For Clients

Tired of being outside, but can't stand the shelters?

We might be able to help.

The Mad Housers builds sturdy, lockable shelters and gives them away for free to homeless folks. There are only two restrictions:

Do you need a shelter?
Sometimes someone will contact us for a shelter who doesn't really need a shelter. For instance, we once got a call from a person who was staying with her parents, but really didn't like it. Sorry! Staying in a hut is not an improvement in some cases, and there are plenty of people in much worse situations.

Also, oftentimes folks contact us for non-shelter assistance. That's not what we do - we can't help with items like rent, or overnight emergency shelter, or travel assistance, or job placement. The best we can do is refer you to other organizations that do do these things, and really, we're not even particularly good at that - try the United Way.
Do you have a safe place for us to build your shelter?
This is two questions in one. First: do you have a safe place? We will not find a location for you. We don't know what location works for you; only you know what location works for you. We don't run the campsites that we do serve. We help folks as they are, where they are.

Second, do you have a safe place? We're not going to build you a shelter if it'll just get you arrested and the shelter destroyed. That's a waste of time and effort, and once again, it's not an improvement to your situation. We make the ultimate judgement call as to whether a site is safe for a shelter.

Keep in mind that we're not asking if you own the land, just whether it's safe. We understand that if you're homeless, you don't likely own a piece of real estate.

Let's say you're camping outside, you have a safe place where you've been camping, and you'd like a shelter. Here's how it works:

You get in touch with us, and we'll come out to see where you're camping.
If we think that we can build a shelter there without it getting torn down, then we'll put you on our client list.
When your name comes up on the list, we'll come back to confirm that you're still there and still interested.
We'll then build you a shelter at your site, give it to you for free, and leave you alone.

That's it! We're not here to hassle you, we're just trying to help.

For more details on the shelters we offer, check out our construction page.

You can reach call us at our client hotline at (404) 939-4287, or send us email at clients@madhousers.org.

Good luck!

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