(Network of Officially Designated Encampments)
10 to 50 MCSU+H units. One designated area. One sanitation stop. One outreach team. One security perimeter. This is where the cost savings materialize.
*Tacoma, WA — high end of a four-city HUD/Abt Associates study. See sourcing below.
A Node is a cluster of MCSU+H units deployed together on a paved surface the city already controls — a parking lot, a transit corridor, a city-owned parcel — near existing service infrastructure where the unsheltered population already concentrates.
Cities have encampments where resources are. The Node puts a sanctioned, registered, managed zone where those encampments already are. That's not displacement. That's recognition.
The Housing First system isn't broken. The MCSU+H Node is the bridge — a managed designated area for the people the waitlist hasn't reached yet.
Each unit in a Node is city-owned and assigned to a registered individual, with the option for the city to add its own GPS tracking to the fleet. The Node satisfies the physical requirements state designated-area laws already spell out — restrooms, running water, safety, and security — without a building, a permit, or a yearly operator contract.
Want to see how a Node fits your city? Reserve a demo through a Letter of Interest — no cost, no commitment.
Download LOI → Email Your LOI → Questions? Reach Tom directly → [email protected]Encampments don't form at random. A 2025 study of Seattle's unsheltered population found tent sites sit closer to food and basic services than emergency shelters do — people aren't choosing the sidewalk over help, they're choosing proximity to what keeps them alive. Research consistently shows they cluster around the same handful of things: food access, public transportation, employment opportunities, healthcare and social services, shelter access, and weak enforcement zones like parks and greenspace. That's not incidental — it's why a designated area has to sit near the same cluster of services, or it won't hold anyone.
But that requirement runs straight into the other thing every one of these statutes demands: distance from residential property and no reduction in commercial property value. Behavioral health services and transit are concentrated in city centers, next to the exact residential and commercial property the statute says to stay away from. North Carolina's HB 781 ran headfirst into this — an advocate testified on the record that the bill's own rules make it "nearly impossible" to find a legal site at all, because the two requirements fight each other.
That's a real problem — for a single, fixed, permanent site. A city that builds one shelter, one facility, in one location has to solve that contradiction once and live with the answer forever. If the site's wrong, there's no fixing it short of tearing it down and starting over.
Because a Node deploys on any paved surface a city already controls — a transit corridor, an underused lot, a city-owned parcel — instead of requiring land acquisition or construction, a city isn't searching for the one perfect address. It's searching a much wider field of candidate locations for the spot that actually threads the needle: close enough to transit and services to hold the people it's meant for, far enough from the residential and commercial line the statute draws. And if the answer turns out to be wrong, the Node moves. The building doesn't.
Source: encampment-amenity proximity study, Seattle/King County unsheltered population, 2016–2022 outreach data (published 2025).
An uncertified encampment gets swept because it's illegal wherever it sits. No designation, no lawful basis to leave it standing. That's what makes the cost recurring: sweep it, it repopulates, sweep it again — the same block, the same crew, the same bill, month after month.
A certified Node removes the legal trigger. It's not an illegal site anymore — it's a compliant one. No violation, no basis to sweep it, no recurring cleanup cost for that location.
A federal study of four U.S. cities — Houston, Chicago, San Jose, and Tacoma, WA (population roughly 220,000) — found it cost between $1,672 and $6,208 per unsheltered person, per year, just to respond to encampments. Tacoma topped that range. That's the recurring cost a certified site stops generating — scoped to that site, not a citywide claim.
Everything below follows from that one mechanism
Source: U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development / Abt Associates, "Exploring Homelessness Among People Living in Encampments and Associated Cost" — 2019 data from Houston, Chicago, San Jose, and Tacoma.
Ready to stop paying for the same block twice? Reserve a demo through a Letter of Interest — no cost, no commitment.
Download LOI → Email Your LOI → Questions? Reach Tom directly → [email protected]| Scale | Units | Primary Savings Visible | Est. Annual Avoided Cost* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pilot Node | 25 | All categories — early measurable data | $750K–$1.5M |
| Municipal Node | 50 | Full ROI — council-ready data | $2M–$5M |
| City Network | 100+ | Systemic budget impact across departments | $5M–$20M+ |
*Unit and Node pricing pending fabrication — not yet available. Avoided cost ranges are modeled from the Abt Associates/HUD four-city encampment cost study and Urban Institute analysis of encampment response spending — a city should verify against its own sanitation, enforcement, and outreach budgets before citing a figure in a public document.
Ready to price out your city's pilot? Reserve a demo through a Letter of Interest — no cost, no commitment.
Download LOI → Email Your LOI → Questions? Reach Tom directly → [email protected]Adjust the sliders to match your city's situation. The calculator shows your estimated annual avoided costs and cost per person served. Plug in your own local sanitation, enforcement, and ER/jail figures for the most defensible result.
| Line Item | Annual Avoided Cost |
|---|---|
| Enforcement/cleanup reduction | $0 |
| Sanitation reduction (60%) | $0 |
| ER/jail cycling reduction (40%) | $0 |
| Total avoided cost | $0 |
Model assumptions (85% enforcement/cleanup reduction, 60% sanitation reduction, 40% ER/jail reduction at $3,500/event) are planning estimates, not verified national averages. Replace with local figures before presenting to council.
The First Physical Definition Of A Compliant Designated Area.
At least eight states — Texas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Indiana, and Utah — have passed statewide public camping bans in the last five years. Of those, at least five write specific compliance standards directly into the designated-area provision: Texas, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Louisiana all require some combination of sanitation, running water, safety, and health-services coordination before a site can be certified. That standard isn't a coincidence across five state legislatures — it traces back to a shared model bill most of these laws are adapted from. Not one of the enacted versions defines what a compliant designated area actually looks like on the ground. No equipment standard. No diagram. No vendor. No state funding.
The MCSU+H Node is the first concrete answer to that question.
| What the bills require | What the Node delivers |
|---|---|
| Restrooms | Cassette toilet — city-managed canister swap every 3 days |
| Running water | Foot-pump sink — fresh and gray tanks built in — sanitation and handwashing |
| Safety and security | Locked enclosure — city-assigned unit, private shelter |
| Shelter alternative | Deployable bed — weather-proof canopy, fully enclosed, privacy |
| Fixed outreach location | Same units, same Node, same address every week |
| Away from residential areas | Deployable on any city-controlled paved surface |
Cities don't have to figure out what goes in a designated area anymore. They're looking at it.
See the compliant standard in person. Reserve a demo through a Letter of Interest — no cost, no commitment.
Download LOI → Email Your LOI → Questions? Reach Tom directly → [email protected]Cities that submit a Letter of Interest receive priority placement — an in-person, on-site demo of the working unit, in your office, before public scheduling opens. Prototype completes end of July 2026. Demos begin August.
Reserve a demo through a Letter of Interest.
Simply email us your Letter of Interest.
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