Lucy Tompkins
Appearances
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
To move into this community, you have to have some kind of income. So for most people, that's government benefits. SSI, disability, people aren't making much, but it's enough to pay the rent, which is usually around $400 a month.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Which Alan sees as creating a sense of ownership and responsibility in the community. There are also some behavioral rules. There's no drinking or drug use allowed out in the open, but...
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
There's no sobriety requirement. They know that people will be using substances here, and for the most part, just let that be. Their concern is less with kind of individual actions and more with how it affects the broader community. If drug use or alcohol use is starting to disturb neighbors or if someone's selling drugs in the community, that's all cause for some kind of punishment.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
I don't know how often people are reprimanded, but there are fines that they charge for breaking little rules. People do have to leave. Sometimes people do get kicked out of the community. This year so far, they've evicted 22 people.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
That's a federal definition, and it refers to people who have a disability like mental illness, addiction, or a physical disability and who've lived on the streets for more than a year or repeatedly.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Mm-hmm. But most people do stay and live in the community for years. Some stay the rest of their lives. And these rules and this culture that they sort of maintain have made it possible to grow this community in the way that Alan dreamed.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
It is, and the city of Austin thinks so and is depending on them now to be a big part of their homelessness system. The federal government has also bought into the project, and now they're in the middle of a huge expansion, a $225 million expansion.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
They have two new pieces of land, and they're planning to grow to house 2,000 people, which is about half the chronically homeless population in Austin right now. But in spending time here and seeing what success looks like for the residents of Community First, I think it also requires sort of a shift in what that means for the people who live in this community.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Success for them is a much more complicated and messy story.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And we really saw that in hanging out with this one guy.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
So I was interested in meeting with Justin because he was relatively new at Community First. He'd only been there about nine months when I first met with him. Well, maybe let's go back and you can tell me a little bit about where you're from and... Where you grew up.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He said he grew up in a military family, so he was moving around a lot as a kid.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He struggled in school. He ended up dropping out and picking up work really young.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Then he married young and had two sons, but he said he was struggling with drinking, and he'd go on what he described as pretty regular benders. And by his late 20s, his marriage was falling apart.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And he said this is really the destabilizing event for him that starts his experience of homelessness.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Yeah, these are the people who, when you think about encampments in L.A., people who are really visibly living on the streets, this is that population. They make up about a third of the total homeless population, but they're the most visible. And over the last few years, communities have really been struggling with how to address growing tent encampments.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He starts kind of working odd jobs and living a nomadic lifestyle. He works as a trucker. He works in fast food restaurants. Eventually, he ends up sleeping on the streets, and his health gets worse.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Yeah. His drinking gets worse, and he is sleeping on a bench and doesn't really see a way out of this for himself.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Yeah. That's when he meets a social worker who introduces him to the folks at Community First and helps him apply to get in there.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He was still getting settled and adjusting to life there, but he had a job on site that he really liked. He was working as sort of an ambassador for new people who moved into the village. He was paying his rent with money from that, and he was able to host his sons overnight.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Which is the first time he'd been able to do that in a decade since he'd become homeless.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Definitely. Have you used the, like, recovery services at all here?
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He was still drinking pretty heavily. He knew AA was available, but he wasn't really interested at that point in getting sober. But then in May... Okay, good morning. Check, check. We're at Community First. Daily producer Olivia Nat and I went back to Community First. How are you doing?
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He talked about himself staying there long term. He had relationships with his neighbors.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He seemed a lot more settled into the community and had come to kind of think of himself as the neighborhood dad. He was barbecuing for his neighbors on Sundays. Definitely was talking about this place in a more permanent way. But he also said he was still struggling with his drinking, and it wasn't really clear what path he was on to recovery, if anything.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And some places have taken a more punitive approach, ticketing people. And usually what people are offered is a temporary shelter bed that doesn't really address this underlying problem of where are people going to live long term.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
It seemed like he was holding on to stability, but a little bit shakily. Why do you think your mom asked you that question?
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And it sounded like his loved ones were still holding their breath.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Hey, Justin, it's Lucy. And a couple days ago, I called Justin to check in on him.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
where he wasn't really leaving his house. He was ordering bottles of whiskey to be delivered to him. Things just got really dark, and he eventually decided to try to quit cold turkey, and that went really badly. His body just couldn't handle it.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He stayed in the ICU for several days. And then when he got out... Have you been sober this long before? No.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
I think he just felt like if he kept drinking, it would kill him. And he's now been sober for five months, which is the longest he's ever gone without drinking.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And that's what made me really interested in this village on the outskirts of Austin called Community First Village, which people had been telling me was tackling this problem in a different and better way than anything else out there. So I was intrigued, but also a little bit skeptical and wanted to go and see it for myself. We're driving out of town.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Yeah, I think that's one of the tough parts about reporting on this topic is we tend to lose sight of the fact that people are dealing with really serious ongoing issues and their progress isn't linear. And Justin's story is a reminder of that.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
But I think what Alan would say to your question of is this place ultimately helping people and how to look at this balance, I think he'd say you're thinking about this the wrong way.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He recognizes that people moving into Community First are coming in with all these wounds from living on the streets for usually a decade, plus the, you know, health issues or addictions or family trauma that got them there in the first place.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And when they move into community first, all of that doesn't go away. I think what Allen is doing with this model is accepting that and saying we can't fix all of that at this point.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He really feels like what serves this group of people best is a palliative care model.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
I think the idea of success that a lot of people have in their minds doesn't really apply to this community. And I think in many ways, Alan and his model see those expectations as well-meaning but ultimately unrealistic.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And not only unrealistic, but actually getting in the way of us being able to deal with homelessness in the way that we need to in this country. So many of our systems are designed around temporary fixes and there's all these shifting funding streams.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And if the ultimate goal is to get people housed and keep them housed, then this model is saying you have to come to terms with the reality of what that looks like and not just what you want it to look like. And until you can do that, you're not going to make a dent in this problem.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
It's like a 15-minute drive from downtown, and we're definitely getting out of the city.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
It was as surprising as people made it sound. All right, here we are.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Yeah, it is really cute. I've now been back to Community First a handful of times, most recently with Daily producer Olivia Nat. All right, let's go. And when you show up, you really feel like you're kind of entering another realm. It's very quiet. There's not a lot of people out right now. Somebody's planting. It's a peach tree. Good morning. Everybody says morning to each other.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
It's beautifully landscaped. There's plants and flowers and trees. There's a farm with chickens and vegetables. It's colorful. There's all these tiny homes and mobile homes packed together neatly. And they've sort of filled in the suburban neighborhood with all these other services. We're walking by the hair salon right now. There's a building for elder care. for a community care paramedic.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
It feels like a cheerful place to live, and that's not what I was used to seeing in covering homelessness. But amid all this charm, so we just walked by a house that has a front porch with a lot of clothes hanging on the railings and there's a dog. There are lots of reminders of who this community actually serves. There's the sheriff's vehicle driving by.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Often when I've come here, there have been emergency vehicles, ambulances. That is a common sight. And then every once in a while walking around, you'll see someone without shoes or pushing a shopping cart full of stuff. Some people are walking around barefoot or talking to themselves. And it's easy to see that the people who live here are dealing with a lot of different complex problems.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
The best way to understand how Community First came to be is through the guy who invented it, Alan Graham. And could you tell me a little bit about your background? I sat down with him in his home, which is actually in the middle of the village.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
In a mobile home where he lives with his wife. And he kind of walked me through where all this started. Growing up in Houston, he had a mom who struggled with mental illness.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
That was really difficult for him to see. And his parents eventually separated.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He ended up having to take care of his mom himself because of her mental illness. And all of this left a deep impression on him and I think made him more empathetic toward people struggling with similar issues. Eventually, Alan moves to Austin.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
He gets his life together and becomes this really successful real estate developer.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
But at some point, he said he was starting to ask what else he could do that might be more meaningful. And he attends this men's retreat through his church.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And he has a sort of religious awakening and eventually starts serving meals once a week to homeless Austinites.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And as he's serving meals year after year, he really gets to know the people who were living on Austin streets. And he notices that they're there year after year. And he gets really frustrated that nobody seems to be actually helping to move people into homes. And then one day he's out at some ranch land and there's an RV parked there. And staring at it, he has what he describes as an epiphany.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
What if he could create a mobile home park specifically for the chronically homeless where everybody has sort of a shared history and where you could sort of foster a sense of community that that could help people remain stable?
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
So he goes to the mayor and proposes an idea. He says, if you give me the land or lease me the land, I'll make this project happen. I'll raise the money. I'll manage it. And we can do it wherever there's space.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
The mayor likes the idea. He agrees to it. The city council unanimously approves giving Alan this land. Things are moving forward. But then when the neighbors find out, they, as you might imagine, are not very happy about it.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Yeah, so I write about homelessness, and I think it's fair to say in this topic and in journalism in general, a lot of the stories are very focused on what's going wrong, how intractable this problem is, how it's growing. But part of my job is also to look for examples of where we're making progress.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
So they raise all these objections in neighborhood meetings and before the city council.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
They think putting all of these people with the same issues in one place is concentrating poverty and trauma, and in the face of all that, the city council backtracks.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
But Alan is undeterred and he finds a way. So he leverages all his business connections and raises $20 million, and he decides to buy a piece of land just outside the city limits. So in 2015, Community First Village becomes a reality. He moves the first people in. At first, they're just living in canvas tents, but then soon he buys used RVs, and it grows really quickly into hundreds of people.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Alan believes that the main cause of chronic homelessness and what's at the root of it for a lot of people is a loss of family. And so this community is built in a way that kind of forces all of these close social connections. Most of the homes are tiny homes that don't have their own kitchens or bathrooms. Partly that's because they're cheaper and quicker and easier to build, but...
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Allen also says that this type of housing is just better suited to people who've lived on the streets for a long time. Every resident gets their own standalone home, which makes it easier for them to have their own space and easier for Allen and the organizers to be a little more hands-off about what goes on in there.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And there's less chance of bothering your neighbor if you're having an episode or something in your own home. It gives people a little bit more independence.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And I moved to Austin a few years ago, and as I started talking to people about homelessness there, I kept hearing about this community on the outskirts of town that people said was a really creative and successful and impressive way of housing some of the most difficult to house people who live on the streets, the chronically homeless.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
But Alan also says that this helps kind of force people to go outside of their homes and interact with their neighbors, literally. If you need to go to the bathroom, you need to do laundry, you want to cook a meal, you have to leave your home and go and be in a shared public space. And there are also events that happen every week, like... For instance, every Thursday.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
I attended one of these dinners with Olivia, and we watched as dozens of people came out of their homes and lined up.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
And then they all sat down at these communal picnic tables with each other and they were chatting and catching each other up.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
Some people got extra plates of food to bring back to a friend who, for whatever reason, couldn't leave their home that night.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
There was really a sense of taking care of each other.
The Daily
The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness
There are rules, but maybe not the kinds of rules that you'd expect. The first one is you have to pay rent.