What If Unhoused People Designed Their Own Homes?
Unhoused individuals are often subject to “about us, without us” plans, which helps to explain what the industry calls the “service-resistant.” Israel Muñoz, who lived in a tent on and off for about five years before landing at Homefulness, explains that “very restrictive” rules kept him from traditional shelters: “The people humiliate you. That’s a reason a lot of people live in the streets instead.” At Homefulness, Muñoz feels part of a family, one that keeps him busy and away from his addictions. “Here it’s not like, ‘I’m the manager,’” he says. “If you got issues with anybody, we cancel everything and we sit down. The whole village.”
Homefulness began over a decade ago by renovating an abandoned bungalow and has slowly grown with volunteer architects and engineers. Eight residents will welcome at least a dozen more once fully occupied. By Gray-Garcia’s ad hoc accounting, building it cost over half a million dollars. None came from the usual “politrickster” and “philanthropimp” sources, she boasts, but instead largely from the “solidarity family”—a group, now numbering more than 100, of supporters and graduates of Tiny’s workshops deprogramming “folks with race and class privilege.” While donations to its 501(c)(3) are tax-deductible, Tiny insists, “this is not charity. It’s poverty reparations.”
“You don’t get to have any agenda-setting power just because you throw down a bunch of money,” says Cecilia Lucas, a lecturer in UC Berkeley’s Global Poverty and Practice program, who has been one such supporter for eight years. Lucas says the model of giving helps materially secure people “rethink your concepts of expertise and knowledge production.”
“There’s something really magnetizing about Tiny,” says Lucas, who has lectured with Gray-Garcia. Tiny approached the appearances as political performances, arriving in character as a homeless person who starts going through the garbage bins. Once the audience is sufficiently uncomfortable, they’re let in on the shtick. It’s a comment on “how people quickly get called insane and seen as trash,” Lucas says.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/04/oaklan-homefulness-unhoused-homeless-housing-townhome/
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