Maggie Grether, Contributing Photographer

For the past three years, a backyard in the city’s Hill neighborhood has become a home to dozens of homeless people.

“It’s the basic model of a refugee camp,” Mark Colville, who runs the Rosette Neighborhood Village Collective, said. “If there was a disaster in New Haven and hundreds of families had to leave their homes, where would they go? They’d go to a refugee camp where you have a central facility surrounded by satellite units of housing. That’s what we’ve been doing here.”

To Colville and many of the residents at Rosette Neighborhood Village, homelessness — and the city’s response to it — has become a disaster of its own.

As the community evolved from tents to tiny homes, it has sparked a lengthy debate over how to handle the city’s housing crisis, and whether makeshift outdoor housing can help solve it.

The community is located behind the Amistad Catholic Worker House at 203 Rosette St. in the Hill. Colville, a longtime housing activist, began the project in early 2022 in an effort to support New Haven’s increasing homeless population.

In April 2023, when the city bulldozed a tent city alongside Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, many residents from that encampment moved to Rosette. To make room for the new neighbors, the Village expanded into a neighboring community garden — a venture which the city eventually shut down.

In 2024 alone, the New Haven area’s verified homeless population doubled. Rosette Village’s proponents hoped to send a message about the need for improved affordable housing in New Haven and the lack of alternatives to homeless shelters for the city’s homeless population.

“A shelter is very much like being in a jail,” village resident Suki Godek said in a Connecticut Public documentary about the project. “You’re giving up your rights to privacy, your rights to your possessions, to your ability to come and go as you please.”

The documentary — entitled “Where Then Shall We Go?” — showcased how village residents formed a community in the Amistad backyard. Weekly schedules dictated who was responsible for chores throughout the week. Residents met with Colville to set community norms, like a nightly quiet hour.

Tiny home villages have cropped up elsewhere in the United States, in cities such as Madison, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon.

Community First! Village near Austin, Texas, one of the largest, spans 51 acres and houses 370 people, according to its website. Like the Rosette Neighborhood Village, Community First! is a Christian-run organization in which tiny home residents share communal facilities. But since the county where the Texas village is located doesn’t have its own zoning code, its developers faced fewer of the legal challenges that have come to plague Rosette.

At first, the Amistad settlement consisted mostly of tents, with extension cords connecting each one to electricity from the house. By 2023, it was evolving. Donations from local community members paid for Amistad to install six small shelters built by a company named Pallet. The new homes, installed at Rosette Street that October, included beds, smoke detectors, power outlets and individual heating and electricity units.

But after sending multiple orders to stop the construction of the tiny homes, the city refused to connect the new electricity units to the grid, citing noncompliance with zoning regulations and the state building code.

For weeks in December 2023 and January 2024, activists struggled to communicate with the city and state about what requirements the homes would need to meet to receive approval. Finally, the city turned on the heat in mid-January under the condition that the homes would have 180 days to come into compliance with the policies. In March, the Board of Zoning Appeals granted zoning relief to the tiny homes.

When the 180-day exemption expired in July, the city determined that the village remained in violation of the state building code, and power was shut off once more.

This mid-summer shutoff became a lightning rod for advocacy on the part of the Unhoused Activists Community Team, or U-ACT, an advocacy group led by Colville. In January 2025, U-ACT staged a demonstration at City Hall to highlight the city’s treatment of the homeless, both in the tiny homes and at an encampment on the New Haven Green, which the mayor cleared in October.

Colville told the News that about half of the New Haven Board of Alders and roughly a dozen state legislators — including Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, who represents part of New Haven — have visited the tiny homes. Despite those lawmakers’ largely positive responses, he said, Mayor Justin Elicker has approached the tiny homes more like a dutiful policeman than an influential policymaker.

Meanwhile, Elicker contends that the village’s code violations — including violations of wind and weight load requirements — present safety risks for residents and a liability for the city.

“When the city knows about a housing violation or billing code violation, and we don’t do anything about it, we open ourselves up to a lawsuit,” Elicker said in a recent interview with the News. “And if someone gets seriously hurt, that could be millions of dollars that taxpayers pay.”

Elicker emphasized the city’s commitment to addressing the homelessness crisis, citing the city’s eight homeless shelters, including a converted Days Inn hotel. He said that neighboring municipalities have been resistant to changing restrictive zoning policies that contribute to New Haven’s housing shortage.

For now, the tiny homes remain intact, but still without heating. In January, Amistad and the Rosette Village Neighborhood Collective formed the Good Neighbors Fund to pay for the village’s “exorbitant” operational costs, Colville said.

State legislators proposed a bill earlier this year that would allow religious organizations like Amistad to establish “temporary shelter units” for people experiencing homelessness. Colville is encouraging the community to advocate for the legislation.

“We’re determined that the coming winter is not going to be like last winter,” Colville said. “By any means necessary, within the bounds of nonviolence.”

In 2024, homelessness in Connecticut increased by 13 percent, according to a press release from the mayor’s office.

Correction, June 1: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the tiny homes did not yet have zoning approval.