to that third tier within his system, which is the love and belonging, then we should be good to go and see what really can produce and see what we can achieve in the United States and see how we can enhance everything better than the last decade or the last century. Let’s see if we can, like, I don’t know, get to Mars faster.
But I did see this image online that showed the Wright Brothers airplane and I think that was like 1903 and they talked about how it took 60 years from ’03, 66, to ’69 to reach the moon, and how we’re approaching the same number of years since reaching the moon and we haven’t really gone any further, like we haven’t gone to Mars or Venus or anything like that.
We as the humans have not. They’ve had various different technology that’s gone out to the outer rings and stuff like that. But the reality is we as humans have to progress too. We can’t just have robots doing everything.
Yeah, 100 percent, and I’ve had so many conversations about misaligned priorities and stuff like that, but kind of take that to exhaustion. One of the things I’m also wondering is that some people have called into question the system in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the basic idea behind it is that you need to meet level one before you go to level two, you need to meet level two before you go to level three, and so on. And if that system is correct, then we can’t really start fulfilling our purposes in life until we found that community, that belonging, that level three. Do you, I guess, agree with how that’s phrased in the format of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? And in that case, we’re looking at a lot of people, whether they have a home or not, even a lot of people with homes haven’t met that level three of needs, they’re still looking for a community, they’re still looking for belonging and love, and that’s why we’re not getting these higher level, purpose-driven pursuits coming in.
It sucks saying it but yeah. I think right now, yes, that is a huge thing, because if someone doesn’t feel safe and secure with their selves, it’s hard to go out and be around a community and feel safe and secure on that community. If our basic needs aren’t met, then it’s harder to have that community but, at the same time, those that are already at that level need to realize that we need to help everyone else and bring them up.
Yeah.
No matter who they are, what they’re doing in their life, if they’re doing drugs, illicit drugs, anything like that, we need to help these people in any way that we can so that they can feel like they have a community and a support system that they might not have ever had prior. That’s a huge thing within Tiny Villages is creating those subcommunities and then having a larger community to be able to branch out with self-awareness and so we’re going to see if this is true and see where we can go from there with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Nice, and I’m glad you brought up that support system. I didn’t want to be the person to bring up the drug thing but I know that that’s a common stereotype that a lot of people have. This person got hooked on a hard drug, quote unquote, “hard drug,” and we can all argue about what constitutes a hard drug, and, therefore, they’re kind of completely at fault and unworthy of our compassion. Do you encounter that attitude frequently in your kind of search for funding?
Whenever I present the idea, I have most of the time had people ask me, “What –– the villagers, are they going to have to go to substance abuse and alcohol? What is your thought about that?” and my reaction is this, do you drink or do drugs in your house? And the reality is, some people do, so we can’t create an environment where they’re not going to feel like they’re okay because some of those microdosing of various products can actually help someone, whereas the prescription drug that they’re on is more addictive than natural. And so those are things like the reality is we don’t know 100 percent so allowing them to be free in their own place and who they are is something that I really want to drive home when we have these villages created. But also having that safety net. Let’s say that someone is not doing well mentally, we will have psychiatric help on staff, 24/7, so that they can get what they need. Security is not going to be there to be enforcing on these people, it’s going to be there to make sure that they feel safe where they’re at and that’s that support system again, going back with making sure that they’re supported so that they feel secure and safe where they’re at and with whatever, however, whoever they are and then progressing from there.
Yeah, because, even if someone is, say, addicted to heroin, a substance that we all know is bad and I’ve never touched in my life, there’s probably a circumstance or reason why this happened in this person’s life. There’s probably a set of feelings that made that person less likely to be able to resist it than your average person and most people in this country are not addicted to heroin so, yeah.
So I’m going to open up, okay, and I’m going to do this, I’m hoping that he doesn’t murder me at some point, he won’t. I have a child, she’s eight years old. I am the independent parent of that child because of her father’s mental state. Normally, if he’s not on his medication, he will go out and drink alcohol and he does meth and then, because he hears voices and sees things that aren’t really there, then he becomes aggressive. So I know for a fact that there’s a fine line, yes, there’s some people that need to be on the prescriptions and there’s some people that can handle microdosing shrooms and being happy, they just need that little bit of a lift and they’re fine. And so I’ve seen that in both factors. So there is some people, yes, they can do certain things, but there’s some people that also, obviously, at the same time, because of what they have internally, they are better suited with pharmacy compared to natural and vice versa. So it really depends on the person.
Oh, yeah.
And so having just, again, having that right support staff around to make sure that they are doing what they need to do and not necessarily hurting their selves or others will be something that we want to ensure. So, for example, with a heroin addict, maybe figuring out something that’s more natural or a prescription so that they don’t have that itch for heroin, which will maybe help them be healthier, depending on their circumstance. But, again, it’s going to be their choice.
Yeah.
We’re not going to force this on them.
Yeah. And then if we kind of boil up to the big picture, we talked about all the things going on the world, whether it be how many people have the drug problems or also like problems with housing affordability, anything else going on, number of people without homes, what is your vision for the impact that Tiny Villages will have on kind of the world at large?
Our vision is that we can provide permanent housing in a safe place so that people can really grow and be and create their pursuit of happiness journey. Share on XThat’s exactly what our constitution and everything is about is the pursuit of happiness for people. So we are just helping them on their pursuit of happiness journey. And then once that happens, then we’ll work on creating more within the cities with creating condos and things of that nature, so that people, all people in the United States, have permanent housing.
And then you talked about the condos being your phase two.
Correct.
Is there a phase three and phase four?
So I know that some of my business partners, they want to create sober living and things of that nature so people that are in the same house, they need a support system with that so that would be something that we’re looking at. Then after we do the US citizens, then it’s going and looking at, okay, well, what do we do with those that are illegal immigrants? And, obviously, in that situation and like parolees and stuff like that, we can’t give them something permanent because we don’t know what their permanent status is so it’s helping illegal immigrants to become legal and then doing permanent. Parolees, helping them get off of being completed with their crimes and then going from there and helping them be better in society and understand that there’s norms that we have in place to keep everybody safe and those are things that we’re hoping at some point we can develop and do.
So it seems like there’s a theme to all of it, which is like really helping out people who just find themselves in a horrible situation and I’m thinking about like the refugees out there, I think 10 years ago in Europe, there was that migrant crisis around the war in Syria and people just like trying to find a way out of there, and right now here, the situation in Venezuela in particular is creating a lot of mayhem, it’s making people go around, but that’s just one of these, all these tough situations that you’re talking about. So, yeah, is that accurate that you have this like theme around, okay, people get in these really, really hard, horrible situations and maybe need a little help getting out of it.
That is a huge idea and concept that we’re trying to do. And then there might be people that just you wouldn’t normally see as being disadvantaged and then helping them create something as well. And so it’s –– we’re not going to limit ourselves, but, right now, we are doing the unhoused population because we’re helping the people in the United States that need the most help first, so the unhoused population, and then, after that, we will work on helping everybody else.
Completely out of left field question, which is that earlier you talked about some wealthy but smart people taking advantage of the housing market and that some of the actions they had taken had made them a lot of money but also led to the housing market becoming less and less affordable over the last couple of decades.
So they were just trying to figure out a way to prop up our retirement funds ––
Yeah, yeah.
–– in a more secure way than just the stock market. And so by having tangible real estate assets, it was helping those that were at some point going to be retiring that had put money into their accounts and saw them deplete by half overnight, they’re like, “Okay, well, we need to do this to figure this out,” and they figured out a solution at the time, because we found out how much the entire world is interconnected in 2007, 2008 because it wasn’t just the United States that had a housing crisis after that.
Yeah, it was like pretty much everywhere. I know we had a housing crisis and then it seemed like the housing prices ballooned back up even higher than they were in 2006, 2007 before everything kind of came apart. I guess what I was wondering is whether or not there are people who made serious money off of all these investments, and I’m not saying the retirement people that just need to feel secure in their retirement, but if there’s anyone who did make serious money who, I don’t know, just might be willing to give to an organization like this to round out some of the adverse effects that they may have had on making housing so unaffordable for so many people.
I would hope so, and they’re more than welcome to reach out to me, because I would love to have a conversation with them. And those people, they might need the tax advantages that a nonprofit can give, which is that charitable contribution to lessen the taxes and we would love to be able to do something better than temporary shelters for people in the United States.
Well, that’s amazing. I love your mission. I love that you’re trying to help people who just find themselves in a hard situation. And, of course, not having a home is definitely one of the hardest situations that someone can find themselves in and there’s a variety of reasons for it. If anyone listening out there is inclined to get involved, donate, anything like that, that would best be done by going to www.tinyvillages.org, is that right?
That is correct. Thank you, Stephen, for everything today.
Yeah. Ashley, thank you so much for telling us all about this mission, diving a little bit into topics like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and some of the other things that come up. And I also want to thank everybody out there for listening today, or whatever day that you’re listening, taking time to tune to Action’s Antidotes and, hopefully, feel inspired to find the problem in the world that you’re seeing that you want to help contribute to and maybe believe that you can actually build something that contributes to what you want to contribute to.
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About Ashley Garcia
Ashley Jetta Garcia is a Colorado Native and double Alumni of Regis University with three degrees: a Dual-Bachelor’s of Science in Mathematics and Business Administration with an emphasis in International Business and a Master’s of Science in Criminology. She has worked in the private sector for Fortune 500 and 100 companies in the public sector. She is currently the CEO/Founder of Ashley Jetta Garcia LLC, AJG LLC, AJG REI LLC, and AJG Private Investigation Firm LLC. Ashley Jetta Garcia strives to enhance her understanding of different marketplaces by leveraging her traits as a dependable, well-rounded, organized,business-savvy, complex problem-solving Mathematician with the goal for all to strive for increased: Health, Wealth, Knowledge, and Happiness.
With that goal in mind, Tiny Villages Inc., a 501(c)(3) Colorado Nonprofit Corporation, was created to provide permanent housing solutions for citizens in the United States. Tiny Villages Inc. is currently focused on ending homelessness and providing all citizens with safe housing and a high quality of life. Tiny Villages Inc. was created in response to the alarming increase in homelessness, resource inequality, and climate destruction across the United States. Tiny Villages Inc. believes that we can offer solutions to all these problems at once by focusing on the rescue and redistribution of wasted products, creating affordable, accessible housing, powered by low-impact, renewable energy, Tiny Villages Inc. can create meaningful change for the most vulnerable members of our community and the environment in which they reside.