BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM

Chris, 57, a former painter and decorator from the north-east, spent most of his life “travelling from town to town with a tent.” Now he has his own front door, a view of the Bridgewater canal, and a German kitchen fitted with Bosch appliances. His main preoccupation when a reporter visited was whether he could beat his personal fishing record: a 29-pound carp.

“I’m very lucky,” he said.

Chris is the first resident of Embassy Village, a new development in Manchester’s Castlefield district, built under two Victorian viaducts between the River Irwell and the canal. Forty studio flats, no purchase required. To live there, you have to be male, homeless, and ready to rebuild.

Who is actually ending up on the streets

When Sid Williams started working with homeless people in 2004, most had come out of institutions: the care system, the armed forces, or prison. That has changed. “We find there’s about 300% to 400% on top, just your average Joes: people who just can’t quite make ends meet any more,” he says.

Williams founded Embassy, the Christian charity behind the village. He puts about 60 percent of homelessness down to relationship breakdown, not addiction, and argues the standard shelter model was built for a narrower population than the one now sleeping rough. Studio flats by the canal in central Manchester typically run to around £1,000 (approximately $1,260) per month. Embassy’s residents pay with a housing benefit, about £625 (approximately $790) per month for a single man, which covers the rent and a few costs on top.

A dress rehearsal, not a shelter

Williams calls Embassy Village “a dress rehearsal at managing a home, managing your finances and holding a job down.” One full-time support worker covers every six residents, which Williams says is “basically unheard of.” Sessions cover budgeting, cooking, and preparing for work. There are weekly “family dinners” cooked by staff, a sports pitch and boxing gym under construction, and a joinery studio run by Oli Green, who spent years crafting high-end kitchens in Cheshire and now works with the men at Embassy.

Residents can fish and kayak in the canal. Peel Group, the developer behind MediaCity and the Trafford Centre, donated the land on a 125-year lease and owns the adjacent waterway. The £6.2 million (approximately $8 million) build was funded by the Moulding Foundation, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and a coalition of 130 local businesses working either for nothing or at zero profit, many of whom are also offering jobs and placements to residents. Drugs and alcohol are banned. No visitors are allowed.

Williams is direct about what drives all of it. “In God’s upside down economy, the last, the poor, the least (in this world’s eyes) are his VIPs. That’s who Jesus wanted to spend his time with. And we were like, wouldn’t it be great to take that literally? So that’s why we got a VIP tour bus that had been touring Tinie Tempah and Coldplay and had a deeply inappropriate champagne fridge on it.” His first project was turning Mumford & Sons’ tour bus into a mobile shelter for rough sleepers. “We want residents to feel like: ‘Wow, I’ve landed on my feet, I’m going to take this opportunity.’”

Not a place to stay forever

The goal is not permanent housing, and Tim Heatley is clear about that. Heatley is co-founder of Manchester developer Capital & Centric and led the fundraising for Embassy Village as chair of the Greater Manchester Mayor’s Charity. “Helping them to clean, cook, budget, get a job, keep a job,” he says. “If we don’t get that right, then it will have failed.” He also worries about residents getting too comfortable: “I think we need to quickly move people from here on to their own accommodation — somewhere else that’s not state-supported — so that they can continue then to rebuild and go on and not be reliant on the state.”

In Manchester, one in 61 people is homeless. The social housing waiting list for able-bodied men is 15 years. “No chance, basically,” says Williams. At Embassy’s other sites across Greater Manchester, residents stay an average of 14 months before moving into private rentals, and between 92 and 95 percent leave with a full-time job, no long-run benefits, and a private tenancy. “So we’re unburdening the council housing waiting list in the process,” he adds.

Manchester City Council leader Bev Craig plans to refer homeless people to Embassy, drawn to its emphasis on community over case management. “When we talk to people that find themselves on the streets, it’s a failure of mental health services, it’s failure of tackling addiction, and it’s the failure of not being able to deal with loneliness,” she says. She calls Embassy Village proof that “good people can do good things.”

James Whittaker, managing director of Peel Group, wants the model to travel. “We’re not stopping here,” he says. “We can copy this in every city in every town throughout the UK.”

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