Towne Twin Village is a permanent supportive housing community for older people who have been homeless for a long time, built on the site of an old drive-in cinema on San Antonio's East Side. It is run on the Housing First model: residents get a home of their own first, with no requirement to be sober or in treatment, and then are offered health care, case management and other support on site. The first residents moved into tiny homes in April 2023, a second phase of 41 tiny homes opened in April 2025, and the finished campus is planned to have 204 homes.
The project first made headlines in late 2019, when the nonprofit behind it reportedly passed $2 million in donations and announced plans to house around 200 seniors. This page covers what was promised then, what has actually been built, who can live there and what research says about the approach.
What Towne Twin Village is
The village is developed and operated by the Housing First Community Coalition (HFCC), a San Antonio nonprofit. It sits on about 17 acres at 4711 Dietrich Road, where the Towne Twin Drive-In theatre once stood. The vision was led by Chris Plauche, founder of the city's Catholic Worker House, and the village's executive director is Edward Gonzales, who previously worked in the city's housing and human services departments.
Three things set it apart from a shelter:
- It is permanent. Residents sign a lease and can stay; it is a home, not an overnight bed.
- It is single-site. Instead of scattering apartments across the city, homes and services are on one campus. It was described as San Antonio's first single-site permanent supportive housing project.
- It focuses on older adults. It is aimed at people who are chronically homeless, older, and living with a disability or serious illness.
From a 2019 fundraising push to the first residents
When the plan was announced in 2019, HFCC described a community of about 200 homes, a mix of small apartments and tiny houses, with gardens, an art studio, a chapel, a pet park, picnic areas and an outdoor stage for music and films. That was a vision at the fundraising stage. Turning it into homes took several years.
Move-ins were first planned for January 2023 but were delayed by construction and supply-chain problems. In mid-April 2023 volunteers, including a group from a local Catholic parish, furnished the first homes with towels, dishes, microwaves and televisions. The first 14 residents were due to move in the following week. That first cluster consisted of 13 brightly painted tiny houses of roughly 450 square feet each, larger than the 350 to 400 square feet mentioned in early announcements, and at least one resident was placed in one of more than a dozen RV trailers across the street.
Phase one cost about $12.3 million and was paid for largely by private donations. On 14 April 2025 the City of San Antonio celebrated the opening of phase two: 41 more tiny homes, built with $9.9 million from the city's voter-approved 2022 Affordable Housing Bond. It was the first permanent supportive housing project finished with that bond money. The same funding paid for groundwork for a future 80-unit apartment site, the planned third phase.
Tiny-house villages like this one, photographed for a 2016 report, helped popularise small detached homes as a way out of homelessness. Towne Twin Village uses a similar layout of individual cottages around shared paths. Photo: YES! Magazine.
Who can live there and how residents are chosen
When the first homes opened, applicants had to be at least 50, homeless for a year or more and living with a disabling condition. They also needed to manage basic personal care and be able to sign a lease. The city's 2025 announcement describes the community as serving people aged 55 and over, so check current criteria with HFCC.
Residents pay no more than 30 percent of their income in rent, and for some that is nothing. Many have only a small disability benefit, typically around $800 a month according to local reporting. Pets are welcome, which matters: many people sleeping rough refuse shelter places because they will not abandon a dog.
Places are not first come, first served. Outreach workers from several agencies, including the Catholic Worker House, SAMMinistries, Christian Assistance Ministries, the Center for Health Care Services, Haven for Hope and the city's Department of Human Services, put forward clients. A committee ranks them by need and vulnerability, considering age, how long they have been homeless, disabilities and other risks. In the first round, 17 people were presented and six chosen. Four of those six had a severe mental illness; others used wheelchairs after amputations or were visually impaired.
One practical hurdle surprised volunteers: some of the people selected had no phone or fixed routine, so outreach workers had to go and find them to say a home was ready.
Homes and services on the campus
The campus is designed so that people can get most of what they need without travelling. Services described by the operators and the city include:
- medical, dental and mental health care on site, including a planned telemedicine clinic;
- addiction recovery support and intensive case management;
- a care coordinator for each resident, who checks in daily and helps build a personal plan;
- life-skills classes, from budgeting to GED study;
- home health care so that residents can age in place;
- free meals, clothing, laundry, showers and grooming services through the Catholic Worker House's Dorothy Day House of Hospitality;
- a library, gym, garden, chapel, dog parks and transport help.
Taking part in programmes is voluntary. That is a deliberate feature of the Housing First approach, not an oversight. The residential area has a security gate, and overnight guests are limited to a few nights a month.
Why Housing First? What the evidence says
Housing First was developed in the early 1990s by psychologist Sam Tsemberis, who founded Pathways to Housing in New York City in 1992. The traditional "staircase" approach asked homeless people to prove they were ready for housing, for example by getting sober or completing treatment. Tsemberis flipped the order: give people a stable home first, then offer support for as long as they need it.
The research is strongest on keeping people housed. A 2009 review of 28 studies found that Housing First programmes produced significantly better housing stability than approaches with less support. Canada's large At Home/Chez Soi trial, which housed more than 1,000 people with mental illness in five cities between 2009 and 2013, reached similar conclusions. Finland built its national homelessness strategy around the model from 2007 and is widely cited as one of the few countries where long-term homelessness has fallen steadily.
Cost is the other argument. People who are chronically homeless often use emergency rooms, ambulances, police time and jail beds heavily. A Seattle study of chronically homeless people with severe alcohol problems found average savings of about 53 percent in health and social service costs once they were housed. Results vary by place, though, and housing is not free.
Common myths and honest limits
"Housing First means housing only." No. The model depends on support services. Towne Twin's on-site clinics and care coordinators are central to it.
"It ended homelessness wherever it was tried." Not quite. Early articles about this project said federal counts credited Housing First with cutting US homelessness by 13 percent between 2010 and 2017. National counts did fall over that period, but many policies and economic factors were involved, so the decline cannot be attributed to one model. Researchers also find weaker or mixed effects on health and addiction than on housing stability.
"Nobody criticises it." Critics argue that people with the most severe addiction or mental illness need more structure than many programmes provide, and the approach has become politically contested in the United States. That debate is worth following, but the core finding, that people stay housed far more often, has held up across many studies.
The bigger picture in San Antonio
The whole campus was expected to cost around $41 million, built in phases as money arrives from donors, the city, Bexar County and federal grants. When the first homes opened, local estimates put the number of chronically homeless people in Bexar County at 400 to 500, so a 204-home village is a significant share of the need for older people in particular.
The city counts 477 permanent supportive homes as complete, under construction or planned, toward a goal of 1,000 by 2031 under its Strategic Housing Implementation Plan. Towne Twin Village is the most visible piece of that effort.
Older homeless people are a growing group in the United States, and they are especially vulnerable: chronic illnesses, mobility problems and the physical toll of years outdoors make the streets far more dangerous for a 65-year-old than for a 30-year-old. A quiet cottage with a door that locks, a dog allowed inside and a nurse a short walk away is a simple idea, but for the people living there it is a very large change.
For a very different proposal to house homeless people, see the Portland cruise-ship housing idea and its open questions.
A video report shared on Facebook in 2019, when the project's fundraising milestone was announced.
Sources: San Antonio Report, 14 April 2023; City of San Antonio, 14 April 2025; Housing First Community Coalition; Wikipedia: Housing First. Tiny-house village photo: YES! Magazine.
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