Claim:
Iceland installed foldable, solar-powered shelter pods between alleyways for homeless people, as described in a November 2025 Facebook post.
Rating:
In November 2025, a rumor about a project to help homeless people in Iceland spread over Facebook (archived), getting tens of thousands of likes and shares within a couple of days.
According to the post that was the source of the rumor, cities in Iceland were installing “micro-housing hubs” for homeless people in urban alleyways, utilizing foldable, solar-powered pods with heated mattress strips to do so.
The post was shared elsewhere on social media, including by other Facebook accounts (archived) and to Instagram (archived). A Snopes reader reached out to us by email to ask about the truth of the rumor.
The story about Iceland’s foldable, solar-powered pods for homeless people was false, although similar concepts have been tested at a small scale elsewhere.
A Google search for “Iceland homeless pods” revealed no evidence such a project was real. The only links referring to the pods were social media posts spreading the claim.
The description of the Icelandic pods is similar to that of made-up German homeless pods shared previously by Fact 27 (archived) and other Facebook (archived) pages (archived) that share fabricated stories of feel-good scientific innovations and advancements.
These claims, whether set in Iceland or Germany, have roots in projects to design and distribute real pods meant to help people who are homeless, even if the social media posts falsely exaggerate their functionality and usage.
In 2020, the city of Ulm, Germany, debuted what it called the Ulmer Nest, which were sleeping pods designed to serve as emergency shelters for homeless people on cold winter nights. The Ulmer Nests were solar-powered and included similar features to the fake pods in the social media posts, such as sensors to let social workers know when one of the pods were in use. However, the Ulmer Nest website says only two hand-assembled prototypes exist and there aren’t yet plans to mass produce them as the current prototypes are still in the evaluation phase. The Ulmer Nest Facebook page hasn’t been updated since 2021 and the current status of the project is unknown.
A British charity called Amazing Grace Spaces also has a similar concept with its emergency urban sleeper pods. These pods, which the BBC reported were in use in the British community of West Bowling in April 2025, include a bed, toilet and USB socket.
Iceland, for its part, has a small homeless population. According to national data published by the OECD, a collection of much of the Earth’s wealthy countries, there are 1,272 homeless people in Iceland, which is 0.34% of the population. However, only 194 of those people are literally living on the streets.
Iceland does not have a national strategy for tackling homelessness, but Reykjavik, the country’s capital and home to over half of its people, does. This includes work to put 20 tiny houses into operation around the city, which can be transported to different places if necessary. These tiny houses are big enough to have a living room, sleeping nook, kitchenette and bathroom, and are thus larger than the “pods” described in the Facebook post.
Snopes has previously fact-checked a number of fabricated claims about scientific innovations or advancements, claims which usually have a hopeful, environmentally friendly lean to them. These types of claims are their own genre of fake stories, spread by many pages and accounts that specialize in creating and sharing them.
