Alan Graham
Appearances
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Our neighbors take care of this place because they are invested into this place. And they're invested into the culture of this place, which means one must pay rent. Now, everybody doesn't, but most people do.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Look, if you want to smoke crack, go smoke crack. I'm not getting into your business. It's none of my business to be in your business.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
You develop relationships with people and you have a compassion for them. But you also have to have, in order to maintain a community, you have to have some community standards. And that is extremely difficult to navigate. To have a lot of grace and mercy along with standards in the community is pretty difficult.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
foster care system is a train wreck in our country, the mental health care system, the physical health care system, the criminal justice system, our education system. You know, if you look at this as a flowing river that's got rapids in it, we're down at the end of this deal fishing people out of these raging rapids to keep them from drowning. That's where we are.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Everybody thinks if you stick people into housing that it's going to solve all their problems. And I'm just telling you that that's not the case.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
My original motivation was palliative, which is the relieving of the suffering associated with disease. without pursuing the cure for the disease.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
This isn't ever going to be a model that's a fix and repair model that's going to come in and retrain people to be a computer technician or something and then pop them out into the real world.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
This is a very complex group of people with a myriad of very, very complex issues. They will have to be subsidized for the rest of their lives. And we just have to come to grips with that as a society.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
You know, I had a nervous breakdown, a big one, when I was about four years old and was institutionalized.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And then as he got older... By the time I turned 18, I became her custodial caretaker. And I had to have her institutionalized because she was not able to live alone and independently.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Now this is the mid-90s and things are looking good. I'm developing air cargo.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
In a way, starting to become... the hotshot that I wanted to be, the Donald Trump of old.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And had I known that men were going to hold hands and pray and, God forbid, do that bromance, hug it out thing that we do, I would have never gone. But it was a feeling of an extraordinary presence of the Holy Spirit, and I was jazzed to the hilt.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
To take things from those of us that have abundance to those that lack abundance.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
I thought, you know, I could live as a single male or a female in something like this. There's dignity here.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And when I was done with that presentation, the mayor looked at me and said, we need four of these in Austin.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Everybody thought the deal was dead, but I don't die easy, man.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
many of our neighbors cannot navigate the social geography of a shared wall. So the idea of building an apartment structure, which can kind of be more efficient in terms of providing everybody with utilities, creates an environment that is very difficult for many people to live in.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
When somebody gets bedbugs, which is common, or roaches or whatever, without the shared walls, it doesn't infiltrate next door.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
When I was dreaming about this thing and the idea of building an RV park, I realized that in an RV park, People were coming out of these small spaces, cooking burgers together, going to the movie night in the RV parks. And so we were trying to recreate that inherent sense of community.