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 This is to help solve the problem of what to do with homeless people that have been drinking and the fact that no one wants to live near a Detox /Homeless Shelter (Drunk House). This Modular Sobriety Achievement Center with Transitional Housing (Detox/Homeless Shelter) would be built in movable sections so it could be in a different location (maybe every 3 to 5 years) if necessary and as more room is needed more sections could be added.Almost every major city needs a Detox/Homeless Shelter. It needs to go somewhere and no one wants be live or work near it. If it is presented as a temporary thing it will be much easier for the surrounding area to accept. If the perfect location was found in your city, and the neighbors did not object, it could remain permanent.
You are not bidding on an actual building! If you are a city official or charitable organization or person interested in building my Modular Sobriety Achievement & Transitional Housing Center... There are modular housing manufacturing businesses all over the United States. With gas selling (as I write this) at $3.00 a gallon, it makes sense to contact your nearest factory home builders in your area and get multiple bids. Just do a general search for modular home network and you will get an alphabetical list of all the states. Each state will have a list of sellers in that state. If you have any trouble finding them send me an e-mail and I will send you a link to the website. Send the modular manufacturer a link to this ebay ad and they should be able to give you a price quote. As I write this I am waiting for a price from a modular home seller in Western Minnesota. I will post their price once I have it. If you have any questions call me at (701) 280-1413 or email phonomike@aol.com. ************************* You are not bidding on an actual building! ********************************* HOW I CAME UP WITH THIS IDEA: Early April of this year I found out the city was going to put a homeless shelter / Detox center in our quiet neighborhood. Our neighborhood has a grade school and rest home. No one wanted this "in our back yard". After the outcry of mad area residents, the city commission decided to let volunteers from our neighborhood see if we could find a better location and building. I was one of 14 volunteers. We scoured the city for the ideal location and building. There were 15 criteria the city gave us to try and comply with when finding the building. For example: It could not displace a current tenant. It could not be next to railroad tracks. It could not be within 300 feet of another community service building and It must be within 2500 feet of downtown. We added to this list with our own rules: It could not be in a residential neighborhood, near a school or rest home and would not be on a popular pedestrian street. Even with all these rules and with a lot of work, we came up with what we thought was the perfect location and building. The city had an architect do a price estimate to remodel 7800 square feet of the building. He came back with an estimate of an incredible 1.04 MILLION DOLLARS! The original building, in our neighborhood, was then selected. (By the way & As expected... All the other locations were also met with strong resistance from everyone who lives or works nearby. No one wants to be near a Detox/Homeless shelter!) This experience got me to thinking about designing a Detox / Shelter that would be built in a factory, in sections and could be moved on site. Since this building would be in sections it could be moved to a new location every 3-5 years. It will be a lot easier to get people in the area that the Detox/shelter is located, to accept it if it is presented as a temporary thing. If the perfect location was found in your city, and the neighbors did not object, it would be fine to leave it as long as necessary. I visited both local the Detox Center and Homeless Shelter to get an idea from those who worked there - what would be their ideal "dream facility". I am not an architect, but was an art major in college. After I learned what was needed, I started by doing a lot of floor plan drawings. When I finally got a drawing that I thought might work, I cut up pieces of foam core board, in sections and shapes of rooms and kept experimenting with different layouts until I got what I thought would work.
Then I did the drawing over a photo of the foam core sections, that you see in the first part of this listing. As with all ideas, they are fluid things that change and evolve with time and experience. I called a seller of manufactured homes and asked what is a comfortable size for a house section traveling down the road... I choose to work with sections 14' X 56' because 4 horizontal section ends equal the length of the vertical sections. I found that the standard of the industry is that these sections are bolted together and could be unbolted if the structure needs to be moved. These structures would be hauled on (standard-of-the-industry) metal frames. Usually the frame is removed, but if it is suspected that the sections will be moved sometime in the near future they may remain. The beauty of this design is that as more room is needed, more sections could be added and this would not have to be a permanent location! In our city of 120,000 - on an average night, 4 people are in Detox rooms, but they have had as many as 17 people in one night to detox. I designed this with 12 detox rooms. The four rooms in the center, near the detox admittance desk could be used first and as more people need detox, rooms down the halls would be filled from nearest the detox desk to farthest from the desk "hub". Currently, in our city, the detox only has 4 rooms so they often must put more than one person in a room. On the rare night that more than 12 need to be in detox, there is enough area in each room to comfortably add two more mattresses (and people) in each room. This complex was designed so that the detox center would be at the back entrance and preferably have a "car port" over the door. (Currently 98% of the people in detox, in our city, are brought there by police car.)The front entrance would be the shelter entrance, with admittance area and desk. This shelter was designed so that men and women who have been drinking, but are not drunk enough to be of harm to themselves or someone else, would have a place to sleep. The idea here is: the more drunk they are the closer they would be to the locked detox rooms and if they are so drunk they need detox that is where they would go. Those that are sober would be in their own sleeping area, with a bathroom for each section. (See the many drawings.) The front of the structure would be the shelter admittance entrance, next - the community/TV room then the sleeping rooms for sober people and in the back , sleeping rooms for people that have been drinking and finally, the detox area in the very back. Since most would be sleeping on mattresses on the floor, I would reccomend in-floor heating throughout the building. Each Detox room would have a steel toilet, a drain in the floor, no handle on the inside of the door, a small window that is a mirror on the inside that someone on the outside can see through to the inside. (I called a company that sells these "one way mirrors" and a foot square mirror costs about $15.00. The detox room that has the mirror side needs to be 4 times brighter than the outside in order to clearly see into the detox room. I would also reccomend security cameras in each room.) In the door would be a small pass-though slot so water and whatever could be passed inside without opening the door. (No windows or TV or anything else in detox because those inside need no stimuli, they just need to sleep it off.) I would recommend security cameras throughout and monitors at the detox and shelter desks. I would locate a staff break room in the kitchen and a staff bathroom in the laundry area. Or if your budget allows the staff bath and break rooms could be separate. As with all ideas, they are fluid things that change and evolve with time and experience... If there was another vertical section added on the front, there would be more room for a separate staff bathroom and break room.
*************************************** Some things to consider with this invention: 1. Is there an existing building in your community that could be remodeled to use as a detox/homeless shelter that would cost considerably less than building this new modular shelter? Is that building in a location that the neighbors will be acceptable to? (The quote for the remodel in my example was 1.02 million, far more than the cost to build my new modular detox/homeless shelter.) 2. Most modular sections are designed in pairs, so the peak of the roof is at the centers of where the pairs meet. This has an odd number of sections, so adding a section to the front may actually be easier to build as it could have the standard roof. (My preference would be a roof that would span the entire structure. I would guess eliminating all the valleys would help with water and snow issues.) About 250,000 to 3.5 million Americans are homeless and about 1/3 to ½ are homeless due primarily to drug and or alcohol abuse. The need for the modular detox/homeless shelter is huge! **************************************** I have done a patent search and can find nothing like this. I found patent number 6,981,347 from 2006 and patent number 5,724,774 from 1998. They have nothing to do with my invention, but I thought I would include it anyway to show you the closest I could find. You can search for yourself on line. Google now has seven million patents on line. Just Google "Google Patent Search" and you should find it. It is great fun! *************************************** ************************************************************************ BONUS IDEA: HOMELESS URGENCY GRANT program: MY DREAM WOULD BE THAT THE DETOX/SHELTER WOULD BE OBSOLETE! Our goal should be no more homeless people! * * * THE BEST LOCATION FOR HOMELESS is in their own homes... On Easter Sunday I dropped in on the only homeless shelter in our city that accepts people who have been drinking, to get a look for myself at what goes on there. When I walked in the door I was kindly offered a hot meal. I observed about twenty people, men and women and one child, talking, watching TV, finishing the Easter meal and enjoying their time together. I asked one of the older lady’s if she knew where I could find Sandi, the director of the shelter. She pointed to the back of the facility. As I walked to the back, there was Sandi, all dressed up in a cheery pink Easter outfit. (Not exactly what I expected the director of a homeless shelter to be wearing. I kind of imagined her to be in army fatigues and jack boots .) Sandi was in the middle of a conversation with a young lady who was all excited because next week the young lady will be moving into her own apartment. After they were done talking Sandi invited me into her office. We had a nice long conversation. While I was sitting there one fellow came in to get towels so he could take a shower. A staff member, who had been up all night cooking the Easter feast, came in to talk with us. During all this a cute little girl, about 4 years old, with a big smile and dimples, came in to get the guitar Sandi had stored in her office. (One of the residence jokingly said they were going to try to teach the little girl how to play the guitar.) The guitar was as big as the little girl. In-between the comings and goings of people in Sandi’s office I was able to ask Sandi many questions. I found out that she feels safe in this homeless environment and has never been attacked. I also came away with the impression that their feelings were hurt when our neighborhood so emphatically stood up and said we did not want them in our neighborhood. (I don’t know how many of us were mad because we do not want to live near homeless, and or intoxicated, people or mad because we were never told about it or mad because we thought it was crazy to put it near a grade school and retirement home, but in any case we were mad!) By the time I got out of my chair I could see this was not a scary place, but a place for people to seek shelter and interact, kind of like a big family... but, as with a lot of families there can be someone who causes problems, like the tall intoxicated fellow who followed me out the door and asked for money. I did not give him any money, speculating he would just buy more liquor. This fellow was not too happy with me and when he was walking away he told me not to come back. Later, As I was walking back home I was thinking about my 95% positive experience and the sad reality that it’s the 5% negative that put a cloud over the other homeless people. If only there was a way to guarantee that aggressive intoxicated people from the shelter/detox center would not be intimidating residents in our quiet neighborhood, with it’s grade school filled with unworldly children and retirement home occupied by vulnerable elderly men & women. The irony is that if any of the individual residents, or family’s, in the homeless shelter moved next door to me, I would welcome them and call them friend, but put them together in a shelter and they become "those people" and are perceived as kind of scary. I wonder if the city had softened the perception, real or not, of a Homeless Shelter/Detox Center by calling it: "Transitional Housing/Sobriety Achievement Center" if we would have found it so scary? One startling fact I learned from my visit was that currently there are apartments and money available for the homeless, but there are so few social workers that many homeless wait up to 7 months for housing! (That’s how long the young girl at the shelter had been waiting.) Why aren’t there an army of para-social workers or trained volunteers to help get the homeless into homes in 7 hours not 7 months? There should be a way to get the homeless - homes first - and worry about the paper work later. Someone should start a Homeless Urgency Grant program... Maybe start with tax credits for landlords who sign up to be part of the program? A pool of money from private and public funds?... A tiny tax on alcohol, casinos & lotteries? A big part of finding homes for the homeless is going to be finding landlords willing to rent to the homeless and especially the 5% problem people. Talk to almost any landlord and they will tell you horror stories about trashed apartments. For this to work there must be a way to assure landlords that they will be compensated for any loss. As new apartments are built (or remodeled) a percent or so of these should be made as if they are going to be trashed... Linoleum on the floors (no carpet or wood) fewer windows that are easily replaced, solid doors, hidden drains in the floors, easy to clean surfaces. (I could write pages, describing in disturbing detail, the mess landlords have had to deal with.) Society paying for apartments for the homeless, on the surface, sounds like a way to for government and/or charities to spend other peoples hard earned money. Look closer... The cost of ambulance rides to the emergency rooms and emergency room visits and unpaid hospital care cost society much more than apartment rent. Finding homes for the homeless will save money in the long run. No hard working, tax paying person is happy about supporting a lazy bum, but most of those so called "lazy bums" have some mental, emotional or physical problem. Many were in the military and come back from seeing horrible things and can’t deal with it. Another thing that must be considered: In a free society does someone have the right to be intoxicated? Alcohol is a powerful legal drug... I had a great Uncle who passed out behind a bar and froze to death, in Bemidji, Minnesota. Years ago, my dad would often tell me what a happy-go-lucky young man his Uncle was before he was sent to fight in Korea. He said Alvin (we all called him Unkee Alvin) went through unspeakable things and came back a changed man. Alvin dealt with his horror by medicating himself with alcohol. I just remember my great uncle as a shy quiet polite man, drunk or sober. He lived in a simple house, had a wife and took care of his elderly mother by doing odd jobs. (They had an outdoor toilet and no running water.) I know a detox/shelter would not have saved him no matter where it was located, unless someone found him before he passed out. If Alvin would not have had alcohol to help him deal with the nightmare of war, I often wonder what he would have done. He was not the type to seek professional help. In a free society does someone have the right to be homeless? I have a second cousin, who had three children by three different women. He owes so much money in back child support, he just goes from place to place doing odd jobs "off the books" so he doesn’t have to pay. He is what you would call a transient. By now his kids are all grown, but this is how he lives his life... Homeless! ******************* There are no easy answers to these hard questions, but a Modular Sobriety Achievement Center with Transitional Housing and a Homeless Urgency Grant might help.********************* If you have any questions please E-mail or call 701-280-1413 or 701-293-0234 phonomike@aol.comPlease call before you bid! |
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