The Daily - The Texas Village Rethinking Homelessness

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Warning: this episode contains strong language.In Austin, Texas, a local businessman has undertaken one of the nation’s biggest and boldest efforts to confront the crisis of chronic homelessness.Lucy Tompkins, a national reporter for The Times, takes us inside the multimillion-dollar experiment, to understand its promise and peril.Guest: Lucy Tompkins, who reports on national news for The New York Times.Background reading: Can a big village full of tiny homes ease homelessness in Austin?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobauro. This is The Daily. In Austin, Texas, a local businessman has undertaken one of the nation's biggest and boldest efforts to confront the crisis of chronic homelessness. Today, Lucy Tompkins takes us inside the multi-million dollar experiment to understand both its promise and its peril. It's Friday, December 6th. Lucy, thank you for coming to the studio.

Thanks for having me, Michael. So, I want to start by asking you, how did you come to the story of this social experiment that's been happening in Texas? 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. 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.

And just describe that population, what that word really means. 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. And it would seem like a population that a lot of major American cities are really having a hard time grappling with.

Yeah, these are the people who, when you think about encampments in LA, 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. And some places have taken a more punitive approach to getting 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.

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. It's like a 15-minute drive from downtown, and we're definitely getting out of the city. And what did you see when you first went out there to see it yourself?

It was as surprising as people made it sound. All right, here we are. Welcome Community First Village. Wow, it's really cute. Yeah, it is really cute. Yeah it is really cute. I've now been back to Community First a handful of times, most recently with daily producer Olivia Natt. 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. 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. It feels like a cheerful place to live and that's not what I was used to seeing and 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. 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. So, Lucy, how does this very unique sounding concept of Community First, how did it come

to be? And what exactly is the philosophy behind it? 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 just background? I sat down with him in his home, which is actually in the middle of the village. So you want to go right way back? Way back.

Yeah. 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. You know, I had a nervous breakdown, a big one, when I was about four years old and was institutionalized. That was really difficult for him to see. And his parents eventually separated. 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. 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.

Now this is the mid nineties and things are looking good. I'm developing air cargo. He gets his life together and becomes this really successful real estate developer. In a way, starting to become the hot shot that I wanted to be the Donald Trump of old. 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. And had I known that men were going to hold hands and pray and, God forbid, do that bromance hugging out thing that we did, I would have never gone. But there was a feeling of an extraordinary presence of the Holy Spirit and I was jazzed

to the hilt. And he has a sort of religious awakening and eventually starts serving meals once a week to homeless Austinites. To take things from those of us that have abundance to those that lack abundance. 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.

I thought, you know, I could live as a single male or female in something like this. There's dignity here. 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. So how does he go about trying to take that philosophy and this idea he has of an RV community for the chronically homeless

and also then make it a thing, make it a reality? 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. And when I was done with that presentation, the mayor looked at me and said, we need four of these in Austin.

The mayor likes the idea. He agrees to it. The city council unanimously approves giving Allen this land. Things are moving forward. But then when the neighbors find out, they, as you might imagine, are not very happy about it. Good morning. I'm Austin Mayor Will Winn. It's my privilege to welcome the... So they raise all these objections in neighborhood meetings and before the City Council. I'm here representing the Lincoln Gardens Neighborhood Association. Our opposition to the Herald Court Project is not motivated solely by the not in my backyard mentality.

They're worried about their property values. They're worried about drug use. The idea of moving a population of homeless individuals into a leopard colony-style camp in a single-family residential neighborhood at the edge of the city is a fundamentally flawed idea with a potential for serious harm to the camp's homeless population and the neighborhood in which it is placed. 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. We stand adjourned. It is 8 o 1 p.m. And puts the project on hold

Everybody thought the deal was dead, but I don't die easy, man. 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.

So now that we understand how community first came to be, walk us through how exactly this village serves this population that's so hard to serve. What are the nuts and bolts of how it operates? Allen 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.

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. 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 Alan and the organizers

to be a little more hands-off about what goes on in there. When somebody gets bedbugs, which is common or roaches or whatever, without the shared walls, it doesn't infiltrate next door. 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.

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.

But Allen 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. All right, so with that, Charles is going to pray for us. There's the Steiner Ranch dinner.

Lord, we just thank you, Lord, for your salvation, your great mercy, your great love. I attended one of these dinners with Olivia, and we watched as dozens of people came out of their homes and lined up. Amen. Amen. One beef, one chicken. And then they all sat down at these communal picnic tables with each other and they were chatting and catching each other up.

So is it okay if I record your voice for? You want the sexy one or do you want the serious one? Tell us your name. Smiles. You want the sexy one or do you want the serious one? Tell us your name. Smiles. Where were you living before you moved to Community First? North...I lived in Houston, Texas for 42 years. I was married for 27 of those. My daughter is older than you.

Are you still in touch with her? She's better off without me. Some people got extra plates of food to bring back to a friend who, for whatever reason, couldn't leave their home that night. By the way, that's where that plate's going. Her name is Stacey. She lives two houses down from me. She's in the hospital right now. So I'm gonna refrigerate it. That way whenever she gets out, she has something to eat. There was really a sense of taking care of each other. [♪ music playing, fades out. [♪ music ends.

You're describing all these social functions that would seem to keep people connected to each other within this community. I'm curious what kind of rules are in place to hold it all together. There are rules, but maybe not the kinds of rules that you'd expect. The first one is you have to pay rent. How? 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. 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. 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...

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. 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. But otherwise, it's pretty hands off. And how often is someone reprimanded or even removed from this community? 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 have evicted 22 people.

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. 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. From what you just said, this sounds like a success. 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. 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. Hmm. Success for them is a much more complicated and messy story. My name is Justin Tyler Jr. And we really saw that in hanging out with this one guy. That's about it. I'm nothing special. I got no title. Justin Tyler Jr. We'll be right back. So, Lucy, just before the break, you had mentioned Justin Tyler and how his story complicates

what feels like the visible success you observed at Community First. So where does his story begin? 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. Mainly grew up in Round Rock, Texas. It's right down the road. He said he grew up in a military family,

so he was moving around a lot as a kid. For a while there, I was into the whole Jack Kerouac part of life, where I was just wandering around. I was that rambling teenager. I wanted to hurry the hell up and get out. So probably about age 15, 16, started hopping on greyhounds and just going wherever I had it. He struggled in school.

He ended up dropping out and picking up work really young. I had a good girlfriend at the time who was like a high school sweetheart who I wound up marrying. 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. You know, right after I got divorced, I kind of just, I didn't know what the hell I was gonna do.

And he said this is really the destabilizing event for him that starts his experience of homelessness. I just got in a car and realized I didn't have anywhere to stay. So I kind of just stayed in my car and then the very first time I lost my car and then actually stayed on the streets, that was probably, I don't know, maybe about eight years ago or so. 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. Yeah, I just kind of started just giving up on everything. My health kind of went to shit. Uh, and then I started drinking a whole lot. So, uh, I didn't help the body situation any. Yeah. His drinking gets worse, and he is sleeping on a bench and doesn't really see a way out of this for himself.

I started talking to some people like that that were trying to help on the streets. And I did whatever they asked, you know? I just didn't want to be on the streets anymore. It wasn't the romantic story of wandering anymore. 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. And how was he doing at Community First? 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. My youngest was like, damn, dad, you snore. I was like, I've never heard you sleep. I was like... Wow.

Oh yeah, I didn't even think about that. Which is the first time he'd been able to do that in a decade since he'd become homeless. Wow. So a really big personal milestone. Definitely. Have you used the recovery services at all here? That part of my life is still just up in the air. I'm still going to drink. I know it's a problem.

I know the triggers and stuff. Once you go do your little 28 days or whatever, you get a different grasp on it. But I have tried almost everything. 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? I'm doing good, actually. Yeah, yeah. I mean, uh... He talked about himself staying there long term. He had relationships with his neighbors. This place changed my life.

I mean, I don't know if it necessarily saved my life. It might have because I was... There was a few times, I mean, right before I got here, where I was... I was like, man, I don't know how much more my body's going to take or how much my mind's going to take. But this place is awesome. I mean, I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm just really just taking advantage of it and I love it and I'm going to keep on doing it, you know? Talk to whoever needs to be talked to, do whatever job needs to be done. 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. Funny story my mom just asked recently when she was here a horrible question for a mom to ask but she was like well if you do pass before us what do you want done and I was like just spread me. It seemed like he was holding on to stability but a little bit shakily.

Why do you think your mom asked you that question? I live rough. I think she's always been worried that she's going to watch her son die, which is, you know, speaking from a parent's point of view now, that's the most horrible thing in the world. And it sounded like his loved ones were still holding their breath. Hello? Hey Justin, it's Lucy.

And a couple days ago I called Justin to check in on him. Well, I'm pretty bad. A little bender for my QH and it got so bad that my body just said no more. And a lot had changed since we had seen each other in May. to the point where I had the money and I had the capability of just ordering bottles of whiskey. So I wasn't even at the end, like getting up and going and getting it. I was just— He said soon after we had seen him drinking, took over, 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. It went from, do you want to go to the hospital, to which hospital are we taking you to because you have

to go now because we've just, it's just watched you have too many strokes. Wow. He stayed in the ICU for several days and then when he got out... Have you been sober this long before? No, the longest I think I've ever gone is maybe a little bit over a month. 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. It's a very sad situation. He almost died. And that makes me think about the meaning and effectiveness of this model of community first.

I mean, on the one hand, in Justin's story, you clearly see that the absence of really strict rules and standards around sobriety mean that he is able to drink this way and almost drink himself to death. But on the other hand, before that, he had been making all the progress you described. His kids are able to stay over, which is wonderful. And even after he gets out of the ER, he's back in the community and it's creating a space for him to try to get back on his feet, which no doubt would be all the harder if he were on the streets. And so those two sides of this story, they can feel hard to reconcile, right?

I mean, is Community First supporting him and or is it enabling him? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 health issues or addictions or family trauma that got them there in the first place.

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. And when they move into community first, all of that doesn't go away. I think what Alan is doing with this model is accepting that and saying we can't fix all of that at this point. My original motivation was palliative, which is the relieving of the suffering associated with disease without pursuing the cure for the disease. He really feels like what serves this group of people best is a palliative care model.

Can you just explain that that word palliative care means something pretty specific to most people? It means end of life care. It means hospice. And therefore, it's a little bit of a confusing word to use when talking about homelessness. Yeah, and I think he does mean it that way. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. Well, Lucy, thank you very much. Thank you, Michael. Lucy originally reported on Community First as part of Headway, a times initiative focused on social and economic progress that is funded in part through private

grants. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Rebels in Syria, who have already taken over the major city of Aleppo, stormed the city of Hamas on Thursday, bringing them one step closer to the capital city of Damascus. The rapid rebel advance has shifted the front lines in Syria's 13-year-old civil war for the first time in years. Analysts say that the rebel's success has exposed the vulnerability of Syria's government, which is led by President Bashar al-Assad, and the degree to which Assad's biggest allies, including Russia and Iran, are now preoccupied with their own crises.

Remember, you can catch a new episode of The Interview right here tomorrow. David Marchese speaks with the actor Tilda Swinton. If I ever met your incoming president, there is something I would really love to talk to him about, which is having a Scottish mother. What would you want to talk to him about that? I'd like, I want to hear. I want to hear about her. I'm very curious about her. On you. Today's episode was produced by Olivia Nat and Will Reed,

with help from Mary Wilson. It was edited by Mark George, with help from Ben Calhoun. Fact Checked by Susan Lee contains original music by Alicia Baitou, Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, and Diane Wong, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderly. The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lindsey Garrison, Claire Tennesgetter, Paige Cowitt, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fischer, Chris Wood, Jessica Chung, Stella Tan, Alexandra

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Mahima Chablani, Elizabeth Davis Moore, Jeffrey Miranda, Maddie Masiello, Isabella Anderson, Nina Lassam, and Nick Pittman. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you on Monday.