Inside Avivo Village: How 100 Tiny Homes in a Minneapolis Warehouse Are Helping People Move Out of Homelessness

In Minnesota, winter is more than an inconvenience.

For someone without a stable place to live, freezing temperatures, snow, wind and prolonged exposure to the elements can turn an already difficult situation into a dangerous one.

In Minneapolis, that reality helped inspire an unusual approach to emergency shelter: instead of filling one large room with rows of beds, organizers created something that looks much more like a small neighborhood.

Except the neighborhood is indoors.

Known as Avivo Village, the project is an indoor community containing 100 individual, secure dwellings — often described as “tiny houses” — inside a warehouse building in Minneapolis.

From the outside, it may look like an ordinary industrial structure.

Walk inside, however, and the concept becomes clear.

Rather than asking residents to sleep in a large communal area with little privacy, Avivo Village gives individuals their own private space. Each small dwelling provides a place where a resident can sleep, keep personal belongings and close a door.

That seemingly simple difference — having a private space — is central to the philosophy behind the project.

But Avivo Village was never designed to be only a place to spend the night.

Mental-health services, substance-use treatment, medical support, employment assistance, case management and help navigating the path toward permanent housing are connected to the shelter model.

The ultimate objective is not to keep people living in tiny homes indefinitely.

It is to give people enough safety and stability to begin moving toward something permanent.

And several years after the project opened, hundreds of people have passed through its doors.

According to Avivo, as of July 2026, 873 individuals had been served by Avivo Village since it opened in December 2020, and 339 had moved into safe, permanent housing.

Those numbers help illustrate what makes this unusual indoor village more than an architectural experiment.

It represents an attempt to rethink what an emergency shelter can look like.

Why Build Tiny Houses Inside a Warehouse?

Traditional emergency shelters save lives and provide essential protection, but not everyone experiencing homelessness feels able to use them.

Large communal sleeping spaces can present challenges for people who have experienced trauma or who feel vulnerable around strangers. Privacy can be limited, and concerns about belongings, personal safety or crowded environments can make some people reluctant to enter traditional shelters.

Avivo Village was designed specifically for people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, including people who had been living outside or in places not intended for human habitation.

The concept began taking shape during an extraordinary period.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic made crowded indoor environments especially concerning. At the same time, visible encampments and unsheltered homelessness were significant issues in the Twin Cities.

Organizers began considering whether there was a way to bring people indoors without recreating a conventional congregate shelter.

The answer was a village within a building.

Instead of constructing dozens of small houses outdoors, individual structures could be placed inside a large warehouse.

The building itself would protect residents from Minnesota's weather, while the individual units would provide separation, privacy and personal space.

In October 2020, the Minneapolis City Council approved the Indoor Villages project, which envisioned 100 tiny shelters within a Minneapolis warehouse.

Avivo subsequently became the organization operating the program.

The first residents arrived in December 2020, and the project grew into the 100-unit community operating today.

Privacy Can Be More Important Than It Sounds

For someone who has always had a bedroom, apartment or house, the ability to close a door may feel ordinary.

For someone who has spent months or years without reliable housing, it can mean something entirely different.

A private space can provide a degree of control over everyday life.

There is somewhere to sleep without constantly wondering who is nearby.

There is somewhere to keep personal belongings.

There is a space to decompress.

There is a door.

Avivo describes privacy and security as core features of its model, emphasizing that residents have individual spaces where they can sleep, think and decompress.