Michael Tatmon leaned forward in his chair, a determined look in his eyes. He spoke emphatically.

“This place is, for the first time, giving me an opportunity to look back on my life,” Tatmon said. “Everything is silent now, and I’m hearing a voice that I’ve never heard before. That’s my own voice.”

The 67-year-old Air Force Veteran wore black photochromic sunglasses and an olive-green baseball cap, the late morning sun illuminating his stubbled grey beard as it filtered through a window on his right. He occasionally glanced outside as he spoke, waiting a moment to collect his thoughts before continuing.

Tatmon is a resident of the Veterans Community Project (VCP) location in Longmont, a new “tiny home” community for veterans who have experienced homelessness and struggled to return to life outside of military service.

The goal of the community, those involved with it say, is to give its residents the resources they need to get them back on their feet for the long-term.

And its work has given Longmont city officials new ideas on how to implement its own affordable housing developments.

An intentional design

At its location just a stone’s throw away from downtown Longmont, the 26-home community has two distinct aspects. The residences give its occupants the space to make them feel comfortable; the case management program gives them the tools needed to find their place in society.

Run by the Veteran’s Community Project, a nonprofit organization established by combat veterans in Kansas City, the Colorado location is one of several other villages the organization is building across the country — all of which rely on the “tiny home” concept.

The homes — most of which are just 240 square feet, with some family homes maxing out at 340 — are arranged in a quadrant and interconnected by paved walking paths. Nearly 70% of each residence’s construction was done by volunteers, said VCP Executive Director Jennifer Seybold.

“Anything that’s not electrical, roofing or plumbing can be done by volunteers,” Seybold said. “From the ground up, we had about 4,500 volunteers contribute to the construction of this project over the couple years were were building.”

While the community has housed residents since the first homes were completed in 2023, that number remained relatively low until the entire development’s construction finished on June 12, Seybold said.

As of late August, the location is at about 50% capacity and hoping to reach an 85 by the end of September. Each occupied residence is adorned with an American flag hanging off the exterior.

Inside each home is a pet-friendly studio living space, featuring a kitchen, living area, bed and bathroom. On the left, a wall-mounted TV hangs in front of a recliner chair and a multi-use table.

Everything from the orientation of the beds and windows to the color of the paint on the walls was specifically chosen with veterans in mind.

“The bed has its back against the wall — veterans often want to read the room, so if you’re sitting against the wall you can actually see 360 degrees, including inside the bathroom, so there’s nothing that can sneak up on you,” Seybold said. 

Once a tenant has completed their time living in the community, usually after between 14 and 16 months, they are able to take any non-structural component of the home, including appliances and furniture, with them to their new residence, Seybold said. The organization will then replace them at no charge and put a new coat of paint on the walls before moving someone else in.

“That’s part of what we do,” Seybold said. “We do that through the generosity of our community. To flip it and re-do it, it costs us about $5,000.”

In total, one year’s worth of utilities, services and case management salaries costs about $15,000 per single-resident home, Seybold said. All of that is paid for by VCP.

Helping residents reclaim their freedom

The other aspect of VCP’s work involves case managers meeting with the residents to help them work toward a variety of different goals that would allow them to live on their own in a healthy and sustainable manner, Seybold said. Those goals vary from case to case, but can include anything from overcoming addiction to career development and financial literacy.

“The veterans, when they move in, set a series of goals for themselves,” Seybold said. “Our job is to help them achieve those goals, so when they transition out of the village, that gives us more confidence that they’ll able to maintain that housing and are in a self-sufficient and stable place.”

The organization first finds people they think would be a good fit for the village through its outreach services program, which works with other community-area veteran’s agencies and organizations to support up to 350 people per year, Seybold said. Once someone is in the outreach program, the organization works to house them either in the tiny home community or in a private apartment.

All potential residents go through an extensive background check during the application process to ensure they are honest about their past and committed to move forward, Seybold added. Only those on a registered sex offender list are immediately disqualified from living in the community, though the organization may still work with them to find alternative private housing.

The organization strives to keep an 8:1 ratio between its residents and case workers, Seybold said, in an understanding that the depth of work required for each case inherently limits the number of cases each manager can take on.

That case work is pivotal to the success of the community and is the biggest reason why Tatmon, having joined the community two months ago, has quickly found himself at home in the village after years without one.

The son of a Coast Guard father who was stationed in Connecticut, Tatmon grew up as an athletic kid who was eager to fight if the moment called for it.

“If someone was picking on a friend of mine, I wanted to jump into a fight alongside them,” Tatmon said. “I always hated to see when bigger guys picked on little guys … I wanted to help that little guy.”

After coming back from his first college semester in California, where he had gone to play football, Tatmon’s father suggested military service in light of his son’s lack of success both on the field and in the classroom. That decision made in 1977, he said, was one of the best he’s ever made.

While completing his Air Force service over the next few years, Tatmon picked up boxing and had toured around the country in competition, a sport that fit his love of fighting but also gave him traumatic brain injuries that would impact him for the rest of his life. 

When Tatmon returned from his service, he went to school for acting but was unprepared for the rigor of what that training would be. It was at that time when he picked up a cocaine habit that would dominate the next several years of his life until the late 1990s.

“I spiraled for a long time, lived in denial for a long time, dropped out of acting, lived to make money, went to jail, writing bad checks and credit card fraud,” Tatmon said. 

In the years after dropping the habit, Tatmon tried to replace that feeling with money, relationships and lesser drugs — but could never truly do so. Then in 2019, in the midst of a messy breakup with a woman he had been dating and living with in Fort Collins, Tatmon found himself at a low point.

“What I felt was that I did not have the energy to rebuild my life again in a town that I loved. Everything was destroyed,” Tatmon said. “I had to have an intimate conversation with a friend and I was so low that I told her, ‘I don’t feel like living anymore.'”

In the years after that, Tatmon lived in another homeless community before his social worker told him about the VCP project. Living in the village, he said, has given him the inner peace that he’s always searched for.

“Everything I have looked for in my entire life has always been inside me, and I’ve never stopped long enough to listen to that voice,” Tatmon said. “I’m finally doing the things I want to do. Even though I’m alone, I’m not alone. I’ve got people who know I’ve got situations and they’re concerned about them. That’s a big difference.”

Having that support system around him, Tatmon said, has made him felt a level of freedom he hasn’t ever before. He now feels comfortable in his everyday life, as well as back onstage.

“When you live your whole life in anxiety, you don’t know what anxiety is because you’ve conditioned yourself to feel this way,” Tatmon said. “The process of letting go, hearing your own voice, that’s tremendous.”

Buy-in from city officials and residents

When the city of Longmont passed a proclamation to work on ending veteran’s homelessness in 2018, Kevin Mulshine decided that he wanted to be one of the first people to intentionally put a homeless campus on the same property as a new residential development.

A real estate developer in the Longmont area for about a decade and a developer and partner at HMS Development Group, Mulshine took it upon himself to find a concept that would work in Longmont, while being effective at addressing the issue at hand.

“We went to four or five places in the country that have veterans transitional living,” Mulshine said. “We found that most of them are communal living, which doesn’t work real well for PTSD patients.”

The last stop on his journey was the VCP location in Kansas City. While walking around the campus, the place resonated with him in a way that no other developments had.

“I could feel the energy in the volunteers and everyone else,” Mulshine said. “The campus was so vibrant in Kansas City that I thought, ‘You know what, if I moved into a community and that campus was down the block and I could walk down and volunteer, I would have a higher likelihood of buying a home there.'”

The city of Longmont supported Mulshine’s initiative, working with him and VCP to bring the community to the city.

“When you look at our broader approach to housing, the unhoused in our community is something that almost all cities in the metro area are putting a lot of resources into,” said Longmont City Manager Harold Dominguez. “I went to Kansas City to actually see what VCP was doing, and it really felt like a perfect match.”

There were several reasons why the partnership with the organization worked well, Dominguez said, including how intentional its case management system is and how the organization works both with people living on its own campus, as well as in the greater community.

“What we really saw is that this was an opportunity to be a significant value add to the community and really allow us to do more with the resources we have,” Dominguez said. 

The city manager also noted that he was moved by seeing the organization’s work firsthand.

“When I had the chance to go to Kansas City, the day that I got there, they were having a big celebration because one of the individuals who had been previously unhoused had just got custody of his kids,” Dominguez said. “To really see the stories of people moving through their system and then into different types of housing, really reclaiming their lives, was something that was incredibly impactful.”

“There was never a doubt in our mind that they wouldn’t succeed here in Longmont,” he added. 

After working with the city and VCP’s leadership to bring a location to the city, Mulshine donated a two-acre plot of land that was originally part of his 459-home Mountain Brook development for the organization to build the community on. That land already had the necessary infrastructure on it, including water and electricity, Mulshine said.

Since the community has been there, the city has taken some tips from the organization in navigating its own affordable housing initiatives.

“We learned a lot from VCP to the point of really seeing how they were successful in dealing with a similar demographic (that we are),” Dominguez said. “We just created 70 permanent supportive housing units focused on the same demographic and services we’re trying to provide. It’s not tiny homes, it looks like an apartment complex, but how we’re operationalizing it is very similar.”

A part of the larger community

At an event on on Aug. 22, several neighbors from the adjacent Mountain Brook residential development gathered in their neighborhood clubhouse. Carrying plates of finger foods and cups of wine, they talked to Seybold and other VCP members about the work they were doing just a few hundred feet away.

The conversations were largely positive, with many inquiring about volunteering opportunities and how to help out. Some said they had seen the residents while walking around nearby Golden Ponds Park, occasionally stopping to introduce themselves or say hello.

“That feeling is what we look for in a community when we’re deciding where to put a new location,” Seybold said. “We won’t just put a village anywhere. We want to make sure that it will be received well by those already living in the area.”

That intentionality has been part of the reason why Longmont’s project has succeeded, thus far, while many see others, including Denver’s own tiny home initiative, failing.

Denver homeless village, surrounding area saw nearly 2,000 emergency 911 calls over 8-month period

Several other locations are in development in other states, all sharing the same tiny home concept and case management system. 

And for veterans such as Tatmon, that could mean more opportunities to turn their lives around.

“I can imagine this village full, I think it’s going to be a real cool place,” Tatmon said. “We haven’t sat out yet around the fire, it’s been too hot this summer, but I see all those type of things coming. This is one of the coolest places I’ve ever known.”