The sixty-year-old Irene McGhee had been homeless for over ten years after she tragically lost her husband and her home as well. Irene, who was known as ‘Smokie’ on the streets, recently got in touch with a man that would change her life forever.
Elvis Summers, a 37-year-old Los Angeles native, regularly asked around for recyclables and met Smokie one day. The two quickly befriended each other and Elvis was touched when he heard Smokie’s story.
“She’s a human being, 60 years old, a mother, a grandmother, sleeping in the dirt. It’s just not right,” Elvis said to CBS2/KCAL9.
Smokie said, “It was really hard, people talking crazy to you, kids are mean to you, talk about ‘look at that old woman pushing a basket.’”
Not long after he met her, Elvis proposed to do something for the homeless woman.
“He said, ‘What would you think if I built you a house?’ I said, ‘When is it gonna be ready?’”, Smokie recalls.
Immediately, Elvis started to get to work. He recalled reading an article about a man from Oakland using recycled and often discarded material to build small, but sturdy and reliable houses. The man spent a couple of hundreds of dollars to buy enough wood and tools to create a small house and shelter for Smokie.
After just five days, Elvis was ready to hand her a set of keys.
“I had nowhere to really build it, so I just built it in the street outside of my apartment,” he told Good News Network. “The local LAPD cops have been super cool, and have told me they support it–as long as we move it to a different spot every 72 hours.”
“I just wanted to build it safe enough, secure enough so she’d be warm, comfortable.”
Smokie herself couldn’t be any happier with her shelter.
“I felt so good. I was so relaxed. I think I must’ve slept half of the day.”
As for the legal matters, as long as the small house is moved every 72 hours, it doesn’t form a problem.
After building a shelter for Smokie, Elvis decided that he would help out a lot more homeless people and set up a successful crowdfunding campaign.
“I’ve met so many homeless people, good people,” Elvis said to GoodNewsNetwork. “Since I built Smokie’s, I’ve had several people ask me to make them a tiny home and it’s turned into much more than just the one house I wanted to build.”
Heartwarming!
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