It Takes a (Micro Shelter) Village
How students and researchers from the College of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Planning (CAPLA) and the Drachman Institute are working with government and community partners to make a lasting impact on how we house Tucson’s homeless.
In the spring of 2024, Courtney Crosson — an associate professor at the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (CAPLA) as well as the director of CAPLA’s research and community outreach wing, the Drachman Institute — got a call from a man named Chuck Dunn.
Dunn, the executive director of a local nonprofit called the Tucson Hope Factory, had recently gotten back from Seattle, where he’d toured a village of one-room dwellings called tiny houses, or micro shelters, designed to provide transitional housing to local homeless people.
They were private, they were affordable, and they seemed to be working. “It was like, shazam,” Dunn says. “‘That’s what we need here.’”
A couple of years earlier, Bill Mackey ’94, a Tucson architect and assistant research professor at Drachman, had compiled a research paper commissioned through Drachman by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) identifying the limits to innovative, affordable housing types in Tucson. Part of what the paper showed was how the steady expansion of parking requirements within the city had made the development of medium- and high-density housing in Tucson effectively impossible. A parcel that, in the early 1950s, could have accommodated eight units with eight required parking spaces, for example, would until recently have required nine parking spaces and only supported six units.
“You reduce your tax base, you increase your heat island effects, you reduce the number of units available to renters,” Mackey says. “It’s lose-lose-lose.”
Drachman, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year, is in the unusual, amphibious position of being able to operate within the university and in direct collaboration with community and governmental partners, including the City of Tucson. Mackey’s paper went to the city council and ultimately led to a change in the parking code — a solution that was friendly to development while also pushing back on our ever-increasing reliance on cars. (“I can put that on my headstone,” he says. “‘I helped change parking in Tucson.’ I’m really proud of that paper.”)
Could Drachman help reframe the problem of housing for homeless people in a similar way?
Meanwhile, Crosson reached out to architect and CAPLA Associate Professor of Practice Teresa Rosano ’94 ’20 to propose a micro shelter project as the focus for Rosano’s capstone studio — essentially, CAPLA’s senior thesis project. (There are five capstone sections, each with a different theme; Rosano’s was community design and action.)
Rosano ended up co-teaching the studio with Greg Veitch ’23, at the time a Drachman research coordinator, whose background in the nuts and bolts of construction and design-build work served as a complement to Rosano’s focus on community research and outreach. (Veitch was also continuing to research and write papers with Mackey.)
Veitch says that balance of the conceptual and the practical is something CAPLA is especially — and increasingly — good at. “We’re moving toward something we call ‘design research’ or ‘performance-based design,’” he says. “That’s kind of how the whole profession is moving. And the U of A has had a pretty strong pedigree of that.”
For many students, the studio was the first time they’d built anything they could actually walk around in. It was also the first time they’d engaged the social and cultural questions around homelessness so thoroughly. Josh Russell ’25, who took on the role of filming interviews with local homeless people at community-services sites like Gospel Rescue Mission and Youth on Their Own, had gone into the semester assuming it was essentially a problem of supply and demand: Build more houses, house more people. But the more he listened, the more he understood homelessness as a condition often inextricable from substance abuse and mental health issues.
“If you’re going to build this community, you have to supply services to these people, you have to put more intention behind it than just saying, ‘OK, here’s a shelter,’” he says. “It was a perspective shift.”
Carolina Durazo ’25, who produced what was effectively a user manual for the physical assembly of the shelters, found that working with community partners helped her realize the importance of being able to communicate clearly and accessibly with people from a variety of backgrounds. “Architecture school — it was like coming from a different world,” she says. If volunteers didn’t understand the group’s vision once the studio was over, how could the shelters get built?
Broadly speaking, the studio was a success — Rosano and Veitch even won some awards for it, including the Community Design Award from the Arizona chapter of the American Institute of Architects and a Collaborative Practice Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
Rosano is particularly proud of the way the students surmounted the usual hazards of groupwork in order to see the project through. “If you’d asked me in the beginning what I thought about having [16 students] collaborate on one project, I would’ve said it was a bad idea,” she says. “They felt like they were working toward something bigger and outside of themselves that could help people — that became a driving motivation for collaborative effort.”
‘If, however, homelessness were considered a municipal emergency, the code restrictions would be more flexible. “Portland did it, Seattle did it, Denver did it,” Mackey says. And as of February 2026, so has Tucson.’
A vision was there, a prototype built, but there remains the stubborn question of where in Tucson a project like this might feasibly be brought to life. The students had designed both the shelter and a plan for how those shelters might be situated around communal facilities — a village — using the site of St. Francis Community Services, another nonprofit co-founded by Chuck Dunn, but the site was in a floodplain. Since the conclusion of the studio, Crosson and Mackey have been working with a site operated by the Primavera Foundation, a Tucson-based organization dedicated to improving opportunities for local homeless people since the early 1980s. (The group was co-founded by Nancy Bissell ’67, whose name is etched on an arch in the Women’s Plaza of Honor next to Centennial Hall — a project Mackey, coincidentally, helped design.)
Mackey and Veitch’s research into the zoning and code restrictions around micro shelter development, as well as their search for an answer as to how that development might be more easily facilitated, wrapped up quickly. “If you’re a pregnant teen, handicapped physically or mentally, elderly group housing, a homeless person, whatever — if you want to create any sort of development for these kinds of people, you have to go through a process with mayor and council,” Mackey says — that’s it. “It’s really kind of depressing when you think about it. All these people that are having a hard time have to go through a six-to-18-month process in order to get housing.”
If, however, homelessness were considered a municipal emergency, the code restrictions would be more flexible. “Portland did it, Seattle did it, Denver did it,” Mackey says. And as of February 2026, so has Tucson.
“[The emergency declaration] is a huge impact that few people realize the U of A had a hand in,” Crosson says. “We’re contributing to our community.” The project’s future isn’t settled, but, on a logistical level, it’s viable now in a way it wasn’t before. (Mackey and Drachman Research Coordinator Jessica McQuillen have retained the capstone students’ basic shelter design, making adjustments as needed — what Mackey calls “micro shelter 2.0.”)
As the project continues to evolve, Drachman is working with campus partners at the College of Medicine – Tucson (including Dan Beskind, an associate professor of emergency medicine) and the Mel & Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health (Sheila Soto ’17 ’22, a research professor) to establish a clinic within the village to provide medical services.
Crosson says the breadth of the project illustrates what makes Drachman singular within both the U of A ecosystem and the broader community. “We can start by identifying a policy challenge and then see the solution through across scales of impact,” she says. “From changes in policy language, to testing physical prototypes, to working with community partners to construct a village that can materially change people’s lives based on those changes to policy language. And it requires a team of partners, too: our students, government, researchers from colleges across the U of A, and most importantly, the community partners that propel the work.”
Chuck Dunn of the Tucson Hope Factory describes it as a thousand-piece puzzle. “My kids grew up here,” he says. “They’re all Wildcats. My wife’s a graduate of the medical school. It’s in our blood for us to want to make Tucson a better place. And to do that, I need these — all these other pieces. They all have to fit together.”
From these pieces, a picture emerges. Greg Veitch describes the details the studio sifted through in putting together their prototype design — the balance between privacy and communality, the reflective metal cladding that outperforms stucco in the desert heat. “It sounds silly,” he says, “but even the ability to operate a window creates agency in people that might not otherwise feel it or have it.”
Contribute to the Drachman Institute and Tucson Hope Factory’s continued micro shelter efforts here.
