A Place to Call Home : Life is grim when you live on the streets. And while it seems like everyone has a planto create housing, it’s finding the <i> right</i> plan for shelter that’s causing all the trouble.
Where were you when the cold rains came on Christmas weekend?
In your car with the heater on and the windows cracked open? In a hut constructed of cardboard cartons? Beneath a concrete overpass next to a blazing fire? Or perhaps on a cot in a shelter--alert to the smells, sounds and threats of others too close for comfort?
The options are grim for more than 100,000 people on frosty nights when almost everyone with four walls to call home is sleeping safely inside them.
The number of homeless in Los Angeles County has increased about 9% in the past year, according to a study released last month by the Shelter Partnership.
“That’s a very conservative estimate,” said Ruth Schwartz, executive director, “because it is based on data from agencies which give financial support.” The people who don’t get aid--and therefore are not counted--is assumed to be huge, Schwartz said.
Who are all these people? And what would constitute a home if they could have one?
Few experts agree on the answers. Their passionate differences flared last month after a plan was announced to transport Downtown street people to a huge lawn east of the city, where they could rest and maybe be allowed to sleep. Also planned for the site was a shelter where they could rent lockers, take showers and have access to social services.
“An Orwellian poorhouse,” pronounced Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias del Pueblo. “Building a large fenced (area) is nothing but a prison.”
“It’s doghouses for the poor,” blasted Gary Blasi, UCLA law professor and former attorney for the homeless. “The homeless need the same as everyone else: four walls, a window and a bathroom.”
“It’s a great idea for a certain segment of the population,” countered Tanya Tull, director of Beyond Shelter, which finds affordable housing for homeless families. “For some, a safe lawn would be an improvement over where they are now. The homeless are not cookie-cutter people--this plan wasn’t meant to fill all needs.”
“(Mayor Richard) Riordan’s no fool,” said advocate Ted Hayes, who founded Genesis II, the dome village for homeless people near Interstate 10 in Downtown. “The mayor’s plan to clean up Downtown will help business while giving urban campers a place to go. I don’t agree with where they’d go, but I admire him for doing something rather than nothing.”
Of course, it wasn’t Riordan’s idea in the first place, said Rae Franklin James, deputy mayor of housing and transportation. Application was made for a HUD grant to help the homeless back in Tom Bradley’s Administration. When the $20-million grant came through last January, a coalition of advocacy groups for the homeless came up with “the plan,” loudly publicized when it was announced in November. Since then, all 133 pages have been quietly scrapped because of the controversy it caused.
So now the question of the lawn is moot. “We’re going back to square one,” James said. The outcry was so great “that we have decided to rethink the entire homeless initiative, of which the lawn was just a part.”
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Rethinking won’t be easy. The word homeless is so overused that the people it describes have fused in the public’s mind into a faceless mass. And the meaning of home , for someone who has none, is even more difficult for experts to discover.
“A home?” asked Schwartz in surprise. “I can define homeless but not home .”
UCLA’s Blasi had to think for a while: “A home is somewhere you can come back to. It’s the place to which families attach significance. It’s where your stuff is, if you have any stuff.”
Does it have to be four walls and a roof?
Of course, Blasi said: “That’s what evolved over hundreds of years to meet human needs.”
Of course not, said Norman Millar, architect and teacher at Southern California Institute of Architecture. “A home is someplace you have control over. It doesn’t have to be much--just some sort of a realm. A small box, a room, a corner where you have dominion and control of how the space is used.”
Even the dictionary is vague. The word home is rooted in ancient Greek, meaning “to rest”--with all the security that implies. In modern usage, it’s defined as “the place where one lives.”
Who’s to say you can’t live in a cardboard box, or a covered wagon, or between two painted lines that define your private territory--as long as you have the necessary conditions to call it your home? As long as you feel safe and comfortable enough to achieve true rest?
If that sounds too bizarre to contemplate, it isn’t. In Orlando, Fla., a homeless shelter proposal included lines painted on a grid. Each homeless person could stake out a space between the lines, where he or she could sleep without fear of harm or intrusion.
A New York artist built a prototype two-wheel covered wagon--to give privacy, shelter and storage space to those with no place to call home. It could be pulled around by day and set up for sleeping in a safe space at night.
A local architect has proposed a series of four-foot-high block walls under the freeways, to give homeless people a private space in which to sleep and store their belongings. The homeless person would provide a removable roof made of plastic, cardboard or whatever material is available.
Those are just a few ideas meant to help those at the low end of society’s urban spectrum, many of whom are out of the loop due to mental illness or substance abuse. If cities cannot offer safe shelters and medical care for such helpless people, the innovators say, why not try to provide some private space in which they can at least safely lay their heads?
For those who can help themselves if only given a leg up, dozens of low-cost shelter ideas are afloat. Many have a do-it-yourself thrust because people without homes are not without strength and talent, the architects say.
Out in Hesperia, architect Nader Khalili (who used to build skyscrapers in Los Angeles), now devotes his life to a new kind of “earth structure” that can be built “by the more than one billion homeless people of the world.” He said his homes, which are easily put together out of sandbags and barbed wire, are impervious to earthquake, flood, hurricane, fire, extremes of heat and cold. They can be fitted with plumbing, electricity, water, gas.
Yes, but are they attractive and livable?
“All I can tell you is that with the very earth beneath your feet, you can build the most beautiful structures in the world,” Khalili said. “In fact, the city of Hesperia, which was totally skeptical about my project when I first came here, has now given me the contract to build its natural history museum--using sandbags and wire. It will be a handsome building, I assure you,” he said.
Finding suitable structures is the easy part. Far thornier are the problems of where to place them, who will fund them (the government or private groups)--and how to fill them with individuals who want to live in them. All homeless people are not necessarily candidates for all homes.
Hayes’ Downtown dome village, for example, has not turned out to be the utopia he’d hoped for. In addition to financial problems that plague the project, Hayes said some of the residents simply weren’t ready for the responsibilities of community life.
UCLA law professor Lucie White, teaching at Harvard University this year, agrees that providing shelter isn’t necessarily the answer. It is “misleading and dangerous to equate the world of homelessness with the world of innovative homes.”
Far better, she thinks, to “find ways in which people can provide houses for themselves.” In many other countries, she said, the homeless create communities by and for themselves--on land they settle at the outskirts of towns. In South Africa, she saw whole villages created by people who had grouped together and built “wonderful dwellings for themselves from used milk cartons.”
Other experts cite economically viable villages in South America, built and inhabited by formerly homeless families. Using discarded tires stuffed with earth and straw, they have built homes, markets and schools as the population grows and solidifies into a more formal “city.”
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In this country, experts say, brand-new towns and villages will blossom--and abandoned towns can be brought back to life--if the homeless and their organizers are allowed to use arable land and are given a chance to fend for themselves.
On U.S. Highway 1, near Orland, Me., the unbelievable has already been accomplished.
Lucy Poulin, a former Carmelite nun, shepherds a large, economically viable and peaceful community. It was built by and for its inhabitants--75% of whom were once homeless. Almost all are under-educated and have no formal skills, Poulin said.
In 1970, Poulin took over an abandoned 23-acre farm to give poor craftspeople a place to sell their wares. The farm, called HOME, has since expanded into a 700-acre multiuse town with what Poulin calls “beautiful Cape Cod-style homes on big lots,” built from scratch “by our own residents with wood growing on our property.”
Also on the property, built and staffed by HOME residents, are a sawmill, shingle factory, woodworking shop, crafts shop, flea market, cobblers’ shop, school, day-care center, food banks, four emergency shelters for homeless women and children, a men’s shelter, a brand-new single-room-occupancy building and some new duplexes for single parents and their children.
“It’s self-development economics,” Poulin said by phone the other day. “People have needs for housing. So we get land, put it in a land trust. On that land, trees are growing. We harvest the trees, bring them to the sawmill and the shingle mill, and then we build houses with it. We create employment, fill a local need with a local resource.”
Poulin, who is plain-spoken and didn’t finish high school, said, “Everybody has a skill of some sort. We help find it and ask that they use it. If you’re willing to work, you’re accepted here.”
She believes that many homeless people have fewer problems and more talent than society gives them credit for. “We have this man who lived in a truck out on a deserted hill, who wouldn’t look anyone in the eye, couldn’t read or write, who talked to walls and was totally off in his own world,” she recalled.
“He came to live in our shelter, improved his psychology, went to school here, got married here, and recently joined with a group of volunteers to build his own beautiful Cape Cod home, where he lives with his wife. In fact the three key men in our building crew are talented people who used to be homeless.”
She believes that “more than half of what is called mental illness in the homeless population isn’t mental illness at all.”
“It’s the result of isolation, which destroys a person. The more you’re shunned, the dirtier and lonelier you become, the more strangely you behave,” she said. “I’m no professional, but I believe the solution is to employ the unemployed and unemployable. That’s what works here.”
It’s what works anywhere, said Marjorie Bard, who got her doctorate at UCLA with a thesis on the hidden homeless--people once employed and well-housed but who have slipped into poverty through job loss or other hardships.
“There’s no help offered these people,” Bard said. “Once they’ve used most of their savings, they have to start living in their cars. The car is mobility, shelter, storage and relative safety compared to what life would be like as a street person.”
Bard helps these people to retro-fit cars for more comfortable sleeping and storage. In many instances, she arranges a swap: the classy car is traded for a larger van, wagon or recreational vehicle, which can be more comfortable and home-like until the real thing comes along.
Long-term, however, she believes in Lucy Poulin’s approach. To heck with the city, the bureaucracy and the demeaning handouts, she said: Find abandoned towns, farms or vacant arable land on which to build innovative, low-cost housing. Use the barter system to get what you need and start your own community.
“If people chip in to help each other toward a common goal, miracles can be accomplished.”
