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Village Buildings

Housing from the bottom up [and outside in]

by Tim McCormick and the Village Collaborative.

A community-developed book, publicly and live-written, exploring radical & low-cost "peripheral housing" strategies, from land occupation to camps to villages to cooperatives.

Last updated: 6 March, 2024. Short link:  https://VillageBuildings.housing.wiki

[This document is an evolving book outline and partial draft


Table of Contents

(Sections in blue are fairly fleshed out, sections in grey are not yet).

0.  Prefatory quotes        4

1.  Introduction, background, & goals        4

2.  The Village Alternative: an interview with
     Andrew Heben and Tim McCormick
        11

    by Thacher Schmid        11

3.  Camps: transition, creation, containment        59

4.  From Camps to Villages        72

5.  Mobile dwelling: the path of Abel        89

6.  Exclusion, incarceration, exploitation: Cain's response        92

7.  Ambivalent containment: response pattern 2        94

Homeless encampments        95

Transitional & shelter villages        95

8.  Assimilation: response pattern 3        97

9. Positive marginality: response pattern 4        101

10. Permanent villages        120

11. Innovation pilots        121

12. Living, speaking, writing in public        122

Revillaging the Book        124

13. Conventional vs alternative housing, & best vs good        133

14. Homelessness vs disaster        158

15. Covid "Hotel Strategy" vs Village strategies        162

16. Problem/objection patterns        162

17. Later & future village forms        167

References        181

(Un)Acknowledgements,        245

0.  Prefatory quotes

see main article: Prefatory quote ideas.

1.  Introduction, background, & goals

A tale of two villages: Safe Sleeping Village, San Francisco, and Emerald Village, Eugene

"Safe Sleeping Village" (#1), San Francisco, April 2020

"Safe Sleeping Village" (#1), San Francisco, April 2020

A 'village', in contemporary West Coast usage, can be a remarkable range of places.

As an example of one extreme, consider Safe Sleeping Village #1, San Francisco, created in [?] 2020 in response to the  Covid-19 pandemic. An explicitly temporary, reactive and ad-hoc, government-created camp, widely controversial and subject to negative media coverage internationally, characterized as carceral and authoritarian, offering for dwellings nothing more than a grid of spray-painted rectangles on asphalt.

Ironically, this local village is also placed directly amid one of the grandest municipal architecture complexes in the U.S.

At another extreme: Emerald Village, in Eugene, Oregon, opened in 2019, a permanent, carefully planned, independent, non-profit-developed village, self-funded with community support. Also, implementing an innovative, combined Community Land Trust / Limited-Equity Cooperative model, with an extensive program of documentation and advocacy to support much wider application of the model, with at least three new village developments already begun from it.

(pictured on lower half of mockup book cover above).

A plan of exploration

Village Buildings studies a range of housing approaches at the margins of conventional US practices, that have in common an orientation towards self-determination, low cost, and organic, dweller-directed, community development. 'Village' here is both a term literally employed in many of the projects examined, and a organizing metaphor for housing with certain qualities that are ideally or historically associated with traditional villages.

Note, actual villages, historically and presently, don't necessarily have those qualities. This is mostly incidental to our purposes, though, which is to explore new formations now or possibly called 'villages', and trace the roots and potentials of the organizing concept.

At the center of this exploration are contemporary villages, some of which are sometimes called camps, created by, with, and for the unhoused -- the most marginalized, most at the 'bottom' building upwards -- in the United States. Particularly, today, on the West Coast; an era and a region of startling, highly visible, mass homelessness, and pervasive public anxiety regarding it.

Starting with that focal area, and as a project directly rooted in and centered on those projects and the people involved in them, we circle outwards in time and place and conceptually.

We consider, for what light or common pattern can be found in them, various related projects, historical precedents and roots, related development patterns from other parts of the world, and varied ways of understanding such approaches to building and dwelling, such as indigenous, "self-help"/"self build," collective, or cooperative housing.

Extrapolating these views through the lens of the present, we also consider an array of proposed or emerging 'village'-patterned future housing approaches, from climate-adaptive eco-villages to mass-customized "citizen sector" social housing. These have various aims such as being more humane, just, and/or sustainable than conventional housing.

Clashing perspectives

To start with just the specific topic of village housing for the houseless in US, we find there is a wide and often clashing diversity of views even about what this is or should be, reflecting conflicts in concepts, values, and framing terminology:

Goals of this work

Our key goals are to explore and relate these extremely varied perspectives, and to:

  1. Help document, assess, and connect a variety of innovative village-related housing initiatives and leaders, particularly those developed after the 2014 book Tent City Urbanism.
  2. Offer illuminating histories and analyses of certain core underlying, perennially controversial housing questions, such as: ways/reasons people distinguish between 'permanent' and 'temporary' or 'interim' dwelling; and between 'shelter' and 'housing'; and how housing needs of marginalized populations are conceived, created, and addressed (or not).

    We take the perspective that most housing conflicts or debates ultimately trace to just a few fundamental -- if highly complex and difficult to resolve --
    issues, that tend to recur globally and perennially; but that debates, policies, and programs tend not to be particularly informed by broad global, historical, or critical perspectives. Like politics, all housing is local; but housing patterns and controversies definitely are not.
  3. Consider how 'village' patterns as explored here may help us build a more diverse and socially accommodating housing environment for all, and may be expressed within various buildings forms, e.g. with cooperative and dweller-led development.
  4. Provide practical help and frameworks of understanding for the 1800+ people in our Village Collaborative online network who are interested in or already working on village projects, and those with whom they may work or to whom advocate.  
  5. Lastly, explore and embody patterns of building in and for community, with the book project itself, i.e. as applied to media creation and publishing. So, how might we build not just an 'authored' book, but a community knowledge project, to be more participatory, embedded, cooperative, incremental, equity-building, and network-building -- perhaps in a sense more village-like? (see Appendix B: Revillaging the Book).


2.  The Village Alternative: an interview with Andrew Heben and Tim McCormick

by Thacher Schmid

December 15, 2021.

Tim McCormick, left, and Andrew Heben at Emerald Village in Eugene, Oregon. Photo by Thacher Schmid.

In recent years, American homelessness has been on the rise again. In 2015, West Coast cities declared homeless “emergencies.” Since 2017, “Point in Time” counts have risen; some measures see unhoused populations at all-time highs.

Now, due to Covid-19, the numbers could spike higher: as many as 28 million could face eviction in the wake of 40 million layoffs, and one analyst projects a new 43 percent rise.

What to do?

The tiny house village is a solution that has been embraced as low-cost, human-centric, flexible and creative. If Andrew Heben and Tim McCormick are right, it’s our best chance at solving a crisis created by centuries of housing elitism — a street-level concept with diverse roots which offers a pragmatic alternative to a static status quo.

The origins of today’s village movement could fairly be placed in the American West Coast of the 1990s, when protest and partnership created Tent City 3 in Seattle, Dome Village in Los Angeles and Dignity Village in Portland. Nowadays, the movement has diffuse adherents who range from protester to politician, architect to advocate, “vagrant” to #vanlife. Seattle’s Low Income Housing Institute, Heben’s Square One Villages in Eugene and McCormick’s Village Collaborative in Portland are among the groups working to further the vision.

Heben, 33, is author of 2014’s Tent City Urbanism and cofounder and Project Manager at Square One Villages, a collaborative Eugene, Ore. nonprofit that’s created widely-heralded village models. The city’s former mayor Kitty Piercy is board president, yet it has collective action roots in the Occupy movement. Heben, a University of Cincinnati graduate, often travels to give workshops on villages. He favors black hoodie sweatshirts and leather work boots. He lives with his wife Joline and one-year-old daughter Kora in a 384-square-foot house at Emerald Village, a permanent affordable village founded in 2011.

McCormick, 46, is a housing advocate, researcher and project developer, coauthor of Village Buildings: West Coast Housing From the Bottom Up, and micro-housing enthusiast. A Yale graduate, McCormick moderates the PDX Shelter Forum and the Village Collaborative, favors old brown oxfords and collared shirts, does grant and contract writing, works as a furniture assembler and helps care for his aging parents in Portland. A U.K.-American dual citizen, McCormick once lived in a tiny house prototype in a huge, communal Oakland, Calif. warehouse owned by a progressive tech entrepreneur.

In October 2020, after grabbing a burrito at Nelson’s Taquería nearby — where Heben and McCormick chatted about community land trust and limited equity cooperative minutiae — the pair sat for a wide-ranging, two-hour interview inside the Emerald Village commons, next to a garden box teeming with red Thai peppers, punctuated by occasional freight train horn blasts and wheel-squeal.

America is witnessing a new wave of homelessness after a pandemic led to tens of millions of lost jobs and a new wave of evictions. You’ve written about this history. How does what’s happening now compare with the past?

Heben: The pandemic is getting people to think a little bit differently about how we provide shelter to the unhoused. Moving away from the congregate shelter, you see a lot of cities trying the small homes or micro pods.

McCormick: There’s points of similarity. Homelessness spreads in times of disruption, and you’ve got the post-Civil War industrialization, and the Great Depression, and I would say, the economic restructuring at the end of the 1970s. The pandemic is another one. Disease and epidemics have played a big role in reshaping our thinking about housing. If you look at where housing regulations and policies come from, they’re very interwoven with reactions to disease. It’s been awhile since that’s happened, but it might force a very pervasive rethinking, because disease hits everybody, it scares everybody, so it has this way of cutting across divisions.

Heben: I think our attention to homelessness is attached to events like the pandemic or the housing foreclosure crisis, or the Occupy movement, but it’s something that has been a consistent problem since as far back as we can see. I see it more as a pervasive problem that is basically just a structural political-economic part of our society.

New York City has a legal right to shelter, while West Coast states have the nation’s highest rates of unsheltered homelessness. How do homeless populations differ across the country and how much does that reflect different state or local responses?

McCormick: It’s more housed, or it’s more sheltered elsewhere, because of weather, historical practice, and sometimes law.

Heben: In terms of East Coast versus West Coast, I think it’s a difference in politics, and a difference in climate.

McCormick: I think most of the Northeast has older traditions of ways that they dealt with vagrants and stuff, going back way into the 19th century. So there’s longer traditions of ways that we sheltered transients and tramps. And then the Western United States is more spacious, and people kind of do for themselves. [Nationally], the homeless population, compared to the Seventies, is older, less male, it’s more families, it’s more minorities.

I want to zero in on tiny house villages as a response to homelessness. How do they compare to tent cities, sanctioned encampments or tent villages?

Heben: I think those are all possibly words to describe the same thing, based on your perspective and background. All of them describe a more informal approach to the issue of homelessness than the traditional top-down approach of the congregate shelter, and there isn’t as defined a vocabulary around it for that reason. The difference between tiny house villages and tent city would be a difference in physical structure, largely. I think the tent city is when the existing social service industry doesn’t serve a population. People inevitably fall through the cracks and develop their own solutions to those problems, and that’s largely a self-organized, kind of democratically run tent city.

The reason that it stays a tent city is largely issues of land ownership and policing and the unsanctioned nature of it. So they continue to get moved around and are unable to develop beyond the very ephemeral infrastructure of a tent city. Whereas if you give a group of people sanctioned land, you’ll see [cases like] Dignity Village, an itinerant camp that moved to probably a dozen different locations throughout [Portland] before finally being given a semi-permanent location. They’ve existed there for 20 years now. That was the first pilot of this concept of, if you give a homeless camp a stable home, and I think it’s led a lot of people to look at it as an experiment that has been built upon and improved upon since then.

What about tiny house villages versus traditional brick-and-mortar shelters, or even affordable housing?

McCormick: Well, those last two things are conventional, mainstream, dominant responses. The other things you mentioned are basically a space of things that are outside of those. Those conventional responses either don’t reach everybody, aren’t meeting people’s needs, aren’t attractive to everybody, [or] aren’t there at all in some cases. There’s no one clear term, and any terms you use have certain implications, or associations, and the ones you mentioned differ notably in sort of the degree of deviance or disfavor that they tend to express.

You are referring to tent cities, sanctioned encampments and tent villages?

McCormick: Yes. Encampments tends to be pretty negative. It’s kind of a weird, bureaucratic term. Why not say camps?

Heben: It’s usually used if it’s a city-approved kind of thing, city operated or something.

McCormick: But there’s always a suggestion of “invalid,” I think, and deviance. It’s in this deviant space, like outside of real building. And tent city is that way too, because nobody believes that tents are appropriate housing. Tiny house villages is a very clear step towards expressing a positive, legitimate angle. It’s also something that isn’t necessarily just for homeless people. Many people might want to live in one, and do.

Heben: That’s a good point. Nobody wants to advocate for living in a tent as a long-term solution. The tiny house village kind of looks at two parallel movements of self-organized encampments but also the popular tiny house movement, which is people downsizing or a population that isn’t necessarily making that choice because of income reasons. There’s a general infatuation around tiny houses, prime time TV shows about the topic. It’s a thing that everybody is familiar with, and they also have the characteristics of a normal house, so people can relate to them as actual houses. So in a way it’s more of a marketing approach there; you’re basically making it a more attractive thing that you might want to have in your neighborhood — a tiny house village — versus a tent encampment.

But even a tiny house village model is not just a solution to homelessness. It’s basically just a scale of housing, rather than any particular type of person. Lots of different types of people are attracted to this scale of development, where you have a modest, private individual space and then shared indoor and outdoor spaces. It’s something that’s attractive to a broad range of folks, and it’s an option that’s just not available in our city. You have the apartment building, or the single family house. There’s not a lot of shared housing options in most cities. So I see it as a way to both provide solutions to issues of homelessness and low income housing, and an additional option of how we house ourselves.

McCormick: I like to use the term “alternative” shelter and “alternative” housing, because it’s kind of capacious, without being judgmental. There’s a variety of reasons you want an alternative. We’re just not making the normal one the same way.

Advocates promote certain things about villages, like safety, community, a lockable door and help navigating complex systems. What are the most important elements?

Heben: Democratic participation and control. I think it’s about that sense of ownership, and having a say in how your housing or shelter is operated and managed. That’s what makes it a village and not a shelter or encampment. And that’s the thing, in looking at how you scale this model and provide more of these places throughout the country, [that] probably will be the first thing on the chopping block if a city is going to do something like this. They see homelessness and low-income housing as a statistical problem to solve.

You have to treat people like people and respect people and give them a sense of ownership over the place in which they’re living if you want to see good results. All of the projects that we’ve done thus far, you always have that initial public reaction of “oh, this is going to result in an increase of crime and violence in this area.” People don’t want it in their neighborhood initially. But as we’ve done more projects, we’ve shown that those [perceptions] simply aren’t true, and in fact, it creates a safer environment with more eyes on the street. That’s because we’re giving people a place to live over which they have a sense of ownership, not necessarily financial, but in terms of decision making.

McCormick: Self-determination is a good concept, because it covers not only how the village is run, but also, hopefully, describes a key aspect of how space is used. Self-determination means there is space which is mine, and I decide who is in it. I have a door that closes, and I have a locker. That’s exactly what shelters tend to take away from you. There’s no space. You’re just put in a bunk, and then you’re moved to another one. Anyone could rifle through your bunk. I think that’s something that, if people really engaged with homelessness and thought about it empathetically, they’d realize why shelters just don’t work well. They deny what we more or less all take — at least in the modern times — to be necessary to live in an adequate way, which is, I have to have control of my own space. We don’t take that away from ordinary citizens; we don’t command them where to sit and take away space around them.

Heben: Yeah, when you see unsanctioned or illegal tent clusters that pop up and lots of people, there’s trash and feces and that has shaped the public perception of what homelessness is, because that’s what we see. But if you’re not given a legal space to live in the city and you’re forced to live your entire life in the public realm, and you don’t have access to bathrooms or running water or garbage services, of course you’re not going to take care of the environment in which you live. You’re going to have resentment towards that.

So the first element is giving people access to basic services, having sanitation, in order to avoid some of the common misperceptions around homelessness, [that] if you allow a bunch of people in poverty to congregate, that it’s going to result in crime and violence. [But] that’s more the result of creating places in which people don’t have any sense of place or ownership. When you give people a say over where they live, they don’t want people that are going to cause constant disruption. So they sort those problems out.

I don’t want to make it sound like an ideal place, because in terms of living in community, [a village] is very messy. There’s often conflicts. You have people from different backgrounds living and making decisions together. There’s always some sort of simmering conflict. But what you’ll see is that the conflict doesn’t spill over into the outside community because there’s a greater interest in making sure that the place continues to exist.

Tiny house villages cost a fraction of either traditional shelters or affordable housing, both in terms of development costs and ongoing budgets. So why haven’t village shelter models been used more frequently?

Heben: I think you are seeing them be used more frequently for that reason, of lack of funding and a pervasive problem. You see city councils starting to approve more of these pilot projects for that very reason. I think part of it has to do with funding sources that are available, and the funding requirements that these projects might not meet. They’re geared towards more traditional buildings and it’s just the way that it’s been done. There’s existing partnerships between the city and social service providers, and the social service providers sort of have leverage in that sense, because they’re going to be the ones that do the work, and so they decide which RFPs [Request For Proposals] they apply for, and they require lots of money to pay their staff. There’s also a hesitancy, from the political perspective, to accept more grassroots approaches to issues like this.

McCormick: It’s primarily inertia at this point, and it being new. There’s an overwhelming tendency for agencies, organizations, governments to go with the model they’ve been using. We’re steeped in it, but if you just parachuted in somewhere in America, people have vaguely heard of [villages]. It’s something foreign that they don’t know much about. Then there’s the fact that there are institutions that have grown up around these issues that are well-intentioned, well run, often idealistically run nonprofits, that operate a certain way. They’ve learned that they need to try to maintain overhead, and you can’t easily dismiss that; they’ve been in the game and survived this long. Whatever they’re doing, they’ve stayed afloat. But you could wonder if, like any organization, they’re operating on inertia to some extent and are institutionally resistant to innovation, because it would threaten them.

Heben: I think there’s also the perception that [a village] doesn’t meet high enough quality standards. There’s the political belief that everybody deserves access to a decent house, just like everyone else. While that’s well-meaning, it often stands in the way of people having access to any sort of stability or security in their life.

Perfection becomes the enemy of the good?

Heben: Very much so. But it’s often a political argument used to basically stop anything from happening. If you look at the political reality of our federal government, in order to do anything, in terms of having that long-term, big-scale impact of providing housing to everyone, it’s going to require a huge structural change. If you’ve paid any attention to the recent past and where things appear to be heading, it’s not going to happen any time soon. Permanent supportive housing is the solution to homelessness, right? It costs tons of money to build, tons of money to manage. So a lot of cities have developed plans about how they’re going to end homelessness through permanent supportive housing, but where are these buildings going to come from? It’s not a realistic scenario, and so a lot of interest in these villages is tied to the fact that they’re practical solutions to complex problems that are in front of us today.

From the “shopping cart parades” that led to Dignity Village in Portland in 1999, to the Occupy movement that led to OM Village in Madison and Opportunity Village in Eugene in 2011, the first homeless villages were born of protest. Now, governments are creating villages. What’s the difference between a village born of protest and one born of policy?

Heben: Often, it’s the way it’s organized. Villages that are formed out of protest, in terms of grassroots mobilization, it’s people fighting for their right to organize their own shelter and have a place of existence in the city. If a city gives people that right, then they’re able to have ownership over the place, whereas if it’s created out of policy, it’s thinking about it as more of a statistical and efficiency problem, and forgets the human aspect. So if there’s not like these cofounders that founded on values and principles and it’s a city government that’s starting it as a way to address a statistical problem, it doesn’t include those human elements, and it becomes kind of a storage box for people.

McCormick: When you look at villages, there’s this wide variety of origin stories and development paths. So it’s hard to generalize about them. After all, we’re talking about unique environments in every case. The social and political environment, and the set of people who came together are unique. There’s always an effort to be like, what is the model? In some places it required a big protest to kick it off, and people to occupy land by force, and it wouldn’t have otherwise happened. In other places, Emerald Village is a case where there was extremely good community buy-in and cooperation. So it has this totally different story.

Heben: I think we were able to do that with Emerald Village because of the success of Opportunity Village. Emerald Village was created without any sort of existing population that was demanding shelter, whereas Opportunity Village was a reaction to 200 people that were unhoused in the Occupy movement that got displaced and had no other place to go. But it also has to do a lot with local politics in conservative versus more liberal cities. You have the example of Dignity Village in Portland, versus the Pinellas Hope example in St. Petersburg, Florida, where it’s a very similar group of people. Both groups were moved around the city, were democratically organized, there were outside activists who were helping them organize, and they were fighting for a legal place to live. They finally did give them a legal place to live, but the city totally controlled how that process happened, and they contracted with an existing social service provider to create, basically, an outdoor shelter that is run exactly like an indoor shelter. [Laughs.] When you take the self-determination and the autonomous components out of it, it basically just becomes a shelter with worse infrastructure, and putting people in tents outside. That’s the delicate balance, is you don’t want this to be perceived as the solution, if you’re going to just set up outdoor tent shelters run like a traditional shelter.

Cities both Democrat and Republican led make camp cleanups or “sweeps” a central feature of policy towards unhoused people. How do nascent villages avoid getting swept before they’re established?

McCormick: If it’s starting to be discussed as a village, at that point it probably has arrived at some kind of legitimacy or presence, such that it’s not going to be swept. That’s what the term might suggest. You form a village, or a name, or a narrative, as one of the defenses against that. To say, no, we actually exist.

Defense against sweeps?

McCormick: Against sweeps. I really see villages and these kinds of projects as a narrative and a community over time. It often crosses different locations, structures and forms. It might start out just as a group of people, and they are sleeping on cardboard. But they’ve named themselves, and formed an identity. They’ve formed something, but it’s not a physical thing, it’s like an identity, a story, and that often is what enables it.

Heben: It creates a story that newspapers follow, or report on, each time it moves, and they then attract people that are sympathetic to the issue, and so they gain supporters. It’s largely a collaboration between the housed and the unhoused that tend to lead to these sanctioned encampments, and it’s through that that it develops an identity, it becomes a cause, and it becomes politically contentious to start to move them around.

McCormick: And there’s something about it, whether or not they’re literally protesting, it’s almost inherently a protest. Because it’s an act of resistance, and reclamation, against a dominant environment that has dispossessed them. The very act of occupying land is a political act.

So you’re saying an early-stage village is a story of resistance?

Heben: I think it starts out as a story of …

McCormick: A story of survival, maybe.

Heben: … and it’s often picking residual spaces that are outside of contact with people. That’s how you don’t get swept, right? The whole story of Camp Take Notice in my book closely follows the six different locations that they stayed in. It started out as picking locations that they wouldn’t be seen or caught, for very particular reasons. Then they made a calculated move to be located in the center of a highway interchange, where people couldn’t help but see them. That was doing what Tim was saying, giving them a political identity and a story.

McCormick: And you can see cases which are the opposite. So actually, the case of these pallet things in Los Angeles: L.A. is the epicenter, the biggest [unsheltered houseless population] in the whole country. It’s on the scale of Europe’s biggest refugee camps. And we’ve had this kind of deadlock, and a lot of innovative things. The problem’s the worst, and there’s the widest span of interesting answers. Currently they’re setting up a number of camps, but it’s very top-down, because a judge has commanded them. So in a sense this is the exact opposite origin point from beginning as a dweller-led protest camp or occupation. But it’s possible these dynamics could kind of converge. It’s unknown. It’s a story that’s getting written. Names and representations matter, because they’re how the story gets written about at the outset. So if you start out, and you call it “Covid-19 Emergency Camp,” you’ve signed and sealed its fate. You’ve inaugurated it in a way that’s terminated it.

Some houseless villages are self-managed, for example by residents who are board members of a nonprofit. Others are collaborations with — or run by — outside agencies or institutions. How important is real self-governance?

Heben: I think the partnership with an outside sponsor or nonprofit entity is a critical component, and the founders at Dignity Village will tell you that as well. We’re talking about emergency and transitional housing, so the population by definition is revolving, so there’s not going to always be that ongoing keeper of knowledge and the original founding values as such. So an outside agency that’s able to play a facilitation role is critical to the long-term operations of these places, but how that outside entity approaches the program makes the difference. There’s ways of still valuing resident input and decision-making, not having a 100 percent pure self-governance model. I don’t think that’s a really scalable or realistic solution.

The Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI) in Seattle is currently the best example of this. So there’s Dignity Village, where the residents of the village are the board of the nonprofit. Opportunity Village took the next step, of having an outside board of directors of people in the community, but still allowing the residents to make decisions within the village, based on a village manual and operating agreement. Then you see LIHI really bring this model to scale. Why is that? Because they’re also the largest existing housing provider in King County.

Tim, do you agree that it’s crucial to have an outside facilitator or agency?

McCormick: You’d be pretty lucky to succeed without it. I can imagine it happening, I can imagine a colony of people who really get their act together. But there’s just certain things that are needed, like people that know city council members, or donors. It’s about having this plug-in to the community, but it’s a tricky connection to make that happen. The people who are going to be street unsheltered homeless, and get together, are just going to be divorced from a lot of things that are needed to sustain. It could happen, but it would be like this unusual band of brothers that somehow made it work. In any case, why would we not want somebody to be helping them out? If done well, it’s just supporting them and helping them.

Heben: It comes down to the perspective of the partner nonprofit in how they view the issue and the value they give to the residents’ ability to make the best decisions for the community.

McCormick: This tension between self-determination and command-and-control, there’s a couple of points where you really see this conflict. One of them is coordinated entry. This is something that the federal government basically demands of every community in its handling of homelessness. It says, “you need to have one database and one queue.” Everyone comes in, they’re evaluated, then you post them where they’re going to go.

Like HMIS [Homeless Management Information System]?

McCormick: Exactly. And that’s directly at odds with a village determining who goes there. So unless you work something out, those are going to be in tension.

Heben: The self-managed village is basically an informal cooperative, so what we’ve been focused on is developing a more permanent housing model based on a similar structure using the cooperative framework, which is an existing ownership and business entity that allows the residents to become their own corporation and run and manage their own housing. But in doing that, we’ve moved from the more temporary sleeping pods to permanent housing with bathrooms and kitchens. So I think that ideal of resident self-governance is functional and important, but in order to see it operate in a more hands-off autonomous nature, you have to get people to that more permanent housing model.

The structures in villages vary widely, including Tuff Sheds, Conestoga huts, small shacks, crafted mini-bungalows, and repurposed shipping containers, even recycled light rail cars. Do these different designs matter, and why?

Heben: Variation in the structures in a village is very important. It might not seem that important when you’re dealing with an issue that is a matter of life and death, but it has a lot to do with making it feel like a place to call home, a space which has place. The organization and configuration of those buildings, and how they face each other, has a very important part to play, compared to like a Tuff Shed placed in grids.

McCormick: It’s a dead giveaway. If you go see a picture of a place, and there’s identical-looking structures in a row, it’s a dead giveaway that this is top-down controlled, not user-run.

Heben: The one caveat to that might be LIHI.

McCormick: Yeah. Wait until it’s been there a few months, though. If, after a few months, it’s still a row of identical-looking buildings, [there’s] no user governance going on. LIHI will have a row of [identical] things, but within a few months, doors will be different colors, new roofs will be there, a deck will appear on one.

Heben: Allowing it to come to life, and allowing people to put their own personal touches on it. There’s a tension here between creating unique housing and the scalability of needing to address a very large problem, but there’s ways we can create structures that are very similar and can be constructed quickly, but allow people to choose the colors and do finishing touches that makes it feel like a place that’s alive and not just a shelter.

McCormick: On the question of the variety [of structure] you see across all of these, in some ways it doesn’t matter that much.

Whether it’s TuffSheds or Conestoga huts?

McCormick: Right. How it is set up and run is more determinative. You could have a place that’s nicer units, that’s really tyrannically run and it would be no good. You also could have a place that’s tents on pallets that’s a really well done, inspiring thing. If people feel respected, and empowered and able to do things, that matters more than the physical structure.

Heben: I thought you had a point though, that if people are empowered, they’re going to inherently create a space that isn’t sterile, and has a sense of identity.

McCormick: And they’ll tend to evolve it if they are. They’ll upbuild it. Given a chance, people will build on. It’s not that hard to build simple wood structures. [Laughs.] I think different structures do make people feel differently, sometimes in unexpected ways. I remember going to a site in Seattle, it was a city-authorized campsite, and they had some tiny houses and tent platforms, and we were being shown around by this person who lived there. I was like “How would you like the tiny houses to be different?” And she’s like, “Most of us actually don’t like those much, because they get really hot, and we can’t move them. It needs a flatbed truck. We feel more comfortable in the tents.” The tents they had adapted and put a canopy over. To them, it was more adaptable and more portable, and they felt more comfortable.

Heben: You mean SHARE/WHEEL’s camps, Nickelsville? They were also operating under specific constraints of having to move every 90 days. That’s a huge factor.

The former head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, Barbara Poppe, has said the tiny houses in villages, what she called “huts,” are human rights violations because they lack plumbing, heat or wired electricity. How do you respond to that?

Heben: I would invite her to talk to the people that live in some of these places. The gap between living on the street and living in a place like Opportunity Village, that doesn’t have heat, or a kitchen or bathroom in the house, is a far greater gap than the gap between living in Opportunity Village and a traditional apartment. She’s forgetting that by just doing that, you’re meeting people’s basic needs in terms of stability, security, ability to stay warm and dry, even if those aren’t in every building because that’s not financially feasible. More so, oftentimes because these places are only approved on [a temporary basis], never long enough for it to make sense for us to invest in infrastructure. So the temporary-ness of these prohibits you from doing stuff like that.

I don’t need to argue this; people will tell you that. Just the simple fact of having a door to close and not having to live your entire life in the public realm is a huge difference. Obviously, I think we all want to get what she’s getting at there, access to a traditional apartment. But given the way that [Housing and Urban Development] is funded, it’s just not a practical argument.

McCormick: This is a fundamental and perennial argument. There’s a core argument there that goes back many decades. They call it the problem of housing standards, and it’s been discussed endlessly in international development. There’s always people that say, no, this is inadequate, this isn’t meeting our full current standard. There’s always other people that say, yeah, but a third of the population doesn’t have anything, so we’re helping people out.

Heben: And that’s a big reason why we have the homeless population we have today, because …

McCormick: We do nothing.

Heben: In the early twentieth century, there was a broad range of housing options, including SROs [Single Room Occupancy units], where you could rent a room by the day, week, month. We’ve kind of deleted those lower-end options from the array of housing options …

McCormick: You can call that exclusionary zoning.

Heben: And it created this gap, so the gap between the street and a housing unit has gotten bigger, and that’s why you have so many people that are homeless.

McCormick: Basically there is a 200-year tradition of people, particularly middle and upper class people, proclaiming and pushing housing standards that have the effect of excluding and impoverishing people that can’t meet that standard. If you impose standards, without simultaneously providing the resources for everyone to meet those standards, you’re basically consigning people to homelessness or slums. It’s like that. This has been observed for 200 years.

In Victorian England, in the 1850s, plenty of people started realizing that, no, you can’t just knock down all these slum buildings, because you didn’t provide somewhere else for them to go. They just move into the neighborhood next door. You can’t just require much larger amounts of space and light, unless you fund that housing, because all those people still need to live around there. So that argument is archetypal, and people have had answers to that for hundreds of years, and I see it made, very often, in an ahistorical way, with not much knowledge of how it has been used to exclude unhoused people for centuries.

With shared bathrooms and common-use areas, how do tiny house communities for the homeless do in promoting hygiene and public health during a pandemic?

McCormick: In a lot of ways, they’re great, because they’re separating people thoroughly and creating open space and air. Those are all great things, and they can pretty readily have their own bathrooms and plumbing. It’s not that hard to have your own composting toilet. You’re probably better off than a shelter, or certainly a tent. So I’d say they’re generally good.

Heben: The reliance on common facilities has been a challenge for us at Opportunity Village. The way that we’ve handled that is we’ve brought in portapotties, so there’s more choices. There’s pros and cons to it. The pandemic has made most senses of community challenging. We’re forcing people to isolate, for a good reason. The village model is beneficial in that you’re giving everybody access to your own private space in which you don’t have to sleep in a common area with a cot, but it is a challenge with the common facilities. Again, it’s better than the alternative of living out on the street without access to any facilities. The idea that the alternative is that we can somehow put everybody in their own apartment with their own bathroom and kitchen is just not realistic.

Overcrowded apartments have also been identified as a problem, haven’t they?

McCormick: Conventional housing also is a problem. They’re getting more crowded. And the eviction crisis emerging, the problem it may cause may be more overcrowding rather than homelessness. That remains to be seen. People go somewhere, if they’re forced out of their house. Only a fraction end up homeless.

In the broader culture, if you could measure this, I’d say the tiny house index crept upward from the pandemic. [Laughs.] More people are thinking about my own space, separation, maybe air, maybe getting out of the city.

Do you mean as a response to houselessness as well as people that have privilege?

McCormick: Yeah. Everybody. If you had some stock market index, which is the national psyche assessment of tiny house-ism, I think it went upward, because people are like, I want more space, maybe out in a garden, and not in a big crowded apartment building.

So you see Americans becoming more open to tiny house village responses now?

Heben: Yes.

McCormick: I think so. It’s growing awareness. It’s a very new thing. I think we probably are continually overestimating how familiar people are, because we’re into it. Most people, it’s like, they see something on HGTV or something.

Heben: Because of that HGTV show, however, just about everybody is familiar with the concept. I think the challenge is how to navigate existing zoning and building codes to make that happen. There’s ways to do it.

McCormick: What I’ve seen over and over is, you say “tiny house,” or “village with small housing,” this is hard for people to grasp. But if you show them an actual unit, or a picture of a cottage cluster, people tend to love it — even people that were skeptical. They have really positive responses. To see this kind of village ringing around a little courtyard, it’s kind of like bikes in a city: most people have not experienced commuting by bike in a city in dedicated bike lanes. As soon as they do, they’re like, oh my God, this is brilliant.

Do you think of the support of tiny house villages as a response to homelessness as a social movement?

McCormick: I’d say so. There are threads. There’s exchanges of information. There’s manuals and conferences.

Heben: Yeah. It’s definitely a very local movement in each area, and I think it’s because it’s a scale that the average person can engage in, the tiny house village, and homelessness is a problem that we all see in our city in our everyday life. It’s an approachable, practical response to it that the average person can get involved in and do where you don’t have to rely on large public funding programs with large existing service providers. It’s kind of an alternative path. When we post stuff on social media, the number one [response] is, why isn’t there one of these in every city in the country? How do we start one of these? I think it gives people hope that they can actually provide a hands-on, tangible solution to the issue.

McCormick: People interpret it to their own interest. One thing I see is people take it up and they interpret it as purely a temporary or emergency solution. I’m always pushing back on that, to say, “you know it doesn’t have to be that, right?” Or trying to figure out why they do that.

Heben: This is an important point that we haven’t touched on. As a concept, it comes up as a very local, grassroots thing, but in terms of scalability, it needs to be something more than that. It requires public funding to actually address this issue in a meaningful way. We’ve started to see that happen in Seattle, where LIHI operates 15 villages they’ve developed in two or three years. So public funding is the key to this. The grassroots efforts like Opportunity Village or Dignity Village or the SHARE/WHEEL camps in Seattle are key to showing that it can work.

It was seen as this idealistic concept that local city councils were skeptical of, but a few different cities, realizing that this problem wasn’t going to go away, approved pilot projects that have now surfaced and existed for a long period of time and dispelled many of the myths for not allowing places like this. So we now are moving on to the next chapter, where local municipalities are starting to invest in these places and providing operating funding. You see that in Seattle, Clackamas County [Oregon], and smaller cities like Olympia, Wash.

That’s a very good example of why, Opportunity Village, we’ve only done one of those, and now we’ve moved on to permanent housing models, because [temporary] projects operate at a deficit and require ongoing fundraising, whereas [permanent villages] are self-sustaining.

The biggest pot of money, of course, is federal. Since 1992, federal housing officials have supported the concept of “Housing First,” the idea that homeless people are most successful when placed in housing first, without preconditions, after which they can tackle barriers like unemployment, addiction, or health problems. Do villages fit into, or repudiate, this approach?

McCormick: They definitely can be seen as exemplum of it. Even temporary ones. Housing first is something I’ve studied a lot, and just as with any widely heralded thing, it gets different interpretations and is understood in different ways.

Heben: Very much so. Compared to what it actually is.

McCormick: There’s a lot of people who kind of map their assumptions on to it, or assumptions are made in the research about it. For example, [researchers] say something like, “well, we compared permanent housing to some other model.” And you say, “what was permanent housing, what did you define as that?” And they’ll say, “you know, mainstream housing.” And it turns out that they never particularly defined or tested. So you’re like, “OK, so if we did a permanent tiny house village, that would be permanent housing, right?” They’re like, “maybe.” They’ve assumed tiny house villages wouldn’t apply, but they didn’t actually explore that.

Heben: And the way it’s implemented in practice is actually very different than the way you’ve described it, because it actually requires you to be chronically homeless before you qualify for a housing first program, which means you have to have been homeless for at least two years or so many times in a row, plus you have to have developed a disabling condition. So this idea of housing first after you become disabled out of the lack of having housing — it’s ridiculous. It’s really a system designed to keep a revolving door that benefits a lot of large social service providers. It’s not ending homelessness — it’s creating a cycle.

I’ve seen this as a services professional, that as things have gotten worse in recent years, programs have increasingly been designed for the most vulnerable people.

Heben: Which is good. That’s a thing we need to do, right? But if you’re not also doing something to stop people from ending up like that, you’re not really solving the issue. That’s why we’re interested in developing this permanent cooperative housing model, because we believe that is a permanent housing model that can catch people that are on very limited or fixed incomes that could be on their way to becoming homeless. It is providing them a stable place to land before they become chronically homeless.

McCormick: It’s the most complex problem in the world. But on the other hand, it is pretty simple. We need to make available, one way or another, a whole bunch more low-cost housing. That’s it.

Heben: That’s why I’m sort of an observer of this topic from the periphery, because I’ve more become a housing developer. I started as a homeless advocate …

McCormick: Now you’re a pro forma reader. [Laughs.]

Heben: Right. Now I read pro formas [analyses of financial feasibility for development projects] and figure out how to develop housing because I think unless more people do stuff like that, if we just allow the traditional housing development model, we’re going to just keep following the tax credits, and not make any sort of meaningful change. Unfortunately, if we just keep creating more units of housing following the same tenant-landlord low-income rental housing model, we’re just kind of throwing housing units into a vacuum that’s not going to actually solve the issue.

Some observers say zoning and building codes have become dauntingly complex, bureaucratic or expensive, making it hard to fund or build villages. Do you agree, and if you had a magic wand, what would you change first?

Heben: I don’t see building codes or zoning to be that big of an obstacle. We’ve created these places without much alteration to the existing codes. You can build a tiny house village as basically a detached multifamily development that can be built on any residential property in Eugene. You just have to follow the density guidelines. The bigger factor in all this is the availability of patient capital [money lent with lenient repayment terms] or funding sources that are flexible enough to allow for developments like this, and not incentivize more complex developments. Tax credits, by their nature, incentivize you to make the housing more expensive. So housing developers follow the availability of public subsidies, and the availability of investors to make a profit.

McCormick: There’s a commercial multiunit model that has a certain set of rules that leads to fairly predictable outcomes. They’re rent maximizing, large unit, fill the property. There’s another set of rules that are for tax credit buildings, that end up going the same place. If it doesn’t fit one of those two formulas, it’s a bit like, who’s doing it? Also, who’s lobbying for it? What’s the constituency that’s pushing the laws? Certain constituencies are very involved from the start. What sector has time to send people to [lobby] all the time?

If you had a magic wand, is there a law or funding mechanism you would change first?

Heben: Providing below-market-rate-interest loans to affordable housing developments. Access to low to zero-interest loans would allow more people to develop more housing. Currently, the tax credit program is just inherently problematic. It increases costs every step of the way, and it requires you to involve a whole broad range of professionals …

McCormick: So much overhead. You can’t do it in a lean way.

Heben: Yeah.And there’s a bunch of people taking a little bit off the top, so there’s a lot of people interested in the continuation of that, but the availability of more-flexible sources of capital is what’s needed.

McCormick: And also more flexible use of public land. Right now, most places by law have to sell it to the highest bidder, if they dispose of land. That’s just a conventional real estate practice that they put on places so that they wouldn’t be corrupt. Some places are starting to change that so that you can convey land to nonprofits. But that just means they give it to the traditional high-cost developers. But yeah, low-cost loans, for nonprofits, which is a practice going way back to the mid-19th century.

Heben: Sure. In the 60’s and 70’s it was a very popular thing. They created tens of thousands of cooperative housing developments through these very loans. The issue is, that didn’t benefit banks, or people that have an interest in making money off of all this. That’s why it has been shaped the way it has. Look at Section 8 vouchers. Those are designed to benefit landlords. You’re putting money in the pockets of landlords. It’s a terribly inefficient way of doing it. But it’s this idea that the private sector has to drive any sort of solution or progress in housing development. What you’ll find is that it kind of just warps the whole process, in which people extract as much money as possible and deliver the minimum viable product.

McCormick: If you rewind 20 or 30 years, it was more understandable. You’d be like, there’s no way we can do this building feasibly without federal involvement or these loans. Fast forward 30 years, and you’ve got this behemoth of a process that’s so unwieldy and costly that it starts to get to the point that maybe we can do better just by throwing it away.

Black people are 13 percent of the nation’s population but 40 percent of people experiencing homelessness, according to Point in Time homeless counts. What role have Black leaders played in the village movement, and how does the village model meet the needs of homeless Black people?

Heben: Ibrahim Mubarak pioneered Dignity Village. The group of Dignity Village founders were a very diverse folk.

McCormick: He’s a big figure. With Dignity Village, also, a number of key people were, if not themselves African American, very interested in African American culture. So one of the other key people, Jack Tafari, was this British Rastafarian. He went to Ghana, and died there. And Mark Lakeman is very interested in village patterns and buildings, including African.

Any other Black leaders come to mind?

McCormick: In Portland right now, Laquida Landford is the leader of Afro Village PDX. An important one, really foundational, was Ted Hayes, the guy who started Dome Village in L.A. Dome Village was the precursor to Dignity Village. You might say it didn’t go as far, because it was always tenuously on someone else’s property, but it was there for quite a few years, with pretty permanent structures.

Heben: That was tied to the Take Back the Land movement, wasn’t it?

McCormick: I think so. Hayes is one of the very top people you would think of having any sort of influence in that field.

What about how the village meets the needs of houseless Black people?

Heben: I think by definition, in terms of involving houseless people in the process and making them leaders of the shelter models in the places in which they live, if that’s a higher population, [a village] is giving everybody who lives there an equal voice.

McCormick: I don’t know that there’s any obvious reason that it would be different for Black homeless people than any other category of homeless people.

Heben: That’s what I’m suggesting. Each person has an equal voice. [Villages] emphasize democratic process, where everybody has a voice, and if they’re a significantly overrepresented population, they should be significantly represented in these places.

McCormick: That [40%] figure is probably from Point in Time Count, which is meaning that it’s especially representing chronic, long-term homelessness. The fact of that giant disparity is the result of the mainstream system failing. So something that’s deliberately alternative to the mainstream system holds promise. We’re trying to do things in a different way than the mainstream has, and make people more self-determinative.

Heben: But these models have also sprung up in the Northwest, as opposed to other geographic areas, which are whiter areas than other parts of the country, so that also has to factor into it.

McCormick: Well, there’s a lot of activity in Philadelphia recently, where two encampments just started. That was largely African American.

Heben: In terms of [villages] receiving sanctioned status, though, that has been largely Northwest. But you’re right, this is a common phenomenon in all cities.

McCormick: We could observe that community land trust has an important root in African America. It originated in a farm community in …

Heben: Georgia.

McCormick: So you could say, well, it’s informed what Square One Villages is doing.

Some villages currently shelter specific groups, including women, veterans, religious groups, Black, Indigenous and People of Color, or LGBTQ populations. Do you support the idea of creating villages with similar identities or backgrounds, or a diverse setting like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “beloved” community?

Heben: I support creating diverse settings. We’re doing permanent housing, largely, now, and you can’t discriminate, so that’s one factor, fair housing. It seems to me that population-specific model is often done as a way to build community support. How can you not support housing veterans? But in terms of a self-managed community, I think they benefit from a diverse population of people from different backgrounds and different skill sets that can come together and work together.

McCormick: I definitely feel uninclined to tell any group of people that they can’t self-organize the village that they want to.

Heben: Right. That tends to be the decision by the developer or operator of the project, and it’s often a way to source funds for a project. I think we see this a lot with funding that’s geared towards serving families. But if you look at the demographic trends, everything is pointing to a drastic increase in one and two person households. A lot of our funding sources are geared towards building two, three, four bedroom houses. Building studios and one-bedroom apartments, you receive a worse score on funding applications for that. But if you’re a housing authority, the wait times for a studio or one-bedroom far exceeds that of a family-sized unit.

McCormick: Single males tend to report much more difficulty getting services. A lot of services are for women and families, or women with children.

Heben: But it’s not just that. In general, more households are single and two-person households of all sorts of different types of people.

McCormick: So Afro Village PDX is an interesting test case for that kind of dedicated community. That’s just this embryonic thing, so it’s not exactly carved in stone. And I’ve heard different versions of it, being African oriented, African American, African American post-prison population. So it’s probably still being worked out. [But] that’s a case where, as far as I can tell, it’s not coming from some funding strategy. It’s just what she [Landford] thinks is needed.

Heben: You’re right. That’s why I didn’t want to say that definitively. I think that’s the case sometimes. I think there’s people that see a need and want to help a certain type of people. I don’t know, maybe we should do it differently in the whole shelter realm, but if you look at the whole housing realm, you can’t just create, like …

McCormick: Categories of people?

Heben: Yeah. When you apply some of these things that you do in shelter models, in terms of targeting specific types of people, that’s not the way the real world works. We live in an environment where we don’t necessarily pick our neighbors. They can be any type of people.

Domestic violence is the number one cause of homelessness among women. Many unhoused people are vulnerable in other ways. Do villages that shelter these groups need fences and gatehouses?

Heben: I think it’s important for them to have defined boundaries where you can monitor who’s coming and who’s going. What we’ve seen, in the Occupy movement for example, is when you don’t have that, you have people from the outside coming in and causing problems. And then that’s perceived like, this can’t work. So there needs to be some regulation, where the people that live there can maintain the place where they live, and defend it from outsiders.

McCormick: I would hesitate to make a hard rule about fences and stuff. It might matter, significantly, whether the site has solid, durable structures that securely close and lock. If not, if you’re in a tent, then, you might fear going to sleep. That’s different than in a cabin.

Heben: The Occupy camp here locally is a good example, where there wasn’t defined boundaries and people that weren’t even really involved with the camp came in, started fighting, I believe somebody died, and it caused the whole thing to be shut down. It had nothing to do with the people that were living there, participating in the process. There is a value, to some extent, to be able to manage who comes and goes.

McCormick: With that question, it sounds a little bit like something that authorities would impose.

Heben: I was on that side of the fence when I first got into this initially and wrote Tent City Urbanism, and I know that was a thing for Dignity Village, when they did receive the sanction and [public land], there were a number of people that didn’t go to the site and highlighted the fence. But I can speak from the experience of Opportunity Village. They called it a “gated community” and the people there say they feel safe. But it creates this exclusion.

Some villages patrol their surroundings, have guard shacks or security fencing, rules or behavioral codes. Yet the perception that they are magnets for crime persists, and many neighborhoods remain reluctant to host them. Why?

McCormick: Because neighbors, particularly homeowners, are always fearful about a whole bunch of things. [Laughs.]

Heben: I think it has to do with the nature of homeownership, where you’re putting your property value at the forefront.

McCormick: Maybe there’s some rational basis. But it’s also a huge magnet for prejudice.

Heben: It’s also conventional wisdom. It’s a rampant belief amongst folks. It’s very hard to break the stereotype that the congregation of poor people results in crime and violence. It goes back to the ownership concept of the village. It’s more about how you treat those people, and what freedoms you allow them to have in terms of the place in which they live.

McCormick: I’ve been listening to a lot of homeowners in PDX Shelter Forum [an online discussion space which McCormick moderates], and there’s all these people from the neighborhood associations who are genuinely well-intentioned, and consciously voicing concerns for social justice, including everybody. But they’re very clearly perceiving disorder and crime associated with camps, and they’re very unhappy about it. They may be appraised of the point that what they’re seeing might not be caused by homeless people, there might be people dumping stuff there, it might be dealers that go and deal there, but at a certain point they don’t care, because these factors are all there together. [Laughs.]

So I’m hearing someone say, “we have this dead-end street at the park near us, and it’s turned into this drug-dealing den in the tents down there, and it’s just this festering thing.” So it’s a reality to them, even if we could prove that net crime in Southeast Portland hasn’t increased. So this becomes a practical issue, because whatever the legitimacy of their opinion, we’re trying to place a village, and we’re trying to get buy-in, and we’re trying to convince them that we’re doing something about it. So we may have to promise the fence, or the patrols, or something like that. But it’s an absolute minefield, and path to ruin, to start being steered by people’s fears. Because fear is infinite. Fear of the Other and the unhoused is infinite. It can never be completely appeased.

Also, things that you do in response to that could be useless or counterproductive. One thing I see constantly is some camp or village proposal, and the city staff has been entrusted to estimate this project, compared to their favored option. Of course, they estimate round-the-clock, team member professional security. And maybe they’ve been required to hire the police, and it’s hundreds of dollars per hour. Of course, this ends up making the thing look horrifically expensive. And you don’t want professional security or police there. That’s traumatizing and alienating most of the people in the village. [Laughs.] So it’s done, supposedly, to help, but it’s really harmful. There’s a bunch of cases out there showing that security tends to work really well when it’s run by the village people themselves. I’ve had great experiences visiting many villages and being shown around by resident-run security. So many people in those camps are fearful of official security and police, even traumatized by them.

Some child protective services systems won’t place a child in a tiny house village for houseless people. This may reflect the fact that some villages do not perform background checks. Do you think children are safe in villages?

McCormick: They could be. As safe as anywhere else.

Heben: The examples I’ve seen, like Nickelsville, even when it was unsanctioned, had several children there. People that I talked to there seemed to think it was an important thing. It changed residents’ perspective in terms of wanting to make it be a clean and orderly and safe place. Everybody else that lives there takes those types of things more seriously when kids are there. I know the LIHI villages also have children in those.

McCormick: I feel like there should be a presumption in favor of it, because it’s something that people do. They have children. They have them before they got homeless, they have them when they’re homeless. They get married or meet partners who have children. By default, we should try to make that work.

Heben: If you want to find a better situation for them, awesome, but I think they’re better in a community like that, where they have neighbors that support them, than having to live in a storefront, where they’re exposed.

McCormick: The bigger context is we live in an extraordinarily generation-separating culture, by global and historical standards. The U.S. in general is extreme in separating generations from each other. I have a father in a care home; I have watched that myself, personally.

According to a recent presentation from the Portland area’s Joint Office of Homeless Services, the monthly cost for “Creating Conscious Communities Together” (C3PO), three sanctioned tent villages managed by a nonprofit, is $145,000 a month for 110 people. By comparison, Right 2 Dream Too, a self-governed houseless village, costs $3,000 a month for 100. Both models sit on public lands. Why might the self-governed group cost less?

Heben: Staffing costs and overhead of the nonprofit. I think Square One is kind of in the midst of this, of being in between. We’re not a grassroots group anymore; we’re not a big social services provider either. We started Opportunity Village 100 percent volunteer-run. I don’t think that’s sustainable in the long term. It’s certainly not sustainable in creating a scalable solution that serves more than 30 people or so. The trick is, how do you provide staffing support effectively? I think it’s about finding the right balance between staffing and self-management.

What benefits do taxpayers get from more-managed village shelter models?

Heben: I don’t know that they’re better managed. I think a lot of times one of the reasons they become more expensive is, they probably have full-time case managers, for example, that are meeting with folks and trying to help them get into other places. That’s a good thing, but it costs a lot of money; you have multiple annual salaries you have to start covering.

McCormick: The outcomes might not be better at all. They might be worse. Comparing a more self-governed versus a more-managed camp, I wouldn’t necessarily assume that the more-managed one, or higher-budget one has better outcomes for the people in the village.

Maybe you get better job placement, or something like that, because you’ve got dedicated people. On the other hand, the self-determination of people in self-governing might be more beneficial to them.

Heben: A lot of the metrics we use to evaluate whether these places are successful are all smoke and mirrors, too. Their funding sources are based on transition rates, so they’re incentivized to get more people into housing, and there’s lots of ways you can do that, that don’t actually result in the person being housed in the long-term. So what you see is, there’s an incentive to just move people through without actually addressing the long-term causes of what made them homeless in the first place. There’s nobody monitoring what happens to that person after they get placed, the day after they live there. You can kind of cook the books pretty easy to make it look very successful. But I do think having some of that staff support for people is important, particularly for people that are interested in being connected with resources and finding a different living situation.

McCormick: Oftentimes [staffing] seems to be sort of unnecessarily considered together with the housing form. People will talk about a village that needs to happen, and then they’ll describe the land and the building, and then they’ll start layering on all the staff costs, and say “this is the cost of the village.” Maybe it’s better to keep those things [separate].

Heben: Yeah, you start paying people that aren’t even directly involved in the project, and it’s just a way to fund your organization. You create a large organization, and then all of a sudden you have to cover your annual operating budget. It kind of self-perpetuates, and things get more expensive.

McCormick: I think in most cases, the case managers and support people and all that, they could operate whether it was an SRO [Single Room Occupancy] or a tiny house village.

Heben: Yeah. I support connecting those types of services, like case managers, to people, rather than structures or projects.

McCormick: Yeah. They get lumped together, and then you get these cost estimates that are really confused. They’re confusing the housing form with the services they attach to it.

Heben: That’s very much the case with permanent supportive housing as well. They have insanely high operating costs that rely on really large amounts of ongoing subsidies in order to continue to operate that just aren’t there.

McCormick: When they say “homelessness” these days, very often people are talking about “chronic” homelessness. Then it’s assumed that people need this whole array of services, and also that people would be permanently in need. This shapes your whole vantage around certain things. If you pull back, and you say “anyone experiencing homelessness,” the vast majority of those people, it’s casual, not very long term, and often they don’t really need other services. They lost their job, they got thrown out of their house or something. So this is a recurring thing for me, pushing back against the endless narrowing of the discourse to chronic, extreme-case homelessness.

Heben: That’s why I’m interested in creating more housing options that don’t result in people ending up in that situation. Obviously, now that we’re in this situation, you need those band-aid approaches, but they don’t do anything to stop the issue.

McCormick: It’s like a permanent emergency response.

Heben: That’s a good way to describe it.

McCormick: It’s like we’ve built a whole system around a permanent emergency.

Heben: You see that now, with the response to the pandemic. A lot of cities are creating these “rest stops” and things like that, and they’re thinking about them in very short term metrics, and investing a lot of money into these pallet shelter concepts. For a similar amount of money, you could build a more durable and higher quality of shelter. But they’re thinking about it as “how do we solve this issue this winter?” as if next winter homelessness isn’t going to be a thing.

McCormick: Just seeing the same type of archetypal argument, over and over again, this emergency-as-temporary-response [approach]. What do you think is going to happen next year?

Heben: There’s a political discomfort in acknowledging that homelessness is embedded in our political economy. More and more people are wising up to that as ten-year plans to end homelessness end and the problem keeps on getting worse. That’s why you see more and more interest in these types of models in city councils.

Some faith-based communities might welcome villages for the houseless, and own underused and available land. Are there many tiny house villages at churches, mosques or synagogues?

Heben: I think there are.

McCormick: Well, sometimes they may sell the land, like the cases you’re dealing with. The whole SHARE/WHEEL model [in Seattle] was predicated on church land. They move from church to church. And I think that’s where Portland is going with its whole Shelter to Housing Continuum code reform project.

Heben: Most of our car camping sites with the Conestoga huts and such are on church property, where they host up to six Conestoga huts. It’s actually a very common thing, and it’s because land use exemptions allow them to do things you can’t do on other types of land. Churches are a huge player in making a difference and helping out with the issue. I just think it’s kind of a sad component, because they’re basically picking up the slack of local government. We’ve kind of come to rely on them. The City of Eugene, there’s five new rest stop sites approved. But you need funding to operate these places, and they’ve come to rely on the grassroots activist groups and the churches to do it. It’s just not a long-term, scalable and sustainable solution. I think churches are overburdened with this issue. Churches and libraries.

Many churches have declining enrollments and land they’ve owned for a long time. But you think the government should be funding this?

Heben: Well, it’s a public problem. It needs to be dealt with by the public. But it’s not. So churches are kind of doing an oversharing of the burden of addressing this issue.

McCormick: I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, there’s this really long tradition of church and faith organizations helping — in fact, historically, up until pretty recently, they were the main people that did anything about homelessness.

Heben: Still are, really. Three of the six founding members of our organization were church pastors.

McCormick: So it’s actually what normally has been done throughout our history. But civil rights and equal protections were also not normally done. For a couple thousand years, it was pretty much a Christian and Islamic voluntary sector — charity — that helped all the people that were homeless, and founded hospitals, which were often housing. But we live in a different world now, in which the public sector controls land use in a far greater part of the economy. I feel like governments, and I’m watching Portland do this now, are kind of copping out, and being like, helping all of the people who have been left out of our systems — maybe the churches can pick that up.

Heben: That’s what I was getting at. It’s become a let-them-deal-with-it kind of thing.

A pressure release valve?

McCormick: A way of avoiding responsibility.

Heben: Of avoiding responsibility and putting resources into an issue that needs resources.

McCormick: And avoiding political fights.

Heben: There’s often an issue, historically, with city and county government, with the city thinking it’s the county’s responsibility and the county thinking it’s the city’s. Or it’s a federal problem. So it’s a lot of finger pointing, and nobody ends up actually doing anything and the churches end up, out of their good nature, helping people.

McCormick: Take Portland as an example. They’re like, “there’s a bunch of churches with extra land on their parking lots.” I guess there are, but that’s also a bunch of different organizations and situations. On the other hand, we keep hearing about the hundreds and hundreds of vacant and underused parking lots the city has. People have been fighting for years, to get these maps and inventories out of them, and they never want to do it. We don’t want to have to organize a different unique model with like 75 different churches. We want to figure out a model that you can know what the rules are and do it on every site.

So there are unique challenges in working with faith-based communities?

McCormick: Unique advantages. They’re probably really good as sites go, it’s just that the public sector has resources that a bunch of separate churches don’t. It has land, it has control of zoning, it has access to federal funding.

Schmid: On the West Coast, we’ve seen pioneering examples of houseless villages. Are villages mostly in blue states and cities, or are they also springing up in red states and rural areas?

McCormick: They’re springing up in other places. I was just watching Kansas City. This veterans organization in Kansas City has got one village and wants to do a bunch more.

Heben: That’s an example of, in a conservative city, making it a veterans project is what made that work, right?

McCormick: Right. Maybe that’s a beachhead. Then you’ve got, are there villages in Salt Lake City? I think it can have some pretty cross-political appeal. On the one hand you’re doing something new, but on the other hand, you’re kind of doing traditional, detached housing. So it has a lot of traditional appeal to have your own house and fly your own flag outside, and there’s self-determination there. So it can appeal to a lot of people across political [boundaries] in ways that a shelter doesn’t.

I’ve gotten this spreadsheet, which is a research group at Missouri State University’s mapping of every village in the country, according to their criteria. Not quite the same criteria as we might use, but still probably the best mapping yet. There are versions all over the country. There are things that are only temporary, and there are developments that are like RV parks, that weren’t really packaged as homelessness, maybe low income.

The vintage single-wide trailer, and today’s tiny house, how different are they?

McCormick: That’s a good question, because physical resemblance is only one question. You might find physical resemblance in their space, for example square footage, but how they’re built, the industry, regulations and cultural association are all different.

Heben: And the long-term durability of them, the materials they’re built out of.

McCormick: It’s really common in our society generally to equate and quantify living space by square footage. So people are constantly dismissing and mocking tiny houses, as in, “I’m into tiny houses, especially if they’re adjoining and stacked. Ha ha, that’s an apartment building.” It’s like, “Ha ha! Yes.” As if that’s the only thing that’s different, is square footage. [Laughs.]

Many existing West coast homeless villages were suffocated in smoke this summer. Tiny houses have also been part of regional responses to extreme weather, as in the Gulf Coast’s Katrina “cottages” and trailers. How well do villages work in climate crisis?

McCormick: In a lot of ways it might be quite good. Smoke affects everybody. You might have to go outside a bit more if you’re in a small unit than if you were in a big apartment building, but it’s not that different. You either stay inside with everything closed, or you go outside where there’s smoke. You might in your tiny house have better control over ventilation and air than being in some New York City building whose windows don’t fully close.

I’m really interested in the spectrum of housing that includes moveable and relocatable housing. The more mobile your housing is, the more adaptable you are to most emergencies. Even in the recent wildfires in Oregon, authorities were advising, “if you have a trailer, just drive to Portland, and find somewhere to go there.”

What about the legacy of Hurricane Katrina and Katrina trailers or cottages? What can be improved on?

McCormick: Basically, do the opposite of Katrina trailers. That’s a case study in what not to do. It was completely top-down, and total profiteering. So contractors and buddies with ties to FEMA were selling these units at a fortune, and they were just kind of dropped on the population.

I saw a bunch of these, because I worked as a volunteer after Katrina in Biloxi. They were totally flawed, and filled with foam and formaldehyde, which made them disastrous for health, and tons of them were just abandoned. They exemplify everything about how trailers, and sometimes mobile homes, are non-adaptable, non-maintainable. They’re just these aluminum, fiberglass bubbles you can’t alter. And they’re very cramped. I’ve been in them. Two people in one is crowded. So it’s pretty much wrong in every way. [Laughs.] Luckily, there were other things done.

Heben: I think the real challenge, or conflict, is with scalability. A lot of times when we see it move from the grassroots to the top-down approach, it loses the elements that made it of value in the first place. It kind of gets all those stripped out of it and it’s very austere. So I think the question is, how do you scale this up without falling into this?

Would you like grassroots organizations or village advocates to partner with corporations, political or civic leaders?

Heben: A lot of this comes back to having adequate public funding to operate these places. Maybe rather than giving a huge lump sum to an organization that does the whole thing, is providing grants to different neighborhood groups, that each creates their own village. The locality and the place-based nature of this model is a really important piece. The interaction of the housed and the unhoused, on that personal, local level is important. So how do you keep that while doing it at a meaningful scale? Here in Eugene, they just approved five new rest stops. But who’s going to operate them?

McCormick: By the time the emergency hits, it’s too late. If nothing has really been planned out, it’s going to go down Katrina Trail[er] Road.

Heben: It’s the unwillingness to address the issue until it’s an absolute emergency, and then you address it in a very short-term way.

McCormick: Emergencies are gigantic profit opportunities for a lot of powerful people. They’re very happy for there to be no plans on the ground. They can get a call in to FEMA, and get a giant contract. What if we were totally rational in thinking about all of the catastrophes and problems on our event horizon? In the case of Oregon, you have massive earthquakes and wildfires. So you could have hundreds of thousands of refugees, houseless, instantly. If we were really rationally operating, we’d be doing a lot of things differently. We’re totally unprepared for a massive Cascadia earthquake. A bunch of infrastructure is going to just collapse, for years. We’re just hoping and praying for a gigantic federal bailout.

The thing I would think to do, being rational, would be to say, OK, in any of these circumstances, we need hundreds of thousands of fast, low-cost homes. Yes, we could throw everybody in someone else’s house, but that’s a social disaster. So, how can we make this happen? I’d say, pre-approve unit types that are really easy to make. That are similar to what was built after the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, which is one of the best precedents ever for doing this well. And it would use very basic stuff, like basic lumber that already exists and is easily acquired. Then, have pre-approved locations, and maybe even foundation posts, pre-set. Maybe, underneath lawns, in every new house, put a set of foundation posts.

So gradually, over years, ahead of time, at a fairly low cost, creating this capacity for throwing up, in a matter of weeks, large numbers of units providing new space and shelter. You’re also doing things like creating 500-gallon water tanks in every ten of them. It would save you tens of billions of dollars after the event. You could also marry this to doing useful things in the meantime. Like, they could be low-cost backyard cottages. They don’t have to be unused. So you say to people, “OK, who wants to host a FEMA rental cottage? Pick one of these plans, we’ll send out a crew, lay these down, and if there’s an emergency and you agree to shelter people, we give you this loan to do it.” Stuff like that.

Nobody understands homelessness like those who have experienced it. How successful has the village movement been in centralizing the lived experience of houseless people?

Heben: The whole point is putting it at the forefront in terms of allowing people with the lived experience to be involved in determining their shelter.

McCormick: More so than any other approach. It has largely evolved from observing what people have done. Where does it come from? Some tradition of protests and camps, then Dome Village, then Dignity Village. These are grassroots-generated things. There wasn’t a federal commission that came out in 1975 that talked about the new village model. [Laughs.]

Heben: What you see with the self-organized tent city is that if people fall through the cracks, these are the types of communities that they would organize for simply providing better infrastructure and support to allow them to operate a little more effectively.

Eric Tars, legal director of the National Homelessness Law Center, has emphasized the importance of having an “exit plan” before an encampment or village is sanctioned. There is evidence that people can end up living for years or even decades in houseless villages that are designed to be “temporary.” Should exit plans be required?

Heben: Opportunity Village is an example, where we have a couple people that have been there since the beginning, eight years ago. I know those people. What’s the alternative? There’s just a lack of opportunity for certain people. The idea that everybody is going to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and earn a living wage when a lot of these people are disabled and have been beaten down and screwed over by society in a lot of different ways … Our philosophy has been to provide resources and staffing to help people transition out. I don’t think kicking them out into the streets is the answer.

McCormick: I might ask, should there be a required exit plan for Eric Tars to leave his house, or his job, because change and development is good for people? Why is this something that we impose upon poor, helpless people? This is a very elite point of view.

Heben: The position we’ve evolved in Opportunity Village on that is, a lot of times transitional housing programs have a set duration, two years oftentimes, sometimes shorter, but we simply require that residents meet with a case worker a certain number of times.

McCormick: Also, why should we decide? How about we let villages decide what they think their policy should be? Maybe they think it’s good, maybe they think it’s bad. I wouldn’t even presume to say.

I’ve talked to one of the people at moving SHARE/WHEEL camps in Seattle, which were moved every three months, and he said, “you know, surprisingly, I kind of like [moving], because it sort of gives us this chance to shake things up and rearrange things that would otherwise be harder to do.” Definitely not what I was expecting.

I know of Eric Tars, I’ve read his work and followed him a lot, often chatted with him on social media. I can infer from the question, but I know separately, that he basically views villages as inherently a substandard and temporary thing at best. He’s written about this at great length, and coauthored reports. So I know that he’s coming from that standpoint. So I would say to him, “what if it’s not a temporary village? What if it’s not set up that way?”

Heben: Nobody wants to be an advocate of living in a tent permanently. So it’s a fair point of view to desire better living conditions for everybody. But in the absence of those opportunities, we shouldn’t just kick everybody out of Opportunity Village. We now require people to meet with a staff person every couple of months to have a plan, but if they’re not successful in executing that plan, they don’t get kicked out.

McCormick: One thing hovering in that question is, what is the presumed better thing?

Heben: A house with a kitchen and a bathroom.

McCormick: So I’ve talked to people in Dignity Village who’ve lived there for years [with shared bathrooms and kitchen]. They’re proud, they’ve got this nice house, it’s decorated, they’re really proud of it, and they’re like, it’s working out for them. If we say to them, “Hey, on the other side of town, here’s an apartment, unit 609, in this building,” I think many people in that context wouldn’t want that. They’re like, “What? I built this house, and I’m in this community of people.” A standard apartment building is like complete alienation. No community whatsoever. Should we assume a standard apartment with a kitchen is better for that person?

Heben: He’s very much looking at it like a statistical problem, rather than a quality of life problem.

You’re saying that some who live in villages that officials consider unsheltered homelessness might continue to choose to live there over a permanent housing opportunity?

Heben: It’s not just simply a personal desire to not do that. These are people that have suffered from abuse, and a lot of bad things have happened to these people. There’s a lack of trust. If you have this safe place in Dignity Village that you’ve been at for several years, and you’re given the keys to this apartment, what happens next month? If something bad happens, you’re back where you started from. So there’s a lack of trust there. It’s not that simple.

I’ve heard the village has a “secret sauce.” Is it in helping people who often have high trauma and barriers through community and informal peer support?

Heben: I think so. At the same time, it’s fair to have expectations of a higher quality of life.

McCormick: The notion of housing quality needs a lot of examination, though.

Heben: Yeah. I agree.

McCormick: The history of housing regulation is basically middle and upper-middle class people, driven by fear and stereotype, imposing on powerless and poor people how they should live. It has dramatically lacked dweller self-determination.

Heben: That’s the extreme. I think there’s an in-between, though, right?

McCormick: There’s intermingled wish for the betterment of people. But even when there’s that, and I hear it in statements from Barbara Poppe or Eric Tars, there’s tremendous confidence that they have the right to judge what is quality housing for other people. Why should we assume that you have that? How do upper-class people live? An upper-class person builds a house in a wealthy suburb and has two SUVs. Should I really allow you to live that way? That’s completely inappropriate, and harmful to you and the environment.

Heben: [Laughs.] That’s a good point, actually.

McCormick: That’s not appropriate quality of housing. It’s un-urban, it’s isolating, it’s environmentally damaging. Surely we should prevent you from making that mistake with your life, and being spiritually un-moored in that way.

Heben: I never thought about it like that. [Laughs.]

McCormick: We should have a very strong presumption in favor of the dweller’s own judgment and determination of their needs and wishes. The history of housing is 100 percent the story of doing the opposite. Of imposing on others and assuming for them. Should there be an exit plan required? Well, [Tars] is apparently ready to require a plan, but not the provision of an apartment, and that would be the worst scenario. Where that’s going, is what happens, which is they’re forced to leave, but they’re not provided another place to go.

How can states, cities, and smaller organizations work proactively to address our current wave of homelessness?

McCormick: There’s lots of models. You don’t have to go reinventing anything. There have been many years of people setting up villages and camps. When you look at places like L.A., they’re doing it pretty fast, on a large scale. Stop arguing the same old questions that have been argued for years on every such project, and fast forward to say, “OK, let’s look at who out there has a good model, and let’s see what they did well.”

It’s about getting to urgency, and getting to action. Because there will be a bunch of people that will be very happy to argue this into the ground for years and years. No problem. But it’s about saying, “we have an emergency. It’s not acceptable to have thousands of people abandoned and left on our streets. How are we fixing it beginning this week?” Somehow resetting it to that level of urgency.

Heben: Yeah. And we clearly don’t have the resources to solve the issue overnight, providing everybody housing. The key to it is working with people rather than against people. So often we see local municipalities fighting against the current, trying to stop the issue of camping. People are camping, and then you sweep them, and you spend huge amounts of money cleaning it up. Conversely, you could recognize that there’s a problem, try to find suitable sites and provide the necessary infrastructure to meet people’s basic needs.

McCormick: States and the federal government could help a lot if they embraced this view that emergencies and dire needs require actions. We need to mobilize on a large scale. They could prevent localities from fending off the problem and NIMBY[Not In My Backyard]-ing it. States could do things, like California does with housing, and come up with assessments of the amounts of housing places need to create. Or it could be shelter or interim housing. Places will complain until the cows come home about things they don’t want to do, and they will present it to be utterly impossible, and inconceivably expensive. But if you actually force them, like in California, the judge has ordered, if they’re actually put to it, they find a way.

You can shelter people, you know. [Laughs.] But not unless it’s made urgent and mandatory upon you. You can also do it way better than just by building the same kind of housing you build from the top of the current private market, which means you’re making half a million dollar units that no way can you make enough of them, nor will you ever get enough political support for building enough of them, nor is it really what most people want.

Thacher Schmid is a journalist, musician and bilingual social services professional. Email: thachmid@gmail.com. Portfolio: ThacherSchmid.com.

3.  Camps: transition, creation, containment

Villages often grow from, are viewed as, or have many properties of camps.

Although camps of what are today called the 'homeless' are now often called by the peculiar name 'encampments', I think it helpful to unframe that and consider what is meant by and what have been called 'camps'.

Camps arise from special needs, contexts -- emergency, disaster, protest, settlement, occupation, travel, pilgrimage recreation, festivity, handling disruption or rapid change. Camps can embody a wide range of dynamics/goals: agency, adaptation, transformation; or negatively: suspension, state of exception, extra-legality, poverty.

[Where did the term 'encampment' come from? It seems to function as a way to designate specifically houseless camps in the US, tending to break a conceptual connection to all the other kinds of camp. Why do and which people use it?]

[Also, 'tent city'?]

Settlement, squatting, direct action, occupation, land struggles

"One-night house": a global tradition in etymology, law & folklore, holding that anyone who can build a house in one night, on available land, gains the right to stay there. A well-documented and long-running practice in various places such as Turkey and Lima, Peru (where the resulting settlements are called "pueblos jovenes". cf Colin Ward's essays.

See also Tim McCormick's "Knight Houses" project for popup housing in San Jose, awarded $40K grant by a national jury in the Knight Foundation's "Knight Cities" challenge, 2014. The name was partly a reference to "one-night house" term used in Turkey and other places for 'squatter' housing, which I naturally thought was amusing and apt, but which also may help explain why local interests or officials apparently intervened to dissuade the Knight Foundation from ever paying me the grant funds, in breach of contract, never resolved. [TM - get logo, visual materials from the project.]. The mayor, Sam Liccardo, was super friendly and encouraging and posed nicely shaking my hand at the public announcement party downtown which Knight Foundation required me to organize [TM - dig up that picture and post here], but something sure put the squeeze on that play soon after.

Nonetheless, the City of San Jose seems to have eventually come around to something like this idea, and now, with Mayor Liccardo still at the helm, and San Jose housing prices and homelessness another leap more out of control, they've developed in last few years the Bridge Housing Communities program using movable tiny houses, and in 2020 the Emergency Interim Housing program [link to section in Emergency housing" article] in response to Covid-19 pandemic.

Anarchist tradition: Kropotkin, Ebenezer Howard, Colin Ward, Giancarlo De Carlo, J.F.C. Turner

Latin America - J.F.C. Turner "Freedom to Build"

Vernacular housing: J.B. Jackson, et al.

"Right to the City" concept and activism: Henry Lefebvre, David Harvey, etc.

1960s onward - alternative housing - Whole Earth catalog, Shelter Publishing, etc.

Kern, Ken. The Owner-Built Home. (Homestead Press, 1972).

Corr, Anders. No Trespassing!: Squatting, Rent Strikes, and Land Struggles Worldwide.1999.

Vasudevan, Alex. (2017). The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting. 2017.

Dignity Village, Portland began as Camp Dignity, employing direct action & land occupation strategies. Mark Lakeman says he eventually counselled them into adopting 'village' name, and strategies of synergizing with Portland aspirational values of ecology and decentralization, ergo 'village' e.g. Dome Village, Los Angeles of the time.

Quixote Village - early days, 2007- as occupation in downtown Olympia, Washington.

Lents Women's Village - precursor to Kenton Womens Village - direct action leads to new village.

Military camps, & town foundings (e.g. Greek, Roman)

Campus Martius, Rome -- the main etymological referent of 'camp'.

A flood plain between the city (walled area, religious bound) and the Tiber.

Originally mostly a field for military exercises and gathering. Subsequently developed into space for sporting events (natch), and many temples, now the geographic center of Rome and e.g. where the Pantheon is.

A place for changing and exceptional uses -- military preparation, competition, festival, worship, etc -- but stable in its location. In some ways like the 19th Century ex-urban 'borderlands' as examined and theorized for United States suburban development: places for "camp meetings", religious revival meetings, leisure excursions, land-sale promotional events (sometimes elaborately choreographed and lavishly amentized by land promoters, cf. Dolores Hayden Building Suburbia).

Migrant & wartime worker housing

Shafter Camp, Central Valley, California, 1939. Photograph by Dorothy Lange.

Shafter Camp, Central Valley, California, 1939. Photograph by Dorothy Lange.

McCoy, Mike. "Farm Labor Camps: A Look Back at How America Solved the Crisis During the Great Depression." Valley Ag Voice, 3 March 2020. https://www.valleyagvoice.com/farm-labor-camps-a-look-back-at-how-america-solved-the-crisis-during-the-great-depression/

cf. Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies. -- the set of journal articles Steinbeck wrote in 1930s, upon which he developed The Grapes of Wrath.

"[After WWII] in some instances -- in rural California, for example -- tent and shack cities in unincorporated areas gradually were transformed into more settled, if still often informally built, settlements (Stein 1974; Gregory 1988; Starr 1996)."

- Mitchell, Don (2013). "Tent Cities: Interstitial Spaces of Survival." in: Brighenti, Andrea Mubim ed. Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-between. Ashgate Publishing, 2013. [reprinted with minor changes in Mitchell (2020). Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital. (2020).

References:

from tents to houses in California "Little Oklahomas" ca. 1940.

from tents to houses in California "Little Oklahomas" ca. 1940.

from tents to houses in California "Little Oklahomas" ca. 1940. from Gregory, J. 1989. American Exodus: The Dustbowl Migration and Okie Culture in California:

"Like work, housing accommodations fell way behind the requirements of the 1930s influx. Some families found houses to rent, but tiny incomes forced many others to make their homes in auto courts, trailer parks, or in the private campgrounds usually located just outside established towns. There for a few dollars a month a family rented a tent, a cabin, or a patch of ground and gained access to toilets and showers.

"Even cheaper were the Farm Security Administration camps....Clean, generally well-managed, with tent platforms, sometimes metal cabins, and assorted recreational facilities for up to 300 families, these were the federal government's principle answer to the problems created by the Dust Bowl migration...Mostly  they served new arrivals and the highly mobile elements in the farm labor force. A one-year residency rule and the stigma of living in a 'government camp' kept the more fortunate and established away."

"Buying property of their own was an option for those with somewhat more resources. Despite their frequently marginal economic situation, a substantial number of farm workers acquired their own homes during the 1930s. It was possible because of cheap land values on the outskirts of many valley communities. Understanding the potential market, developers subdivided unused land and sold it in tiny lots with only minimal improvements...

"Of course that was just a start; the next step was building a home. Some paid others to do it for them, but a surprising number, equipped with carpentry skills from years on the farm and burdened with lull periods between jobs, took on the challenge themselves...Scavenging or trading for materials, people built all sorts of dwellings: sound or unsound, attractive or unsightly, usually beginning with a crude shack and working from there on a real house. 'The houses have been built just a piece at a time,' a resettled Oklahoman noted proudly of the Modesto-area subdivision where he lived...At one time nearly everybody in here lived in tents but they have build little houses and have kept addin' on.'"

"Called 'Little Oklahomas' or 'Okievilles' by Californians who resented their makeshift, typically squalid appearance, the migrant subdivisions appeared wherever there were concentrations of Southwesterners eager to buy property, landowners willing to sell, and no buildings codes to interfere. Huge developments spread around the outskirts of Bakersfield...Similar, just beyond the city limits of Modesto, Little Oklahoma's emerged....Fresno, Stockton, and Sacramento watched similar developments spread out beyond the incorporated limits."

"boom towns of destitution"

Vanport, Oregon.

Marin City - enclave in wealthy, exclusionary Marin County; remains so to this day.

see / adapt sections from Social Housing article.

Detainee, refugee, emergency camps/housing 

e.g San Francisco "Earthquake Cottages" 1906

see main article Emergency housing

Nomadism, poverty, disaffiliation: Hobo camps, Hoovervilles

Camps as sites of revival, protest, organizing, & festival 

Hoovervilles, "Bonus Army" march and camp 1932

Nel Anderson.

Don Mitchell - discussion of political/organizing role of hobo camps.

see main article Bonus Army

The Bonus Army march and camp in Washington D.C. began mostly in Portland and was led by a Portlander! Possibly among the most consequential protests in US history, in that it is perceived as having majorly contributed to the election of FDR over Hoover, the first ever Federal social program for homelessness, and key components of the New Deal.

This is one of strangely many key elements in this story that happened in Portland, such as the 2018 seating of US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that issued landmark Martin v. Boise ruling on constitutionality of sleeping/camping bans.

Tent City Boston, Poor People's Movement, ca.1968, Tompkins Square Park 1988

The large camp that occupied much of Tompkins Square Park, in the East Village / Lower East Side of NYC ca. 1987-88, was something called by promoters and observers "Tent City NY". It was controversial among local residents and organizations, and not surprisingly mostly opposed by city officials. Tensions escalated until in [date, year] the New York Police Department organized a huge takeover action, leading to a violent multi-day confrontation later termed the Tompkins Square Riot of 1988.

Tompkins Square Park had a long historical association with radical and labor protest gatherings, particularly from the "Tompkins Square Riots" of 1873 [?], among the largest urban riots in US history, and internationally publicized particularly in labor movements.

Village Buildings organizer Tim McCormick lived adjoining and overlooking Tompkins Square Park from ca. 1998-2003.

In the 1950s-60s, various Beat figures lived or stayed near there -- particularly Allen Ginsberg, who was still living nearby and observed the 1988 riot. Several well-known photographs of Jack Kerouac were taken near there, at Ginsberg's apartment, and walking on 7th St. past what what would later be my building, with the equestrian statue in Park behind him. Kerouac's novel The Subterraneans, though set in San Francisco, is actually based closely on his experiences from that time in the 'Village' (i.e. West or Greenwich Village) and what was then still called/considered part of Lower East Side, now usually called by realtors' term East Village. The part African-American love interest of the narrator in The Subterraneans was based in [what's her name again?] with whom Kerouac was involved at that time, and lived in the area, known from photographs by/with William Burroughs at Ginsberg's apartment, and often depicted on cover art for editions of The Subterraneans.

Christiana, Copenhagen

decades-long-running self-organized sub-city within Copenhagen, occupying an area of former army barracks. Perhaps the most famous of all "temporary autonomous zones".

Dignity Village

from Camp Dignity protest to the most famous and influential authorized village for the houseless.

Right 2 Dream Too

Right 2 Dream Too rest area, also known as R2D2, began in part -- weirdly enough -- as a retaliation and free-speech protest, on the part of a business owner in Chinatown, downtown Portland, who had long feuded with the City over their efforts to shut down his adult bookstore in an unfortunate (from officials' viewpoint) location right next to the Chinatown Gate. [Arch?].

In the early 2000s, he decided to demolish his store, and host on the lot a rest area for unhoused local residents, which he determined could be defended under free speech legal claims.

15 years later, Right 2 Dream Too is a largely self-sustaining non-profit with a successful and influential, model rest area now located on the Central East Side (near Moda Center arena). It is authorized under a permanent Oregon law permitting urban "campgrounds" -- not, unlike other villages, under a state of local emergency declaration -- and played a significant role in the settlement and broadening of that law to allow more such campgrounds per city. The current rest area is built with tent on platform, tiny houses, and some trailers, on a disused Portland Bureau of Transportation parking lot leased from the city for a nominal rent, in what's actually a very central, well transit-serviced, and in many ways quite scenic and dramatic position overlooking the Willamette River across to downtown Portland.

Right 2 Dream Too is frequently sited as an example of the extreme potential cost-efficiency of self-managed camps for the unhoused, sheltering 20-25 people ongoing and up to 100 people/night with drop-in visitors, with a budget of around $4000/month. (Editor: essentially, zero, unheard-of in homelessness-services terms). It has an operating agreement with the City, like most ongoing such camps/villages, and also a notably positive relationship with the area, as represented by Lloyd Center [what's the name of that group - Keith is a leader of?] combined resident and business association.

Right 2 Dream Too has financial assets of over $800,000 which were awarded to it through an agreement with Old Town business association to pay for its relocation, but which have been subsequently tied up in legal proceedings related to an aborted relation to a site further south on Eastside near the Tillicum Crossing bridge. While apparently considered indefinitely tied up, and perhaps steadily dwindling from legal fees just like, appropriately, Jaundice v. Jaundice in Dickens' Bleak House, nonetheless this is a financial asset practically unheard of for self-organized villages.

Right 2 Dream Too also helped form a wider advocacy organization Right 2 Survive, headed by organizer Ibrahim Mubarak, formerly an early member and leader of Dignity Village and then Right 2 Dream Too. It has become, along with Dignity Village, perhaps the most influential Portland self-organized villages and among the best known in the country.

Nickelsville

Hooverville updated to refer to Seattle Mayor Nickels.

Lents / Kenton Women's Village

A key leader in this site occupation in Lents, which led to creation of Kenton Women's Village, may become Portland Mayor! We can hope.

Occupy Movement, & related villages, eg OM Village

Many village projects around the US originated with or have close ties to Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011.

The founder of SquareOne Villages and Village Collaborative, Andrew Heben, began his exploration of this area via an undergraduate planning thesis project of site research to Occupy camps around the country. He and other people observed that these consciously political, autonomous camps often attracted and joined with unhoused residents, and sometimes converted into or joined with or helped spin off more politically conscious, intentionally autonomous and self-identifying unhoused camps/villages.

SquareOne Villages developed from Occupy Eugene camp, which evolved into Opportunity Village Eugene site, which led to SquareOne Villages non-profit being formed to develop and manage OVE and then expand to further villages.

Revival meetings, Chautauqua, Burning Man

4.  From Camps to Villages  

: ecology, local scale & control, organic or intentional community

somewhat paradoxically, transitory camps have archetypal village aspects: scale (eg Dunbar's number), local/community control, simple & vernacular building, relative self-sufficiency, mutual aid. Parallels/overlaps w  ideas of universal "traditional urbanism".

Pre-modern - located based on some ecological basis or traditional activity/route.

Indigeneity

How did people originally or anciently build in this area? What can we learn from it -- both exempla and counter-exempla -- to help build well-adapted and counter-fragile practices e.g. for heating, cooling, food supply, water supply, health, sustainability, or land-use management?

How have, in any area, people lived and built in places like this who had the least resources, the least social standing and inclusion ("How the other half live")?

What practices do the most marginalized people in our environment choose or resort to, or aspire to, or have applied to them? What practices are used by people in this environment who are choosing to build/dwell with the most minimal resources or environmental impact (e.g., camping, Burning Man).

Pacific NW tribes winter dwelling, from Zuker and Hogfoss

Pacific NW tribes winter dwelling, from Zuker and Hogfoss

Klamath tule hut (southern Oregon / Northern California)

Klamath tule hut (southern Oregon / Northern California)

"Homelessness and indigeneity in Portland"

[notes for a presentation at Portland Forum on Alternative Shelter and Villages, June 25 2020].

"To build on [this event's] land acknowledgment from earlier, we might consider that the native peoples of this land, like the Multnomah and Clackamas, lived sustainably for many thousands of years, in ways we might call homelessness.

They lived

However, we can guess, usually they weren't 'homeless', or unsheltered, because much of the area's land, you could use if someone else wasn't; nor were you forbidden to build for or shelter yourself,

So, yes, we live in a different time and world, a city of 2.5 million people, but still, we might ask: how sensible are our ways of land-use and dwelling, if year after year thousands of us live unsheltered, or stuck somewhere we hate, or facing eviction and no place to go as soon as a paycheck ends?

You might call it naive or idealistic, but this is how I tend to think of shelter and villages -- as just, the ways we might build and dwell using what's around us, so all of us around here might live at least decently. If I'm on the street, or shut out tonight, or got nothing after this month's lease, I call it, a major step up, a huge relief, and a path to where I want to go.

Now, "what's around us" today might include FEMA money, stimulus payments, ballot measure funds, as well as Western Cedar or straw-bales or unused parking-lots. The key thing is to do what we can, with what we have, for all -- for it to be inconceivable to leave thousands of people out, on the street, neither sheltered nor allowed to shelter themselves.

Alternative shelter and villages, therefore, I see as basically, things we can do to give people a place of their own, to be fully human, and a resident, like any of us. They might be basic, things you can do quickly such as a pre-fab cottage or a shared house or cabins; but these might also be homes or sites you could further develop, or relocate -- to someone's backyard, say, as an affordable accessory dwelling -- and stay living in, if you wanted and the situation worked. Call it the new starter home.  

This place, it should be recognized and respected, by city and community, so you know it won't shut down suddenly or disappear, and that your space is your space, your privacy and possessions are yours. You should have clear rights, a voice and a stake and a role in deciding how the place runs; a choice in going there, and choices to move on to from it. You should have health and safety, like anyone else. It should be in a location that's workable, to get to your job or friends or whatever, and it shouldn't be dumped somewhere nobody else wants to live.

It *could* be a place you help make, and shape, and run; and actually something fun and different. It could be a place that isn't only for the desperately poor and pitiable, but maybe also, for the frugal, village-inclined, or minimalist or traveller. It's actually where I want to live, which is another reason I'd like to help build it.


Indigeneity / Indigenism.

Grant, Elizabeth, and Kelly Greenop, Albert L. Refiti, Daniel J. Glenn, eds (2018). The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture. Springer, 2018. E-ISBN.

Watson, Julia. LO-TEK: Design By Radical Indigenism. Cologne: Taschen, 2019. ISBN:9783836578189.

Oregon indigenous dwellings.

Berg, Laura, ed. The First Oregonians. 2nd edition, 2007. Portland: Oregon Council for the Humanities.

Lewis, David G. (2016). "Houses of the Oregon Tribes." NDNHistory Research, December 31 2016. https://ndnhistoryresearch.com/2016/12/31/houses-of-the-oregon-tribes/.

Organic community.

Residents (or local Lord!) significantly determine who lives there.  

Local ownership (even if possibly very uneven or feudal)

Social roles & mutual aid for a variety of people.

'Village' concept in urban development and urban studies

Park Village, London - the progenitor of 'village' urban & suburban development

Park Village, near present Camden Town, London, sometimes referred to as Regent's Park Village: two small, but highly influential housing developments (Park Village West, intact, and Park Village East, now 1/2 gone because of the London-Birmingham railway line). The site plans and houses were designed by leading English architect of the Regency & Georgian eras, John Nash (1752-1835), designer of Buckingham Palace, the Brighton Pavilion, and London's central Regency Street shopping district. He did the Park Villages as a personal side project, conceived as middle-class housing, using some leftover area from his main much larger project overseeing development of upper-class housing in and around what is now Regents Park. The planned development of the park area itself didn't end up happening, but the small fringe project Park Village did, and became famous in architecture and planning.

The conception and design ideas of Park Village(s) are clearly traceable to a then-new aesthetic movement championing the "picturesque" (Alexander Pope's anglicization of a French (?) aesthetic term pitteresque (?) meaning picture-like, or picturable) in contrast the 'beautiful' or the 'sublime' modes of art and experience.

Key establishing work: Price, Uvedale. "Essay on Architecture and Buildings." in Essays on the Picturesque, 1794. [section discussing villages]. https://archive.org/details/siruvedalepriceo00pric_0/page/398/mode/1up.

This and the lineage of how it inspired John Nash are studied in:

Taylor, Nicholas. (1973). The Village in the City. London: Maurice Temple Smith Ltd, 1973. ISBN 0851170110. [available for 1-hour loan from Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/villageincity00tayl/. Tim ordered used paperback 28 June 2020].

see also discussion in:

Survey of London. "Park Village west." Survey of London: Volume 21, the Parish of St Pancras Part 3: Tottenham Court Road and Neighbourhood. Originally published by London County Council, London, 1949. Pages 153-155. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol21/pt3/pp153-155.

Village in urban studies

Whyte, William Foote (1943). Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943. Obscure until republished in 1955 as just, Street Corner Society, after which it became a standard work of urban sociology.

Gans, Herbert J. (1965). The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans. Free Press, 1965.

Taylor, Nicholas. (1973). The Village in the City. London: Maurice Temple Smith Ltd, 1973. ISBN 0851170110. [available for 1-hour loan from Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/villageincity00tayl/. Tim ordered used paperback 28 June 2020].

Prince Charles, UK: Poundbury development, village ideas.

from [David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 2000]:

"But how could it happen that the critical and oppositional force given in utopian schemes so easily degenerates in the course of materialization into compliance with the prevailing order? There are, I think, two basic answers to this question. Let me unpack them by a closer look at what is now held out as one of the leading candidates to transform our urban futures, the movement called 'the new urbanism.'

"[Andres] Duany (1997), one of its leading lights, 'feels strongly that urbanism, if not architecture, can affect society.' Getting the spatial play right, in the manner proposed by the new urbanism will, he argues, help rectify matters. His proposals evidence a nostalgia for small-town America, its solid sense of community, its institutions, its mixed land uses and high densities, and its ideologists (such as Raymond Unwin). Bring all this back in urban design and the quality of urban living and of social life will be immeasurably improved. This argument is buttressed by appeal to a long line of critical commentary (Kunstler, 1993; 1996) on the 'placelessness' and the lack of 'authenticity' in American cities (soulless sprawling suburbs, mindless edge cities, collapsing and fragmenting city cores fill in the pieces of this dispeptic view). The new urbanism does battle with such monstrous deformities (Katz, 1994). How to recuperate history, tradition, collective memory, and the sense of belonging and identity that goes with them becomes part of its holy grail. This movement does not, therefore, lack a critical utopian edge.

"The new urbanism offers something positive as well as nostalgic. It does battle with conventional wisdoms entrenched in a wide range of institutions (developers, bankers, governments, transport interests, etc.). In the tradition of [Lewis] Mumford, it is willing to think about the region as a whole and to pursue a much more organic, holistic ideal of what cities and regions might be about. The postmodern penchant for fragmentation is rejected. It attempts intimate and integrated forms of development that by-pass the rather stultifying conception of the horizontally zoned and large-platted city. This liberates an interest in the street and civic architecture as arenas of sociality. It also permits new ways of thinking about the relation between work and living, and facilitates an ecological dimension to design that goes beyond superior environmental quality as a consumer good. It pays attention to the thorny problem of what to do with the profligate energy requirements of the automobile-based form of urbanization and suburbanization that has predominated in the United States since World War II. Some see it as a truly revolutionary force for urban change in the United States today.

"But there are problems with materializing this utopian vision. The movement presumes that America is 'full of people who long to live in real communities,but who have only the dimmest idea of what that means in terms of physical design' (Kunstler, 1996). Community will rescue us from the deadening world of social dissolution, grab-it-yourself materialism, and individualized selfish market-oriented greed. But what kind of 'community' is understood here? Harking back to a mythological past of small-town America carries its own dangerous freight. The new urbanism connects to a facile contemporary attempt to transform large and teeming cities, so seemingly out of control, into an interlinked series of 'urban villages' where, it is believed, everyone can relate in a civil and urbane fashion to everyone else. In Britain, Prince Charles has led the way on this emotional charger towards 'the urban village' as the locus of urban regeneration. Leon Krier, an oft-quoted scion of the new urbanism, is one of his key architectural outriders. And the idea attracts, drawing support from marginalized ethnic populations, impoverished and embattled working-class populations left high and dry through deindustrialization, as well as from middle- and upper-class nostalgics who think of it as a civilized form of real-estate development encompassing sidewalk cafes, pedestrian precincts, and Laura Ashley shops.

"The darker side of this communitarianism remains unstated. The spirit of community has long been held as an antidote to threats of social disorder, class war and revolutionary violence (More pioneered such thinking). Well-founded communities often exclude, define themselves against others, erect all sorts of keep-out signs (if not tangible walls), internalize surveillance, social controls, and repression. Community has often been a barrier to, rather than facilitator of, social change. The founding ideology of the new urbanism is both utopian and deeply fraught. In its practical materialization, the new urbanism builds an image of community and a rhetoric of place-based civic pride and consciousness for those who do not need it, while abandoning those that do to their 'underclass' fate. Most of the projects that have materialized are 'greenfield' developments for the affluent (including, of course, Prince Charles's own venture in the construction of Pound bury in Dorset, Plate 8.25). They help make the suburbs or the ex-urbs better places to live (Langdon, 1994). But they do little or nothing to help revitalize decaying urban cores. [Vincent] Scully (1994), a sceptical ally of the movement, doubts if the new urbanism can ever get to the crux of urban impoverishment and decay. In commenting on Seaside, that icon of the new urbanism, he notes that it has 'succeeded beyond any other work of architecture in our time ... in creating an image of community, a symbol of human culture's place in nature's vastness' (the same is now being said, by the way, of Prince Charles's Poundbury). But, Scully continues:

"[O]ne cannot help but hope that the lessons of Seaside and of the other new towns now taking shape can be applied to the problem of housing for the poor. That is where community is most needed and where it has been most disastrously destroyed. Center city would truly have to be broken down into its intrinsic neighborhoods if this were to take place within it. Sadly, it would all have been much easier to do before Redevelopment, when the basic structure of neighborhoods was still there ... It is therefore a real question whether 'center city' as we know it can ever be shaped into the kind of place most Americans want to live in." (229)

The presumption here is that neighborhoods are in some sense 'intrinsic,' that the proper form of cities is some 'structure of neighborhoods,' that 'neighborhood' is equivalent to 'community' and 'community' is what most Americans want and need (whether they know it or not). It is further presumed that action at the scale defined by this new urbanism is effective and sufficient to solve problems that exist at all other scales. The nostalgic and spatially limited strain of the utopian dream resurfaces." [Illustration - Plate 8.25 Poundbury, Dorset. Prince Charles has led the way in a movement that calls for the construction of 'urban villages' as a solution to big city problems. He has put these ideals to work on one of his own estates close to Dorchester, and constructed a high density neighborhood appealing to the nostalgia of vernacular styles and small-town intimacies that were supposed to characterize a bygone era]."

New villaging: Utopian, religious, intentional communities

cf Dolores Hayden (2003), Building Suburbia, on the origins and preeminent influence of 'communitarian' movements in 19th Century US upon broad shift to suburban development. She argues that this was the dominant cultural precedent, rather than British Evangelist movement and such factors focused on in Fishman's Bourgeoise Utopias (1993). But, like almost any lineage of cultural influence, many things entwine and influence is hard to definitively determine.

New villaging: anarchism, Kropotkin, soviets, worker units.

n.b. 'soviet' is a Russian term for a collectivized agricultural village or other production unit.

thus, top-down villaging, you might say.

Dome Village, LA

1993-2006.

Hayes, Ted. "History of JHUSA" [Justiceville/Homeless, USA - i.e. Dome City, Los Angeles]. http://www.tedhayes.us/domevillage/JHUSA.html

Justiceville/Homeless, USA (2001). "A Look at Dome Village." Dome Village Booklet Publication, Issue 3, July 2001.

http://domevillage.us/a-look-at-dome-village/.

Dome Village (Justiceville II), downtown Los Angeles,1993-2006

Founder and housing activist Ted Hayes was friends with Craig Chamberlain, architect and student/friend of Buckminster Fuller, who proposed creating dome dwellings on the site. Chamberlain also apparently had experience with fabricating fiberglass surfboards, and this informed his design of the Omni-Sphere dwellings at Dome Village, made of polyester fiberglass panels bolted together.  

Mr. Lod Cook, the then President and Chairperson of the Board of the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) which contributed $250,000 to initiate the Dome Village said of it at the opening ceremony on November 3, 1993, “The most innovative concept addressing homelessness in at least the last 50 years.”

The 20 20’+12’ apex omni-sphere domes of that made up the village on 11/4 aces lot in downtown, Los Angeles, was invented by Craig Chamberlain, a US Military, Vietnam combat  Veteran and ardent disciple-student, as well as personal friend of the late, R. Buckminister Fuller.

A wealthy property owner, Mr. David Adams, met with Ted, and so understood the immediate and long term resolution to chronic, sidewalk, encampment homelessness, became his business credibility partner; along with LA Mayor Richard Riordan who led the cities Planning Department, to permit the omni-spheres as legal, temporary, transitional structures for so said purposes.

Dignity Village, Portland

particularly strong articulation of cultural & ecological meanings of 'village'.

interview/features: Ibrahim Mubarek, Mark Lakeman

uniqueness: perhaps first US permanent city-sanctioned, resident-established village

Dignity Village's [web] site: https://dignityvillage.org.

Gragg, Randy. "Guerrilla City." Architecture, May 2002. https://saveferalhumanhabitat.wordpress.com/2002/12/27/guerrilla-city-a-homeless-settlement-in-portland-has-its-own-government-urban-plan-and-skyline/:

“In its ‘permasite’ configuration, Dignity Village could potentially be a working model for a new type of truly sustainable, high density and mixed use, organically developing urban village model. If developed according to Dignity Villages wishes, the village would enhance Portland’s reputation as being the most green city in America. ... Dignity Village hopes to become a demonstration site for solar and wind power, permaculture, environmental restoration, stormwater and greywater reuse and innovative use of recycled materials and alternative building techniques for construction.”

References

What are villages not like?

Another way to approach the question of what villages are -- or really, symbolize -- is to consider the post- or non-village experiences people have had historically, and do have now contemporarily. Which also bears on the questions of why we have mass homelessness, and why 'village' housing isn't suited only to, nor appeals only to, the houseless or marginalized.

Actual village/rural life may not have been much like the archetype

Stadtluft macht frei[1] ("urban air makes you free") - the city/town as a realm of freedom, in German, Hanseatic, post-Norman Conquest English regimes.

After the village: mass scale, inorganic community, fractured/partial acquaintance.

from Gemeinschaft to Geschellschaft

Ferdinand Tönnies

Goldsmith's "The Deserted Village" (1770).

Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903),

individuation, atomization, interactions mediated by many & impersonal mechanisms (market, bureaucracy.)

In "The Fin-de-Siècle Homeless City", focusing on New York City in the late 19th century, Webb [2014]:

"The concerns with the city were not mere fictive backdrops for a good story. They represented an incipient turn to bourgeois reform in the face of modernization. Activists eventually began to acknowledge that bucolic small-town life and the sense of community that was supposedly lost with its waning could never overtake the city—too many forces of capital, migration, rationalization, and technological innovation made such a return impossible.

"The Christian home ideal, which fostered the family as the last remnant of a collapsed Gemeinschaft, would remain the measuring rod for society and that by which the city would be critiqued. Elements of the pastoral and communitarian—thought to best promote the family—would be introduced into the slums to restore order and assimilate the poor laborers overflowing in the slums. The search for order in its legal, spatial, and linguistic senses all sped forward in an often haphazard rush for reforming rationalization. The loss of community and small-town life was considered by bourgeois reformers like Jacob Riis to be a problem of homelessness; the ideal location for the family was lost to the homelessness of the city.

"the problems of overcrowding, cultural hetero- geneity, insufficient privacy for the family, lack of green space, and general urban dirtiness were all considered aspects of homelessness. Journalists and activists considered the city to be the locus of homelessness because it brought these attributes together and because the processes of urbanization undermined older social structures of the small town, which were thought to foster the family."

Housing shifts to more individuated, private/separated (as affluence increases).

Marginalized people & dwellings

In societies and communities generally, many groups of people are marginalized: poor, ill, disabled, indigent, out-grouped, ethnic/racial minorities, foreigners, dissidents, low-caste.

if we consider those "experiencing homelessness," or the houseless, to be merely those who can't afford housing, we'll tend to miss the variety of ways the homelessness reflects marginalization: not only economic poverty but social estrangement ('disaffiliation'), racial discrimination, gender/sexual-orientation discrimination, illness and disability, refugee and immigrant status.

This tends to be so the more conditions are inequitable, disrupted, maladaptive, misgoverned.

Societies + communities always have margins

"The poor will always be with us"

The Bible:

"Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.” Deuteronomy 15:11 NRSV.

"A woman came to him with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment, and she poured it on his head as he sat at the table. But when the disciples saw it, they were angry and said, “Why this waste? For this ointment could have been sold for a large sum, and the money given to the poor.” But Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why do you trouble the woman? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me."  Matthew 26:7-11, NRSV.

"For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always." KJV.

Of course, today as in other points in history it is widely considered a goal of law, policy, and education to assure equal rights and status to groups that have been marginalized or outgrouped: e.g., those of different religious affiliations, racial/ethnic identification, sexual/gender orientation, or all "protected groups" in US law. Nevertheless, this continues to operate in tension with communities' self-definition, with ongoing prejudice, and the many ways segregation and exclusion continue to occur.

Allport on prejudice

Allport, Gordon W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice.

"Everywhere on earth we find a condition of separateness among groups. People mate with their own kind. They eat, play, reside in homogeneous clusters...Much of this automatic cohesion is due to nothing more than convenience...most of the business of life can go on with less effort it we stick together with our own kind." (p.17-18).

"Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each even freshly in its own right." p.20

"Contrary evidence is not admitted and allowed to modify the generalization; rather it is perfunctorily acknowledged but excluded. Let us call this the 're-fencing' device. When a fact cannot fit into a mental field, the exception is acknowledged, but the field is hastily fenced in again and not allowed to remain dangerously open." p.23.

"the very act of affirming our way of life often leads us to the brink of prejudice." p.24

Nightingale on global history of segregation

Nightingale. Segregation: A Global History.

Diversity of state, status, means, needs, preferences

Immigration, mobile work, disaster/disruption

where housing provision is poor and segregation/exclusion greater, larger portions of people are marginalized to poorly located, substandard, overcrowded, or informal housing.

Today, anti-gentrification view that disadvantaged communities should have more right to exclude. (exclude development, or newcomers, or types of people?).

Gentrification & the new revanchist city of elites:

Villages are distinctly not like, and chosen over, conventional homeless shelters

(Loftus-Farren, 2011).

5.  Mobile dwelling: the path of Abel

Camps & informal villages are typically seen, especially in the most modernized and wealthy nations, as distinct from and not convertible into legal, permanent housing - and by implication, as substandard. They may be so, or begin so, in the US in a descriptive or legal sense, but if we take a wider global and historical view, we can see that much of all human dwelling and dwellings, from prehistory to the present, could be called temporary or transitional, and it isn't necessarily non-legal, substandard, or marginalized. Also, the concept of "permanent housing" even today is ambiguous, as it could refer to building types, types of tenure, or types of entitlement to or sustainability/ inalienability of housing.To assume buildings, land-uses, tenures need be 'permanent' to be legitimate is constrictive, maladaptive, ahistorical, ethnocentric, & future-fragile.

Varieties of nomadic dwelling 

Schoenauer

Even separation of workplace & home is type of mobile living.

Cain and Abel: fixed vs mobile as ancient, archetypal, opposition.

J.B. Jackson,

The battle between fixed and mobile: from Cain and Able to today

Historical and archetypal patterns of

Cain and Abel story:

Allen, John J. (2011). "The Mixed Economies of Cain and Abel: An Historical and Cultural Approach." Conversations with the Biblical World, Vol 31. https://www.academia.edu/5122071/The_Mixed_Economies_of_Cain_and_Abel_An_Historical_and_Cultural_Approach.

Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. "The Mobile Home, and how it came to America." in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (1984).

Hailey, Charlie (2003). "Camp(site): architectures of duration and place." Ph.D dissertation, University of Florida, 2003. https://archive.org/details/campsitearchitec00hail.

Vagrancy

Vagrancy as a society-wide, formalized concept and subject of criminalization is usually traced to 14th Century Europe, most clearly in England during and after the time of Great Plague.

Mobility isn't necessarily marginal: journeymen, nobles, wealthy

Camps, settlements, waystations, boarding houses, hotels.

Car camps (1930s), mobile home/RV parks, rest areas, state parks, BLM / NPS.

Community First! Village, Austin, particularly integrates mobile, RV park forms.

Modern / regulatory-state view: land use / dwelling form fully determined in advance

by authority, before 'development' of the site. Usually changeable only by a powerful land-owner/developer. Counter-cases: mobile park preservation, tenant protections, area-wide upzoning, allowing owners to upbuild & add ADUs, hyperlocalism,  

Variety of permanence in building forms.

Sustainability/resilience

the degree to which buildings are likely sustainable, and to what extent built and operated to be usable after predicted disasters like earthquakes or wildfire, also in effect limit their 'permanence'.

Tenure and precarity

Many people's housing is precarious because of having few to no tenant rights, little financial or income security, & perhaps little protection from catastrophe.  

3.x contemporary 'village' usage often partakes of these dwelling patterns of temporary / transitional. Dignity Village, Opportunity Village, Seattle's LIHI Villages.

What is 'permanent' dwelling?

Perhaps a permanent voucher,or vehicle dwelling you own, is better than rental permanent housing.

6.  Exclusion, incarceration, exploitation: Cain's response

carceral containment

[image: SF, Fulton Street Mall, tents contained by metal barriers, April 2020]

Vagrancy laws

Workhouses, work farms. Punitive public housing.

Banishment, trans-shipment (e.g. to colonies).

Homeless shelters

Fears of homeless advocates: criminalization, transcarceration, FL

Immigrant detention camps; internment camps.

"The Positive Functions of Poverty" (Gans).  

Homelessness as constitutive (defining, necessary) for housedness (Feldman).

Social control of the labor reserve army. (Piven & Cloward)

Opportunistic disaster response - GW Bush, Trump

Slum housing is a profitable endeavor.

'Renter Nation' - refeudalization - bifurcation of owners & renters /UK

"Homeless industrial complex," prison / detention-center complex.

Willse, 2015.

Housing standards (& perhaps socio-economic rights) as exclusionary mechanisms.

In the US, most responses to homelessness are at least partly exclusionary, in that they don't offer to all in need even a baseline of dwelling rights or support.

7.  Ambivalent containment: response pattern 2

[image:  workingman's housing, public housing with rules]

Old Poor Laws

in a sense provided for everybody, but inadequately (some places too poor to support indigent), selectively by indigent vs able; & preventing freedom of motion.

Ghettos, trader/foreigner zones

Asylums, places of refuge

Skid rows, refugee camps

Nel Anderson.

Don Mitchell - discussion of political/organizing role of hobo camps.

Public & early social housing, settlement houses

Informal self-build housing. Colonias in the US.

[+ critiques, e.g. Ward, Roy]

Homeless encampments  

de facto tolerated, or 'sanctioned' temporary

see main article: Homeless encampments

Transitional & shelter villages

Nickelsville, SHARE/Wheel, Seattle

SafeGround Sacramento

Low Income Housing Institute, Seattle

Quixote Village, Olympia WA

see main article, Quixote Village.

Opportunity Village, Eugene OR

created by Andrew Heben / SquareOne Villages.  

Parr, Evanie and Rankin, Sara (2018). "It Takes a Village: Practical Guide for Authorized Encampments." Seattle University Homeless Rights Advocacy Project, May 3, 2018. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3173224.

 

Village of Hope, Portland

Schmid,  Thacher. "A New Self-Managed Homeless Village Just Sprang Up in Northeast Portland." ["The 'Village of Hope' Sits on City-Owned Land, and Is the First Such Community to Emerge Under Mayor Ted Wheeler"].

Portland Mercury, Jan 28, 2018.

https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2018/01/28/19638240/a-new-self-managed-homeless-village-just-sprang-up-in-northeast-portland

Harbarger, Molly. "Police sweep new homeless camp, Village of Hope." The Oregonian. Feb 02, 2018

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/02/police_sweep_new_homeless_camp.html.

Elia, Cory. "Keeping hope alive: seeking answers for the future." PSU Vanguard, March 16, 2018. http://psuvanguard.com/keeping-hope-alive-the-eviction/

Elia, Cory.  "City of Portland threatens houseless advocates with fines." PSU Vanguard, April 13, 2018. https://psuvanguard.com/city-of-portland-threatens-houseless-advocates-with-fines/.

Kenton Women's Village, Portland

interview/feature: Sarah Iannarone, members of Lents occupation

Communitecture page on Kenton Women's Village

http://www.communitecture.net/kenton-womens-village.html

Petteni, Marta and Leickly, Emily, "Kenton Women’s Village Update and Survey" (2019). Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative Publications and Presentations. 10. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/hrac_pub/10.

Clackamas County Veteran's Village

Agape Village

Tim's photo album on Agape Village: https://photos.app.goo.gl/dTejKWH39fKi4T859.

Shelter designs after the POD Iniative:  how users, villages, and builders have modified or chosen/developed different designs, and why.

Hazelnut Grove 2.0

Cascadia Clusters.

Clackamas Veteran's Village

Agape Village, Portland

8.  Assimilation: response pattern 3

Almshouses, asylums, caravanserai - religious missions

Traveller stopping sites, rest areas, Sailors Homes

UK Caravan Act

Urban camping (e.g. in Great Depression), allowing encampments,

Pu’uhonua (place of refuge, in Hawai'ian culture); ancient & contemporary.

Pu’uhonua o Waianae is the name of a community of unhoused residents near the town of Waianae, 30 miles from Honolulu. "Starting as a houseless encampment, Pu'uhonua o Wai'anae has become a full blown community and transitional shelter serving all those who need help."

Barney, Liz. "Hawaii's largest homeless camp: rock bottom or a model refuge?" ["Long America’s vacation paradise, Hawaii is in a state of emergency as it battles a homelessness crisis. Could Pu’uhonua safe zones help alleviate the problem?"]. The Guardian, 22 June 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/22/hawaii-homeless-camps-puuhonua-safe-zones. https://www.facebook.com/puuhonuaowaianae/

The organizers of Pu’uhonua o Waianae invoked a traditional concept in Hawai'ian culture of "Pu'uhonua," meaning "place of refuge," the best known of which is preserved at Pu'uhonua o Hōnaunau National Park on the west coast of Hawai'i island (big island).

A fugitive who had broken kapu (sacred law) could seek refuge and forgiveness within the walls of the Pu'uhonua. In addition, in the event that war was declared, families of combatants could seek refuge and safety within the Pu'uhonua. [NPS 2015].

Pu‘uhonua o Hōnaunau National Park, Hawai'i. NPS photo.

"Pu'uhonua o Hōnaunau is an important Hawaiian ceremonial site bounded on its southern and eastern sides by a massive L-shaped wall, known as the Great Wall, and on its northern and western sides by the ocean. In addition to the Great Wall, within the Pu'uhonua are several other important ceremonial structures including the Hale o Keawe, 'Āle'ale'a Heiau, and the Ancient Heiau.

"In ancient Hawai'i a system of laws known as kānāwai enforced the social order. Certain people, places, things, and times were sacred -- they were kapu, or forbidden. Kapu regulated fishing, planting, and the harvesting of other resources. Any breaking of kapu disturbed the stability of society, and the punishment was often death. Any fugitive who had broken kapu (sacred law) could seek refuge and forgiveness within the walls of the Pu'uhonua. In addition, in the event that war was declared, families of combatants could seek refuge and safety within the Pu'uhonua and be assured to return home unmolested on cessation of battle regardless of the outcome. Although many pu'uhonua existed in ancient Hawai'i, Pu'uhonua o Hōnaunau is the best preserved and most dramatic given the extent of its monumental architecture.

"The concept of refuge in Hawai'i is an ancient one, with roots found in the larger Polynesian culture. Traditional accounts indicate that a ruling chief of a kingdom could declare certain lands or heiau (sacred structures) as pu'uhonua, and as long as they retained undisputed power these designations would remain in force. Unfortunately no absolute chronology exists for dating the original establishment of Pu'uhonua o Hōnaunau. However, rough estimates can be made based on genealogies and traditional accounts. Some have indicated that the Pu'uhonua may have originally been established by 'Ehu kai malino, ruling chief of Kona, around 450 years ago."

- National Parks Service. "Pu'uhonua o Hōnaunau." Last updated 28 February, 2015; accessed 24 May 2020. https://www.nps.gov/puho/learn/historyculture/puuhonua-o-honaunau.htm.

Photo tour: https://www.nps.gov/puho/.

Hotels, boarding houses, "municipal dorms"; shared, congregate, collective housing.

Full integration

Likewise, in social practices towards the marginalized, there is often a goal or ideal of total integration -- for example, "supportive housing" / "Housing First" models for the formerly chronic, addicted/disabled homeless whereby housing "scatter site" amid and indistinguishable in form or practices from mainstream rental housing. Or regulated-affordable buildings, or Inclusionary housing units, that are by design or by law indistinguishable in form from contemporary market housing; or the use of vouchers or rent assistance whereby poor/disadvantaged households might rent any home they choose can be afforded (and at which the landlord accepts them, which may not be legally or socially assured).

Opposing the ideal of full integration for all there are, of course, various practices whereby some groups are deemed to require separation -- most obviously, the seriously ill, or violent criminals, but also any people segregated away by the more powerful, which as Nightingale observes in Segregation: A Global History

Social housing

Housing First & scatter-site supportive housing

"All types and conditions of men"

Housing as a human right?

Universal rent assistance

appears to include all, except only applies to certain range of low-income, and it tends not to address the problem of housing being scarce where needed.

Housing For All, Minimum Dwelling / Existenzminimum

Most societies don't have enough shared prosperity and tradition of political equality to readily support mass social housing like Vienna. Compare USSR, PRC China, Japan.

Nationally administered programs have often been hard to do well, or to adapt / maintain. E.g US, UK, France, South Africa, USSR, Soviet Bloc, China.  

Villages as urban developers: the curious case of Shenzhen and Malaysian kampung

The "appropriate technology" viewpoint comes from observing situations of global disparity, where colonized or underdeveloped countries are marginalized relative to a globalized power, trade, and technology system.

We can also relate this to various ways societies handle or accommodate marginalized people internally -- the poorest, suppressed racial or religious or caste groups; the ill, disabled, indigent, and outcast

There is one viewpoint that the marginalized society or sub-society should be integrated and made equal -- for example by exerting equal rights to self-determination, fair trade and distribution of resources, and attainment of similar fully 'adequate' (eg in international law terms) economic and social conditions. This we could roughly associate with the "modernization" paradigm as described in international development.

In contrast to and polemical opposition to this, the appropriate technology paradigm sees equal development and techno-social practices as not yet and possibly never attainable in some places, and also perhaps in any case inappropriate and undesirable, by imposing uniform and foreign practices on societies not well served by them.

9. Positive marginality: response pattern 4

homesteading, cultural identity/project, (re)claiming, community creation, counter-dominant building

[from May 20 comment to Graham Pruss on FB]:

For 2 years I lived at or perhaps more accurately was based at, a warehouse facility in West Oakland, called variously Containertopia or Corrugate Underground. This in part included, and was a building/hosting site for, various movable dwellings including the Houslets prototypes in which I lived; trailers, RVs, container conversions, stick-built tiny houses on wheels, etc.  

This site and community had and has a fairly fluid relationship and boundary with the "public space" or "public parking" outside. The warehouse space is largely open at one end, so it is something like an open air space or galleria in itself. Also sometimes people would live outside in various types of dwellings or vehicles, and informally or formally arrange to use facilities in the warehouse such as bathrooms or maker facilities.

Sometimes people would move a vehicle residence into the warehouse from nearby or outside or stopping in while travelling, or move one from inside to outside street parking.There was flexible rent levels for such varying accommodations, and varying people.

Also, people based at the warehouse experimented with placing container-conversion or RV units on the  street as rental & short-term-rental dwellings. This practice, a form of which is referred to in Seattle pejoratively but perhaps accidentally insightfully as "RV ranching", proved economically & culturally viable in this environment.

This far West Oakland RV ranch and homesite attracted various types and condition of dweller. Including, entertainingly, international travellers drawn variously to this cheap alternative to San Francisco's outrageously expensive and scarce hotels -- The original impetus for founding of Airbnb – – the highly convenient location one BART stop from San Francisco financial district, and l/or of course the transgressive, underground, self-determinative & pirate-utopia autonomous vibe, and transgression opportunities, long since largely fled from San Francisco.

It was an amazing experience as well as pragmatic solution for me, arguable a good case of what in my book project Village Buildings I call "positive marginality," in contrast to 3 other marginal states in my typology:
1. exclusion/transcarceration - Cain's response to Abel's gift.
2. ambivalent/temporary accommodation;
3. assimilation.

I argue that the "positive marginality" modality has been under- to dis-regarded by academic research on such dwelling, perhaps in part because academic researchers are unlikely to directly experience, or have experienced, the conditions/necessity of such survival self-determination and self-building -- though such is globally & historically quite normal, among even their forebears, and global brothers and sisters.

This radically inclusive situation and place might well be described by the title of one of the most interesting Victorian 'slum' fictions, Walter Besant's All Types and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story, 1882. Set in London's East End --  somewhat like West Oakland could be seen as an East End of San Francisco, and like east ends and East of Edens of cities all over the world.

[/ Facebook comment]

This history of such tensions goes very deep into history and prehistory, into humankind's prehistoric -- yet in some places is still occurring -- transitions to or tension between, varieties of nomadic life, and imposition or opportunity of settled life.

Let's consider a glancing outline and quick roam over the long cultural history of the mobile versus the settled, and particularly those expressions embraced by the less settled.

1. The Cain and Abel story, its Hebrew scriptural and apocryphal expressions, and earlier Mesopotamian roots; and the interpretive tradition viewing it as in part  an anthropological/folk depiction of ancient conflict between nomadic and agricultural peoples of the Middle East.

2. Ascetic,religious, literary theme: exile, spirit quest: Vamalkirti, Chomei, Thoreau

Vimalakirti

Vimalakīrti (Sanskrit: विमल vimala "stainless, undefiled" + कीर्ति kīrti "fame, glory, reputation") is the central figure in the Vimalakirti Sutra, which presents him as the ideal Mahayana Buddhist upāsaka ("lay practitioner") and a contemporary of Gautama Buddha (6th to 5th century BCE). --Wikipedia, "Vimalakirti", accessed 26 June 2020).

Vimalakirti is the wisest of men, and fabulously wealthy, yet lives by himself in a simple hut, where he called upon by princes and people from all around, seeking counsel and wisdom:

The Lord...said to the venerable Sariputra, 'Sariputra, go to inquire after the illness of the Licchavi Vimalakirti.'

Thereupon, the venerable Sariputra had this thought: 'There is not even a single chair in this house. Where are these disciples and bodhisattvas going to sit?'

The Licchavi Vimalakirti read the thought of the venerable Sariputra and said, 'Reverend Sariputra, did you come here for the sake of the Dharma? Or did you come here for the sake of a chair?'

from: Vimalakirti. Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra, translated by Robert A. F. Thurman. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. https://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln260/Vimalakirti.htm

Vimalakirti's famous humble hut is the archetype of a rich Buddhist tradition, in scripture and literature and practice, of the small hut or cell as symbol and dwelling of reflective wisdom. Related figures of ascetic dwelling and wisdom are found in many other cultural traditions as well -- for example, in Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, John the Baptist dwelling in the desert, Jesus and Mohammed living in seclusion or wandering, etc.

Chomei

"Kamo no Chōmei (鴨 長明, 1153 or 1155-1216) was a Japanese author, poet, and essayist. He witnessed a series of natural and social disasters, and, having lost his political backing, was passed over for promotion within the Shinto shrine associated with his family. He decided to turn his back on society, took Buddhist vows, and became a hermit, living outside the capital. This was somewhat unusual for the time, when those who turned their backs on the world usually joined monasteries. Along with the poet-priest Saigyō he is representative of the literary recluses of his time, and his celebrated essay Hōjōki ("An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut") is representative of the genre known as 'recluse literature' (sōan bungaku)." -- Wikipedia (En). "Kamo no Chōmei."

Thoreau

The 19th Century poet, naturalist, essayist, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (XX-XX) is perhaps the contemporarily best-known (in the US) icon and depictor of this "tiny house" wisdom depiction, with his book Walden. [add full name and publication year: Walden, or Life in the Woods (1851) ?].

Thoreau had read extensively and was lifelong interested in Indian philosophy, religions, and cultures, and it is thought [citation?] he was probably familiar with the Vimalakirti Sutra and subsequent related works in Buddhist and Japanese tradition, though he doesn't specifically reference it in Walden.

Settlement; Utopian, religious, intentional communities, ministry,

The 'Basiliad' or New City - founded by St. Basil in Asian Minor, present-day central Turkey in the 4th Century C.E.. Considered the first 'asylum' or hospital.

Squatting, occupation, hobo culture

Cooperative housing

Bohemianism, gentrification

Self-help / Self-build housing, incremental building

 ("housing from the bottom up),

Harris, Richard (1999). "Slipping through the Cracks: The Origins of Aided Self-help Housing, 1918-53." Housing Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, 281-309, 1999.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard_Harris39/publication/248960570_Slipping_through_the_Cracks_The_Origins_of_Aided_Self-help_Housing_1918-53/links/584845a808ae61f75de350c1/Slipping-through-the-Cracks-The-Origins-of-Aided-Self-help-Housing-1918-53.pdf.

developing economies - "self build" tradition, "housing as a verb" (J.F.C. Turner), cycle of applying back to more-developed countries.

Ward, P., and G. C. Macoloo (1992). "Articulation theory and self-help housing practice in the 1990s." Urban Studies 16 (1): 60-80. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xe68jbph5H1MkFNrlklWjEcGeJcWMRO9.

Abstract

"Explores the proposition that many aspects of self-help housing practices are being undermined by the penetration of capital accumulation processes at the urban periphery of Third World cities. Specifically, the authors investigate the ways in which different modes of housing production may be articulated - economically, politically and ideologically. Drawing upon evidence in two principal locations (Mexico and Kenya), they analyse the methods and costs of land acquisition by low-income groups, and the production and consumption of building materials for self-help construction. The authors conclude by identifying ways to restore a dialogue between those academics interested primarily in critical theory and housing production, and those researchers and practitioners who are more concerned with policy formulation and implementation."

Walter Segal - Segal Self-Build Housing System - Lewisham, London.

State-aided Self-help housing

Harris, Richard (1999). "Slipping through the Cracks: The Origins of Aided Self-help Housing, 1918-53." Housing Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, 281-309, 1999.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard_Harris39/publication/248960570_Slipping_through_the_Cracks_The_Origins_of_Aided_Self-help_Housing_1918-53/links/584845a808ae61f75de350c1/Slipping-through-the-Cracks-The-Origins-of-Aided-Self-help-Housing-1918-53.pdf.

Middle East - Hassan Fathy

UK - Walter Segal self-build method - council housing, Lewisham, LondonUS community/occupation housing 1960s-mobile/temporary vs permanent housing;  emergency response vs permanent rebuilding

J.B. Jackson; Ian Davis "Shelter After Disaster" 1978.

the Principle of Requisite VarietyBhatt, Vikram, et al. "How the Other Half Builds - Vol 3: The Self-Selection Process." Centre for Minimum Cost Housing, McGill University, Research Paper No. 11, March 1990. https://www.mcgill.ca/mchg/files/mchg/how_the_other_half_builds_ssp.pdf.

Hamdi, Nabeel. 1995. Housing without Houses: Participation, Flexibility, Enablement.  Warwickshire: Practical Action Publishing (formerly Intermediate Technology Publications), The Schumacher Centre, 1995. https://www.scribd.com/document/364607734/hamdi-nabeel-housing-without-houses-participation-flexibility-enablement.

Hamdi, Nabeel (2004). Small Change: About the art of practice and the limits of planning in cities. London: Earthscan, 2004. https://www.scribd.com/document/363933988/320473408-Hamdi-Small-Change-pdf.

Kapur, Purnima. "From Ideas to Practice: 'Self-Help' in Housing From Interpretation to Application." M.S. Architecture Studies and M.C.P. thesis, MIT, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/75537.  [advisor: Nabeel Hamdi].

Holtzman, Ben.  "When the Homeless Took Over." ["As the homeless and affordable housing crises become a focus on local and national campaigns, we must remember the rich history and critical contributions of homeless organizers."] Shelterforce, October 11, 2019

https://shelterforce.org/2019/10/11/when-the-homeless-took-over/.

Roy, Ananya (2003). “Paradigms Of Propertied Citizenship: Transnational Techniques of Analysis,” Urban Affairs Review, vol. 38, no. 4 (2003): 463–91. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1078087402250356. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1e0iX1kzxDQ-6lGB9_851exaMiuRCfHRx.

"Abstract: The American paradigm of propertied citizenship has far-reaching consequences for the propertyless, as in the brutal criminalization of the homeless. Activist groups, such as the anarchist squatter organization Homes Not Jails, have sought to challenge this paradigm through innovative techniques of property takeovers, invocations of American traditions of homesteading, and Third World tactics of self-help and informality. This study trains a transnational lens on both the paradigm and its subversions. Posing Third World questions of the First World, the author seeks to unsettle the normalized hierarchy of development and underdevelopment and explores lessons that can be learned from different modes of shelter struggles."

Intermediate & appropriate technologies - Schumacher

work of Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, whose theoretical framework of “intermediate technologies,” now known as “appropriate technologies,” gives the most concise and explicit approach to this type of project (Schumacher 1973).

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher advocates for developing a design with low capital costs, which uses local or found materials, keeping with grassroots decision making, working collectively, rather than relying upon individual efforts, the allowance for user control, supporting community empowerment and economic self-sufficiency (Schumacher 1973, 167-168).

The concept of intermediate/appropriate technology is, in a sense, to integrate indigenism with present technological/industrial capabilities. It considers the resources of a society and community holistically, for example recognizing levels of skills, education, capital, and social organization, and what kinds of technology and development may be best able to produce equitable, sustainable outcomes.

In this context, techno-social practices such as advanced machinery and grid utilities may widely improve life quality, but they may also support inequity and disempowerment, for example if extractive industries are developed and controlled for the benefit of local or foreign elites.

Of course, part of the point is that appropriate technology practices probably would be advisable in any situation, not just in 'developing' countries.

Ivan Illich - convivial tools

Communes, cooperatives, Community Architecture, Community Development Housing

CDCs CDHO - tradition since 1960s, pedagogical & social-cognitive (Ruskin, etc!) perspectives.

Wates, Nick, and Charles Knevitt (1987). Community Architecture: How People Are Creating Their Own Environment. Penguin UK, 1987.

(Excerpts / Tim's notes: https://photos.app.goo.gl/jJhUdzwXrw68vcqH6).

DeFilippis, James, and Susan Saegert (2012). The Community Development Reader (2nd edition, Routledge 2012).

Frisch, Michael, and Lisa J. Servon (2006). "CDCs and the Changing Context for Urban Community Development: A Review of the Field and the Environment." Community Development: Journal of the Community Development Society, Vol. 37, No. 4, Winter 2006. http://www.thecyberhood.net/documents/papers/servon.pdf.

Immerwahr, Daniel (2018).  Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development. Harvard University Press, 2015.

O’Regan, K. M., Quigley, J. M. (2000). Federal Policy and the Rise of Nonprofit Housing Providers.

Journal of Housing Research, 11(2): 297-317. https://urbanpolicy.berkeley.edu/pdf/OQ_JHR00PB.pdf.

Ryder, Marianne. "USP528 - Concepts of Community Development" [course syllabus, Portland State University, Winter 2019].  https://www.pdx.edu/usp/sites/www.pdx.edu.usp/files/USP%20Syllabi/USP528%20Syllabus%20Winter%202019rev2.pdf.

Simon, William H. (2002).  The Community Economic Development Movement: Law, Business, and the New Social Policy. Duke University Press, 2002.  $5.11

Stoecker, R. (1997). "The CDC Model of Urban Redevelopment: A Critique and an Alternative." Journal of Urban Affairs, 19(1): 1-22.  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9906.1997.tb00392.x. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AWgx3fj3cB2gPd33qq2EUKLfDU41-yQt.

Abstract:

"This paper questions the viability of an urban redevelopment model that relies on small communiry development corporations (CDCs) and proposes an alternative. Because most CDCs are severely undercapitalized, they can not keep up with accelerating decay. Their existence, and the emphasis placed on their supposed successes, allow elites to blame poor neighborhood CDCs rather than external conditions for redevelopment failure. The model also emphasizes that CDCs be community-based, but because their resource base is controlled from outside the neighborhood there is really very little community control over CDCs. CDCs may even delegitimize more empowerment-focused community organizing attempts by making them appear radical. Consequently, the CDC development process my actually disorganize poor communities by creating internal competition or disrupting social networks. An alternative model of neighborhood redevelopment is proposed which emphasizes community organizing, community-controlled planning, and high-capacity multi-local CDCs held accountable through a strong community organizing process."

Vidal, A. (1992). Rebuilding communities: A national study of urban community development corporations.

Community Housing Development can be recuperative

Stoecker,(1997). "CDC Model.. A Critique"

Architecture and participation - Giancarlo di Carlo, et al.

"Non-Plan" tradition

UK - manifesto in the New Statesman ca.1969.

Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Peter Hall, & NS editor.

Situationism, Liminal space / "Terrain vague"

"The concept of terrain vague was first theorized by Ignasi de Sola-Morales in the mid 1990s as a contemporary space of project and design that includes the marginal wastelands and vacant lots that are located outside the city’s productive spaces – which Morales describes as oversights in the landscape that are mentally exterior in the physical interior of the city. Around the same time, the artist and architect collective Stalker defined Terrains Vagues in the plural as spaces of confrontation and contamination between the organic and the inorganic, between nature and artifice that constitute the built city’s negative, the interstitial and the marginal, spaces abandoned by economic forces, or in the process of transformation.

"This book Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale – edited by the architect Manuela Mariani and the professor of English Patrick Barron - seeks to expand on Sola-Morales ideas and to present the terrain vague through a taxonomy of urban empty spaces presented by the authors in the introduction – derelict lands, brownfields, voids, loose spaces, heterotopias, dead zones, urban wilds, counter-sites. The book aims to collectively refine this notion as a central concept of urban planning and design, architecture, landscape architecture, film studies, cultural geography, literature, photography, and cultural studies, looking at possible positive alternatives to the negative images projected into them."

Barron, Patrick, and Manuela Mariani, eds (2014). Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Brighenti, Andrea Mubi, ed. (2013). Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-between. Ashgate Publishing, 2013. ISBN.

Don Mitchell excerpts.

David Harvey - Spaces of Hope (2000) excerpts.

Rediscovering informal, interim, tactical urbanism

Tactical urbanism - City Repair Project

City Repair Project (2006). The City Repair Project’s Placemaking Guidebook. ["Collectively authored and edited"]. 1st edition, 2003; 2nd edition, 2006. License:  Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5. http://docshare04.docshare.tips/files/5331/53315133.pdf.

"When they approached the Portland Office of Transportation (PDOT) about the project, PDOT rejected the idea, ironically telling some of the neighbors, “That’s public space—you can’t use it!” "Later, some individuals from within PDOT approached the residents and told them that the only way to get the City to even consider such an untried idea was to force their hand. The neighbors refined the design and decided to create the “Intersection Repair” without City approval. In September 1996, they arranged for a legal block party street closure on all four radiating streets of the intersection of SE 9th and Sherrett, and they installed the first phase of “Share-It Square.”

"Share-It Square began as a colorful painted circle, connecting the four corners of the intersection. The intention was to mark the crossroads as shared space. With an eye towards the intersection becoming a permanent public square in the future, they included prototypes of such things as an information kiosk and community watering hole (tea serving station) to represent characteristics of traditional public squares.

"Immediately, PDOT sent notification to remove the installation, and threatened to fine the folks involved. The neighborhood group then engaged PDOT and City Council members in dialogue about the project, and set out to prove its value by surveying the neighborhood and observing behavior at the intersection. The resulting survey showed that the vast majority of respondents perceived increases in neighborhood communication and safety and decreases in crime, both important benchmarks for the City of Portland."

"The neighbors made a presentation to City Council, presenting their survey findings as well as a plan for the management and development of Share-It Square. It wasn’t until City officials realized that the project was meeting a host of City livability goals without spending any tax dollars that the project fi nally won City backing. The Council began issuing a series of City ordinances that granted permits to the project, and set out guidelines for similar undertakings to be installed throughout Portland."

From: Burman (2017), "Liminal Dwelling: Support for Street Residents, a Place of Re-integration and Transition." MArch thesis, Dalhousie University:

"The In-Between.

Every city has spaces that can be considered “terrain vague”, which may be defi ned as derelict areas, wastelands or transgressive zones, that are neither slums nor open spaces but instead, are spaces that look empty and appear to have no current use. They may have once been spaces used for industry that are no longer supported by the post-industrial city. They are outside of the city’s formal circuits and structures, and need to fi nd a new use, but in the meantime, sit vacant, waiting for a new use to emerge (Doron 2010, 247). Instead of being viewed as blocked, inactive thresholds, these spaces should be seen as spaces in which to experiment, that is, spaces that may create opportunity for new forms of social interaction and relationships (Mariani and Barron 2014, 57).

    "Space is not a container to be filled with, or to be emptied of, a specific content, space is rather a network of relations activated, rearranged, and made meaningful by human actions (Mariani and Barron 2014, 49)."

Hailey, Charlie (2003). "Camp(site): architectures of duration and place." Ph.D dissertation, University of Florida, 2003. https://archive.org/details/campsitearchitec00hail.

Food-cart culture and form

Food-carts as key paradigm-changer and new unit of urban form, discussed by Palleroni & Cruz on OPB Think Out Loud [Blanchard 2012]).

Blanchard, Dave. [2012]. "Designing for Homelessness." [interview with Linly Bynam, Teddy Cruz, & Sergio Palleroni]. OPB Think Out Loud, October 3rd 2012. https://www.opb.org/radio/programs/thinkoutloud/segment/architecture-homeless/.

MP3: https://www.opb.org/audio/download/?f=tol/segments/2012/100303.mp3.

Tiny House Movement

Tent encampment as site of political agency

10.x Sparks, Tony. "Citizens without property" (2016): "the tent encampment as a site of creative political agency and experimentation."

In design, planning, pedagogical fields

Hazelnut Grove

Village Coalition

interview/feature: Vahid Brown, Village Coalition, Hazelnut Grove

others in OR & elsewhere

Portland State, Center for Public Interest Design

Connecting global practices of informal, community-based, participatory development

Rethinking Shelter project/exhibit, 2012

Teddy Cruz interview

from interview with Teddy Cruz, 2012 Visiting Professor at CPID, on OPB Think Out Loud [Blanchard 2012]:

"I've been interested in documenting many of the, what I call stealth activities that happen in many neighborhoods of immigrants who come and maybe plug an economy into a garage, or maybe build a granny flat that is illegal, just to support an extended family... much of this incredible social and economic entrepreneurship sometimes is not really included in the zoning regulation, and in a sense I've been trying to amplify how this activity in the hands of immigrants comes to retrofit the monoculture and mono-use parcels of many of these older neighborhoods could be the DNA to in fact rethink land use and ultimately housing models.

"So I think that what we are talking about maybe in Portland in the context of these projects and these initiatives is pretty much the same. It may not be immigrants per se, but it's really about the entrepreneurship also of youth, and how their activity can begin to inspire the reorganization of housing models, and here is then when architects come in, maybe not as designers of buildings only, but maybe as designers of interface systems that can begin to enable to very different idea of housing altogather. By that I mean whether it is governance or development or academia, we tend to think of housing only as units of housing, instead of maybe imagining housing as an incubator of economy, or maybe as a catalyst for a kind of cultural and social relations.

"In a sense I've been in trouble with my own field of architecture, because I've been critical of architects who only focus on buildings, Instead I think we really need to begin to understand the broader set of relations. In other words, the future of the city at this moment of crisis depends less on buildings, and more on the reconfiguration of social and economic relations. I think there is a huge potential that Outside In, the agencies that are so progressive, in cities equally progressive as Portland, can begin to lead the way in reimagining what we mean by housing."

Blanchard, Dave. [2012]. "Designing for Homelessness." [interview with Linly Bynam, Teddy Cruz, & Sergio Palleroni]. OPB Think Out Loud, October 3rd 2012. https://www.opb.org/radio/programs/thinkoutloud/segment/architecture-homeless/.

MP3: https://www.opb.org/audio/download/?f=tol/segments/2012/100303.mp3.

Turner, Jody (2013). "Collaborative Design Tackles Homelessness" ["A group designing innovative support systems in Portland, Ore., is identifying better ways of living for the homeless and for communities at large]. Stanford Social Innovation Review, Jan. 15, 2013. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/collaborative_design_tackles_homelessness. [on Rethinking Shelter project].

Feldman, Roberta M, and Sergio Palleroni, David Perkes, Bryan Bell. "Wisdom From the Field: Public Interest Architecture in Practice." 2013. www.publicinterestdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Wisdom-from-the-Field.pdf.

Ferry, Todd, and Sergio Palleroni. "Research + action: the first two years of the Center for Public Interest Design." in Wortham-Galvin, B.D., editor, Sustainable Solutions: Let Knowledge Serve the City, 2016.

https://www.amazon.com/Sustainable-Solutions-Knowledge-Serve-City/dp/178353396X.

Village Coalition & POD Initiative

Village Coalition meeting at Rebuilding Center, 2019

Village Coalition meeting at Rebuilding Center, 2019

Cross-sector coalition and design, to convene deep community response

POD Initative

Plywood POD Initiative

MADWORKSHOP Homeless Studio, LA

This project closely coincided with POD Initiative and was quite similar in many ways. Comparisons may be instructive, for example how MADWORKSHOP unlike POD Initiative did not explicitly have a pre-specified building code they were building to, or site either actual or hypothetical for program. While POD Initiative did not actually (at least yet) build site or structures for the contemplated users/program (Hazelnut Grove village), the built structures did get used at other sites - Kenton Women's Village, Clackamas County Veteran's Village, and possible others to come. Some already built or to-be-built POD units may be used at the new site in St Johns area to which Hazelnut Grove village plans to relocate -- name to be decided as of late Nov 2019.

Borges, Sofia, and R. Scott Mitchell (2018). Give Me Shelter: Architecture Takes on the Homeless Crisis. ORO Editions, February 1, 2018)

"Give Me Shelter documents the work of the MADWORKSHOP Homeless Studio at the USC School of Architecture and their solutions for tackling the Los Angeles homeless crisis through design, compassion, and humanity. The book features exclusive content from leaders in the field including Michael Maltzan, Ted Hayes, Betty Chinn, Gregory Kloehn, Skid Row Housing Trust, and many more. Paired with a forward by Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, Give Me Shelter provides an in-depth look at how design can bridge the gap in services to get people off the streets and into housing sooner."

10. Permanent villages

see main article, "Permanent villages."

11. Innovation pilots

Meyer Trust - Cost Efficiencies program.

New congregate housing

LISAH - Low Income Single Adult Housing - Transition Projects, Inc

Harbarger, Molly, and Elliot Njus (2019). "Portland banking on low-rent SRO hotels to ease housing problems." The Oregonian, April 27, 2019. https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2019/04/officials-look-to-sro-hotels-as-model-for-low-income-housing.html.

LISAH - Low-Income Single Adult Housing - Transition Projects project with 36 SRO units, also 35 studio apartments in a separate building.

"Lean" manufacturing": REACH CDC - SE PDX project

SquareOne Villages - Cottage Grove Village

Meyer Trust - Million Month Challenge program

Program of Meyer Memorial Trust.

See main article: Million Month Challenge

proposals Fall 2018

awardee projects - updates from Sept 2019

Rob Justus - Home First low-cost affordable housing

LA homelessness Innovation Challenge projects

Boston Office of Housing Innovation

Guerrilla Development - Jolene's First Cousin project

See main article: Jolene's First Cousin.

Co-op/condo villages - Orange Splot, etc
See also main article: Cluster housing.
Cully Grove
Sabin Green
Mason Street Townhomes

12. Living, speaking, writing in public

("Criticism in the Wilderness").

The privilege of taking it off-line: on living and speaking in public, and "writing with strangers."

"IMO most brilliant thing [Judge David] Carter did was 2 hold actual court hearing in parking lot of the Downtown Women's Center (middle of #SkidRow) with gigantic speakers facing the street so that everyone even a block away could hear EVERYTHING that was being said about their own community."
- Katherine, local resident & activist, Los Angeles.

"Taking it offline", I've found, is a common and powerful privilege pattern, at many scales and in many contexts.

The poor and marginalized often have good reasons to prefer speaking/being in public; the privileged, to take it offline, private, F2F (face to face).

The landed & placed incline to landing & place, I've long observed.

So, I have also long suggested, perhaps speaking out of place and above my station, in various public context.

For example, years back, to the head of YIMBY Action, in San Francisco, with whom I long ago worked in early days of SF YIMBY movement.

I would regularly try to respond or discuss things online, publicly (e.g. on Twitter) or semi-publicly (e.g. on the YIMBY Action Slack space), or by email, and get told that I should meet in person to discuss. Meaning, at or near the YIMBY Action office, or where they were. Which would be typically, at least a trip from Oakland and several hours total time, and often, much more difficult or impossible because I might be in the South Bay, Mendocino County, or Portland, etc.

After observing this pattern of response for some time, directed both at me and many others; and experiencing similar from many other people in leadership or high-status positions, I started speaking up about it.

Though considering the risks, I wrote publicly and forthrightful, and so far have left it online in an easily-found public record.

The organization director may never have seen it, or heard it, and I assume they do not have much interest in my views.

However, from my perspective it was and it is far better than I spoke publicly, and on the record, such that now even years later I can go back and learn from it, re-share it; perhaps, once again, only in the face of further and broader silence, but there you are. I go by the (sometimes attributed to Goethe) maxim of: write first for yourself, then for your friends, then for the public. Except, for it something more like: write first in public, to help find who you are, help discover your friends, and eventually perhaps find your writing.

At least in my perspective and long-running experience, privileged and powerful people often in many ways, whether they realize it or not tend to silence and background voices that challenge them or their positions, and/or come from places and people of lower status.

One typical way they do this is to consistently, blithely and maybe even meaning well,, ask people to take it off line and take it face-to-face; and to take it out of public space.

People, perhaps well meaning people ask for and expect personal email responses and a reply to their inquiries and questions, on their timeframe, or only direct in-person meeting or conversation. Often, they evidently don't know or follow all the public, readily findable communication I've made on the subject at hand, which often as in the most recent case I've right in the thread linked them to. (see "#pdxRIP"'

I sometimes suggest, perhaps they could more easily and usefully engage if they looked at this public material first.

Then again, one might ask, why bother writing to people, anytime?  To be frank, increasingly for me it's because I am writing a larger essay or proposal or something partly on the subject, and I often proceed by writing, speaking, or commenting in other contexts, justifying it by the practice of adapting and incorporating material into my own contexts.

In part, I choose to to do this because it feels like the larger, imminent context rarely meaningfully engages or responds; and I don't generally expect it to. I and perhaps most people are mostly "off message", from most people's perspective; and speaking up is often uninvitedly speaking out of place and out of rank..

Or, in any case, I mostly find the public, imminent context or purported goal so unlikely to be responsive to anything I might do that this motive wouldn't really justify getting involved; and I hypothesize this is often true for marginalized people in public processes.

Incidentally, the tendency to not observe or credit possible motives other than the explicit/official focus of discussion is another systematic privilege pattern. Those to the manner & manor born, and effortlessly, unconsciously, fully used to having agency in all matters, are endlessly baffled and frustrated by the fringe groups' & cranks' commotions, diversions, intransigence, non-cooperation, & lack of appropriateness.

From the standpoint of those at the table, steeped in table manners, the gestures of those butting in with stray signals may seem often unconstructive. But the subaltern narratives, and performances, may function to baffle, resist, reframe, reassert narrative control or media representation, help stage a different entry point/role, or often, be designed for other audiences and each other. It might also be largely for fun -- as Saul Alinsky gave as one of the rules for radicals, "A good tactic is one your people enjoy," (#6). Relatedly, #5, "It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage."

Revillaging the Book

with this book project itself, we aim to explore and embody patterns of "village building" as the book studies. Building in and for community as applied to media creation and publishing: participatory, cooperative, incremental, equity-building, network-building, development

Living book: developed incrementally, openly, and ongoingly 

by writing & disseminating articles, gathering feedback, soliciting suggestions for approaches/projects to include, and most usable ways to present.

  STRATEGY: to extent possible, keep developing the project in public wiki, in relatively self-contained sub-topic articles. This means: a) it's never really yet-unpublished, it's just a gradually or steadily improving state.  b) open for others to contribute, ask questions, give feedback;  c) sub-topic articles may be useful for other purposes too, as soon as they're created.  d) a 'book' will be just a certain gathering-point from this material, but overall it can continue developing.

The book-in-progress is a web-hosted living version, on a stable and sustainable and securely-archived (i.e. automatic to Internet Archive) platform, which can collaboratively evolve to include new projects, concepts, research, bibliography.  This living version is noted and linked to from every copy of the book, whether print, ebook, etc.  The living book platform allows open comment and suggestions, and shows current in-process state, and possibly periodic new release versions. (as with software).

 

Ward Cunningham - ideas from Wiki & Federated Wiki

much inspiration from Portlander, inventor of the wiki, Ward Cunningham, who implemented and ran the first wiki ever on a server in Multnomah Village, Portland, nearby where this book has mostly been written.

Cunningham, Ward. "Writing with Strangers." (undated; accessed April 2, 2020). http://ward.bay.wiki.org/writing-with-strangers.html

Cunningham. Ward. Keynote speech at Write the Docs conference, May 19, 2015. http://makecommoningwork.fed.wiki/view/federated-wiki.

patterns model:  I think of as a sort of "modularization of experience".

Kosslyn, Neil. "A modern wiki for a modern internet: the Smallest Federated Wiki on The GovLab’s Demos for Democracy." GovLab Blog, August 15, 2014. http://thegovlab.org/a-modern-wiki-for-a-modern-internet-the-smallest-federated-wiki-on-the-govlabs-demos-for-democracy/.

Community Book concept

Cooperative Product Development paper, 2016

Cooperative funding/development and value sharing

For this "community book" project, we are evolving an experimental 'village' development model, for multiple motivations:

  1. as a way to solicit funding and other contributions, given lack of traditional means to do so;
  2. to try to fairly and effectively incent, credit, and reward those contributions to the project; and
  3. to make the project prefigurative or analogous to the built environment forms we are writing about or wish to see.

This builds on earlier work discussed in "Cooperative Product Development" (notes / paper draft) by Tim McCormick, January 2016, and the concept of a DCO (Distributed Cooperative Organization) in the blockchain world.

How this could work:

1) Keep track of any project contributions made, which can be financial, in-kind work, or anything considered of value to the project.  

2) At some stage, we establish a "Release 1.0" funding/contribution Goal of, say, $50,000 in financial or in-kind contributions. This is chosen as an amount expected to be sufficient to reach a defined completion milestone, i.e. first publication.

3) At this point, all prior and subsequent contributors are offered' equity stakes' i.e. shares, based on the contribution's proportion of the total goal. Any offer/grant of equity would be publicly and immutably recorded (e.g. with some blockchain mechanism, but this may not really be necessary).

4) All contributors are credited in the book & platform, and automatically receive a share of any any future (post-publication) net profits, in proportion to equity stake.

A more sophisticated version of this approach would allow for project equity to be traded or sold under certain conditions, as in a housing cooperative. Project contributors who receive equity stake for work, can potentially have a way to exchange that for (fiat) money, rather than being paid only from future revenue share.

Also, tradeable/convertible equity stakes or tokens might enable other reward mechanisms. For example, tokens may be issued with a planned or demand-driven value increase over time, which may be used to incent early contributions. (e.g., an hour or work or dollar of donation may earn more equity stake near start of project timeline than later on. This may provide more incentive to early contribution, and balance the greater risk/uncertainty of earlier-stage contribution).

[note that In either of the cases above, of equity having resale value or not, the mechanism in theory could be viewed by the US government as a 'security' subject to securities regulations. Compliance would probably be untenable, so the project would need to be designed to avoid risk of this classification. That isn't likely, and the interest here is probably not so much in anyone making notable money, but in exploring a new model for cooperative projects that share credit, resources, and rewards, in order to be more effective and fair].

 

Open / cooperative licensing

Planned licensing is Creative Commons - Attribution, Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC). This means, other people and organizations can use and create derivative works, except in commercial contexts, for which they would have to request licensing.  We might also add Share-Alike (SA) clause, which means any derived works are automatically relicensed under the same terms.

STRATEGY:  establish at start a policy of allowing content sharing, by default and potentially automatically (except perhaps special permission images, etc) from Village Buildings to the other partners, e.g. to HousingWiki and a Village Collaborative wiki.

STRATEGY:  set plan for, at later phase, a) converting to more unrestricted open licensing, e.g. CC-BY-SA;  b) migrating articles/materials into other places such as A Pattern Language For Growing Regions (APLFGR - Michael Mehaffy & Ward Cunningham wiki), and Wikipedia -- both of which are CC-BY-SA licensed.  

Key book contents such as project discussions and analyses of patterns may be adapted into Wikipedia, and/or other open online resources, for maximum dissemination and impact.

Cross-referenced to e.g. Wikipedia, HousingWiki, etc to build completeness as a reference resource.

--> building towards a broad, growing, public repository of public-interest housing/building materials.

Defensibility vs community - in authoring

On the defensibility of a project, variously defined:

Camus (paraphrased by Howard Zinn): "It is the job of the thinking person not to be on the side of the executioners."

Integration with A Pattern Language for Growing Regions 

Michael Mehaffy, a student and collaborator of Christopher Alexander, and director of the Portland-based Sustasis Foundation, has been developing a new book to extend A Pattern Language, called A Pattern Language for Growing Regions. It is planned for publication on late 2019, with a public draft now open for comments, and extensible online repository.

"56 new patterns will address new challenges, including rapid urbanization, declining public space, urban sustainability, new technology, economic tools and strategies, geometric patterns, and more.  This draft version will be finalized later in 2019, along with an on-line repository of these and other new patterns, based on Ward Cunningham's new federated wiki.  Ward was the inventor of Wiki, and a pioneer of "pattern languages of programming" -- for which he developed the first wiki.  His new "federated wiki" has exciting new capabilities which we hope to exploit in the new repository.  Ward is a board member of Sustasis Foundation and Sustasis Press.  "Our goal is to exploit the powerful successes of wikis, pattern languages of programming, and other outgrowths of pattern languages, returning again to the challenges of cities, buildings, and public spaces. We are collaborating with many former students and colleagues of Christopher Alexander, as well as others who have used pattern languages effectively in other domains.  We are also working with people in many countries around the world. We want to make a tool that allows people in any part of the world to use, edit, add, revise and develop their own pattern languages for their own projects, contributing at the same time to a growing resource of patterns for others to share. "

We've been discussing with Michael and have suggested, could there be a section, supplement, or supplemental volume to #APLFGR for housing affordability patterns? Mehaffy talks about wikis and pattern-languages as tools for "consensus development." In that vein, I've been thinking with this book concept about how to show varied patterns - from public housing to 'abundant' market housing - as all being possible sources of or factors in affordability. As integrable, instead of conflicting, ideas/approaches.

 

Hybrid print/electronic publishing

Book is available in print for sale; epub/mobi ebooks for sale in e-commerce channels e.g. Amazon; epub/mobi/PDF/HTML donate-what-you-wish on our and partner sites (Village Collaborative, HousingWiki, etc).

 

Visual / information design 

Graphically innovative, bold design emphasizing

a) "pattern language" approach of mapping very wide range of approaches, and analyzing how different projects may embody multiple patterns to various degrees.

b) Holistic / "overview" angle: e.g. provide estimates for how much housing and what affordability impact each approach might conceivably enable.

Relation to other books / web resources

Tent City Urbanism book (2014): consider this project as a complement to this book. Perhaps possible to use the same "Village Collaborative" imprint?

-> avoid redundant material.

-> consider what are natural follow-on questions and topics, gaps, from 2014 book; and what could make the new book as valuable, and complementary.

    -> present results of pilots / hypotheses from 2014 book.

    -> new conceptual extensions.  

SquareOne Villages' Toolbox resource, portions of which such as house plans require a $10/mo donor membership.

CPID publications / publicity

Meyer Memorial Trust materials.

Village Coalition site.

Housing.wiki.

Help build knowledge/organizing network between organizations

e.g. with Village Collaborative, Village Coalition (Portland), Low-Income Housing Institute (Seattle).

Book as network: see also: "From Monograph to Multigraph: the Distributed Book" [McCormick 2013].

See also Ward Cunningham's work on Federated Wiki, use on A Pattern Language for Growing Regions (Mehaffy et al).  

Potential network participants:

13. Conventional vs alternative housing, & best vs good

Twitter thread with

Dr Johannes Lenhard

@JFLenhard

Writing a book on the ethics of venture capital and one on D&I in tech and VC. Postdoc and teaching @MaxCamCentre @cambridge_uni; research on homelessness.London, UK

https://twitter.com/jflenhard/status/1336925992741376005?s=21

John Ecker

John Ecker

@John_T_Ecker

PhD in community psychology; Researching and evaluating solutions to homelessness; Tennis & pop culture enthusiast; He/him; Tweets are my own. Ontario, Canada

Tim Aubry

@TimAubry

Professor, School of Psychology & Senior Researcher, CRECS, uOttawa. Tweets are my own. taubry@uottawa.ca

Ottawa, Canada

"Developer, coalition pitch 'tiny homes' for homeless, using shipping containers."

Lindsay Kines / Times Colonist (Victoria, Canada)

Dec 8, 2020. https://www.timescolonist.com/news/local/developer-coalition-pitch-tiny-homes-for-homeless-using-shipping-containers-1.24251777.

Ecker: "Again, I will ask the question - Did anyone ask individuals with lived experience if this will work for them? Is raising $500k for temporary units in renovated shipping containers the answer?"

Lenhard: I think this is the right question to ask - and really the only one: do the people themselves like this? We have observed that in Cambridge they really do like their modular homes: https://www.cchpr.landecon.cam.ac.uk/Research/Start-Year/2020/modular_homes_homeless/modular_housing_prelim_findings.

Aubry: "The other question that needs to be asked of individuals with lived experience - given a choice between living in a shipping container and an apartment, which would you choose? This is a dumb and undignified idea even as a transitional measure.  #Righttohousing #HousingFirst"

The general or best solution

See XKCD, "The General Problem".

General vs specific solution is a form of best vs good.

The general solution: limiting or ending capitalism.

Engels - first the revolution

"The Housing Problem" - foundational text for the final-solution school of housing advocacy.

Peter Marcuse - redistribute resources, limit capitalism

Marcuse, P. (2016). After Exposing the Roots of Homelessness – What? Urban Geography, 38(3), 357–359. doi:10.1080/02723638.2016.1247601

"I am deeply impressed by the contributions to this symposium and the debates that have led up to it, and happy that my little essay of more than 25 years ago [Marcuse, Peter. "Neutralizing Homelessness." Socialist Review, 1988. issue 1] fed into them. But at the same time I am saddened by its continued timeliness.

"It is now clear that we know enough about homelessness and its causes and effects to understand how abhorrent it is within an affluent society, and further that we know enough to be aware of what is needed to end it, what can and should be done. I write “‘we’ know enough”: at least no one seriously argues today that homelessness is inevitable as a natural and healthy phenomenon, needed to keep society going, providing an incentive for those too lazy or too stupid to get to work and take care of themselves.

"So why do we still have homelessness in countries like the United States today?" [...]

"But consider the further implications of acting on what we know about homelessness, pursing its implications critically in public policy formation. The money and resources that are needed to provide adequate housing for all must either come from the private profit-motivated sector—we live in a capitalist society—, or from government. In the private sector that means raising wages and incomes substantially at the bottom and the middle; and in the government sector, raising taxes at the top. Clearly controversial. Power to bring about either event does not lie with those pushing to solve homelessness."

"What needs to be done urgently today—yet will be done gradually and, ultimately, tomorrow—is really pretty clear."

Don Mitchell (2020)

homelessness IS capitalism accommodation.

"Without homelessness there will be no capitalism.*" (Preface ix).

"* This is not at all to say that overthrowing capitalism will automatically solve the problem of houselessness among some portion of the population -- it did not in any of the state socialist societies that emerged after the Russian Revolution -- but rather that homelessness plays an inescapable, foundational, and necessary role in capitalism; it is neither contingent nor epiphenomenal, but constitutive."

"Homelessness is not a status of shelterlessness, at least not foundationally, but is rather both an effect and a determinant of the circulation of capital and the division of labor it requires. Shelterlessness (or houselessness, as many homeless activists and their advocates now call it) is an epiphenomenal form of deeper structural processes, for, as we will see, homeless people have historically, and not infrequently, been sheltered and even housed...In fact, at this epiphenomenal level, homelessness is precisely a form of sheltering in capitalism, just as much as are suburban tract homes, tiny studios and bedsits, or luxury condos in towering skyscrapers. These deeper structural processes are...the dynamics of capital circulation and accumulation that require impoverishment of a significant, and growing, number of people to function well."

--Mitchell, Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital (2020).

Housing is the solution

It's an appealing, intuitive, idea, and often said in the homelessness world: the solution to homelessness is housing. (eg here by National Alliance to End Homelessness https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/what-causes-homelessness/housing/). Who could disagree? What devil would want that they shouldn't have housing?

However, perhaps it is a bit like saying the solution to cancer is to not have cancer. It's true enough, but how? Perhaps, in the case of cancer, first by studying how and doing what helps prevent it, e.g. health practices and environmental protections; then, how soonest to detect it, since sooner remedies are much more effective; then what techniques are best to treat it; then, how to fairly choose what to do, given competing prevention/treatment options to approve or fund. The goal is clear but there are many paths.

Greg-Barchuk--A-child-could-figure-out-how-to-end-homelessness.jpg

The self-evidentness of "Housing ends homelessness" belies the complex history of how it arose, and what work it does in the field. It is associated with the late-1990s categorizing the "chronic homeless" (Culhane & Kahn, 1998, etc), who permanently need and can be effectively treated (Tsemberis 1999 etc) with conventional housing plus services, provided without treatment preconditions ("Housing First"). Increasingly this has been generalized into the officially endorsed concept for all homelessness response, and used to oppose or limit support for 'shelters,' or anything classified as transitional housing, and sometimes also charitable services such as mobile showers (e.g. Parsell & Watts, 2017).Also, "housing ends homelessness" or Housing First ideas are typically used to argue, explicitly or implicitly, for providing housing that is the same as current, conventional market housing (see e.g. PSU HRAC's 2019 homelessness report); or a variant, "supportive housing," usually defined as that plus on-site medical and social services/facilities. Often, there is an argument that this is not only the best thing to, but saves public money by reducing use of other services -- which, while it helps to seal a slam-dunk case, turns out to be generally doubtful, and anyway unfortunate in arguing that helping the needy must pay for itself.

Or often, now, permanent supportive housing is seen as the /only/ solution. For example, a recent OPB story "Multnomah County Seeing Spike In People Experiencing Chronic Homelessness" quoted Multnomah County / City of Portland Joint Office of Homeless Services: "Jolin said the office already knows what the solution is. 'The fact that we don’t have supporting housing is why we’re seeing a persistent increase in the chronically homeless over time,' he said." The Joint Office "defines supportive housing as housing that is affordable to those with 'very limited to almost no income' and is equipped with onsite mental health treatment and other support services." [though the US Interagency Council on Homelessness doesn't consider on-site required: https://www.usich.gov/solutions/housing/supportive-housing/; and Sam Tsemberis, chief promulgator of the approach, defined it initially as, and prefers, housing that is *not* integrated with on-site services].

So for example, we see, as city response to homelessness, policy like the Portland 2016 Housing Bond, dedicating $258M to create 1,300 units of permanently affordable housing, 600 for households below 30% of AMI, 300 of them Permanent Supportive Housing. Portland Housing Bureau just announced they have hit goal, (via the crucial factor of state law changing to allow funding of private projects), funding 1,424 units, with $213M of the money -- 64% new units, 36% acquisition/rehab. That averages $150k of city funding per unit, probably higher for the new units, and total subsidy per unit much higher due to partner developers bringing other subsidy funds such as LIHTC tax credits, so I'll loosely guess $300k/unit. These projects also have significant rent income from most home recipients, via income or benefits.

One issue with these projects is what housing economists call the "crowding out" effect of subsidized housing. They are generally in good locations which, given the level of housing demand, would likely otherwise have been developed as market-rate housing. While subsidized projects clearly help the city's affordability more, it should be compared to what positive affordability effect the market-rate housing might have had; and also, what alternately could be done with the subsidies.

The basic problem here is that we have a quite costly response, of creating/acquiring housing units at $100k's each, which is helping only a small part of the needy population; and we have both a large needy population existing, but steady inflow of more people into homelessness. Of course, we could say (and advocates often do say) that we just need to greatly scale up the response. But do we even know how much impact the current approach has, that we would know how much it would need scaling? I think we hardly know or agree on that at all.

Official announcements and advocacy often state or imply that 100 units of permanent supportive housing would reduce chronic homelessness by 100 households; but aggregate-effects research, such as reviewed by O'Flaherty in his recent lit review, find dramatically different results, of < 10 household reduction for every 100 new PSH units. (O'Flaherty, Brendan. "Homelessness Research: A Guide for Economists (and Friends)." Journal of Housing Economics (2019), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhe.2019.01.003. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open...).

In any case, when confronted with a large social project such as ending homelessness, shouldn't we ask how best, cost-effectively, and expeditiously it can be done, and not just accept a "trust us!" from the establishment in charge? Is it undignifying the homeless, to ask what housing is, how it can be done anew? I think it's more undignifying to suggest that the answers are all known, to a monumentally complex and severe problem stretching on for decades and in many places including West Coast cities, getting worse. With deep respect for the many committed, caring, expert people working in this field -- and recognizing that experienced advocates may feel embattled and inclined to circle wagons and use what rhetoric seems to work -- I think, as Giancarlo De Carlo said: architecture is too important to be left to the architects. ("Architecture's Public", 1970).

In my opinion, towards housing for all, governments should focus on first on reducing overall housing scarcity and cost factors, then on the potential for helping the least-served with a housing benefit (i.e. voucher), and then on enabling in the most cost-effective way the largest possible amount of basic housing options, in the way that least crowds out other housing production; and by combining all means, move towards an effective "right to housing." Some obvious candidates for where governments might look for lowest-subsidy-cost, adequate new dwellings are: incenting and facilitating house-sharing, of underutilized e.g. empty-nest homes; and likewise, low-cost accessory dwelling and cottage cluster housing aimed at low-income households.

The seemingly obvious "housing ends homelessness" answer, in my opinion, unfortunately tends to evade necessary analyses, and considering issues broadly and radically. It tends to promote a costly new-housing 'cure' over possibly much more cost-effective preventions or treatments, it tends to occlude the question of what counts or works as 'housing,' and how it might be done differently. Exactly contrary to hopes, it may help tend to frame the problem such that it will never be solved, at least in our time.

---

thread with Watts et al:  https://twitter.com/tmccormick/status/1189138645866799106

cf: Parsell, Cameron, and Beth Watts. "Charity and Justice: A Reflection on New Forms of Homelessness Provision in Australia." European Journal of Homelessness. Volume 11, No. 2, December 2017.  https://www.feantsaresearch.org/download/think-piece-12032277176126500690.pdf.

Abstract: Charity directed at people who are homeless is invariably portrayed as positive. The good intentions of the provider of charity are not only lauded, but equated with positive outcomes for the receiver. The often severe material deprivation experienced by those who are homeless appears to justify the celebration of an extremely low bar of resource provision. Extending what has been the historic provision of food, drinks, blankets, and other day-to-day means of survival, contemporary charity in Australia also includes the provision of mobile shower, mobile clothes washing, and mobile hair dressing facilities. The emergence of similar ‘novel’ interventions to ‘help the homeless’ are seen in a wide range of other countries. In this paper we examine the consequences of providing charity to people who are homeless; consequences for the giver, receiver, and society more broadly. Drawing on the ideas of Peter Singer and the ‘effective altruist’ movement as a possible corrective to this prevailing view of charity, we suggest that such charitable interventions may not only do little good, but may actually do harm. We further argue that justice is achieved when inequities are disrupted so that people who are homeless can access the material condition required to exercise autonomy over how they live, including the resources required to wash, clothe and feed themselves how and when they choose.

 

Parsell, Cameron. "Homelessness, Identity, and our Poverty of Ambition." Keynote address at 14th European Research Conference on Homelessness. 20 September 2019, Helsingborg, Sweden.

Presentation slides: https://www.feantsaresearch.org/public/user/Observatory/2019/2019_conference/ppts/Plenary_-_Cameron_Parsell_-_Keynote_Europe_September_2019.pdf

Video:  https://www.facebook.com/FEANTSA/videos/515174705720867/ (2:40 - 33:20).

"We overserve people who are experiencing homelessness, and this overservicing represents one of the key barriers to actually ending it." (near start).

"Homelessness exists in Australia and increases because actually we pity them, we pity them as someone deficient, as the downtrodden, as a group of people that we want to exercise our compassion towards. Whereas a few years ago we were talking about justice, we were talking about evidence, we were talking about ending homelessness, this is what we're doing in Australia now:  we're actually giving brand new vans and washing machines, and driving around washing their clothes."

Culhane, Dennis P. & Stephen Metraux. "Rearranging the Deck Chairs or Reallocating the Lifeboats? Homelessness Assistance and Its Alternatives." Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol 74, Issue 1, 2008, pp111-121. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944360701821618.  [full text].

"Housing For All, the Minimum Dwelling, and the problem of standards."

 

Teige, The Minimum Dwelling (English version)

Teige, The Minimum Dwelling (English version)

the 'Existenzminimum' tradition:

Teige, The Minimum Dwelling (1932).

CIAM II Congress, 1929.

Brysch, Sara. "Reinterpreting Existenzminimum in Contemporary Affordable Housing Solutions." Urban Planning. Vol 4, No 3 (2019).  https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/2121

Korbi, Marson, and Andrea Migotto. "Between Rationalization and Political Project: The Existenzminimum from Klein and Teige to Today." Urban Planning. Vol 4, No 3 (2019). https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/2157.

Mumford, Eric. "CIAM and Its Outcomes." https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/2383.

Porotto, Alessandro, and Chiara Monterumisi. "New Perspectives on the II CIAM onwards: How Does Housing Build Cities?" https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/2430.

"Just enough" - minimalism, ecology, & justice in housing

book Just Enough by Azby Brown - Edo Japan as a social/technological apex in sustainable communities.

Minimum Cost Housing Group (McGill University School of Architecture). "Publications." https://mchg.ca/publications/.

14. Homelessness vs disaster

"Housing in the twentieth century has been one continuing emergency."

- Charles Abrams, "The Future of Housing." 1946.

In the long run, we're all homeless

Natural vs unnatural disasters: why is homelessness different?

comparing & combining responses to homelessness, catastrophe.

 


from comment in Village Collaborative group by Tim about post on SOS "Stewardship Villages", San Francisco:

"This presentation from Saint Francis Homeless Challenge highlights the large current and potential overlaps between homelessness response, 'emergency' or 'disaster' response, and climate-change adaptation -- e.g. off-grid and decarbonized energy sources. It's fruitful to compare ways these two situation types thought of and responded to, or might be, and I'm exploring this in an essay draft, "Homelessness and disaster: comparing and combining responses," for #VillageBuildings web/book project. What do you think, why with homelessness do we not help everyone equally and best we can, as with 'natural' disasters?

This is a perennial question posed with homelessness. Perhaps the different response is because 'disaster' is seen as a well-defined and specific, rather than many-causal and ongoing, affliction; affecting people equally and regardless of their actions?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheVillageCollaborative/permalink/1168850549956586/

What do you think, why with homelessness do we not help everyone equally and as best we can

Saint Francis' choice of label for their model, "S.O.S." (Safe Organized Spaces) signals 'emergency' -- also, saving souls -- and in the presentation below they focus on solar power supply "which could provide off-grid energy for our proposed 180 Jones, Tenderloin prototype village and for future sites, as well as for disaster relief situations and as a mobile charging station for the unhoused."

But disaster effects actually often are many-causal, ongoing, and avoidable: for example, all kinds of societal decisions create disaster vulnerability, especially for the marginalized, such as steering them into relatively unsafe housing, in flood plains or landslide zones;  not building or maintaining levees, not investing in early-warning systems, sirens, emergency response systems, emergency transport capability, first aid supplies, and shelters.  

Conversely, for the more privileged, society has long permitted and even subsidized housing in disaster-prone areas such as near shore on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, canyon and hill areas in California urban edges.  They are subsidized by explicit or implicit insurance (e.g. Federal flood insurance, and expectation that costly emergency response and rebuilding will recurringly be undertaken by government).  These are cases where the 'disasters' are somewhat predictable, in that wildfires and storms/hurricanes are known to reoccur, yet people keep building and rebuilding in places where they probably wouldn't if they were fully bearing the disaster risk.

------

Aquilino, Marie, ed. Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity. (New York, NY: Metropolis Books, 2011).

ISBN 9781935202479. [1].

   Part 1. Architecture after disaster :

Learning from Aceh / Andrea Fitrianto --

Beyond shelter in the Solomon Islands / Andrea Nield --

News from the Teardrop Island / Sandra D'Urzo --

From transitional to permanent shelter: invaluable partnerships in Peru / International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies --

   Part 2. What should governments do? :

When people are involved / Thiruppugazh Venkatachalam --

Citizen architects in India / Rupal and Rajendra Desai --

What about out cities?: Rebuilding Muzaffarabad / Maggie Stephenson, Sheikh Ahsan Ahmed, and Zahid Amin --

   Part 3. Urban risk and recovery :

Below the sill plate: New Orleans East struggles to recover / Deborah Gans with James Dart --

Slumlifting: an informal toolbox for a new architecture / Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner --

Sustainable communities: avoiding disaster in the informal city / Arlene Lusterio --

Camouflaging disaster: 60 linear miles of local transborder urban conflict / Teddy Cruz --

Cultural heritage and disaster mitigation: a new alliance / Rohit Jigyasu --

   Part 4. Environmental resilience :

Green recovery / Anita van Breda and Brittany Smith --

The home as the world: Tamil Nadu / Jennifer E. Duyne Barenstein --

Design as mitigation in the Himalayas / Francesca Galeazzi --

On beauty, architecture, and crisis: the Salem Centre for Cardiac Surgery in Sudan / Raul Pantaleo --

   Part 5. Teaching as strategic action :

Cultivation resilience: the BaSiC Initiative / Sergio Palleroni --

Studio 804 in Greensburg, Kansas / Don Rockhill and Jenny Kivett --

Sustainable knowledge and internet technology / Mehran Gharaati, Kimon Onuma, and Guy Fimmers --

   Part 6. Is prevention possible? :

More to lose: the paradox of vulnerability / John Norton and Guillaume Chantry --

Building peace across African frontiers / Robin Cross and Naomi Handa Williams --

Haiti 2010: reports from the field / Marie J. Aquilino --

Afterword :

Open letter to architects, engineers, and urbanists / Patrick Coulombel.

 

Architecture for Humanity, Cameron Sinclair, & Kate Stohr. Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crisis. 2006.

Cuny, Frederick C. (1983). Disasters and Development. 1983. Full text: https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/159887.

Davis, Ian (1978). Shelter After Disaster. https://drive.google.com/open?id=18pZGVf5aRCkT1LnmmZeMQ8hZ6QwN6nog.

"Disasters: A Sociological Approach." Kathleen Tierney, 2019. https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B07RZWMLVJ/.

15. Covid "Hotel Strategy" vs Village strategies

16. Problem/objection patterns

We should provide enough funding, not lower housing standards

This isn't and distracts from the real solution, housing

temporary housing or shelter is now widely deprecated as a homelessness response, in US & European official/mainstream positions. It is said to divert from the real solution, permanent housing, and it doesn't end homelessness.  [shelter and temporary housing are now defined to be states of homelessness].

Culhane, Dennis P. & Stephen Metraux. "Rearranging the Deck Chairs or Reallocating the Lifeboats? Homelessness Assistance and Its Alternatives." Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol 74, Issue 1, 2008, pp111-121. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944360701821618.  [full text].

Herring, Chris. "The New Logics of Homeless Seclusion:Homeless Encampments in America's West Coast Cities." City & Community 13.4 (2014): 285-309. Web. 20 Feb. 2017. https://www.academia.edu/15061831/The_New_Logics_of_Homeless_Seclusion_Homeless_Encampments_in_America_s_West_Coast_Cities_2014_City_and_Community_Vol_13_No._4_285-309.  https://www.asanet.org/sites/default/files/savvy/journals/CC/Dec14CCFeature.pdf.

Herring, Chris (2015). "Tent City, America." Places Journal, December, 2015. https://placesjournal.org/article/tent-city-america/.  https://doi.org/10.22269/151214.

USICH

Tiny houses / villages are too low-density for cities

'Self build' & lower standards facilitate exploitation, inequality, defunding. 

Cf Delgado, Richard (1997).

e.g. Giancarlo De Carlo's critique of CIAM and "Existunzminimum" / Basic housing concepts, in "Architecture's Public's," as serving interests of inequality and exploitation.

We shouldn't endorse the idea that low- or very-low-income housing can be created without public subsidy -- this undermines the ongoing urgent effort to increase public funding.

If acceptable housing standards (e.g. dwelling space, facilities) are lowered in cases or one area, it allows or creates pressure for them to be lowered more widely, and this will lower living standards for many.

Ward, Peter (1999). Colonias and Public Policy in Texas and Mexico: Urbanization by Stealth. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).

["describes how a two-tier system of housing regulations was gradually codified by the state in Mexico, leading to the legitimization of sub-optimal informal housing for the poor."].

Different housing for the poor makes it stigmatized & segregated

Stigma on or deliberate demarcation (positive or negative) on social housing.

US case of restricted and differentiated style/materials, vs e.g. WPA, Vienna, UK examples of positive socialist and civic symbolism.

Homeless and low-income people shouldn't be expected to take less/different or 'substandard' housing vs other people.

Lower cost/standard housing may be more costly in long run

Lower building costs help developers, but don't lower price

housing diversity - letting dwellers choose/adapt housing that matches their value priorities. issues with government funding restrictions / mandates.

This questions leads into larger and complex topic of how housing development costs and prices are related.

See Development costs for more on that.


Old materials

to be moved into new draft/outline

Oregon land use reform

Portland Downtown Plan 1972

Portland City Planning Commission (1972). "Planning Guidelines - Portland Downtown Plan." https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/94718.

"The [Citizens Advisory] committee has learned that traditionally a complex set of factors, including transportation, circulation, zoning, and taxation, have determined land use when logically these factors ought to support prior land use decisions. The Downtown Plan is an opportunity for the citizens of Portland to say: Let's first decide how we want to use our Downtown and then determine what tools are necessary to achieve our land use decisions. For example, our goals call for increasing the number of low-income and middle-income housing units Downtown. The traditional land use determinants would probably bar implementation of this goal. Thus, if the citizens of Portland approve this goal, then alternative implementing methods need to be developed." (p.2)

"[Section:] Housing & Downtown Neighborhoods.

General Goal: to give high priority to increasing the number of residential accommodations in the Downtown area for a mix of age and income groups.."

   "Encourage the fullest use of public and private programs to ensure that future Downtown housing accommodates a mix of low, moderate, and high-income people."

   "Recognize the differing needs and problems of the various groups who will be housed, including those groups who naturally gravitate to the city core. Provide housing and services commensurate with their physical and social needs. These groups include the single retired, the elderly, itinerant workers, 'down outers,' students, the handicapped, as well as middle and upper income groups." (p.3).

State-level planning

Andersen, Michael. [2019] "Re-legalizing Fourplexes is the Unfinished Business of Tom McCall"  ["For decades, Oregon has used state law to battle economic segregation. Fair-housing experts say HB 2001 is the next step"]. Sightline.org, January 23, 2019.

Abbott, Carl (1994). "Metropolitan Portland: Reputation and Reality." Built Environment, Vol. 20, No. 1, (1994), pp. 52-64 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23287727. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=13FpPqg_NW0HzyjUti2-0ued7eu_IORQ2.

Abbott, Carl and Deborah Howe. "The Politics of Land-Use Law in Oregon: Senate Bill 100, Twenty Years After." Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 4-35. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20614497. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QoDK-YPGIrYFMDiJmzP9gt-Agf_jRhRS.

Gifford, Laura Jane. "Planning for a Productive Paradise: Tom McCall and the Conservationist Tale of Oregon Land-Use Policy." Oregon Historical Quarterly , Vol. 115, No. 4 (Winter 2014), pp. 470-501. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5403/oregonhistq.115.4.0470. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=13c4zGoGxX3ZizhZPZ2TxS637ljBSUtCJ.

   

 

17. Later & future village forms

Village cluster housing, coops, baugruppen, pocket n'hoods

villages as cluster housing / pocket neighborhoods - enabled by state law HB2001 and Portland RIP program?

City of Milwaukie study

[add here my article on this in Village Collaborative group -tim.].

a path to larger co-operative building approaches, eg Baugruppe.

Created [mostly] by community capital, vs financial capital.

14 September 2019 post by Tim McCormick to American Tiny House Association, Oregon Chapter group on Facebook:

To me it seems like a big, big potential opportunity for siting tiny houses, especially in Oregon, California, and Seattle, is in movable (and perhaps foundation-anchorable / deanchorable) tiny houses being accepted and facilitated in local accessory dwellings (ADU) ordinances, i.e. as backyard cottages. Also, in cluster-housing developments enabled on former single-family lots by new Oregon law (#HB2001), Portland law (pending RIP Residential Infill Program), and just-passed California ADU law.

The new Oregon Reach Code offers some help there by:

a) recognizing the use of standards applying to both vehicle and on-foundation cases, and making it easier to do both, e.g. with similar RV-type utility hookups; and

b) bringing movable tiny-house *into state building code*, which I think will make quite a difference in local governments approving this use for ADUs and other contexts.

What might take this even further?

Based partly on the Reach Code, I and friends in Portland have been developing for last year a proposal "New Starter Homes" for the city to pilot a wide-scale, affordable ADU program. It would help (and perhaps manage & pay for) low-income homeowners to put simple post foundations and utility hookups on their parcel, then help match them with low-income residents who'd bring, build or be offered use of a tiny house to put on the site. Tiny-house resident would pay pad rent & towards utilities, perhaps subsidized by city or funder.

Portland has 110,000 single-family lots which could take an ADU, according to Commissioner Eudaly's analysis. Currently there are ADUs on less than 2% of lots. If we could interest or incent just a few more % of homeowners to accept that simple and buryable post foundation being put in, and agree to 1-2 year lease hosting a tiny house, we could have 1000s of sitings in Portland.

Proposal: New Starter Homes:

Google Doc: http://bit.ly/levitatetown.

PDF: http://tjm.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/New-Starter-Homes_2019-09-10.pdf.

Comments & questions invited!

References:

1) Oregon #HB2001, requires cottage clusters be allowed at least somewhere in all single-family residential zones above 25,000 population. See https://www.sightline.org/2019/06/30/oregon-just-voted-to-legalize-duplexes-on-almost-every-city-lot/.

2) Portland's proposed Residential Infill Program would enable fourplex developments on a large portion of residential lots citywide. RIP: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/76592.

3) Also, in an August 26, 2019 memo, the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS) noted that as part of a new "Anti-displacement Action Plan" added to RIP, it is discussing an idea to allow sixplexes if at least 3 units are affordable at 60% Median Family Income. https://efiles.portlandoregon.gov/Record/13182894/File/Document. It's apparently inspired by a similar new law in Austin, "Affordability Unlocked."

4) Oregon's Building Codes Division last year passed a Tiny House Code which allows < 400 square foot homes, both mobile and on foundation, to be permitted in building code. https://www.oregon.gov/bcd/codes-stand/Documents/reach-18reachcode.pdf. It was recognized by Portland Bureau of Development Services, which assigned an official to develop implementation materials and help developers in Portland: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bds/article/700062

5). City of Milwaukie released in June an impressive report "Milwaukie Cottage Cluster Analysis Final Report (done with Orange Splot of Portland and Opticos), that analyzed various hypothetical cluster developments. It showed that even if developed on a conventional for-profit model, they could bring costs of some units way down to 30-60% of Area Mean Income, far lower than existing or new single-family housing in the area. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u5LhZGO8PLo7H40oduKWOhsbNvqge1Bm/view?usp=sharing

6. For a discussion of cottage clusters generally and how Portland might use them, see: Michael Andersen, "Cottage clusters: Portland’s chance to build community in a new way." Portland For Everyone, Nov. 2, 2017. https://medium.com/@pdx4all/cottage-clusters-portlands-chance-to-build-community-in-a-new-way-7c504c5b260b.

in Portland Residential Infill Project (RIP)

RIP is reducing the review procedure required for "planned developments" (PDs) which would include cluster housing, in most residential zones (R7, R5, R2.5).

Portland, City of. Bureau of Planning & Sustainability. "Residential Infill Project: Recommended Draft, August 2019." Volume 1: Staff Report and Map Amendments

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/746997.

"7. Continue to allow different building forms and site arrangements through a planned development review. Affects R7, R5 and R2.5 zoned properties.

"Land use review procedures, in order from least to greatest level of process, include Type I and Ix, Type II and IIx, Type III and Type IV. Most PDs currently go through a Type III procedure, which is decided by a Hearings Officer and, if appealed, by City Council. By comparison, a Type IIx land use review, which applies to smaller land divisions, is less expensive, requires less time to process and is a staff decision that can be appealed to the Hearings Officer. Both procedure types utilize the same approval criteria and provide opportunities for appeals at both the City and State level. The recommended threshold for PDs is changed so that proposals for up to 20 units are processed as a Type IIx case, the same maximum number of units that can be reviewed through a Type IIx standard R2.5 subdivision (10 lots with two units each)."

Planned development. See Chapter 33.270


2 November 2019 post by Tim McCormick to American Tiny House Association, Oregon Chapter group on Facebook:

reposting to this group a long reply to a suggestion that tiny houses aren't appropriate in cities, because too low density, from PDX YIMBY group.

Original post was sharing an article about Sacramento's Mayor, also chairperson of California Statewide Commission on Homelessness, calling for large statewide expansion of tiny-home approaches. (http://www.capradio.org/articles/2019/10/29/sacramento-mayor-calls-for-rapid-expansion-of-tiny-homes-across-california/). Doug Klotz in PDX YIMBY group commented: "While tiny homes might fill in on suburban lots, for urban areas, especially near transit, they do not provide the necessary density. Only multistory does that." My extended reply below:

"Yes, I hope nobody considers tiny houses the answer to all housing needs/contexts or all homelessness issues. On the other hand, I also hope nobody considers our present set of approaches to be without major gaps and flaws, and large opportunities for change. Particularly, in my opinion, if you look at it from the bottom up -- i.e., what the most needy need, and what we could do with comparatively simple and decentralized approaches.

On density: yes, if you have a larger lot, zoned for multistory, and you have access to a lot of capital and good future rent revenues, then you can get more units with a large apartment building. However, most times and places in US cities are not like that, not even in most of inner Portland or with statewide HB2001 upzoning or citywide R.I.P. infill program. Most area of most US cities is 4-8000 square-foot lots with low-density residential, with prohibition of or strong opposition to large/high buildings. Available, financeable sites for large apartment buildings are scarce and costly, and will typically be built as market-rate, usually rental housing for the high end of market -- possibly with inclusionary housing units -- or sometimes as dedicated-affordable buildings, also costly per unit to build.

As a back-of-envelope exercise, we could take a typical Portland residential lot, of 50 x 100 feet, and consider development options. Assuming no on-site parking, and a 10' access way up the middle, it's plausible to create eight 20'x25' sub-lots, each of which could site most of the house models used at Emerald Village (see attached image). One unit might be a common building with shared kitchen, meeting/social space, etc.

I'm looking for examples of contemporary apartment buildings built in such a case, e.g. in Portland, and I'd say it's at least uncommon to put more than eight units on a site like this, though it can be done with small apartments, and has been done in other eras.

Aside from number of homes, an approach like dense, cluster, small housing has different characteristics and possibilities. First, it can require far less capital. Emerald Village, Eugene, for comparison (not that dense, but to compare model) is 22 mostly custom homes, total development cost including land $55k/home, which was financed by SquareOne Villages non-profit with small-scale grants and funds. (compared to $300-800k per affordable housing unit, typical range from Oregon to San Francisco).

This approach is also much more conducive to piecemeal and incremental development, both across a site and for an individual home which could be separately financed/finished/expanded over time -- this facilitates individual financing and building and owning. Which, incidentally, is characteristic of dwelling in many times and places, that gave people good opportunities to become owners and meet their needs -- including earlier eras in the US -- which is why I call a project proposal I'm working on for low-cost cottages, New Starter Homes.

Much lower capital requirements means many more parties can potentially develop, with different models such as limited-equity community land trust (e.g. SquareOne Villages), groups of people developing for their joint need (like Baugruppe model common in Germany, or any org/agency looking to create low-cost ownership housing.

Finally, I think small detached units have unusual potentials that we don't often think about. They can be pre-fabbed, so potentially built off-site more efficiently in all seasons, with much less construction disruption to area. They can be redeployable, so financed separately and more easily, and could move between interim-use, cluster-housing, or accessory-dwelling unit contexts. They can be built with very ecological materials, and have very low embedded and operating energy requirements. (home size is the #1 factor in building lifecycle energy use, along with driving less far to get to it). Also they can be more likely than large buildings to remain inhabitable after natural disasters like earthquakes, and can be relatively easily operated off grid; both of which sooner or later will be crucial when the Cascadia Fault earthquake hits Oregon.

When the Big One hits, I for one want to be living small, and cooperatively with neighbors."

Refugee, emergency, climate-change, & eco-villages?

anticipating a long-term increase in disaster and climate-change related disruption in the US and globally.

Help provide models and learning for the US and globally.

Bridging emergency/immediate response with long-term adaptation and resettlement. (a long-running thorny problem, at least since the previous age of mass dislocation, during/after WWII).

Note that the Pacific Northwest already receives a large in-migration from US (especially to Portland, Seattle, & Oregon coast), and is predicted to increasingly do so from climate-change effects upon other parts of the US that likely will make SW & SE of US increasingly uninhabitable or agriculturally viable.

Oregon could experience large refugee / resettler influxes from California due to earthquake or wildfire impacts.

Oregon could also at any time be hit by "the Big One" offshore Cascadia Fault earthquake which will destroy coastal areas and devastate much of the infrastructure of western Oregon. Up to 100,000s of Oregon could be displaced, have uninhabitable homes, be without utility water, sewage, gas, electricity for months to years.

Backyard cottages for low-income & homeless

Block Project, Seattle

LISAH - Low Income Single Adult Housing - from Transition Projects and Meyer Trust in Portland.

Multnomah County pilot.

Los Angeles pilot.

Dinh, Tran and Brewster, David and Fullerton, Anna and Huckaby, Greg and Parks, Mamie and Rankin, Sara and Ruan, Nantiya and Zwiebel, Elie (2018). "Yes, In My Backyard: Building ADUs to Address Homelessness. University of Denver Sturm College of Law Homeless Advocacy Policy Project, May 3, 2018. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3173258 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3173258.

Redeployable tiny homes for village / ADU crossover use

see: New Starter Homes / PAD Initiative project document.  [McCormick 2019]

Precedent of San Francisco's 1906 "Earthquake Cottages".

O'Connor, Charles James, et al (1913). San Francisco Relief Survey; the organization and methods of relief used after the earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906.  New York: Survey Associates, 1913.. https://archive.org/details/sanfranciscoreli00oconrich/page/n8.

the Parking Dwelling Permit

see article Parking Dwelling Permit.

Bottom-up regulation of land use

see also article Hyperlocalism.

Myers, John. "Fixing Urban Planning with Ostrom: Strategies for existing cities to adopt polycentric, bottom-up regulation of land use." Prepared for delivery at the Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop (WOW6) conference, Indiana University Bloomington, June 19–21, 2019. Working draft dated 31st May 2019.

http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/10457/Ostrom%20paper%20John%20Myers%20May%202019.pdf.

Integrating bottom-up/autonomous development with govt support

e.g. combine universal rent assistance with permissive building/dwelling laws

Colin Ward. Talking Houses (1975).

  "Dweller control" in public housing.  

from Karakusevic & Batchelor [2017]: Social Housing: Definitions and Design Exemplars:

"In the 21st century, the definition of [social housing] exists in multiple forms. Across Europe there are many distinct methods for delivering housing and in many of the countries featured in this book the term 'social' is rarely used at all. In the UK it is commonly (mis)understood as simply 'council housing', in France it is 'housing at moderate rent' (habitation a loyer modere), in Denmark it is 'common housing', in Germany 'housing promotion', while in Austria it is 'people's housing'. Uniting all of these, however, is the idea that there are and can be alternatives to a purely market-orientated system of provision and it is here, amidst the variety of alternative forms both new and old, that this book places itself. Within our definition of 'social housing' we present here public projects led by local authorities, philanthropic schemes led by charities and co-operative or collective schemes led by residents and the people who will live in them.

    Across Europe some form of strategic public oversight of housing supply has been maintained through a variety of means that includes direct building, subsidies, planning and rent control." "This book's alternative narrative embraces those who want to create the homes they need by their own volition as groups and collectives. This is not contradictory to a social housing ethos, but rather a rediscovery of a grassroots form of social organization, which when blended with the support and advocacy of a local authority or a housing association can be part of a positive mix in provision."

CDCs (Community Development Corporations) and CHDOs (Community Housing Development organizations):

emergence in 1960s.

Housing vouchers and income support.

Spohn, Richard B. (1972). "The Owner-Builder: Legislative Analysis and Recommendation." In [Turner & Fichtel, eds, Freedom to Build, 1972].

Harms, Hans H. "User and Community Involvement in Housing and Its Effect on Professionalism." In [Turner & Fichtel, eds, Freedom to Build, 1972].  

"Problems of insufficiency and inadequacy are immanent in the present housing supply structure, which is oriented toward the supply side and the construction of units according to procedures set by industry and government, and which subsidized industry, professional 'facilitating beneficiaries,' and the rich in order to provide housing for the poor...Direct subsidies to users in combination with a network of decentralized services could increase the autonomy of low-income families without setting up complicated mechanisms to regulate the lives of the poor or the process by which housing for the poor is created."

Discusses 1968 Tent City in Boston.

"The failures of the market- and state-based housing provision and the relative success of community-based home and neighborhood building (especially the so-called third world and supposedly developing countries) highlight the complementarities of these three essentially different 'sectors.'"

- John F. C. Turner, Foreward to Nabeel Hamdi, Housing Without Houses, 1995.

Houseless political representation and organizations

see main article: Houseless political representation and organizations.

Right to Build and the "Citizen Sector": digital, distributed, mass self-build housing

digital, distributed, mass self-build housing

Alastair Parvin - WikiHouse, Citizen Sector.

Parvin, Alastair, and David Saxby, Cristina Cerulli, Tatjana Schneider (2011). "A Right to Build: The next mass-housebuilding industry." Architecture 00 and University of Sheffield School of Architecture, 2011. https://issuu.com/architecture00/docs/arighttobuild.

Parvin, Alastair, and Andy Reeve. "Scaling the Citizen Sector." Medium, Oct 5, 2016.

https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/scaling-the-citizen-sector-20a20dbb7a4c.

Parvin, Alastair, and Andy Reeve. "Affordable Land." 2018. https://www.opensystemslab.io/affordableland.

Constructing a legal right to housing

[see "Constructing a legal right to housing" section in main artice Right to housing].

Envisioning decentralized, federated society

 - e.g. David Harvey

see Spaces of Hope.

Appendix 1:

Sponsor / collaborator roles & opportunities

Potential grant sponsors or collaborators:

 

Name ideas

(the last three titles allude to works of Christopher Alexander et al: The Oregon Experiment (1975), which "describes an experimental approach to campus community planning at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, Oregon which resulted in a theory of architecture and planning described in the group's later published and better-known volumes A Pattern Language (1977) and The Timeless Way of Building (1979)."

   "A pattern language is a method of describing good design practices or patterns of useful organization within a field of expertise. The term was coined by architect Christopher Alexander and popularized by his 1977 book A Pattern Language." (Wikipedia).

 

Appendix C: book proposal template

In case we consider proposing this project to a publisher, and useful to consider in any case, here are questions from: "Guidelines for Submitting a Proposal to Island Press" https://islandpress.app.box.com/s/pwy70may609coa912ft4pewilzu0mtxb.:

 

1. General Overview: Introduce your subject and argument. Explain why your book is needed; what does it offer readersthat is new? Describe your overall approach and structure.

2. Table of Contents: List allchapters, along with any front matter (introductions/prefaces, etc.) and back matter (appendices/charts/references/sources lists/index, etc.). Annotate each chapter briefly.

3. Audience: Define your intended audience and explain why the book will appeal to them. Include well-defined groups of readers (e.g.,members of particular professions or academic fields). List the relevant associations that are most important for the audience for your book and identify those in which you are active. If your book is primarily intended for students, please describe the courses that should adopt it.

4. Author Information: Give a brief rundown of your occupation. Summarize your areas of expertise and explain why you are qualified to write the book. In addition, please submit a CV or resume.

5. Marketing Platform: Describe your professional activities and writing experience (with a focus on books, articles, blogs). Have you been interviewed by the media on a topic related to your book or do you have other experience with media outreach? What is the size of your network (contacts who could helpwith the promotion of the book)? If you give lectures or workshops, include a summary of your activities for the past year. If you have a well-developed social media network, please explain.

6. Competing/Comparable Titles: List any previously published titles that are similar to your book in topic, approach, or writing style (please specify which). What about your proposed book is different, timely, and important in comparison to existing print or online information on the topic? For course-adoption books, what is the primary benefit to an instructor in using your text rather than competing titles?

7. Production Considerations: Estimate when you plan to complete your manuscript. Estimate the manuscript’s word count and the number of photographs and other illustrations (maps, diagrams, graphs, etc.) that you plan to include. Please include sample images.

8. Course Materials: If your book is intended primarily for course use, please describe any ancillary material you would be willing to share (PowerPoint slides, sample syllabi, study questions, charts, graphs, pictures, videos).

9. Writing Samples: If you have already drafted book chapters, or have writing samples that are germane to your proposed subject, please include them with the proposal.

10. Submission: If you are submitting files larger than 2MB(high-resolution art samples for example), please send them via a file-sharing service such as Box, Dropbox, or WeTransfer.

11. Is there any other information that would be helpful to us as we consider your project?

 

A Pattern Language For Housing Affordability

See main article: A Pattern Language for Housing Affordability

 

References

Abarbanel, Sara, and Cassandra Bayer, Paloma Corcuera, Nancy Stetson1 [2016]. "Making a Tiny Deal Out of It: A Feasibility Study of Tiny Home Villages to Increase Affordable Housing in Lane County, Oregon." A Report for United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, Portland, Oregon Field Office. May 2016. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M8SsRA7-2us2BACTOSb7yxRweiBZu4V0/view?usp=sharing. 1Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley.

Abbott, Carl (1994). "Metropolitan Portland: Reputation and Reality." Built Environment, Vol. 20, No. 1, (1994), pp. 52-64 https://www.jstor.org/stable/23287727. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=13FpPqg_NW0HzyjUti2-0ued7eu_IORQ2.

Abbott, Carl and Deborah Howe. "The Politics of Land-Use Law in Oregon: Senate Bill 100, Twenty Years After." Oregon Historical Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 4-35. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20614497. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QoDK-YPGIrYFMDiJmzP9gt-Agf_jRhRS.

Abrams, Charles. Man's Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World. (1964).

Agamben, Giorgio. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

See especially Ch.7, "The Camp as the 'Nomos' of the Modern".

 "In his main work "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" (1998), Giorgio Agamben analyzes an obscure figure of Roman law that poses fundamental questions about the nature of law and power in general. Under the laws of the Roman Empire, a man who committed a certain kind of crime was banned from society and all of his rights as a citizen were revoked. He thus became a "homo sacer" (sacred man). In consequence, he could be killed by anybody, while his life on the other hand was deemed "sacred", so he could not be sacrificed in a ritual ceremony." [...] .

"Agamben opines that laws have always assumed the authority to define "bare life" — zoe, as opposed to bios, that is 'qualified life' — by making this exclusive operation, while at the same time gaining power over it by making it the subject of political control. The power of law to actively separate "political" beings (citizens) from "bare life" (bodies) has carried on from Antiquity to Modernity — from, literally, Aristotle to Auschwitz. Aristotle, as Agamben notes, constitutes political life via a simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of "bare life": as Aristotle says, man is an animal born to life (Gk. ζῆν, zen), but existing with regard to the good life (εὖ ζῆν, eu zen) which can be achieved through politics. Bare life, in this ancient conception of politics, is that which must be transformed, via the State, into the "good life"; that is, bare life is that which is supposedly excluded from the higher aims of the state, yet is included precisely so that it may be transformed into this "good life". Sovereignty, then, is conceived from ancient times as the power which determines what or who is to be incorporated into the political body (in accord with its bios) by means of the more originary exclusion (or exception) of what is to remain outside the political body—which is at the same time the source of that body's composition (zoe). According to Agamben, biopower, which takes the bare lives of the citizens into its political calculations, may be more marked in the modern state, but has essentially existed since the beginnings of sovereignty in the West, since this structure of ex-ception is essential to the core concept of sovereignty. .

 "Agamben would continue to expand the theory of the state of exception first introduced in "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life", ultimately leading to the "State of Exception" in 2005. Instead of leaving a space between law and life, the space where human action is possible, the space that used to constitute politics, he argues that politics has "contaminated itself with law" in the state of exception. Because "only human action is able to cut the relationship between violence and law", it becomes increasingly difficult within the state of exception for humanity to act against the State."

Alexander, Christopher, and Murray Silverstein, Shlomo Angel, Sara Ishikawa, Denny Abrams.    

___. The Oregon Experiment, 1975.

___. A Pattern Language, 1977

___. The Timeless Way of Building, 1979.

Alexander, Lisa T [2015].  "Occupying the Constitutional Right to Housing." 94 Neb. L. Rev. 245 (2015). Available at: https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/facscholar/766.  

Allen, John J. (2011). "The Mixed Economies of Cain and Abel: An Historical and Cultural Approach." Conversations with the Biblical World, Vol 31. [1].  

Allport, Gordon W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1954. Full text available at: https://archive.org/details/TheNatureOfPrejudice.

"The checkerboard of prejudice in the United States is perhaps the most intricate of all." .

"Everywhere on earth we find a condition of separateness among groups. People mate with their own kind. They eat, play, reside in homogeneous clusters...Much of this automatic cohesion is due to nothing more than convenience...most of the business of life can go on with less effort it we stick together with our own kind." (p.17-18). .

"Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur. A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each even freshly in its own right." p.20 .

"Contrary evidence is not admitted and allowed to modify the generalization; rather it is perfunctorily acknowledged but excluded. Let us call this the 're-fencing' device. When a fact cannot fit into a mental field, the exception is acknowledged, but the field is hastily fenced in again and not allowed to remain dangerously open." p.23.

"the very act of affirming our way of live often leads us to the brink of prejudice." p.24

Andersen, Michael. [2019] "Re-legalizing Fourplexes is the Unfinished Business of Tom McCall"  ["For decades, Oregon has used state law to battle economic segregation. Fair-housing experts say HB 2001 is the next step"]. Sightline.org, January 23, 2019.

Anderson, Michelle (2008). "Cities Inside Out: Race, Poverty, and Exclusion at the Urban Fringe." 55 UCLA L. REV. 1095 (2008). discussion of "unincorporated urban areas".

Anderson, Nels. (1940). Men On the Move. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [excerpt, "An Old Problem in New Form", in Anderson, 1998].

Anderson, Nels (1998). On Hobos and Homelessness. (compilation of writings, edited and with an introduction by Raffaele Rauty). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226019666.

Anderson, Nels. (1923). The Hobo: The sociology of the homeless man. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Angst, Maggie. "Despite budget shortfall, San Jose spends $17 million on tiny homes for homeless amid the coronavirus outbreak." San Jose Mercury News, April 8, 2020. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/08/despite-budget-shortfall-san-jose-is-spending-17-million-to-build-tiny-homes-for-homeless/.

Angst, Maggie. "Tensions mount as San Jose chooses new site for homeless housing amid coronavirus." San Jose Mercury News, April 22, 2020. https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/22/tensions-mount-as-san-jose-chooses-new-site-for-the-homeless-amid-coronavirus/.

Anson, April. (2014). The World in my Backyard”: Romanticization, Thoreauvian Rhetoric, and Constructive Confrontation in the Tiny House Movement”. Research in Urban Sociology, 14, 289–314. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S1047-004220140000014013. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1F_bEq5Ba81Ahom-npyfx5cF_wtbP9Szu.

Aquilino, Marie, ed. Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity. (New York, NY: Metropolis Books, 2011). ISBN 9781935202479. [1].

Architecture for Humanity, Cameron Sinclair, & Kate Stohr. Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crisis. 2006.

Aubry, Tim, and Roberto Bernad, Ronni Greenwood. "A Multi-Country Study of the Fidelity of Housing First Programmes: Introduction." European Journal of Homelessness. Vol 12, No. 3. https://www.feantsaresearch.org/download/12-3_ejh_2018_introduction2589921445805571542.pdf.  

Awan, Nishat, Tatjana Schneider, & Jeremy Till. Spatial Agency: Other Ways of Doing Architecture (Routledge, 2011).  See also Spatial Agency site: https://www.spatialagency.net/about/.  

Bagshaw, Sally. (2014). “Building on Quixote Village: Divvy Up the Responsibility”. Published online February 25, 2014 on Sally Bagshaw's Seattle City Council site. http://bagshaw.seattle.gov/2014/02/25/building-on-quixote-village-divvy-up-the-responsibility/.  

Barney, Liz. "Hawaii's largest homeless camp: rock bottom or a model refuge?" ["Long America’s vacation paradise, Hawaii is in a state of emergency as it battles a homelessness crisis. Could Pu’uhonua safe zones help alleviate the problem?"]. The Guardian, 22 June 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/22/hawaii-homeless-camps-puuhonua-safe-zones. discussing Pu’uhonua o Waianae, or the Refuge of Waianae, named for the local town about 30 miles from Honolulu.

Barron, Patrick, and Manuela Mariani, eds (2014). Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale. New York: Routledge, 2014.  https://drive.google.com/open?id=1cEpJPkMkoD3O4n9RWXZg6u5oglqow_ey.

Baumohl, Jim, ed. (1996), for the National Coalition for the Homeless. Homelessness in America. Oryx Press, 1996.

Beard, Victoria A. (2003). "Learning Radical Planning: The Power of Collective Action." Planning Theory, Vol 2, Issue 1, 2003. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095203002001004. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xambbnQ0FiW6riVM1cooK0_J5HVD75JU.

Beekman, Daniel. "Stop opening tent cities, homelessness expert tells Seattle leaders." The Seattle Times, 26 February 2016. https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/stop-opening-tent-cities-homelessness-expert-tells-seattle-leaders/.  

Beier, A. (2008). “'A New Serfdom': Labor Laws, Vagrancy Statutes, and Labor Discipline in England, 1350-1800." In Beier A. & Ocobock P. (Eds.), Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (pp. 35-63). Athens: Ohio University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1rfsq2g.5.

Beier A. & Ocobock P., eds. (2008). Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (pp. 35-63). Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008.

Bell, Bryan (2004). Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture. Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

Bell, Bryan, and Katie Wakeford, Steve Badanes (2008). Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism. Metropolis Books, 2008.

Berg, Laura, ed. The First Oregonians. 2nd edition, 2007. Portland: Oregon Council for the Humanities.  

Bernheimer, Lily. "The Shape of (Housing) Things to Come." Next City, Sep 30, 2019. https://nextcity.org/features/view/the-shape-of-housing-things-to-come. [excerpted from book by Bernheimer, The Shaping of Us: How Everyday Spaces Structure Our Lives, Behavior, and Well-Being, 2019].  On Alastair Parvin, WikiHouse, and Citizen Sector home-building approach.

Bey, Hakim (Peter Lamborn Wilson). (1991). "The Temporary Autonomous Zone". in T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Autonomedia, 1991. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism.

Bey, Hakim (Peter Lamborn Wilson). (1993). "Permanent TAZs." Dreamtime, Aug 1993. http://dreamtimevillage.org/articles/permanent_taz.html

"PAZ typology. A 'weird religion' or rebel art movement can become a kind of non-local PAZ, like a more intense and all-consuming hobby network. The Secret Society (like the Chinese Tong) also provides a model for a PAZ without geographic limits. But the 'perfect case scenario' involves a free space that extends into free time."

"I believe that there exist plenty of good selfish reasons for desiring the 'organic' (it's sexier), the 'natural' (it tastes better), the 'green' (it's more beautiful', the Wild(er)ness (it's more exciting). Communitas (as P. Goodman called it) and conviviality (as I. Illich called it) are more pleasurable than their opposites."

"we've had to consider the fact that not all existing autonomous zones are 'temporary'. Some are (at least by intention) more-or-less 'permanent'. Certain cracks in the Babylonian Monolith appear so vacant that whole groups can move into them and settle down. Certain theories, such as "Permaculture", have been developed to deal with this situation and make the most of it. 'Villages', 'communes', 'communities', even 'arcologies' and 'biospheres' (or other utopian-city forms) are being experimented with and imlemented. Even here however TAZ-theory may offer some useful thought-tools and clarifications."

Bhatt, Vikram, et al. "How the Other Half Builds - Vol 3: The Self-Selection Process." Centre for Minimum Cost Housing, McGill University, Research Paper No. 11, March 1990. https://www.mcgill.ca/mchg/files/mchg/how_the_other_half_builds_ssp.pdf.

Blanchard, Dave. [2012]. "Designing for Homelessness." [interview with Linly Bynam, Teddy Cruz, & Sergio Palleroni]. OPB Think Out Loud, October 3rd 2012. https://www.opb.org/radio/programs/thinkoutloud/segment/architecture-homeless/.

MP3: https://www.opb.org/audio/download/?f=tol/segments/2012/100303.mp3.

Boden, Paul, et al (2015). House Keys Not Handcuffs. Freedom Voices, 2015.  $19.

Borges, Sofia, and R. Scott Mitchell (2018). Give Me Shelter: Architecture Takes on the Homeless Crisis. ORO Editions, February 1, 2018)

"Give Me Shelter documents the work of the MADWORKSHOP Homeless Studio at the USC School of Architecture and their solutions for tackling the Los Angeles homeless crisis through design, compassion, and humanity. The book features exclusive content from leaders in the field including Michael Maltzan, Ted Hayes, Betty Chinn, Gregory Kloehn, Skid Row Housing Trust, and many more. Paired with a forward by Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles, Give Me Shelter provides an in-depth look at how design can bridge the gap in services to get people off the streets and into housing sooner."  

Bratt, R, C. Hartman, & A. Meyerson, eds. (1986). Critical perspectives on housing. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. (Available for online loan from Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/criticalperspect00brat). [An excellent and extensive collection of essays from many prominent researchers/writers on housing, generally from a progressive viewpoint].

Brighenti, Andrea Mubi, ed. (2013). Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-between. Ashgate Publishing, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4724-1001-6.

Brown, Emily. "Overcoming the Barriers to Micro-Housing: Tiny Houses, Big Potential." Thesis project for MCRP degree, University of Oregon, Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management, 2016. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gxq1yNEHjAdS2BleEaQPJiiIWztaXMMy/view?usp=sharing.

Brysch, Sara. "Reinterpreting Existenzminimum in Contemporary Affordable Housing Solutions." Urban Planning. Vol 4, No 3 (2019).  https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/2121.

Budnick, Nick. "The Duke of Dignity Village" [:"Ibrahim Mubarak has learned that a homeless utopia is easier to conceive than to achieve"]. Willamette Week, September 17, 2002  Updated January 24, 2017. https://www.wweek.com/portland/article-1315-the-duke-of-dignity-village.html.

Burman, Kara Grace. "Liminal Dwelling: Support for Street Residents, a Place of Re-integration and Transition." M.Arch thesis, Dalhousie University

Halifax, Nova Scotia. March 2017. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h0cHFZRzSixeT_MzozrEY2iELeuORwqb/view?usp=sharing.

Burt, M. R. (2003). "Chronic Homelessness: Emergence of a Public Policy." Fordham Urban Law Journal 30(3) pp.1267–79.

Burt, Martha, et al. "Helping America's Homeless: Emergency Shelter or Affordable Housing?" 7 (2001).

Butigan, Ken. "Olympia’s homeless win struggle for permanent housing."

["With the opening of Quixote Village, an innovative compound of 30 small cottages and a community center in Olympia, Wash., the six-year struggle of the homeless has finally paid off"]. Waging Nonviolence, January 3, 2014. https://wagingnonviolence.org/2014/01/olympias-homeless-win-housing/.

Calfee C, Weissman E (2012). "Permission to Transition: Zoning and the Transition Movement." Planning & Environmental Law 64(5):3-10. DOI: 10.1080/15480755.2012.683689.  PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qtdHsK2abJijrOoH0jvJa7aZhTBzJ4XS.

Cass Community Social Services. "Tiny Homes Detroit."  https://casscommunity.org/tinyhomes/.  Accessed 19 November 2019.

Chapin, Ross. Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World. (2011).

Chernoff S (1983). "Behind the Smokescreen: Exclusionary Zoning of Mobile Homes." Washington University Journal of Urban & Contemporary Law. 25:235-268. http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1442&context=law_urbanlaw.

Chomei, Kamo, et al. Ten Foot Square Hut (Hojoki) and Tales of the Heike. (1972). Translated by A. L. Sadler.

City Repair Project (2006). The City Repair Project’s Placemaking Guidebook. ["Collectively authored and edited"]. 1st edition, 2003; 2nd edition, 2006.

License:  Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5. http://docshare04.docshare.tips/files/5331/53315133.pdf

Clark, Bryan. "San Jose will build ‘up to 500’ tiny homes for coronavirus-affected homeless residents." The Next Web, April 9 2020. https://thenextweb.com/corona/2020/04/09/asan-jose-will-build-up-to-500-tiny-homes-for-coronavirus-affected-homeless-residents/.

Community Planning Workshop (University of Oregon). "Providing for the Unhoused: A Review of Transitional Housing Strategies in Eugene." October 2015. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VqcpQBWby0_uAUpWFsw26Mu4y6uvSHe1/view?usp=sharing.

Corr, Anders. No Trespassing!: Squatting, Rent Strikes, and Land Struggles Worldwide.1999.

Culhane, Dennis P. & Stephen Metraux. "Rearranging the Deck Chairs or Reallocating the Lifeboats? Homelessness Assistance and Its Alternatives." Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol 74, Issue 1, 2008, pp111-121. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944360701821618.  [full text].

Cunningham, Ward. "Writing with Strangers." (undated; accessed April 2, 2020). http://ward.bay.wiki.org/writing-with-strangers.html.

Cunningham. Ward. Keynote speech at Write the Docs conference, May 19, 2015. http://makecommoningwork.fed.wiki/view/federated-wiki. patterns model:  I think of as a sort of "modularization of experience".

Cuny, Frederick C. (1983). Disasters and Development. 1983. Full text: https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/159887.

Davies, Daniel (series creator). "Rebel Architecture." Al Jazeera English, 2014-16.

https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelarchitecture/. ["A six-part [or more?] documentary series profiling architects who are using design as a form of activism and resistance to tackle the world's urban, environmental and social crises"].

Davis, Ian (1978). Shelter After Disaster. https://drive.google.com/open?id=18pZGVf5aRCkT1LnmmZeMQ8hZ6QwN6nog.

Davis, Sam (2014). Designing for the Homeless: Architecture That Works. University of California Press (2004).

"Written by an architect who has been designing and building affordable housing for thirty years, this well-illustrated book is both a call to create well-designed places for the homeless and a review of innovative and successful building designs that now serve diverse communities across the United States. Sam Davis argues for safe and functional architectural designs and programs that symbolically reintegrate the homeless into society in buildings that offer beauty, security, and hope to those most in need."

Dearborn, Lynne M., and Abbilyn Harmon. (2012) "Tent Cities." In: The Encyclopedia of Housing, 2nd Edition. Edited by: Andrew T. Carswell. Sage Publications, 2012. http://doi.org/10.4135/9781452218380.n253.

"Portland continues to stand out as the progressive example of a municipality embracing alternative types of housing for homeless persons."

De Carlo, Giancarlo. "An Architecture of Participation." 1972. [a version is also in Perspecta, 17 (1980), 74-79].

De Carlo, Giancarlo, "Architecture's Public" (1969). in Architecture and Participation, ed. by Peter Blundell Jones, Doina Petrescu and Jeremy Till (Abingdon: Spon Press / Taylor & Francis, 2007), pp. 3-22. https://architecturesofspatialjustice.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/w08_dicarlo_architectures_public.pdf.

DeFilippis, James. Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital (2003).  (Multcolib has ebook).

DeFilippis, James, and Susan Saegert (2012). The Community Development Reader (2nd edition, Routledge 2012).

Dickson, Paul, and Thomas B. Allen. (2003). "Marching on History: When a 'Bonus Army' of World War I veterans converged on Washington, MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton were there to meet them." Smithsonian Magazine, February 2003. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/marching-on-history-75797769/.

Diedrickson, Derek "Deek". Micro living: 40 innovative tiny houses equipped for full-time living, in 400 square feet or less. 2018.

Dignity Village. Dignityvillage.org.

Dignity Village (2001). "Dignity Village 2001 & Beyond: Outline Strategies for a Sustainable Future." Prepared by Dignity Village residents and supporters for the City of Portland and its homeless residents.  https://drive.google.com/open?id=1l5fo_SLimhc54znyTuf1I0YECo3sP21B.

Dignity Village Council. "Dignity Village Proposal, 2004-." (2003?).

[prepared in collaboration with Supporters including The City Repair Project].  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B2jI5OLgYdyYfkYzV19fSF9oYTBPSTFlc3VUX29nSTdwWFdfc3BCeWZVak1jN25kLVYwR1U.

Dignity Village Site Selection Committee, and Larson Legacy Foundation. "Dignity Village: Successes at Sunderland".  June 5, 2002. http://dignity.scribble.com/docs/dignity_success_sunderland.pdf.

Dinh, Tran and Brewster, David and Fullerton, Anna and Huckaby, Greg and Parks, Mamie and Rankin, Sara and Ruan, Nantiya and Zwiebel, Elie (2018). "Yes, In My Backyard: Building ADUs to Address Homelessness." University of Denver Sturm College of Law Homeless Advocacy Policy Project, May 3, 2018. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3173258 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3173258.

Douglas, Gordon C.C. The Help-Yourself City: Legitimacy and Inequality in DIY Urbanism. (2018).

Duncan, J. (1978). "Men without property: the tramp's classification and use of public space." Antipode, 1(1), 24-34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1978.tb00292.x.

Ehrenreich, Ben (2009). "Tales of Tent City: In boom and in bust, homeless encampments are a product of inequality and neglect." The Nation, June 3, 2009. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tales-tent-city/.

Elia, Cory. "Keeping hope alive: seeking answers for the future." PSU Vanguard, March 16, 2018. http://psuvanguard.com/keeping-hope-alive-the-eviction/.

Elia, Cory.  "City of Portland threatens houseless advocates with fines." PSU Vanguard, April 13, 2018. https://psuvanguard.com/city-of-portland-threatens-houseless-advocates-with-fines/.

Ellickson, Robert C. (1996). "Controlling Chronic Misconduct in City Spaces: Of Panhandlers, Skid Rows, and Public-Space Zoning." The Yale Law Journal, Vol 105, 1165-1248. Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 408. http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/408.

"Abstract: During the 1980s, panhandling, bench squatting, and other disorderly behavior became increasingly common in the downtown public spaces of American cities. This sharp rise in disorder was due to an increase in the size of the urban underclass and the weakening of both informal and legal controls on misconduct. An individual who chronically interferes with the correlative liberties of other pedestrians, Professor Ellickson argues, causes significant public harms, even though the harm at any instant may be slight. A promising way for a city to deal with chronic street misbehavior is to differentiate its rules of public conduct from place to place. In the 1990s, 'compassion fatigue' toward the 'homeless' (as street people are often, if inaccurately, labeled) prompted many of the nation's historically most tolerant cities to tighten their controls on panhandling and other street misconduct. In a handful of recent cases, some judges have thwarted these cities' efforts on federal constitutional grounds. Professor Ellickson criticizes these decisions. Destitution should not excuse chronic panhandlers and bench squatters from abiding by the rules-of-the-road that generally apply to users of open-access public places. Judicial decisions that federalize and constitutionalize the details of street law not only unduly limit local choices, but also impair the capacity of central cities to compete with alternative venues such as private shopping malls."

Elliott, Donald L., FAICP, and Peter Sullivan, AICP [2015]. "Tiny Houses, and the Not-So-Tiny Questions They Raise." Zoning Practice (American Planning Association), Issue Number 11, Tiny Houses (November 2015). https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JJ1uX9JeB-rzkYLsQd7dSp6JPmprrzM5/view?usp=sharing.

Engels, Frederick. "The Housing Question." (articles, 1872-73; reissued with new preface 1887).  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/housing-question/.

Evans, Krista. "Integrating tiny and small homes into the urban landscape: History, land use barriers and potential solutions." Journal of Geography and Regional Planning, Vol 11(3), pp.34-35, March 2018. https://doi.org/10.5897/JGRP2017.0679. [open access].

Evans, Krista (2020). "Tackling Homelessness with Tiny Houses: An Inventory of Tiny House Villages in the United States." The Professional Geographer, 29 Apr 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2020.1744170.

"because there is no formal definition or commonly accepted standard for what constitutes a tiny house (Evans 2018a), any organization that defines itself as a tiny house village for the homeless was included in the database. This allows for an exploratory and encompassing examination of this recent approach toward addressing homelessness."

Evans, William N., and David C. Philips, Krista J. Ruffini. "Reducing and Preventing Homelessness: A Review of the Evidence and Charting a Research Agenda." NBER Working Paper No. 26232, September 2019. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26232

(DOI): 10.3386/w26232. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sJ5FSfrtx5YE0i_AuacH7Yz_JNMOIfRn.

Fathy, Hassan. Architecture for the Poor (1968).

Feldman, Roberta M, and Sergio Palleroni, David Perkes, Bryan Bell. "Wisdom From the Field: Public Interest Architecture in Practice." 2013. www.publicinterestdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Wisdom-from-the-Field.pdf.

Ferry, Todd, and Sergio Palleroni. "Research + action: the first two years of the Center for Public Interest Design." in Wortham-Galvin, B.D., editor, Sustainable Solutions: Let Knowledge Serve the City, 2016.

https://www.amazon.com/Sustainable-Solutions-Knowledge-Serve-City/dp/178353396X.

Finkes, Rebecca. (2019). "City Sanctioned Homeless Encampments: A Case Study Analysis of Seattle’s City-Permitted Villages." Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation with Honors Research Distinction in City and Regional Planning in the Knowlton School, The Ohio State University. May 2019. https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/87627/Becca_Finkes_Final_Thesis.pdf.

Fishman, Robert (1989). Bourgeois Utopias.

Foscarinis, Maria.1 (1996). "Downward Spiral: Homelessness and Its Criminalization." 14 Yale Law & Policy Review. 1 (1996). https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1288. 1 Executive Director, National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

"During the 1980s, efforts to establish a 'right to shelter' defined much of the activism, litigation, and debate about homelessness.18 Now, efforts to criminalize activities associated with homelessness are playing that defining role. This evolution follows the failure to address homelessness adequately, and the inability of shelter alone to do so. The trend toward criminalization threatens a further spiraling of minimal aspiration and standard from a cot in a shelter to a spot on the street. At the same time, much of the debate it has sparked presumes a polarity between the 'public's' interest in orderly public places and homeless persons' "'ight' to sleep and beg in public.'

Seeking to reverse the fall, this Article rejects that polarity. It rests instead on the premise that everyone has an interest in pleasant public places and that no one has an interest in living on the street. Activism and debate should focus on addressing the conditions that require people to live on the street, by defining and implementing solutions to homelessness. Longer-term measures that address the causes of homelessness-as opposed to merely providing emergency relief-offer the only realistic possibility of doing so.

"The Article begins with an overview of homelessness in America, including a summary of its size, nature, and causes. The Article reviews recent efforts by local governments to criminalize activities associated with homelessness, focusing on three major categories: begging, public place, and indirect restrictions. It discusses the purposes and effects of criminalization, noting that a common underlying goal is the removal of homeless people from all or selected city areas.

"The Article reviews recent court rulings in litigation challenging the constitutionality of such local government actions. It discusses divergent results and analyses, identifies common themes, and argues for a fact-based approach. The Article proposes that laws criminalizing activities associated with homelessness are unlikely to be both constitutional and effective in meeting their goals."

Fowler, Reverend Faith. (2018). Tiny Homes in a Big City. Detroit: Cass Community Publishing House, 2018. ISBN 9781942011750.

Frisch, Michael, and Lisa J. Servon (2006). "CDCs and the Changing Context for Urban Community Development: A Review of the Field and the Environment." Community Development: Journal of the Community Development Society, Vol. 37, No. 4, Winter 2006. http://www.thecyberhood.net/documents/papers/servon.pdf.

"This review takes Rebuilding Communities [Vidal 1992] as a starting point to survey the community development literature, the community development field, and external environmental factors, in order to examine what has happened over the past fifteen years to shape the context in which urban community development corporations (CDCs) now operate. This paper is both a bounded literature review and an environmental scan. We identify categories of changes and influences on the community development field. We find that in the last fifteen years, the community development field has grown increasingly professionalized. Policy initiatives have also shaped the field. New evaluations of community development have been conducted and published. We now know much more about the potential and limits of CDCs than we did when the Rebuilding Communities (RC) study was launched in the late 1980s. At the same time, significant gaps in our knowledge of the community development field remain. In particular, there has been insufficient study of how the changes in this context have affected the work that CDCs do."

Gabriele, Kristen Elizabeth [2014]. "Design & Management Strategies for Micro-housing Units in Transitional Villages for the Homeless: an Exploration of Prototypes at Opportunity Village Eugene." M.Arch thesis for SUNY Buffalo, 1 September 2014.  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M8SsRA7-2us2BACTOSb7yxRweiBZu4V0/view?usp=sharing.

"The findings from this study provide design alternatives that can lead to improved user satisfaction in micro-housing prototypes."

Gans. Herbert J. (1972). "The Positive Functions of Poverty." The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 78, No. 2. (Sep., 1972), pp. 275-289. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/225324. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WKowlKxe89TBf4HWMCgipAY_-c9a_YLR.

"Abstract: Mertonian functional analysis is applied to explain the persistence of poverty, and fifteen functions which poverty and the poor perform for the rest of American society, particularly the affluent, are identified and described. Functional alternatives which would substitute for these functions and make poverty unnecessary are suggested, but the most important alternatives are themselves dysfunctional for the affluent, since they require some redistribution of income and power. A functional analysis of poverty thus comes to many of the same conclusions as radical sociological analysis, demonstrating anew Merton's assertion that functionalism need not be conservative in ideological outlook or implication."  

Gauldie, Enid. (1974). Cruel habitations ; a history of working-class housing 1780-1918. George Allen & Unwin, UK / Harper & Row, USA, 1974. https://archive.org/details/cruelhabitations0000gaul/page/61/mode/1up.

Unusual for discussing both rural and urban UK lower-class housing of the time. A basic point: rural housing was often as bad or worse than the urban housing usually focused on.

Gifford, Laura Jane. "Planning for a Productive Paradise: Tom McCall and the Conservationist Tale of Oregon Land-Use Policy." Oregon Historical Quarterly , Vol. 115, No. 4 (Winter 2014), pp. 470-501. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5403/oregonhistq.115.4.0470. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=13c4zGoGxX3ZizhZPZ2TxS637ljBSUtCJ.

Gilles, Nellie. "For Portland, Ore., Woman, Home These Days Is Where She Parks Her Minivan." All Things Considered, June 23, 2020. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/06/23/882080701/for-portland-woman-home-these-days-is-where-she-parks-her-minivan.

Glasser, Irene. (1994). Homelessness in global perspective. New York: G.K. Hall Reference. LC-93-25087. Available for checkout at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/homelessnessingl0000glas.

Gong, Neil. "California gave people the ‘right’ to be homeless — but little help finding homes." The Washington Post, May 20, 2021. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/05/20/california-homeless-addiction-drugs/.

Gong N. "Between Tolerant Containment and Concerted Constraint: Managing Madness for the City and the Privileged Family." American Sociological Review. 2019;84(4):664-689. doi:10.1177/0003122419859533.

Grabow, Stephen, and Allen Heskin. "Foundations for a Radical Concept of Planning." Journal of the American Institute of Planning, vol. 39, no. 2, 1973:106-14. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01944367308977664.  PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1CxzvzpiRj7X0TVGvgdEHNYLbZ-iCjvOu.

Glaser, Gary. Justiceville – L.A.'s Homeless City (film recording) 1987. https://www.cctv.org/watch-tv/programs/justiceville-%E2%80%93-las-homeless-city.

Gragg, Randy. "Guerrilla City." Architecture, May 2002. https://saveferalhumanhabitat.wordpress.com/2002/12/27/guerrilla-city-a-homeless-settlement-in-portland-has-its-own-government-urban-plan-and-skyline/.

“In its ‘permasite’ configuration, Dignity Village could potentially be a working model for a new type of truly sustainable, high density and mixed use, organically developing urban village model. If developed according to Dignity Villages wishes, the village would enhance Portland’s reputation as being the most green city in America. ... Dignity Village hopes to become a demonstration site for solar and wind power, permaculture, environmental restoration, stormwater and greywater reuse and innovative use of recycled materials and alternative building techniques for construction.”

Grant, Elizabeth, and Kelly Greenop, Albert L. Refiti, Daniel J. Glenn, eds (2018). The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture. Springer, 2018. E-ISBN 9789811069048.

Gregory, J. (1989). American Exodus: The Dustbowl Migration and Okie Culture in California. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://www.google.com/books/edition/American_Exodus/qNdtGwnXYrIC?hl=en&gbpv=1.

Grenell, Peter (1972). "Planning for Invisible People: Some Consequences of Bureaucratic Values and Practices." In [Turner & Fichtel, eds, Freedom to Build, 1972].  

Grenell notes in footnote "I am indebted to Cora Du Bois, Zemurray Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University (retired), for introducing me to the term 'invisible people.'"

 "Both countries have severe housing problems in spite of the United States' great wealth and India's surfeit of manpower. Leaders of both nations believe these problems can be solved through modern technology and organization if sufficient resources are available. A fundamental consequence of this optimistic view is an underestimation of the variability and complexity of human needs, and also of the great resource represented by the people themselves....The result of these attitudes and their underlying values is to make people seem 'invisible' to those persons -- chiefly members of large bureaucratic organizations -- whose professed task is to serve them. It is only when invisible people have made their presence felt, through political agitation or sheer force of numbers, that governments have been compelled to recognize their existence and to institute new or revised goals and programs. This is as true in India with its islands of affluence amidst a sea of poverty, as it is in the United States with its pockets of poverty in almost university plenty."

Griffin, Anna. "Lio Alaalatoa spends nights on the streets, handing out food, water, blankets — and hope." with photography by Thomas Boyd. The Oregonian, January 31, 2015. https://www.oregonlive.com/projects/portland-homeless/join.html.

Groth, Paul. Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1994 1994. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6j49p0wf/.  Full text available in UC Press E-Books Collection.

Hagerty, Colleen. "These moms were homeless. Now they are starting a housing revolution." The Lily (Washington Post), 6 February 2020. https://www.thelily.com/these-moms-were-homeless-now-they-are-starting-a-housing-revolution/.

Hailey, Charlie (2003). "Camp(site): architectures of duration and place." Ph.D dissertation, University of Florida, 2003. https://archive.org/details/campsitearchitec00hail.

Hailey, Charlie (2008). Campsite: Architectures of Duration and Place. Louisiana State University Press, 2008. https://www.amazon.com/Campsite-Architectures-Duration-Place-Voices/dp/080713323X.

Hamdi, Nabeel (1995). Housing without Houses: Participation, Flexibility, Enablement. Warwickshire: Practical Action Publishing (formerly Intermediate Technology Publications), The Schumacher Centre, 1995. https://www.scribd.com/document/364607734/hamdi-nabeel-housing-without-houses-participation-flexibility-enablement.

Hamdi, Nabeel (2004). Small Change: About the art of practice and the limits of planning in cities. London: Earthscan, 2004. https://www.scribd.com/document/363933988/320473408-Hamdi-Small-Change-pdf.

Harbarger, Molly, and Elliot Njus (2019). "Portland banking on low-rent SRO hotels to ease housing problems." The Oregonian, April 27, 2019. https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2019/04/officials-look-to-sro-hotels-as-model-for-low-income-housing.html.

Harbarger, Molly. "Police sweep new homeless camp, Village of Hope." The Oregonian. Feb 02, 2018

https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/02/police_sweep_new_homeless_camp.html.

Harms, Hans H. "User and Community Involvement in Housing and Its Effect on Professionalism." In [Turner & Fichtel, eds, Freedom to Build, 1972].  

"Problems of insufficiency and inadequacy are immanent in the present housing supply structure, which is oriented toward the supply side and the construction of units according to procedures set by industry and government, and which subsidized industry, professional 'facilitating beneficiaries,' and the rich in order to provide housing for the poor...Direct subsidies to users in combination with a network of decentralized services could increase the autonomy of low-income families without setting up complicated mechanisms to regulate the lives of the poor or the process by which housing for the poor is created."

Discusses 1968 Tent City in Boston.  

Harris, Richard (1999). "Slipping through the Cracks: The Origins of Aided Self-help Housing, 1918-53." Housing Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3, 281-309, 1999.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard_Harris39/publication/248960570_Slipping_through_the_Cracks_The_Origins_of_Aided_Self-help_Housing_1918-53/links/584845a808ae61f75de350c1/Slipping-through-the-Cracks-The-Origins-of-Aided-Self-help-Housing-1918-53.pdf.

Harvey, David (1999). "Frontiers of insurgent planning" (1999).

Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope (2000). https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2017/SOC593/um/Harvey_2000_Spaces_of_Hope.pdf. [excerpts: Spaces of Hope]

Book description from publisher: "As the twentieth century drew to a close, the rich were getting richer; power was concentrating within huge corporations; vast tracts of the earth were being laid waste; three quarters of the earth's population had no control over its destiny and no claim to basic rights. There was nothing new in this. What was new was the virtual absence of any political will to do anything about it. Spaces of Hope takes issue with this. David Harvey brings an exciting perspective to two of the principal themes of contemporary social discourse: globalization and the body. Exploring the uneven geographical development of late-twentieth-century capitalism, and placing the working body in relation to this new geography, he finds in Marx's writings a wealth of relevant analysis and theoretical insight. In order to make much-needed changes, Harvey maintains, we need to become the architects of a different living and working environment and to learn to bridge the micro-scale of the body and the personal and the macro-scale of global political economy.Utopian movements have for centuries tried to construct a just society. Harvey looks at their history to ask why they failed and what the ideas behind them might still have to offer. His devastating description of the existing urban environment (Baltimore is his case study) fuels his argument that we can and must use the force of utopian imagining against all who say "there is no alternative." He outlines a new kind of utopian thought, which he calls dialectical utopianism, and refocuses our attention on possible designs for a more equitable world of work and living with nature. If any political ideology or plan is to work, he argues, it must take account of our human qualities. Finally, Harvey dares to sketch a very personal utopian vision in an appendix, one that leaves no doubt about his own geography of hope."

Hayden, Dolores. Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life. (??)

Hayes, Ted. "History of JHUSA" [Justiceville/Homeless, USA - i.e. Dome City, Los Angeles]. http://www.tedhayes.us/domevillage/JHUSA.html. Accessed 18 October 2019.

Hays, R. A. (2002). "Habitat for Humanity: Building Social Capital through Faith Based Service." Journal of Urban Affairs, 24(3), 247–269. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9906.00126. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Mh7nuyJWzlbJ2nSj7A0o8-6ZQBKTP3cE.

Heben, Andrew (2011). “Inside Tent Cities,” Planning Magazine, 2011.

___. (2012). “From Camp to Village.” Communities Magazine, 2012.

___. (2013). "Opportunity Village: for and by the homeless.” The Global Urbanist, 2013.

___. (2014b). "It Takes a Village" Tiny House Magazine, 2014.

___. (2014). Tent City Urbanism: From Self-Organized Camps to Tiny House Villages. (2014).

____. (2014b). "2014 in Review: A Pivotal Year for Tiny House Villages." Tentcityurbanism.com, 30 December 2014. http://www.tentcityurbanism.com/2014/12/2014a-pivotal-year-for-tiny-house.html.

____. (2015). "2015 in Review: Tiny House Villages progress as traditional housing options continue to fall short." tentcityurbanism.com, 30 December 2015. http://www.tentcityurbanism.com/2015/12/2015-in-review-tiny-house-villages.html.

Herring, Christopher (2014). "The New Logics of Homeless Seclusion:Homeless Encampments in America's West Coast Cities." City & Community, 23 December 2014. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12086. PDF: https://www.academia.edu/15061831/The_New_Logics_of_Homeless_Seclusion_Homeless_Encampments_in_America_s_West_Coast_Cities_2014_City_and_Community_Vol_13_No._4_285-309.

Herring, Christopher (2015a). "The Roots and Implications of the USA's Homeless Tent Cities." City, Vol. 19, No. 5, 689-701, 2015. (co-authored with Manuel Lutz): https://chrisherringdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/herring-and-lutz-2015-city.pdf.

Herring, Christopher (2015b). "Evicting the Evicted: Five Misleading Rationales for Homeless Camp Evictions." Progressive Planning Magazine, Fall 2015, 29-32. https://chrisherringdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/ppm_fall2015_herring.pdf.

Herring, Christopher (2015c). "Tent City, America." Places Journal. December 2015. https://placesjournal.org/article/tent-city-america/.

Herring, Christopher (2015d).  "Sheltering Those in Need: Architects Confront Homelessness" (Introductory Essay for the 2016 Berkeley Prize). https://www.academia.edu/16404074/Sheltering_Those_in_Need_Architects_Confront_Homelessness_2015_Introductory_Essay_for_the_2016_Berkeley_Prize.

Herring, Christopher, and Dilara Yarbrough, Lisa Alatorre (2019). "Pervasive Penality: How the Criminalization of Poverty Perpetuates Homelessness." Social Problems, 2019, 0, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spz004. https://www.academia.edu/38928064/Pervasive_Penality_How_the_Criminalization_of_Poverty_Perpetuates_Homelessness_2019_Social_Problems.

Holtzman, Ben.  "When the Homeless Took Over." ["As the homeless and affordable housing crises become a focus on local and national campaigns, we must remember the rich history and critical contributions of homeless organizers."] Shelterforce, October 11, 2019. https://shelterforce.org/2019/10/11/when-the-homeless-took-over/.

Hopper, Kim, and Jim Baumohl. (1996). "Redefining the Cursed Word: A Historical Interpretation of American Homelessness." in Baumohl, Jim, ed. Homelessness in America (1996). Available for online loan at Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/homelessnessinam00jimb.

HousingWiki. "Hyperlocalism." accessed 6 December, 2019.

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Jackson, John Brinckerhoff (J.B.). "The Movable Dwelling and How It came to America."  New Mexico Studies in the Fine Arts, 1982; reprinted in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, Yale University Press, 1984. "the%20movable%20dwelling"&pg=PA89#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=l0J4gVZFpqEC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PR7&vq=%22the%20movable%20dwelling%22&pg=PA89#v=onepage&q&f=false.

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Justiceville/Homeless, USA (2001). "A Look at Dome Village." Dome Village Booklet Publication, Issue 3, July 2001.

http://domevillage.us/a-look-at-dome-village/.

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Kahn, Lloyd and Bob Easton, eds. Shelter. (2nd edition, 2000).

Kapur, Purnima. "From Ideas to Practice: 'Self-Help' in Housing From Interpretation to Application." M.S. Architecture Studies and M.C.P. thesis, MIT, 1989. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/75537.  [advisor: Nabeel Hamdi].

Kavick, Ray. "First week at Camp Quixote."  Works In Progress (Thurston County Rainbow Coalition), March 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20140605060803/http://www.olywip.org/archive/page/article/2007/03/02.html.

Karakusevic, Paul, and Abigail Batchelor. Social Housing: Definitions and Design Exemplars. RIBA Publishing / Taylor & Francis, 2017.

Kern, Ken. The Owner-Built Home. (Homestead Press, 1972).

Kloehn, Greg. "Greg Kloehn on the ingenuity & resilience of homeless communities." presentation April 24, 2017, at Creative Mornings Oakland. https://creativemornings.com/talks/greg-kloehn/2. [see also: Kloehn's project http://homelesshomesproject.org/].

See also Q&A session from talk: https://creativemornings.com/talks/greg-kloehn/1. Tim McCormick asked: "Do you think this could, or should, and how might it, go from 60 to 70 units [now] to lets say, 6000 units which is how many unsheltered there are in San Francisco and Oakland?"

Kolodny, R. (1986). "The emergence of self-help as a housing strategy for the urban poor." In R. Bratt, C. Hartman, & A. Meyerson (Eds.), Critical perspectives on housing (pp. 447–462). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. (Available for online loan from Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/criticalperspect00brat).

Kohn, W., & Mosher, H. (Codirectors). (2007). Tent cities toolkit: A multimedia grassroots primer [DVD]. Portland, OR: Kwamba Productions.

Korbi, Marson, and Andrea Migotto. "Between Rationalization and Political Project: The Existenzminimum from Klein and Teige to Today." Urban Planning. Vol 4, No 3 (2019). https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/2157.

Kosslyn, Neil. "A modern wiki for a modern internet: the Smallest Federated Wiki on The GovLab’s Demos for Democracy." GovLab Blog, August 15, 2014. http://thegovlab.org/a-modern-wiki-for-a-modern-internet-the-smallest-federated-wiki-on-the-govlabs-demos-for-democracy/.

Kropotkin, Peter. The Conquest of Bread. (1892).

Lagdameo, Jennifer Baum. "How Tiny Pods Are the Future For Portland's Houseless Community." Dwell, August 21, 2017. https://www.dwell.com/article/how-tiny-pods-are-the-future-for-portlands-houseless-community-657aa4a5.

Lakeman, Mark, for Dignity Village. (2001). "Dignity Village 2001 and Beyond: Outlining Strategies for a Sustainable Future. http://dignity.scribble.com/proposal/DignityProposal.html.

Langan, Celeste. (1995). Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom. Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 9780521035101.

Larson, Jane E. (2002). "Informality, Illegality, and Inequality." 20 Yale Law & Policy Review 137. (2002).

Lewis, David G. (2016). "Houses of the Oregon Tribes." NDNHistory Research, December 31 2016. https://ndnhistoryresearch.com/2016/12/31/houses-of-the-oregon-tribes/.

Liccardo, Sam. (2020). Comments in "Reaching the Peak," in interactive Q&A with the mayors of San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and a UCSF doctor. ABC 7 News (Bay Area), April 16, 2020. https://abc7ne.ws/34Gydvn. (video also at https://www.facebook.com/57427307078/videos/555368625125184).  At 16:40, and?

Discussing San Jose government's plan to use emergency funding [including FEMA, I think] to build non-congregate shelters that are durable, prefab structures, to provide transitional housing both immediately and longer-term.

Loftus-Farren, Zoe (2011). "Tent Cities: An Interim Solution to Homelessness and Affordable Housing Shortages in the United States." California Law Review, Vol. 99, No. 4 (August 2011), pp. 1037-1081. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uVh5h2ApWpUkutmo224euDMyodPmQSYY.

"However, tent cities, by definition, are unlikely ever to meet the standards we expect of more traditional and permanent housing, and most policy makers would agree that their residents deserve a higher standard of living than that attainable in an encampment. With these ethical implications in mind, tent cities may best be viewed as a temporary solution, one that can be embraced only so long as local governments are unable to afford or arrange for more suitable long-term solutions."  

Los Angeles County, Los Angeles County Homeless Initiative. "Housing Innovation Challenge." https://www.housinginnovationchallenge.com/. Accessed 11 March 2019.  

Lubenau, Anne-Marie. "Site Visit: A Tiny House Village in Olympia Offers a New Model for Housing the Homeless." ["Quixote Village is a self-managed community that provides permanent, supportive housing for homeless adults"]. Metropolis Magazine, April 20, 2015.  https://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/residential-architecture/site-visit-a-tiny-house-village-in-olympia-offers-a-new-model-for-housing-the-homeless/.

Lutz, Manuel. (2015). "Uncommon Claims to the Commons: Homeless Tent Cities in the US." in Dellenbaugh, Mary, et al, eds. (2015). Urban Commons: Moving Beyond State and Market. Birkhauser Verlag GmhH, 2015, p.101-116.  ISBN 978-3-03821-661-2. https://www.academia.edu/26014671/Uncommon_Claims_to_the_Commons_Homeless_Tent_Cities_in_the_US_2015_book_chapter_in_Dellenbaugh_Mary_et_al._Urban_commons_Moving_beyond_state_and_market._Bauwelt_Fundamente_Vol._15_Birkh%C3%A4user_101-117.

'commoning' as key pattern in tent cities, encampments, villages. Not necessarily ideological or theorized, is a universal and age-old practical approach to surviving.

"It is noteworthy that these communities have managed to sustain and expand their commons for years or even decades...These makeshift communities not only keep their commons working as place of last resort that is safer than the streets, but also provide a structure for a more self-determined life of empowerment, engagement, and protest. Their practice is banal but also turns the dominant principle of capitalist production of space upside down. In a society in which land is treated as a commodity and where the non-properties are governed in dehumanizing ways, the practices in the camps illustrate a break in this logic. Tent city activists continue to renegotiate and politicize their political-economic circumstances and their homelessness management system. When they demand political and legal recognition is it not limited to a place for their own tent city but inevitably extends to opening opportunities for more such tent commons."

"Take Back the Land organizer Max Rameau, of the Center for Pan-African Development, argued that the Umoja Village was not just about gentrification, but was a full "land struggle," in the mold of Brazil's MST (the Landless Workers' Movement) and similar movements in South Africa. As an advocate of Pan-Africanism, Rameau asserted black people should control the land in the black community, as manifested by Umoja Village.

"The village itself was built with the help of local white and Latino anarchists, operating under the black political leadership of Take Back the Land."

"As one activist stated, tent cities are 'simultaneously the most and the least radical response to a disturbing crisis.'" (6) - Rameau, Take Back the Land.

MADWORKSHOP (Santa Monica). Homes for Hope project (2016-). http://madworkshop.org/projects/homes-for-hope/.  Marcuse, P. (2016). "After Exposing the Roots of Homelessness – What?" Urban Geography, 38(3), 357–359. doi:10.1080/02723638.2016.1247601.

"I am deeply impressed by the contributions to this symposium and the debates that have led up to it, and happy that my little essay of more than 25 years ago [Marcuse, Peter. "Neutralizing Homelessness." Socialist Review, 1988. issue 1] fed into them. But at the same time I am saddened by its continued timeliness.

"It is now clear that we know enough about homelessness and its causes and effects to understand how abhorrent it is within an affluent society, and further that we know enough to be aware of what is needed to end it, what can and should be done. I write “‘we’ know enough”: at least no one seriously argues today that homelessness is inevitable as a natural and healthy phenomenon, needed to keep society going, providing an incentive for those too lazy or too stupid to get to work and take care of themselves. "So why do we still have homelessness in countries like the United States today?" [...]

"But consider the further implications of acting on what we know about homelessness, pursing its implications critically in public policy formation. The money and resources that are needed to provide adequate housing for all must either come from the private profit-motivated sector—we live in a capitalist society—, or from government. In the private sector that means raising wages and incomes substantially at the bottom and the middle; and in the government sector, raising taxes at the top. Clearly controversial. Power to bring about either event does not lie with those pushing to solve homelessness." "What needs to be done urgently today—yet will be done gradually and, ultimately, tomorrow—is really pretty clear."

McCormick, Tim. "From Monograph to Multigraph: the Distributed Book." London School of Economics, LSE Impact Blog, 17 January 2013. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2013/01/17/from-monograph-to-multigraph-the-distributed-book/.

McCormick, Tim (2015). "How might we put affordable housing on disused & small sites in San Francisco? Medium, Nov 3, 2015. https://medium.com/@tmccormick/how-might-we-put-affordable-housing-on-disused-small-sites-in-san-francisco-1bc74afca061.

McCormick, Tim (2015). "Tiny Houses for the Homeless in San Francisco?" Medium, Nov 18, 2015. https://medium.com/@tmccormick/tiny-houses-for-the-homeless-in-san-francisco-5c87ca5625db.  

McCormick, Tim (2016). "Cooperative Product Development" (notes / paper draft). January 2016. http://bit.ly/coop-productdev-paper.

McCormick, Tim (2016b). "Agile Housing -- a pattern language." 2016. http://bit.ly/agile-housing-patterns-chart.  

McCormick, Tim (2018). "The New Urban Autonomous House." Medium, May 5, 2018. https://medium.com/@tmccormick/the-new-urban-autonomous-off-grid-house-484bc77df152.  

McCormick, Tim (2019). "New Starter Homes: creating a network of highly affordable, detachable, ownable, 'starter,' smart, tiny homes in Portland." [project proposal, originally created for Meyer Memorial Trust's 2018 Million Month Challenge grant program, 2018]. http://bit.ly/levitatetown.

McCoy, Mike. "Farm Labor Camps: A Look Back at How America Solved the Crisis During the Great Depression." Valley Ag Voice, 3 March 2020. https://www.valleyagvoice.com/farm-labor-camps-a-look-back-at-how-america-solved-the-crisis-during-the-great-depression/.

McCulloch, Heather, with Lisa Robinson (2001). "Sharing the Wealth: Resident Ownership Mechanisms." Oakland, CA: PolicyLink. Retrieved November 5, 2019, from: www.policylink.org. https://community-wealth.org/content/sharing-wealth-resident-ownership-mechanisms.

Mehaffy, Michael M. (2019). A Pattern Language for Growing Regions. Sustasis Press, forthcoming 2019. http://www.sustasis.net/APLFGR.html

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Miller, Abbilyn Marie (2012). "Determining Critical Factors in Community-Level Planning of Homeless Service Projects."  Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Landscape Architecture in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/4838892.pdf.

Mingoya, Catherine. (2015). “Building Together. Tiny House Villages for the Homeless: A Comparative Case Study.” Unpublished master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  https://dusp.mit.edu/sites/dusp.mit.edu/files/attachments/news/mingoya_2015.pdf.

Minimum Cost Housing Group (McGill University School of Architecture). "Publications." https://mchg.ca/publications/

Mitchell, Don. (2011). "Homelessness, American Style." Urban Geography, 32:7, 933-956, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.32.7.933.

Mitchell, Don. "Tent Cities: Interstitial Spaces of Survival." in Brighenti, Andrea Mubim ed. Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-between. Ashgate Publishing, 2013. [reprinted with minor changes in Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital (2020)]. [see also Don Mitchell for discussion/excerpts].

Mitchell, Don. Mean Streets: Homelessness, Public Space, and the Limits of Capital. University of Georgia Press, 2020. [see also Don Mitchell for discussion/excerpts].

Mitchell, Ryan. Tiny House Living: Ideas For Building and Living Well In Less than 400 Square Feet. (2014).

Molinar, Robert L. (2018) "Self-Organization as a Response to Homelessness: Negotiating Autonomy and Transitional Living in a 'Village' Community.'" A Dissertation Presented to the Department of Sociology and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, June 2018. https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/23826/Molinar_oregon_0171A_12261.pdf.

Monahan, Rachel (2017). "A Developer Offers the Portland Mayor 300 Apartments at a Deep Discount—and Waits for a Reply."  [on Rob Justus / Home First Development].  Willamette Week, March 21, 2017.  https://www.wweek.com/news/city/2017/03/21/a-developer-offers-the-portland-mayor-300-apartments-at-a-deep-discount-and-waits-for-a-reply/.

Monahan, Rachel (2018). "With Plans to Build Housing for the Homeless, a Portland Developer is Privatizing Socialism." ["Reason no. 16 to love Portland right now"]. Willamette Week, 14 February 2018. https://www.wweek.com/culture/2018/02/14/our-developers-are-privatizing-socialism/.

Moore, Steven A, and Sergio Palleroni, eds. "The Alley Flat Initiative: Topics in Sustainable Development 2008 Report." University of Texas at Austin, School of Architecture, Center for Sustainable Development.  July 2008. http://251.sustainablesources.com/alleyflat2016demo/af-content/uploads/2016/02/AFI-SOA-2008-report.pdf.

Mosher, Heather Irene, "Participatory Action Research with Dignity Village: An Action Tool for Empowerment Within a Homeless Community" (2010). Portland State University, Dissertations and Theses. Paper 36. http://doi.org/10.15760/etd.36.

Mumford, Eric. "CIAM and Its Outcomes." https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/2383.

Munzer, Stephen R. (1997). "Ellickson on Chronic Misconduct in Urban Spaces: Of Panhandlers, Bench Squatters, and Day Laborers." Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, vol. 32, no. 1, Winter 1997, p. 1-48.

Murphy, M. (2014). “Tiny Houses as Appropriate Technology.” Communities, No. 165, Winter 2014: Fellowship International Community.

Myers, John. "Fixing Urban Planning with Ostrom: Strategies for existing cities to adopt polycentric, bottom-up regulation of land use." Prepared for delivery at the Workshop on the Ostrom Workshop (WOW6) conference, Indiana University Bloomington, June 19–21, 2019. Working draft dated 31st May 2019.http://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlc/bitstream/handle/10535/10457/Ostrom%20paper%20John%20Myers%20May%202019.pdf.

National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (2017). "Tent City, USA: The Growth of America’s Homeless Encampments and How Communities are Responding." December 2017. https://nlchp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Tent_City_USA_2017.pdf.

National Parks Service. "Pu'uhonua o Hōnaunau." Last updated 28 February, 2015; accessed 24 May 2020. https://www.nps.gov/puho/learn/historyculture/puuhonua-o-honaunau.htm.

Nir, Sarah Maslin. "Thinking Outside the Box by Moving Into One." The New York Times, Oct. 13, 2015. [1].

Noterman, Elsa. (2020): Taking back vacant property, Urban Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2020.1743519.

Ocobock, Paul. (2008). "Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective." https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1rfsq2g.4.

(Introduction to A. L. Beier, A. L., and Paul Ocobock, eds. (2008). Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective. Ohio University Press, 2008. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1rfsq2g). [Open Access].

O'Connor, Charles James, et al (1913). San Francisco Relief Survey; the organization and methods of relief used after the earthquake and fire of April 18, 1906.  New York: Survey Associates, 1913.. https://archive.org/details/sanfranciscoreli00oconrich/page/n8.

O’Regan, K. M., Quigley, J. M. (2000). "Federal Policy and the Rise of Nonprofit Housing Providers." Journal of Housing Research, 11(2): 297-317. https://urbanpolicy.berkeley.edu/pdf/OQ_JHR00PB.pdf.

Oregonian Editorial Board. "The bold promise to reduce homelessness: Editorial Agenda 2015." The Oregonian, Updated Jan 09, 2019; Posted Oct 03, 2015. https://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/2015/10/the_bold_promise_to_reduce_hom.html.

"Dignity Village and Right 2 Dream Too, meanwhile, are ghettos operating successfully by their own logic, but they provide no working model for long-term accommodation to the city's burgeoning homeless population."

Oswill, Andrés (2016). "The Landscape: Tiny and Very Small Houses." Metroscape (published by the Institute of Portland Metropolitan Studies, PSU), Summer 2016. http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/17697.

Pacheco, Antonio. "MADWORKSHOP’s Homeless Studio at USC delves into rapid rehousing prototype design." The Architect's Newspaper, March 30, 2017. https://archpaper.com/2017/03/madworkshop-homeless-studio-usc/.  

Palleroni, Sergio (2006) "Building to Learn/Learning to Build" [Collaboration Between a Mexican Squatter Community and American Architecture Students]. Oz: Vol. 28. https://doi.org/10.4148/2378-5853.1427.

Palleroni, Sergio, & Merkelbach, Christina Eichbaum (2004). Studio at large: Architecture in Service of Global Communities. Seattle, Wash: University of Washington Press.  

Palleroni, Sergio, and Vikramaditya Prakash. "Public Interest Design with Sergio Palleroni." Architecture Talk (podcast hosted by Prakash).  March 13, 2019. https://www.architecturetalk.org/home/39.

Palmeri, Jordan. (2012). “Small Homes: Benefits, Trends and Policies”. As presented by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

Retrieved from: http://www.slideshare.net/ORDEQ/deq-building-lca-forwebsite-16minfinal1.  

Park, Eileen. [2018] "Guerrilla Development's bold plan to end homelessness." by  KOIN-TV, Oct 18, 2018. https://www.koin.com/news/local/multnomah-county/guerrilla-development-s-bold-plan-to-end-homelessness/1362079021.

Parker, Will, with photographs by Leah Nash. "Does Oregon Have the Answer to High Housing Costs?" The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 23, 2019. https://www.wsj.com/articles/does-oregon-have-the-answer-to-high-housing-costs-11571823001.

Parr, Evanie and Rankin, Sara (2018). "It Takes a Village: Practical Guide for Authorized Encampments." Seattle University Homeless Rights Advocacy Project, May 3, 2018. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3173224.  

Parsell, Cameron. "Homelessness, Identity, and our Poverty of Ambition." Keynote address at 14th European Research Conference on Homelessness. 20 September 2019, Helsingborg, Sweden.

Presentation slides: https://www.feantsaresearch.org/public/user/Observatory/2019/2019_conference/ppts/Plenary_-_Cameron_Parsell_-_Keynote_Europe_September_2019.pdf

Video:  https://www.facebook.com/FEANTSA/videos/515174705720867/ (2:40 - 33:20).

"We overserve people who are experiencing homelessness, and this overservicing represents one of the key barriers to actually ending it." (near start).

"Homelessness exists in Australia and increases because actually we pity them, we pity them as someone deficient, as the downtrodden, as a group of people that we want to exercise our compassion towards. Whereas a few years ago we were talking about justice, we were talking about evidence, we were talking about ending homelessness, this is what we're doing in Australia now:  we're actually giving brand new vans and washing machines, and driving around washing their clothes."

Parsell, Cameron, and Beth Watts. Charity and Justice: A Reflection on New Forms of Homelessness Provision in Australia. European Journal of Homelessness, Vol 11, No. 2, December 2017. https://www.feantsaresearch.org/download/think-piece-12032277176126500690.pdf.

"Abstract:
Charity directed at people who are homeless is invariably portrayed as positive. The good intentions of the provider of charity are not only lauded, but equated with positive outcomes for the receiver. The often severe material deprivation experienced by those who are homeless appears to justify the celebration of an extremely low bar of resource provision. Extending what has been the historic provision of food, drinks, blankets, and other day-to-day means of survival, contemporary charity in Australia also includes the provision of mobile shower, mobile clothes washing, and mobile hair dressing facilities. The emergence of similar ‘novel’ interventions to ‘help the homeless’ are seen in a wide range of other countries. In this paper we examine the consequences of providing charity to people who are homeless; consequences for the giver, receiver, and society more broadly. Drawing on the ideas of Peter Singer and the ‘effective altruist’ movement as a possible corrective to this prevailing view of charity, we suggest that such charitable interventions may not only do little good, but may actually do harm. We further argue that justice is achieved when inequities are disrupted so that people who are homeless can access the material condition required to exercise autonomy over how they live, including the resources required to wash, clothe and feed themselves how and when they choose."

Parvin, Alastair, and David Saxby, Cristina Cerulli, Tatjana Schneider (2011). "A Right to Build: The next mass-housebuilding industry." Architecture 00 and University of Sheffield School of Architecture, 2011. https://issuu.com/architecture00/docs/arighttobuild.

Parvin, Alastair, and Andy Reeve (2016). "Scaling the Citizen Sector." Medium, Oct 5, 2016.

https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/scaling-the-citizen-sector-20a20dbb7a4c.

Parvin, Alastair (2017). "Development without debt: Re-designing the way we invest in housing." Nesta.org.uk, 27 January 2017. https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/development-without-debt-re-designing-the-way-we-invest-in-housing/

"Finance the homes separately from the land:

One of the most confusing (and dumb) characteristics of the ‘current trader’ model is that it bundles the cost of the land into the cost of development. By financing the home (a consumer durable) separately from the land (a licensed property asset), in many cases it is possible to massively improve affordability. This might include leasing the land rather than selling it (arguably far more responsible in the case of publicly-owned land), deferring purchase over time, or collective purchase of the land. For example, a neighbourhood development company can purchase the land, represent a more appealing prospect to investors, because the risk of defaulting is spread over the whole neighbourhood. Matthew Benson of Rettie’s has proposed the use of ‘land bonds’, whereby a neighbourhood development company (for example a cooperative) could finance the cost of land by issuing 25 year bonds."  

Parvin, Alastair, and Andy Reeve. "Affordable Land." 2018. https://www.opensystemslab.io/affordableland.

Petteni, Marta and Leickly, Emily, "Kenton Women’s Village Update and Survey" (2019). Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative Publications and Presentations. 10. https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/hrac_pub/10.

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Pleace, Nicholas. "The Ambiguities, Limits and Risks of Housing First from a European Perspective." European Journal of Homelessness, Vol 5, No. 2, December 2011. https://www.feantsaresearch.org/download/think-piece-1-38189457923603932070.pdf.

Porotto, Alessandro, and Chiara Monterumisi. "New Perspectives on the II CIAM onwards: How Does Housing Build Cities?" https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/2430.

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Prakash, Vikramaditya. (2019). "Public Interest Design with Sergio Palleroni." Architecture Talk (podcast hosted by Prakash).  March 13, 2019. https://www.architecturetalk.org/home/39.

Przybylinski, Stephen. (2020). "Securing legal rights to place: mobilizing around moral claims for a houseless rest space in Portland, Oregon." Urban Geography, DOI:10.1080/02723638.2020.1719307. [focuses on Right 2 Dream Too rest area].

Rameau, Max. Take Back the Land – Land, Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown (Miami: Nia Interactive Press, 2008), 7.

Rankin, Sara (January 28, 2020). "Hiding Homelessness: The Transcarceration of Homelessness." California Law Review, Forthcoming. http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3499195.

Raymond, Eric Steven (2003).The Art of Unix Programming. https://homepage.cs.uri.edu/~thenry/resources/unix_art/index.html.  

Ribton-Turner, Charles James (1887). A history of vagrants and vagrancy, and beggars and begging. London: Chapman and Hall, 1887.

Richards, Rob.  "A Tale of Tent Cities: A Camp Quixote Retrospective." Medium.com, Oct 25, 2013. https://medium.com/@robrichards/a-tale-of-tent-cities-43bf8f5d6ab8.

Roy, Ananya (2003). “Paradigms Of Propertied Citizenship: Transnational Techniques of Analysis,” Urban Affairs Review, vol. 38, no. 4 (2003): 463–91. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1078087402250356. PDF: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1e0iX1kzxDQ-6lGB9_851exaMiuRCfHRx.

"Abstract:
The American paradigm of propertied citizenship has far-reaching consequences for the propertyless, as in the brutal criminalization of the homeless. Activist groups, such as the anarchist squatter organization Homes Not Jails, have sought to challenge this paradigm through innovative techniques of property takeovers, invocations of American traditions of homesteading, and Third World tactics of self-help and informality. This study trains a transnational lens on both the paradigm and its subversions. Posing Third World questions of the First World, the author seeks to unsettle the normalized hierarchy of development and underdevelopment and explores lessons that can be learned from different modes of shelter struggles."

Roy, Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad, eds. (2004). Urban Informality. Berkeley: University of California, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2004.

Ryder, Marianne. "USP528 - Concepts of Community Development" [course syllabus, Portland State University, Winter 2019].  https://www.pdx.edu/usp/sites/www.pdx.edu.usp/files/USP%20Syllabi/USP528%20Syllabus%20Winter%202019rev2.pdf.

San José, City. "Emergency Interim Housing Response to COVID-19 and City Shelter Crises Declaration." Accessed 27 June 2020. https://www.sanjoseca.gov/home/showdocument?id=57132.

Schmid,  Thacher. "A New Self-Managed Homeless Village Just Sprang Up in Northeast Portland." ["The 'Village of Hope' Sits on City-Owned Land, and Is the First Such Community to Emerge Under Mayor Ted Wheeler"]. Portland Mercury, Jan 28, 2018. https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2018/01/28/19638240/a-new-self-managed-homeless-village-just-sprang-up-in-northeast-portland.

Schmidt, Alexandra (2017). "The Big Politics of Tiny Houses: Zoning Villages for Homeless Individuals." Undergraduate Honors Thesis, Urban Studies, University of Michigan. April 2017. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1weO2FSOZVYkxH3Wcb6xdDnFARW5oJnBO/view?usp=sharing.

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Shearer, Heather & Paul Burton (2019). "Towards a Typology of Tiny Houses." Housing, Theory and Society, 36:3, 298-318, DOI: 10.1080/14036096.2018.1487879.

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[interview with Daniel Immerwahr, author of Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (2015). Immerwahr: "I want a left that can operate on all scales. And part of that involves giving up this uncritical deference to 'communities.'"

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"This article examines the role of citizen participation in community development corporations (CDC). It is argued that CDCs are caught between two distinct forms of participation: instrumental participation that focuses on activities that support project and program activities of CDCs, and grassroots participation that focuses on expanding the role of citizens in local decision-making processes. A continuum based on these two forms of citizen participation is introduced. It is suggested that CDCs are often in the middle of the continuum where they must balance pressures to expand the scope of grassroots participation against the need to use citizen participation techniques to facilitate project and program implementation. The article is based on a series of in-depth interviews with the executive directors of CDCs in Detroit, Michigan. Recommendations growing out of the research focus on how the tendency toward conflicts between the instrumental goals of CDCs and the longstanding value of grassroots activism can be managed better."

Simon, William H. (2002). The Community Economic Development Movement: Law, Business, and the New Social Policy. Duke University Press, 2002.

Smith, Doug (2019). "Five winning ideas to build housing more quickly and cheaply for L.A.’s homeless community." Los Angeles Times, Feb 15, 2019. https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-housing-innovation-grants-20190215-story.html.

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Solomon, Molly.  "What Would 'Housing as a Human Right' Look Like in California?" KQED News, 12 Feb 2020. https://www.kqed.org/news/11801176/what-would-housing-as-a-human-right-look-like-in-california.

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Sparks, Tony. "Citizens without property: Informality and political agency in a Seattle, Washington homeless encampment." Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. September 20, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16665360.

from Abstract:
"This article attempts to broaden and deepen the conversation on informal dwellings in the US by focusing on the tent encampment as a site of creative political agency and experimentation. Drawing upon a body of work referred to by some as “subaltern urbanism”, I examine how everyday practices of camp management produce localized forms of citizenship and governmentality through which “homeless” residents resist stereotypes of pathology and dependence, reclaim their rational autonomy, and recast deviance as negotiable difference in the production of governmental knowledge. Consideration of these practices, I argue, opens up the possibility of a of a view of encampments that foregrounds the agency of the homeless in the production of new political spaces and subjectivities."

Sparks, Tony. (2016). "Neutralizing Homelessness, 2015: Tent cities and ten year plans." Urban Geography, 38(3), 348–356. DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2016.1247600.

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"Abstract: In the era of mass incarceration, services for the homeless often involve mechanisms of confinement and discipline. Over the past decade, homeless communities in cities across the US have developed large-scale encampments in which residents survive outside the purview of official homelessness management systems. Most cities have responded by evicting campers and destroying their tents and shanties. Yet some local governments have instead legalized encampments, while imposing varying degrees of spatial control and surveillance on camp residents. In so doing, they have created unique new spaces for managing homelessness. This article terms these spaces “tent wards” to reflect their dualistic functions of both care and custody. Based on secondary sources and ethnographic research from 2013, I analyze nearly a dozen tent wards in cities across the US, and engage a more in-depth study of the development of such spaces in Fresno, California. I argue that the rise of tent wards calls attention to the need for a renewed focus on the relationship between incarceration and welfare in the US, and the ways in which a diverse range of spaces function together to isolate and discipline entire segments of the population."

Spevak, Eli, and Madeline Kovacs, Orange Splot LLC. "Character-Compatible, Space-Efficient Housing Options for Single-Dwelling Neighborhoods." Oregon Transportation and Growth Management Program, and Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. May 2016. https://www.oregon.gov/lcd/UP/Pages/Space-Efficient-Housing.aspx

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Abstract:
"This paper questions the viability of an urban redevelopment model that relies on small communiry development corporations (CDCs) and proposes an alternative. Because most CDCs are severely undercapitalized, they can not keep up with accelerating decay. Their existence, and the emphasis placed on their supposed successes, allow elites to blame poor neighborhood CDCs rather than external conditions for redevelopment failure. The model also emphasizes that CDCs be community-based, but because their resource base is controlled from outside the neighborhood there is really very little community control over CDCs. CDCs may even delegitimize more empowerment-focused community organizing attempts by making them appear radical. Consequently, the CDC development process my actually disorganize poor communities by creating internal competition or disrupting social networks. An alternative model of neighborhood redevelopment is proposed which emphasizes community organizing, community-controlled planning, and high-capacity multi-local CDCs held accountable through a strong community organizing process."

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Tsemberis, S. (2010b) Housing First: The Pathways Model to End Homelessness for People with Mental Illness and Addiction (Hazelden: Minnesota).  

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"We can then distribute the ideal-typical forms of sociospatial seclusion in the two-dimensional space defined by those two axes (see Figure 1): elective versus forced, at I the top or at the bottom. Looking at the top right-hand side quadrant, on the choice side and high in social and physical space, you find those people who choose isolation and seek privacy, who wish to be among the likes of themselves or to avoid debased populations and unsavory activities. This is self -seclusion at the top fueled by in-group orientation is represented by elite enclaves or traditional upper-class districts in the city....So at the top you find noble activities, exercised by powerful persons, endowed with the material and symbolic capital to exclude others and to self-seclude, while at the bottom are bunched up ignoble activities and tainted populations deprived of economic and cultural capital, the dispossessed and the dishonored." "The prosecutorial approach commonly adopted by social analysts has prevented them from recognizing that the ghetto is a two-faced contraption: it is at once and inseparably an instrument of subordination and a conduit for protection, unification, and cohesion. We must be alert to the hidden and counterintuitive benefits of ghettoization, which offers a subordinate ethnoracial category a vehicle for self-organization and mobilization and thence allows them to leverage their 'power from below.'" [referring to argument of his forthcoming book The Two Faces of the Ghetto].

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["describes how a two-tier system of housing regulations was gradually codified by the state in Mexico, leading to the legitimization of sub-optimal informal housing for the poor."].

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Ward, Peter (2012). "Self-Help Housing Ideas and Practice in the Americas." In: Planning Ideas That Matter: Livability, Territoriality, Governance and Reflective Practice. Chapter: Chapter 11. Publisher: MIT Press, Editors: Bish Sanyal, Lawrence Vale, Christina Rosen, pp.283-310. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277589974_Self-Help_Housing_Ideas_and_Practice_in_the_Americas.

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Abstract:
"Explores the proposition that many aspects of self-help housing practices are being undermined by the penetration of capital accumulation processes at the urban periphery of Third World cities. Specifically, the authors investigate the ways in which different modes of housing production may be articulated - economically, politically and ideologically. Drawing upon evidence in two principal locations (Mexico and Kenya), they analyse the methods and costs of land acquisition by low-income groups, and the production and consumption of building materials for self-help construction. The authors conclude by identifying ways to restore a dialogue between those academics interested primarily in critical theory and housing production, and those researchers and practitioners who are more concerned with policy formulation and implementation."  

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Wright, Talmudge. (1997). Out of Place: Homeless mobilizations, subcities, and contested landscapes. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Wyatt, Anne (2014) "Rethinking Shelter and Tiny House Communities: Dignity Village, Portland, and Lessons from San Luis Obispo," Focus: Vol. 11: Issue 1, Article 14. http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/focus/vol11/iss1/14.

(Un)Acknowledgements,

Thanks for feedback from and conversations with:

Michael Andersen, Sightline Institute.

Elise Aymer, Critical Diversity Solutions - Toronto / Berkeley.

Sue Gemmell, Portland.

Andrew Heben - SquareOne Villages, Eugene.

Chris Herring, UC Berkeley PhD candidate, Harvard University post-doctoral fellow at the Inequality in America Initiative (2020-), joining UCLA Sociology Department as an Assistant Professor.

Sarah Iannarone. Portland community leader & 2020 mayoral candidate.

Mark Lakeman, Communitecture / City Repair Project, Portland

Margarette Leite, PSU Center for Public Interest Design

Michael Mehaffy - Sustasis Foundation, Portland.

John McCormick, AIA, AICP (Emeritus) - Portland.

Julia Mollner, Carleton Hart Architecture & PSU Center for Public Interest Design

Michael Parkhurst, Meyer Memorial Trust.

Alastair Parvin, Open Systems Lab, & WikiHouse, London.

Kol Peterson - AccessoryDwellings.org, etc, Portland.

Sherri Shultz, Springfield/Eugene MicroDwellers.

Eli Spevak, Portland Planning and Sustainability Commission.

Wayne Stewart, civil engineer (retired), former chair of Portland Design Commission.  

 

Unacknowledgements

some reflections on "hobo scholar" processes, disaffiliation, writing from the local global south, etc.

The possible values of not being much indebted or obligated to anyone regarding a project.

Where your treasure is, there shall your heart lie. Storing up riches in heaven, etc.

Notes

(research notes for possible use)

Marcuse, Peter. 1988. “Neutralizing Homelessness.” Socialist Review, 88:1, pp. 69‑97. Reprinted in part in Lisa Orr. 1990. The Homeless: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego, Greenhaven Press.

Hoogenhuijze, Leendert van;Katzeff, Ask;Steen, Bart van der. The city is ours: squatting and autonomous movements in Europe from the 1970s to the present. 9781604866834.

On the whole, however, those communities that resist the tent ward conversion, and that remain stable and self-organized, provide a safe place for unsheltered people to rest (Heben, 2014; Herring and Lutz, 2015; Weissman, 2017). They offer a place for people to “escape the public gaze” (Sparks, 2010) and to “feel human” (Sparks, 2017: 349).

Smith, N. (1992). Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale. Social Text, (33), 54. doi:10.2307/466434

Smith-N_1992_Contours-of-a-spatialized-politics--Homeless-vehicles-and-the-production-of-geographical-scale_Social-Text.10.2307@466434.pdf

Sparks, Tony (2010). "Broke Not Broken: Rights, Privacy, and Homelessness in Seattle." Urban Geography, 31:6, 842-862, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.31.6.842.

https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.31.6.842.

Herring, Chris (2019). "Between Street and Shelter: Seclusion, Exclusion, and the Neutralization of Poverty." in J. Flint, R. Powell (eds.), Class, Ethnicity and State in the Polarized Metropolis. n the Polarized Metropolis. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 281–306. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16222-1_12.

Goodling E. Intersecting hazards, intersectional identities: A baseline Critical Environmental Justice analysis of US homelessness. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. 2020;3(3):833-856. doi:10.1177/2514848619892433.

Picker, G., & Pasquetti, S. (2015). Durable camps: the state, the urban, the everyday. City, 19(5), 681–688. doi:10.1080/13604813.2015.1071122

 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1071122.

Wacquant, Loïc. (2009). Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University Press (2009).

ISBN 9780822344223.

Katz, Michael B. (1996). In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (1st ed. 1986; 2nd ed. 1996). New York: Basic Books.

Internet Archive has 1st edition available for loan https://archive.org/details/inshadowofpoorho00mich.

THE ORIGINS AND SPREAD OF CORE HOUSING by Mark Napier

Excerpt from:

Napier, Mark.

"Core Housing, Enablement And Urban Poverty The Consolidation Paths Of Households Living In Two South African Settlements."

PhD Thesis. University of Newcastle upon Tyne. 2002.

http://web.mit.edu/incrementalhousing/articlesPhotographs/pdfs/Origins-Spread-CoreHousing.pdf.

Ackerman, James S. (1990). The Villa. Form and Ideology of Country Houses.

Ch.1, "The Typology of the Villa": https://jwhite.faculty.unlv.edu/AAD%20202/The%20Villa.pdf.

Park, Robert E. “The Mind of the Hobo: Reflections Between Mentality and Locomotion.”

Park, Robert E. “Human Migration and the Marginal Man."

American Journal of Sociology,

Vol. 33, No. 6 (May, 1928), pp. 881-893

https://doi.org/10.1086/214592

https://www.academia.edu/29709060/Human_Migration_and_the_Marginal.

"'Every advance in culture,' says Bücher, in his Industrial Evolution, 'commences, so to speak, with a new period of wandering,' and in support of this thesis he points out that the earlier forms of trade were migratory, that the first industries to free themselves from the household husbandry and become independent occupations were carried on itinerantly. 'The great founders of religion, the earliest poets and philosophers, the musicians and actors of past epochs, are all great wanderers. Even today, do not the inventor, the preacher of a new doctrine, and the virtuoso travel from place to place in search of adherents and admirers [..]?"

The Oxford Handbook of Urban Plannning. (2015).

Ch. 24: Karen Chapple. "The Evolving Role of Community Economic Development in Planning." (p.477).

Ch. 25: Lisa Bates. "Housing: Planning and Policy Challenges" p.500-523.

Ch. 26: Vinit Mukhija. "Cities with Slums" (p.524).

Ch. 33: Ananya Roy. "Urban Informality: The Production of Space and Practice of Planning." (p. 691).

Ch. 34: Victoria A. Beard. "Citizen Planners: From Self-Help to Political Transformation." (p. 706).

If we have learnt anything from the last ten or twenty years of development effort, it is that the problem presents an enormous intellectual challenge. The aid-givers—rich, educated, town-based—know how to do things in their own way; but do they know how to assist self-help among two million villages, among two thousand million villagers—poor, uneducated, country-based?"

--B.F. Schumacher. Small Is Beautiful (1973).

DeFilippis, James, and Robert Fisher, Eric Shragge. (2010). Contesting Community: The Limits and Potential of Local Organizing. Rutgers University Press, 2010. ISBN 9780813549743

From publisher:
What do community organizations and organizers do, and what should they do? For the past thirty years politicians, academics, advocates, and activists have heralded community as a site and strategy for social change. In contrast, Contesting Community paints a more critical picture of community work which, according to the authors--in both theory and practice--has amounted to less than the sum of its parts. Their comparative study of efforts in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada describes and analyzes the limits and potential of this work.

Covering dozens of groups, including ACORN, Brooklyn's Fifth Avenue Committee, and the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal, and discussing alternative models, this book is at once historical and contemporary, global and local. Contesting Community addresses one of the vital issues of our day--the role and meaning of community in people's lives and in the larger political economy.

Fainstein-and-DeFilippis_2012_Readings-in-Planning-Theory-4th-ed_

Susan S. Fainstein, James DeFilippis        

9781119084679

Park Village, London

Survey of London. "Park Village west." Survey of London: Volume 21, the Parish of St Pancras Part 3: Tottenham Court Road and Neighbourhood. Originally published by London County Council, London, 1949. Pages 153-155. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol21/pt3/pp153-155.

Fishman-Robert_1989_Bourgeois-Utopias_9780465007479.pdf.

Defoe, Daniel. (1724). A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain.

[find passage on viewing London from Clapham area].

https://archive.org/details/tourthroughtthew006736mbp/page/n25/mode/1up.

Gans, Herbert J. (1965). The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans. Free Press, 1965.

Whyte, William Foote (1943). Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943.

Whyte, William H. (1964). Cluster Development.

- Review new Village Buildings material, add to draft/outline.

   - Anderson. Men on the Move.

   - Jencks. The Homeless.

   - gather references from Citizen Hobo.

   - dispossession from the land, creation of landless, mobile proletariat: Marx on "primitive accumulation" at transition from feudal to capitalist eras in England.

Nancy Ettlinger. "Unbounding ‘states of exception’, reconceptualizing precarity." Published online: 24 Apr 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562576.2020.1755645

Inventory of villages/camps

Evans, Krista (2020). "Tackling Homelessness with Tiny Houses: An Inventory of Tiny House Villages in the United States." The Professional Geographer, 29 Apr 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2020.1744170.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tent_cities_in_the_United_States)

http://tentcity.wikidot.com/list-of-tent-cities

History of homelessness terms/concepts

Duncan, James. (1978). "Men Without Property: The Tramp's Classification and Use of Urban Space." Antipode, March 1978.

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.1978.tb00292.x

Duncan-J_1978_Men-Without-Property--The-Tramps-Classification-and-Use-of-Urban-Space_10.111@/j.1467-8330.1978.tb00292.x.pdf

  - long interrelation of issues of mobility and "homelessness"

  - does, should, need every person have a 'home', or have one in a sense defined normatively by society? How to distinguish between universal rights and culturally-specific or paternalistic imposition?

See ROBERT H. NELSON, PRIVATE NEIGHBORHOODS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF

LOcAL GOVERNMENT 265-73 (2005); Nelson, supra note 74, at 833; see also Robert C.

Ellickson, New Institutions for Old Neighborhoods, 48 DuKE L.J. 75, 77 (1998) (discussing a similar idea, "Block Level Improvement Districts").

Evans, Krista (2020). "Tackling Homelessness with Tiny Houses: An Inventory of Tiny House Villages in the United States." The Professional Geographer, 29 Apr 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/00330124.2020.1744170.

"because there is no formal definition or commonly accepted standard for what constitutes a tiny house (Evans 2018a), any organization that defines itself as a tiny house village for the homeless was included in the database. This allows for an exploratory and encompassing examination of this recent approach toward addressing homelessness."

First, this is incorrect or at least outdated, because for what it's worth there is now a definition of "tiny house" included in a crucially authoritative standard,  International Residential Code - basically, a 400sf or smaller house, generally meeting standards of permanent small residential buildings.

Secondly, this approach seems methodologically/conceptually naive in several ways. For one, It implicitly accepts the idea of classifying housing type by (presumed-fixed) physical structure characteristics, rather than aspects such as their ownership and tenure and community arrangements, land-use pattern, or the motivations and agency of the people living in them. In studies of low-income and community housing, there is a long tradition of critiquing such materialist conceptions of housing as physical artifact and product rather than as social process: as memorably expressed by the title of John F.C. Turner's classic essay, "Housing Is A Verb".

Accepting a physical definition like this, we might include, for example, many vacation or condo or retirement communities made up of small homes.

Also, basing the study scope on projects' self-identification as "tiny house" projects raises obvious questions of why this particular terminology and cultural construct might be invoked by projects or not. To whom has this term/concept disseminated, by whom adopted, and why?  Would "tiny home" or "microhousing" or "small unit" or "cottage" quality? How about mobile housing, trailers, RVs, or mobile (manufacturing) homes, communities of which exist in large numbers across the US -- if these are excluded, why?

Further, many projects that seem within the territory of a study/survey like this may deliberately not use a term like "tiny house" for legal or positioning reasons. The organizers may be using a specific different legal designation for their buildings or land-use approval, which they prefer to or are advised to use. This is explicitly the case, for example, with Portland villages such as Right 2 Dream Too, self-describing as a campsite or safe sleeping area; and Kenton Womens Village, and Clackamas Veterans Village, which describe themselves as sleeping-pod or cabin villages due to the legal designation on their structures.

Marx, Karl. (1867). Capital, Vol. 1: Critique of Political Economy. Pelican Books, 1976. ISBN. 9780140445688

Sparks 2016:

"Much ethnography has explored the role of

encampments in fostering a sense of agency and collective identity amongst the unhoused (Gowan, 2010; Ruddick, 1996; Wright, 1997)."

Sullivan, Esther. (2018). Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place. University of California Press, 2018. ISBN 9780520968356.

Sullivan-E_2018_Manufactured-Insecurity_9780520968356.pdf.

Loosely, I am trying to create this as or evolve it to an annotated bibliography, by putting after each items an abstract, summary, my notes or quotes from it. This is to:

  1. hopefully make the bibliography more useful to others, and myself for recalling why I noted/used the source,
  2. with an idea that it may be an approach to drafting the main document, by first putting sources noted into this article, later copying that source and notes/quotes into the document body in the appropriate place and expanding it into full exposition. So, it may in process be more like "Works to cite" than "Works cited." [Likewise, this approach might be taken with assembling visual sources, which can be viewed as a gallery in Special:ListFiles]. -Ed.

Tule Lake internment camp - in Tulelake, CA, SE of Klamath Falls OR.

Lava Beds National Monument

A key site of the The Modoc War, or the Modoc Campaign (also known as the Lava Beds War), 1872-1873.

Village Buildings / HousingWiki - Google Photos albums

Social housing

Gauldie, Enid. (1974). Cruel habitations ; a history of working-class housing 1780-1918. George Allen & Unwin, UK / Harper & Row, USA, 1974

Gauldie_1974_Cruel-Habitations--a-history-of-working-class-housing-1780-1918.pdf

Informal housing

McAuslan_1985_Urban-land-and-shelter-for-the-poor_ISBN-0905347560.pdf

Larson, Jane E. (2002). "Informality, Illegality, and Inequality." 20 YALE L. &

POL'Y REV. 137 (2002).

Anderson, Michelle (2008). "Cities Inside Out: Race, Poverty, and Exclusion at the Urban Fringe." 55 UCLA L. REV. 1095 (2008).

discussion of "unincorporated urban areas"

Delgado, Richard (1997). "Rodrigo's Twelfth Chronicle: The Problem of the Shanty." Georgetown Law Journal, Vol. 85, 1997; U of Alabama Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2711845. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2711845
(challenging Larson's acceptance of colonias as a reasonable housing solution);

in 2004 the city of Fresno, California, decided to rezone a parcel of land to allow for camping, in order to accommodate a tent city.

see discussion in Tent Cities in America.

Fresno. Hanford (where Morgan lives). Tulare, where Tulare Assembly Center (Japanese interim internment camp) was.
https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Tulare_(detention_facility)/.

Steinhardt_1990_Chinese-Imperial-City-Planning_9780824812447.pdf

Self-help housing

Kolodny, R. (1986). "The emergence of self-help as a housing strategy for the urban poor." In R. Bratt, C. Hartman, & A. Meyerson (Eds.), Critical perspectives on housing (pp. 447–462). Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Schuman, Tony. (1986). "The Agony and the Equity: A Critique of Self-Help Housing." In R. Bratt, C. Hartman, & A. Meyerson (Eds.), Critical perspectives on housing (pp. 447–462). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. (Available for online loan from Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/criticalperspect00brat).  

Hancock, Ian F. (2010). "Roma [Gypsies]." in Handbook of Texas Online, published by the Texas State Historical Association. Uploaded June 15, 2020. Accessed June 10, 2020. http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/pxrfh.

Tina Grandinetti - Honolulu Tenants Union / Unequal Cities Network.

Authors/editor bio notes

Tim McCormick - project organizer - see tjm.org/about.

To Do

- review Tent City Urbanism, and references section.

- research Print on Demand options - ask Andrew, Steven

- villagebuildings twitter.

- VB logo?

- VB domain registration

- VB site

 

Potential research visits

Jolene's First Cousin project, Portland

Kenton Women's Village new site.

Seattle - LIHI, current villages, BLOCK Project, prefab ADU developers - revisit

Eugene & Cottage Grove - update on SquareOne Villages projects - revisit

Tiny House Villages in north Bay / Sonoma?  (Darin Dinsmore)

Oakland - Community Cabin sites, Safe Parking sites - revisit

Fresno

Los Angeles -

Las Vegas - Llamalopolis / Airstream Park.

https://tinyhouseblog.com/tiny-house/llamalopolis-an-urban-tiny-living-oasis/ (2016 article with lots of photographs).

Vancouver, B.C. - Temporary Modular Housing projects.

 

Things to read next

(see also updated list in Tim's Workflowy)