It was 43 degrees that Saturday, and Cindy Seymour arrived at 428 Hawley Ave. at 8 a.m. Drills droned loudly around her and sawdust flew over the machines. Two small white homes, still in construction, peeked out over the lot, guarded by yellow construction tape.

The homes might have looked smaller than the rest of the houses on Hawley Avenue, but they served a bigger purpose. They represented the first transitional housing built for homeless women veterans in the area.

Serenity for Women, an organization serving to empower women veterans, partnered with the Syracuse Rescue Mission to create adequate housing for the women. The organization plans to unveil the homes on Veterans Day. Volunteers have been putting in almost 11 hours every day for the last month and a half of construction.

“I am a veteran and I see what happens to them in the military and after they leave the military,” said Seymour, the president and founder of Serenity for Women. “If I can give them solace on a small scale, like a tiny home, I’m happy to do that.”

The homes exceed no more than 192 feet. Each has its own bathroom facility and shares utilities with the other house. Living in the houses comes with conditions: the women have to put in 25 volunteer hours per week at the Syracuse Rescue Mission and have to be substance-free.

The Rescue Mission would have oversight of its environment and offer mental health services as well as emotional and physical care, said June Worden, the vice president of Serenity for Women.

Worden said she believed the homeless shelter wasn’t an entirely safe environment for women. As a retired lieutenant with the state police and special control officer with Onondaga County, she’s worked with the homeless population.

“Anything can happen, and things do happen at a homeless shelter. It’s just a tough environment at the homeless center,” she said, pointing out that the majority of people at the shelter were men. “We intend to have our environment at Hawley Avenue to be a safe environment for women.”

Stacy Fernandez | Feature Editor

Seymour agreed with Worden. She pointed out that the neighborhood had 12 security cameras and that the women would be escorted to and from their volunteer hours by the Rescue Mission.

“I’m not going to out these women in unsafe locations. They’ve been unsafe enough,” Seymour said. “I hear a lot of safety and hygiene issues at the homeless shelter. They have to walk through men. They’re dealing with a lot of military trauma and PTSD, and to walk through the stuff that gave them issues is not safe.”

Seymour said she hopes the houses act as a stepping stone for their residents to move into more permanent housing. As tiny homes, they are easier to maintain, she said.

Serenity receives the land from the Greater Syracuse Land Bank and looks for more plots where tiny homes can be constructed.

That Saturday, volunteers trudged around in muddy boots and shoes, carrying shovels to dig up the ground. Almost all of them had heard about the landscaping event from Facebook, Seymour said, and many were friends of hers who came to help the cause.

Kerrin Conklin was one such friend. Conklin, a consultant in the Syracuse area, worked at the site for nearly three hours, cutting insulation and measuring siding, yet she was not the least bit tired, she said.

“It’s for a bigger cause,” she said. “It gives them some sense of independence and confidence, and it’s a starting point.”

Conklin said she believes the volunteers and organization could do a lot more with the tiny homes, given the right land, funding and fundraising. She added that, as residents of Hawley Avenue, the women would be close to transportation, employment opportunities and schools.

It’s tiny, but it’s a lot better than being homeless, Conklin said.

Joe Greco was another friend of Seymour’s who had put in the hours Monday through Sunday for the homes’ construction. He works in residential remodeling and was more than happy to hop on board with Seymour’s cause, he said.

“It hasn’t been easy, because she’s been doing stuff that’s not in her wheelhouse, but she’s more than happy to jump in and do what it takes to make it happen,” he said about Seymour.

Stacy Fernandez | Feature Editor

Greco said he believes the tiny homes is just a small step forward in a long walk.

“I think there’s a lot of help out there for people who aren’t getting it,” he said. “I hope it gives them a little more structure, a little safe haven for them that they’ve been cheated of.”

Beyond safe housing, the organization and volunteers were determined to give the women a welcoming neighborhood. To that end, the backyard was being converted into a community garden.

Volunteers as young as 14-year-old Mateo Baker, a student at Faith Heritage School, had shown up to carve the backyard for a community garden.

The school requires students to do a certain number of community hours, and Baker, after hearing about the landscaping event through his father, decided to put in his hours that Saturday morning for Serenity.

“The work is difficult at times,” he said, stopping his shoveling for a quick break. “But I think it’s important to help, reach out as best we can and give back.”

Giving back factors into everything Seymour hopes the home will offer. She sees the women as being more than just one part of a “welcoming, eclectic neighborhood.”

“The idea is not just to incorporate the women into the neighborhood. We want to incorporate the neighborhood into the women,” she said. “We want them to know they’re welcome and appreciated.”

Seymour owns a restaurant in the neighborhood and has lived there with her wife for many years, “fighting the good fight,” and cleaning it up, she said. She said she hopes the neighborhood’s community garden would give the women a chance to learn a sustainable trade by growing produce and selling it from their homes. Further, if they could grow their own food, they would never go hungry.

Like Greco and Seymour, Worden believes tiny homes are one tiny step toward addressing the homeless population’s problems.

“I don’t see an end to it. The city of Syracuse and the zoning office see the value of the tiny homes, and how they could really impact our homeless population,” she said. “Tiny homes might be the wave of future in resolving some of these issues.”

Published on November 8, 2017 at 8:31 pm

Contact: dmurthy@syr.edu