>>Breaking ground: Chatham County’s tiny-home village for people with mental illness

Tucked away in the backwoods of Chatham County, down a long, meandering road, a large swath of land has freshly been cleared at The Farm at Penny Lane.

On the sprawling 40-acre therapeutic farm off U.S. 15-105 between Chapel Hill and Pittsboro, crews are breaking ground on a different kind of residential community: a village of 15 tiny homes, each priced at $50,000, ranging in size from 360 to 400 square feet. Amenities include a clubhouse, walking trails and an outdoor pavilion.

Its target residents: people living with serious mental illnesses or on a fixed income.

It’s the final phase of Thava Mahadevan’s vision that started more than a decade ago while he was working as a mental health care clinician.

“We’d see the same people getting arrested, or getting emergency services called. All because they didn’t have a safe, affordable place to live,” said Mahadevan, now the director of operations at UNC’s Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health. “The traditional mental health system can only do so much. We wanted to come up with housing as a solution.”

He founded Cross Disability Services Inc. (XDS), a nonprofit designed to serve people who were falling through gaps in health care. The Tiny Homes Village project, costing $3.2 million, is a public-private partnership with the nonprofit and the UNC School of Social Work. Cary-based Garman Homes is the builder.

Mahadevan says rents will run around $250 to $300, depending on income, and include wraparound medical, behavioral health and social support for residents. Veterans with chronic mental health conditions will be given priority for five of the homes.

“It’s permanent. As long as somebody wants to live there, they can,” he said. “They can also break the lease, like any other lease agreement.”

It’s an “outside-the-box” approach, he says, to tackling affordable housing for some of society’s most vulnerable population. As rising housing costs across the Triangle push many to the financial brink, people with severe mental illnesses who rely on federal disability payments have even more limited options for stable homes.

“These are mental illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression. An average monthly income for someone on disability is about $1,000 a month,” he said. “You can’t even afford a one-bedroom apartment for under $1,300 anymore. Then you’ve got pay for food, medication, utilities. How do you do that?”

An estimated 20% to 25% of the homeless population in the United States suffers from serious mental health issues compared to only 4% to 6% of the general population.

Tiny house, big idea

In 2009, Mahadevan purchased The Farm at Penny Lane to set up a therapeutic farm. Over the years, he added an organic farm, and UNC PAWS, a program that helps train emotional support dogs.

Later, he “sort of stumbled” into the tiny home movement, he says, after watching hours of the popular home renovation channel HGTV.

“It became my go-to,” said Mahadevan, who himself escaped ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka during the early 1980s, living homeless in India for a time. That experience, and the mental health struggles he witnessed, pushed him into the field of mental health, he says. Eventually, he graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a master’s degree in rehabilitative counseling psychology.

He built the first house, a pilot, with the help of donations and volunteers in 2016. Clients from the UNC community mental health center also participated by taking turns living in the accommodation over short stays.

“Their feedback went into designing these homes now,” Mahadevan said.

It’s also included in a research article, along with other findings, published in the Journal of Social Work. It took a lot longer, however, to raise the funds and get rezoning approved by the county. Prepping the land for utilities also proved costly. Bringing in county water alone cost around $430,000, he said.

“You cannot just buy a piece of land and have tiny homes put up there. There were lots and lots of challenge. We learned a lot over the years,” he said.

Today, the village is finally beginning to take shape.

Clients are working on the land or helping care for puppies living temporarily on the property. An Assertive Community Treatment Team, or ACTT team, has its office on the property. These are teams of doctors, nurses and others who serve people with severe mental illnesses where they live. Having doctors and nurses nearby, but in the background, will be an asset, Mahadevan said.

The project is expected to be complete by August.

“We’ve already got close to over 300 inquiries right now, even people from out of state wanting to move here.”

The team is assembling a resident selection committee to carefully review applications.

Mahadevan hopes the concept will serve as a “proof of concept” to rural counties in the state and the rest of the country. Eventually, he would like to compile a step-by-step guide on building such communities that others can use.

“It may not be for everybody to live here. But it’s considered the gold standard in providing housing services for people with serious mental illness. Loneliness can be lethal.”