Students Build Homes for Veterans with Mark of Warrior Village Project

The conversation with Mark Pilcher, founder of the Warrior Village Project, explores the innovative approach to addressing homelessness among veterans through the construction of movable tiny houses by high school students. The project not only provides housing solutions but also empowers students with valuable skills and confidence, fostering a sense of community and responsibility. Mark discusses the challenges faced in the construction process, the importance of collaboration with various organizations, and the future goals of expanding the program to help more individuals in need.

Learn more at https://warriorvillageproject.com/

Go to thetinyhouseadviser.com

Transcript

Less House More Moola Podcast (00:40)
Well, Mark Pilcher, welcome to Less House More Moola podcast. Super excited for this conversation today about the work you're doing in the world. It was so kind of Ellen Stone to connect us and that's how I found out about what you're doing and the ways that you're sort of solving multiple problems with your nonprofit. So thanks for being here.

Mark Pilcher (01:04)
I'm excited to be talking to you today.

Less House More Moola Podcast (01:08)
So would you introduce yourself and the Warrior Village project?

Mark Pilcher (01:13)
Yes, my name is Mark Pilcher. I'm the founder of the Warrior Village Project. ⁓ Our mission is to provide permanent affordable housing for homeless veterans while training next generation of home builders. we do that by building movable tiny houses in high school construction classes. And when they're completed, we donate them to local nonprofits that will use them to serve the veteran community.

Less House More Moola Podcast (01:39)
So amazing. Ellen did mentioned that she loves when tiny homes are sort of solving multiple problems at the same time. And you're addressing two of the really big ones that we hear a lot about. And that is the unhoused, especially within the veteran community. And also the fact that we have such significant gaps in terms of trades folks.

So tell us a little bit about how you came to be interested in the construction of veteran housing.

Mark Pilcher (02:13)
Well, my wife and I retired to Fallbrook, California, which is in northern San Diego County after living overseas in Asia for 17 years. And I was retired still relatively young. I wanted to get involved in the community, which I hadn't really been able to do when we were in Asia. So I looked around for opportunities to volunteer, and I volunteered with ⁓ Afterschool At-Risk Youth Program. I volunteered with Promises.

to kids, which is a program for children aging out of the foster care system. And I tutored second graders in my local elementary school. And I think they're all worthwhile endeavors, but I felt like I could do more with my background. I thought I could do things that were more impactful. And being here in Southern California, you can't help but read about the homelessness problem, which is significant in San Diego County. I think the last count, there's about 10,000 homeless people in San Diego County.

and about 750 of those are veterans. At the same time, it was pretty obvious that, you know, we haven't been encouraging kids to get into the building trades and other trades that were desperately in need of young blood because ⁓ the people that at my age are slightly younger than me that are retiring from the construction industry are not being replaced. So I thought, well, there's an opportunity to ⁓ address two issues at the same time.

So I started the Warrior Village Project and ⁓ just started reaching out to high schools to see if anybody wanted to start this journey with me of building houses and construction classes in high schools. And there are a few high schools in San Diego County that have construction classes. And one school responded when I reached out to them and that's San Marcos High School.

Less House More Moola Podcast (03:43)
Yeah.

haha

Mark Pilcher (04:05)
in San Marcos, California. And very quickly it all came together and we started building houses. ⁓ At that time we were not building movable tiny houses. We were building more conventional houses, 400 square feet houses ⁓ built in modules 8F, feet wide, 24 feet long, but built on a high school campus and trucked to a site where they were put on a permanent foundation. ⁓

That is a difficult way to do it. In California, the building codes are very strict. The energy efficiency requirements are very strict. The process of permitting inspections and everything is very slow and expensive. And through people like Ellen, who I met very early on in my days here in ⁓ San Diego, ⁓ I learned more about tiny houses. And as you know, at that time,

⁓ There weren't a lot of places where you could legally live in a moveable tiny house as a legal dwelling and through the efforts of people like Ellen locally, Jenny Crane locally, ⁓ Nick Mosley in Fresno, Dan Fitzpatrick in Fresno, that's changing and there's more legal places to put those homes. So we moved, shifted to starting to build moveable tiny houses. They're smaller.

They're less expensive to build, the less materials required, they're more manageable for a high school class. And there's more options for where we can put them because we're building them, as you know, to a national code rather than a local code. And the approval permitting process is much simpler. So we've been doing that since last fall. started building our first two houses in January of 2018.

and we started building two more in September 2024. Currently building four houses.

Less House More Moola Podcast (06:01)
Amazing. And it sounds like that the high schools were pretty hungry for this concept or for, you know, to have this project to work on. Do the high schools in your area all have a trade track or how is it that the high schools brought this in in particular?

Mark Pilcher (06:19)
Well most of the high schools here are probably all of them have career technical education career paths. They don't all have construction. I mean there's I think about 20 different trades that the state of California recognizes and has pathways for and each school district has some at one school and some at another. So I don't even know how many schools have construction programs in San Diego County.

Less House More Moola Podcast (06:24)
Mm-hmm.

Mark Pilcher (06:47)
But the one we have at San Marcos we actually started. They had a woodworking program, but not a construction program. So we started that in September of 2019 when we started the Warrior Village Project. But Nick Mosley, I'm sure you're familiar with Nick, he created a curriculum and a certification program for schools to use. And last time I talked to him I think there was about 70 schools across the country that were building houses like ours from Nick's plans.

And ⁓ what's unique about the Warrior Village project, I think, is the way we finance the construction of our homes. ⁓ Most of the schools, all of them that I know besides the schools I work with, the funding for the materials and everything has come from state grants, CTE grants, school grants. And as a result, when they finish completion of their houses, they have to sell them as surplus ⁓ equipment or surplus hardware.

owned by the school to reimburse the school. The Warrior Village Project, we don't do that. We supply all the materials to the schools that we get donated in kind from material suppliers or that we purchase with donations. So when the houses are completed, they're owned by the Warrior Village Project and we're able to give them away to non-profits.

Less House More Moola Podcast (08:08)
And it sounds like that as you are the master in chief, the orchestrator of the entire thing, you're building relationships with schools, you're building relationships with other nonprofits for veteran homeless, and then you're building relationships with the suppliers and bringing all those folks together to focus on this one important issue.

Mark Pilcher (08:30)
Yeah, I think of the Warrior Village Projects as a collaboration. ⁓ It's my little nonprofit, which is kind of the organizer of it. But we have partnerships with the Associated General Contractors Apprenticeship Training Program, California Home Building Foundation. Both of those organizations have provided instructors that have come out and helped our teachers teach our kids. We've also had ⁓ companies like ⁓ plumbing contractors, electrical contractors.

come out and work with our kids. Because our teachers are great, but most of them, to the extent they have a construction background, it's usually around carpentry, not plumbing and electrical and some of the other trades. And what's unique about this home building program in a construction class is it really gets the kids introduced to all of the building trades they need to learn beyond carpentry. Electrical, plumbing, HVAC typically aren't

extensively taught in high school classes. So that's one of the aspects of the program, the home building program that Nick created that's really exceptional.

Less House More Moola Podcast (09:40)
Yeah, amazing. Tell us a little bit about, the students that you've encountered. What have you heard from them and where do you think they, go after building a tiny home on wheels for the homeless and getting all of that experience with all the trades? How do you feel like that is impacting, that experience is impacting them?

Mark Pilcher (10:02)
Right, well we have about, during any school year we have about 75, 100 kids working on our houses. And they all have different objectives or different goals. ⁓ Some of them do want to go into the trades when they get out of high school. Some of them are probably going on to study architecture and engineering and so forth, where this class is of great benefit to them. mean, you can get a degree in architecture.

and never built anything without having ever built anything. So you have students that have benefited greatly from this process or our curriculum if they want to be an architect. But just the skills that they learn are life skills. I mean, they learn how to maintain the plumbing at home. They can fix an electrical plug. They can do things like that. So even those students that don't go on and work in the trades are getting great life skills.

We do have some that clearly want to go into the trades. We had into the trades as a CB, working for the Navy, the Navy construction ⁓ branch. ⁓ We've had several students that because of this class, they saw an opportunity to go into construction management, which they didn't even know was a career. But we had a few students that out on the building site just kind of emerged as leaders. The student that the other students would go to,

to ask, what do we do next or how do we do this? And pretty soon they were project managing and didn't even know it. And they didn't know that was a career path. We had one young lady in our first class in 2019 that graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo this time last year and is now working as a construction project manager here in San Diego. So there's a lot of outcomes. We have a lot that go into the military. We have a very diverse

group of students, some from low income backgrounds, some from middle class backgrounds, many who this is the first step on the ladder of the American dream for their families and for others it's just an interesting class they took.

Less House More Moola Podcast (12:16)
Yeah. It's so interesting. I, ⁓ you and I talked before about how I did a year of building construction technology at a trade school while I was, ⁓ also at the same time working on my undergrad and business management. And it was so much about the self-confidence and the, you know, as I talk about it, self-efficacy, having life experiences that teach you what you can accomplish.

that will then just open up doors for you just because you don't just shut down or say no to opportunities that seem outside of your scope. And the more exposure you have and the more ⁓ self-confidence that you build up throughout your young years, the more avenues that maybe open up for you just because you are welcoming them or open to them. And so I just love that these students are getting.

exposure to something that's really outside of maybe what we think about in traditional high school or outside of maybe the college track. so therefore, if they do become engineers, maybe they don't shy away from career opportunities or internships or what have you, because they go, ⁓ I've, you know, I've worked on something similar to this and they just feel more open to those ideas.

Mark Pilcher (13:37)
Yeah, I love the start of a new school year because it's predictable what happens. You start out there the first week and the kids, they don't know how to put the tool belt on. They don't know which end of the hammer to hold. They're all kind of looking at each other, trying to figure out who's going to do something first, you know, and they're standing back. They're not sure of themselves. And within a couple of months, you'll have students out there before the bell even rings strapping on their tool belts.

forming up their team, getting ready to diving in to do something. The teacher's not even out there yet. They're just eager to go. And you see that transformation during the year where these kids develop confidence in their ability to do something that they never imagined that they could do. And hopefully they take that forward in life. And the next time they see something that they're not sure if they can do, they'll have the confidence to try. That's just you. I don't know how you measure.

the importance of that, it's used for their, it's a thing for their development.

Less House More Moola Podcast (15:25)
Yeah, and it also brings in another element of life that we used to all have access to, right? We also, we all used to use our hands and our body to accomplish things. And of course, now careers are so much based around a screen for many folks. And so there is so much literal biological thrill that comes from working with your hands. have, my favorite thing is framing. I just love framing because you get that instant gratification where you see something.

materialize out of nothing that you did with your hands. And so I'm sure that those kids are getting a whole different level of excitement and validation by working in a way that maybe they've never really done before.

Mark Pilcher (16:09)
Yeah, I mean they enjoy it. You talk to the kids and they really enjoy this class. What we've been seeing over the last several years is kids signing up for the class for multiple years and that's the ideal because when students start, obviously they don't have a lot of skills or lot of confidence, but after the first year they're feeling pretty good about what they can do and the next year they're actually role models for the younger students and the leaders for the younger students.

And you do see students kind of emerge as leaders or foremen , you know, and we encourage that. The teachers generally try to let the kids go out and fail. They don't stop them from making mistakes. They don't stop them from failing because they learn by having to fix those mistakes and next time hopefully they won't make the same mistake again, although we see that repeatedly. They're 16-year-old kids. mean, they're going to make mistakes.

Less House More Moola Podcast (17:04)
Yeah, for sure.

well, failure, The skill of failure and coming back from failure and correcting your mistakes is another area where we build confidence. Hey, I failed at something before and it wasn't a big deal and I was able to fix it and move on. I mean, that's a huge life skill for kids and especially in a world where young people feel so much pressure and they're like really, you know, many of them so driven to be perfect in their.

Mark Pilcher (17:21)
you

Less House More Moola Podcast (17:33)
academic career to secure their future. Like learning the skill of failure is, is really important as well. Tell us about the numbers of like how many folks you have housed and you know, you mentioned how many students that you've brought through the program. What are the, what's the scope of the impact of the warrior village project?

Mark Pilcher (17:54)
Well, in many respects, we're still in early days. We started in September 2019 building two houses. The first house, well, as you'll recall, in March 2020, the school shut down. And here at San Marcos High School, we're rebuilding the houses. They were effectively shut down for two years. So once the schools, once we realized the students weren't coming back,

We had to go to Plan B and we got volunteers, contractors and everything to help us finish the first house. And we put it in the backyard of Wounded Warrior Homes, which is a nonprofit in Vista, CA that helps veterans suffering from traumatic brain injury and PTSD, most of whom have been homeless at some point since getting out of the service. And we put it in the backyard of a single family residence.

as an accessory dwelling unit and the main residence housed five veterans and the ADU was a sixth bedroom if you will, but it was really more than that. It's an apartment, mean a fully equipped apartment. And what Wounded Warrior Homes uses that house for is as a transition from the group home into fully independent living. What they've found over the years is that a lot of their veterans when they leave the group home,

They go out and live in an apartment and possibly for the first time they've ever lived alone and they don't do so well and they kind of bounce back. Because a lot of these veterans went into the service right out of high school. So they had lived with their parents. They lived in their barracks with their buddies. They lived in the foxholes with their buddies. They'd never really been alone. So they used the accessory dwelling unit for the veteran to experience what it's like to have their own space to live alone.

And they do that for several months. Last time I talked to Wounded Warrior Homes, there had been eight veterans that had lived in that house. I'm sure it's probably up to a dozen by now because they don't stay there forever. That's the first house. Actually, the only house we've completed. We had started another house just like that one. At the same time, we started the other house. And we just could not find a home for it. We could not find a home for our home. We were giving it away, and we couldn't find a place to give it away.

⁓ And a lot of it has to do with, you know, ⁓ jurisdictional issues because if you're building the house ⁓ the way we were building them, ⁓ traditional style house, you have to get the plans approved by the jurisdiction in which the house is going to be installed. And there's 28 jurisdictions in San Diego County. So until we found where it was going, we couldn't finish building the house because it has to be inspected while it's built. So that was a problem.

I had someone that said they wanted a house, another nonprofit said they wanted a house, went through the whole process of getting the building department in that jurisdiction to review our plans and agree to do inspections at the school while we building it and all that. And then the nonprofit said, well, no, can't. And it had to do with political problems with the city. But we never did find a home for second house and ended up selling it unfinished and taking the money to build movable tiny houses.

So the four houses we're building now ⁓ are going to be going to Solutions for Change, which is a nonprofit in Vista, California. They recently bought a 100 acre property and our four houses, which we hope to finish by the end of 2025, at Christmas this year, will be going to Solutions for Change to form the nucleus of a warrior village village. That's the goal.

That's the vision is to have villages of tiny houses around San Diego County. And the idea is 12 houses in a community center with a big dining room table where the veterans can go and have Thanksgiving dinner together, Christmas together, maybe, you know, meet family members or whatever they're visiting because the tiny houses are tiny. So that's the goal. And that's what we hope to have at Solutions for Change is our first actual village.

And then we want to continue to grow the program to more high schools so we can build more houses and help more homeless people. And we started with veterans, targeting veterans because there are more veterans needing housing than we could possibly build houses for. And it's a very ⁓ veteran-friendly community, San Diego. There's a lot of veterans here. And we know that most of these veterans are homeless because of the trauma that they experienced.

during their service. So there's a lot of empathy for homeless veterans. ⁓ Not that there's not empathy for other homeless people, but here in San Diego, it's an easy sell to go to a company and say, we're building homes for homeless veterans. How about donating some lumber? ⁓ It's kind of like, well, how fast can we donate it to you? Thank you for asking. But there's about 10,000 homeless people in San Diego County. There's ⁓ foster kids that have aged out of the system. There's ⁓

battered women, there's a whole bunch of people out there that can benefit from tiny house, affordable tiny house living. And we'd like to to grow this thing so we have high schools all over the county building houses for the entire homeless population.

Less House More Moola Podcast (23:30)
Yeah, that makes me think about how the kids are impacted by the notion that they're building a house for someone who's unhoused. ⁓ Do you think that is sort of sinking into the students as they're working on the project?

Mark Pilcher (23:44)
Oh

yes, yes. mean we've had students interviewed by the news networks and they always mention how they feel good to be giving back to the community, giving back to the veterans that have sacrificed for us. we want, part of what we're hoping to do is to kind of introduce to our students the veterans community because as you know only about 1 % of the population now has served in the military. Unlike, you know, my father's generation where there were

12 million servicemen during World War II, ⁓ most people don't know a veteran. They didn't grow up with a veteran in the family. They don't know what the veterans have experienced. And so one of the things we do is try to educate our kids about the veterans community.

Less House More Moola Podcast (24:34)
Yeah. So are you hearing from others that are saying, hey, you know, maybe we have land and, and maybe we would be interested in putting some tiny homes on it. Are you kind of like, where's your bottleneck? Is it the building of the houses? Is it the securing of the land? Is it the materials? Where is your bottleneck to growth?

Mark Pilcher (24:54)
Yeah, all of the above. Yeah,

we...

Yeah, people reach out to me often thinking that maybe there's something we can do together. But most people don't understand the construction process, the preventing process, and they have big hearts. And they say, oh, we could do this here. And you go, well, no, you can't because it's not zoned for removable tiny houses. You know, that's an issue all across the country. And it's probably a bigger issue here in California than it is in many places. So finding a location for these is difficult.

Ellen, as you know, probably know, put the first movable tiny house in a backyard in San Diego, in city of San Diego. And I'm not sure there's been a second one since. ⁓ So it's difficult all the way around. the partnership we now have with Solutions for Change is tremendous for us because there's probably virtually an unlimited amount of space there where we could put movable tiny houses.

So we think that's, for us, for the next couple of years, they'll be able to take all of the houses we built. But yes, people have reached out to me from Las Vegas and said, hey, can we start a warrior village project in Las Vegas? Can we do one in Riverside County? A lot of people have reached out. But we're small. We're learning. These are the first mobile tiny houses we've built. We're learning how long it takes our students to build them.

and what actual materials we need to build them. And we're building our network of donors, material suppliers, and ⁓ cash donors so that we can grow our program one school at a time. A lot of people reach out, and most of the time, it doesn't work for various reasons, as you can appreciate.

Less House More Moola Podcast (26:44)
And so are the jurisdictions that you have worked with are like, they making some, ⁓ changing, willing to change zoning in places in order to allow for this sort of solution for, for the homeless or is there still a lot of resistance?

Mark Pilcher (27:03)
Well, there's still a lot of resistance. There's a not in my backyard ⁓ issue which is prevalent everywhere. But as you know, the Tiny Home Industry Association, American Tiny House Association ⁓ have worked hard to try to get legislation or codes in place to allow movable tiny houses and they've succeeded ⁓ in quite a few jurisdictions in California. There's many, many more where they're still not allowed. ⁓

city of San Diego is the only one in San Diego currently that allows you to put them in a backyard as an, well, they're not accessory dwelling units, they call them movable tiny houses to distinguish them from accessory dwelling units, but it's the same effect. ⁓ But then of course you have RV parks that are zoned that you can probably put them in. But yeah, land is a big challenge for us with respect to our actual building at the schools.

⁓ instructional support is a challenge for us because in a class of students usually have like 25 students and 25 students operating power tools and things like that on our houses it takes a lot of attention from the teacher so we were trying hard to get more trades professionals into the classroom to assist the teachers in teaching particularly in the trades where the teacher doesn't have expertise so that's

been a challenge too, because we need that across all of our schools. So we're trying to, the pace at which we can grow our program in schools and the pace at which we can find homes for them, you don't always align. But we're doing better. We're getting there.

Less House More Moola Podcast (28:46)
Yeah, sounds like you have ⁓ a lot of tolerance for incremental progress.

Mark Pilcher (28:53)
I haven't had much choice but to have tolerance for incremental rising. We lost two years during the pandemic. Didn't see that one coming.

Less House More Moola Podcast (29:02)
Well, Mark, thanks for your resilience in working on this really amazing collaboration project where you're, solving two major problems that we see in our society. And thanks for being the leader of that and, and bringing all the pieces together. Can you share with listeners where they could find out more or possibly donate to the work you're doing?

Mark Pilcher (29:26)
Yeah, we have a website, warriorvillageproject.com. There's a donate page there that you can donate through ⁓ the San Diego Gives portal. We participate in the San Diego Gives campaign every year. And there's a lot, we have a lot of information on our website. We do a monthly newsletter. So our sponsors and people that donate money, donate materials and all that can track our progress.

Every month they see photos of our houses and our students working on our houses so they can see the progress that we make. So there's a lot of information on our website. We don't have any photos of finished moveable tiny houses yet, but I hope we will soon.

Less House More Moola Podcast (30:11)
Well, WarriorVillageProject.com, I'll make sure that that link is in the show notes. Mark, thanks so much for telling us about that work you're doing.

Mark Pilcher (30:18)
Thank you, Laura. It's been a pleasure.