Motor Home Housing Launch Huge Success

L-R: Ed, Mikey, Bob, Maria, Victoria & Connor

Written by Bob Ballard of the Hearts Of Fire Project

Wow! What an amazing day we had at the launch of our new Motor Home Housing Program. This past Saturday, January 30 we awarded a motor home to Maria Pollack and her son Mikey at a ceremony hosted by Regalo Virgin Olive Oil. Representatives from three local newspapers covered the event as well as the local access TV station. More links to those stories at the end of this article.

Maria and her son were overjoyed when they saw the motor home; tears rolled down her face as she expressed her gratitude to everyone involved. Ed and Connie Bermudez donated the RV a few weeks ago. Ed wanted it to go to a homeless family. It was his generosity that started the program.

Victoria Stratton is Maria’s friend and sponsor. Victoria volunteers with Casa Esperanza homeless shelter in Santa Barbara where she heard about our program. She contacted me and told me about Maria and her son Mikey. Like many homeless people, Maria is employed but doesn’t earn enough money to rent an apartment or even buy a car. Maria met Victoria at church a year or so ago and they became friends. In addition to connecting Maria with our program, Victoria is providing a private parking place for the motor home on her property.

More families have contacted us who want to participate in this program. We are looking for more late model motor homes in good shape and people to help us give them a second life.  We are also need places to store the RV’s temporarily while we get them ready to distribute to homeless families. If you can help, please call our toll free message line at 877-827-2012 or email us at heartsoffire@ureach.com.

Media Links for further information:

Ventura County Star

Ventura County Reporter

Video (courtesy of Barrett Productions)

Update: Haiti Earthquake

Architecture for Humanity is working on the rebuilding effort in Haiti.  An update from their website:

Our Local Partners
We had been set to send a design team to Haiti this month to partner with local NGO Yele Haiti but have put this on hold until we can get a full assessment of the situation. We’ve connected with both Yele and our close friends at the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG). We have made a full commitment to support both their efforts in the long term rebuilding of affected areas.

Our Response
We DO NOT do emergency housing. We primarily work in the reconstruction phase of post disaster situations and will be focused on transitional and permanent housing and community structures. Our appeal is to help supply pro bono construction and design professionals and support in the building of earthquake resistant structures.

If you care about building back better, donate today.

For details, you can check out the Architecture for Humanity website.

Slide Show Media: Mike at River Haven

River Haven is a transitional community for people dealing with the issues of homelessness. Last September, World Shelters and The Turning Point Foundation teamed up with hundreds of volunteers to revitalize River Haven, which was previously functioning as a tent city encampment. The volunteers installed 19 geodesic structures called U-Domes, and later on others came by to improve the landscaping, provide beds, gas grills, a refrigerator, and offer other aspects of shelter many of us might take for granted. This is the first in what we intend to be a series of profile pieces about people who are living at River Haven and in other communities.

If you liked this post, why not Subscribe to SHELTER in your favorite reader?

Sign up for our email list.

38 Years. Tired. Ready. Don’t Say He Doesn’t Want To Be Housed.

Written by Joel John Roberts, CEO of PATH Partners.

I spend most of my days sitting in meetings. Talking on the phone. Sorting through emails. Conversing with people. Planning. Designing. Managing. Hoping.

It’s my job. Helping people.

Some people think it’s just busy work. Other people think it’s inspirational. God’s work, they say.

What do I think? It’s the reason for my being. My calling. My destiny. I don’t see it as a choice. It’s my mandate. It doesn’t matter what other people think.

So I walk into another meeting today. Not expecting much. Just another exercise of checking off items on an agenda. Introductions. Done. Preview of agenda. Done. First item…

…but this is a different gathering. The table is surrounded by outreach workers. Their purpose is to convince people living on the streets that they need help. They need to overcome their barriers. They need housing.

Wait. That’s my job too. Take off the tie and oxford shoes. And I look like an educated social worker.

It’s my job. Helping people.

The list on the table is filled with people we surveyed on the streets of Long Beach back in July. It’s a laundry list of hurting people. One has a terminal illness. Another fights demons in his soul. A few are drowning their existence with liquid poison. One is a product of a broken foster care system.

The facilitator of the meeting swipes a yellow highlighter over the name of one gentleman on the list. He has been living on the streets for 38 years. Yes, 38 years. He has cancer, and a few other stereotypical struggles that many visible homeless people encounter.

But this conversation is different. The police officer has convinced a landlord to allow this man to rent an apartment. The social worker has found subsidized rent. They go down a verbal list of other assistance.

“He’s tired,” says the social worker. “He’s ready. He wants a home. A roof over his head.” 38 years on the streets. And he’s ready. It’s practically a miracle. Even this jaded nonprofit executive is impressed.

The conversation turns to a discussion on how to get the furniture. The dishes. The linens. All the things that make a house a home. 38 years on the streets, and a group of people are planning what will be in the kitchen cabinets. Amazing.

No celebrations. No congratulations at the table. There are a few hundred other people we are also trying to reach. Too much work. Almost overwhelming.

But today was a good day. At least a hopeful day. Take away the tie and the oxford shoes, and I’m basically a social worker, a social engineer. Not an executive.

It’s my job. Helping people.

Can’t forget that.

————————————-

Joel John Roberts is the CEO of PATH Partners, a nonprofit organization which helps communities integrate services with housing. He blogs regularly on inforUm, an online journal dedicated to housing, poverty and homelessness.

SHELTER Video

When World Shelters and The Turning Point Foundation teamed up last September to revitalize the River Haven community we were there to capture the moment.  Several hundred volunteers came together to build nineteen structures.  Here’s a look at that happened on the build day.  The clip is longer than those we’ve shown elsewhere, and at the end there’s a link to the Vimeo website, where it can be seen in HD.  Let us know what you think!

Out of sight jigsaws, and sushi…

Here is a new guest post from a contributor from the UK who publishes her blog under the name WanderingScribe. Her post tells of some interesting connections she’s made. For those who missed our earlier re-post of her blog, she’s described her situation this way:

For the past five months I have been living alone in a car at the edge of the woods — jobless and homeless and totally unable to find a way out. I can’t sing, I can’t dance, I can’t scream loudly enough, alI I can do is write. So here I am laying down tracks…hopefully the start of an online paper trail out of here.

Her blog was ‘discovered’ and, as she writes,”I eventually got a publishing deal and made it out of my car to write a book about it… Miracles do happen.” Her book is titled Abandoned and can be purchased at Doubleday and Amazon.

Written by WanderingScribe

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

It seems only yesterday that I wrote in here that I had given up chocolate for Lent…Well, I’ve done it again…Chocolate AND coffee this year, so my nerves are on fire — constant red alert. Only another 35 days to go though (apparently Sundays don’t count as Lenten days!).

Anyway, I really can’t believe that it has rolled around again, and that Lent is here. Time has just slipped away.

I should be keeping an eye on time…making sure it doesn’t just pass me by. It is not just me saying that, apparently it was a direct message from angels for me. So I was told anyway…

When I got back in touch with my dad (Brendan) again, the time just before I ended up living in my car, he heard about a woman in Ireland who was a mystic and received messages from angels. He got in touch with her. I don’t know to this day what he said to her, but he had her telephone number and urged me to call her, saying she would be expecting my call. I didn’t know what to say, and wasn’t going to, but one day, feeling very foolish, I found myself dialing her number.

A softly spoken Irish lady answered, but it clearly wasn’t a good time for her — I think she was in a hurry to pick one of her children up from somewhere (yes, she also has children and lives in a modern house in a modern part of Ireland). She said she had received a message for me though — that the angels had given her a message saying that I had many talents (haven’t we all!) that I was in danger of wasting, and that time was running out. She said she was very busy and couldn’t talk but that I should give her my address and that she would write to me with the message.

I thought she was fobbing me off, but I gave her my address in Newcastle anyway and a few weeks later a letter did arrive. It took up only one side of paper and repeated the message from the angels: saying that they stressed that I needed to be particularly careful about time, and not to let it slip past. Which at the time I thought was a very strange message, even though that is what I have always tended to do in my life. I was a bit disappointed in a way, of all the things that angels could tell you…especially me in the lost and fragile state I was in at the time. She also gave me the name of my two guardian angels. Names which weren’t in English, but which, even though I was skeptical of the whole thing, I still found a bit disturbing seeing written down in the letter.She said all I needed to do was call the name and ask them to come down and they would. I remember rolling the sounds around my tongue and for a few days finding myself silently saying them. But then I got frightened of what I was doing and tried to forget them — which, unfortunately, I have now succeeded in doing. (Though I think I still have the letter somewhere.)

I’d never met this woman myself. All I knew was her name, and her voice…

Then yesterday, in a local bookshop, I squeezed past a couple pushing a toddler in a buggy, and as I did so knocked up against one of the bookcases. A display book, standing face-out on the edge of one of the shelves, threatened to topple. It was a new hardback book with a very nice light cover. As I reached up to straighten it, I instinctively read the title and then my eyes shot up to the author – because suddenly I knew who it was. It was her. The woman with the message for me from the angels. She has a book out, an autobiography called Angels In My Hair. Her name is Lorna Bryne, and she is apparently Kosher — for those who believe.

Brendan still has her telephone number and gave it to me again yesterday when I told him. Though I wouldn’t dare call her again. But how odd…Time did run out for me in the end and I ended up in my car. So in a way the message was right. And then I wrote an autobiography. An autobiography which was there right at the right time in publishing in a way. And now the person who gave me that message has written her autobiography too – with many more books to come it seems. It gave me shivers standing there in the bookshop holding it in my hands. Kind of…sort of…in a way…mysterious…

You can get yourself in a state of mind where things start to feel like proof. As if someone is laying a trail… constantly saying: Now do you believe? Now do you …? Now…? How about this time..?

If you enjoyed this post, why not Subscribe to SHELTER in your favorite reader?

Sign up for our email list.

Running the Numbers

Written by Lee Schneider, director of SHELTER.

How many homeless people are there in the United States? It’s a tricky question to answer, but I want to try running some numbers past you. The National Alliance to End Homelessness has some good ones to get this started. They estimate there are 672,000 people on the streets every night. Of those 672,000, 37% are believed to be homeless families, usually a woman with one or two children.

Most homeless people are, as you might expect, looking for shelter in cities. But at least 20 percent of them are in rural areas, and that number may be even higher because the more remote the area, the harder it is to count the homeless who may be living there.

The number one state, with the most homeless of all? California.

That’s amazing to me: Our once-prosperous state, home to much innovation, money and creative energy, has become the homeless capital of America. According to some observers, it might be the nation’s first state to fail.

What I’ve written above are the most solid numbers I could find, and they’re from two years ago – the last time anybody compiled state-by-state data. Drawing from those 2007 numbers again, we learn that 42% of homeless people are living on the street, but more than half – 58% – are in transitional housing. That’s the spark of good news I think – because many believe that transitional, even temporary housing, is the way to help solve homelessness. To focus on that, let’s go to Ventura, California.

In Ventura, the numbers are newer, drawn from data gathered this year in the last week of January. On a given day, there are about 2200 homeless children and adults on the streets in Ventura. (Federal estimates put the number even higher, at more than 8,000, according to the Ventura County Star.) Most of those children and adults, 73%, are living on the streets but the remainder, a little over 25%, have found some kind of shelter, some in temporary accommodations such as River Haven.

Some experts believe that 18% of the homeless population are “chronically” homeless, meaning that they are mentally ill or otherwise unable to care for themselves.

There’s debate on that number, but even if it’s rough, it still means that a lot of homeless people are people who may have slipped into a tough position and are trying to work their way out. With the economy still in slow recovery mode, it means that we have a crisis on low simmer that’s not going to go away. More families are going to be looking for shelter.

This is where the architects and designers can step in with inventive solutions. Bruce LeBel of World Shelters recently put up another round of housing in Arcata. (Working with the Turning Point Foundation, Bruce’s company World Shelters revitalized the River Haven community in Ventura, California.) Vinay Gupta has long been developing the Hexayurt, a shelter that can be made from plywood, composites, hexacomb cardboard and other materials. He sees Hexayurts as a solution for regions with large scale rehousing needs, such as Bangladesh. They’ve also been used at Burning Man.  Vinay believes in open source design – anybody can build a Hexayurt – and many have!

If you enjoyed this post, why not Subscribe to SHELTER in your favorite reader?

Sign up for our email list.

…I turned a corner

Here is a guest post from a contributor in the UK who publishes her blog under the name WanderingScribe. She has described her situation this way:

For the past five months I have been living alone in a car at the edge of the woods — jobless and homeless and totally unable to find a way out. I can’t sing, I can’t dance, I can’t scream loudly enough, alI I can do is write. So here I am laying down tracks…hopefully the start of an online paper trail out of here.

At the time she wrote that she listed her interests as:

• Hot food
• mugs of steaming tea
• warmer weather
• feather mattresses
• curtains to shut the world out. Getting out of this laneway…

In time, though, her blog was ‘discovered’ and, as she writes, “I eventually got a publishing deal and made it out of my car to write a book about it… Miracles do happen.” Her book is titled Abandoned and can be purchased at Doubleday and Amazon.

Here’s one of her posts.

Written by WanderingScribe

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Today it was the smell of lilacs that got me. I turned a corner, on a road I’d never walked down before, quite close to home, and bang… There I was a child of seven or eight again, dragging her feet on the way to the big houses under the railway bridge, where on some Sunday mornings, a tiny lady who lived in one of them sold us rhubarb, and bunches of mint for potatoes. Delicious smells…but before we got to them, we walked with our huge bundles of rhubarb along a crescent-shaped road that was full of (what I now know to be) lilacs, and the smell cleared everything else from your mind. For a while, everything…One of the saving graces of childhood. To this day I love lilac – the colour, the smell, the look of them…and of course the way they make my mouth water for rhubarb crumble.

If you enjoyed this post, why not Subscribe to SHELTER in your favorite reader?

Sign up for our email list.

The River Haven Community

Written by Lee Schneider, director of the film SHELTER.

I didn’t know you could play a Celine Dion CD off a car battery. But Mike Casper has figured out a way to do it. He’s one of twenty or so residents of River Haven, a transitional encampment in Ventura County, California.  River Haven has been around for four years, but recently Mike was among those who helped radically change it.

At the end of September, several hundred volunteers came to River Haven for a day, erected 19 pre-fabricated U-Dome residences from World Shelters, then had some pizza for lunch and moved on. Of course, the job wasn’t over. Some people had to come back to rebuild the platforms on which the dome homes rested. Others brought flowers and resealed doors and caulked leaks. The U-Domes experience shows that you can get pretty close to building a village in a day, but it takes a longer commitment to make the village work for the residents.

Mike Casper has seen the “old” River Haven when it was just a tent city, a sea of mud and leaky canvas, and he helped put up the new River Haven, which looks something like a space village, particularly at night, when the interiors of the domes are lighted from within. Mike has refurbished a couple of propane grills for cooking, fired up the Honda generator to put a charge on the 12-volt car batteries that power his and other residents’ DVD/CD players, and has even found some time for filing. That’s right, filing.  “Somebody donated these filing cabinets. I’ve been putting our stuff in them,” he said. The idea amuses him. But he likes to keep busy.

Before he lost his house, Mike told me, he was a building contractor with a Beverly Hills clientele. Working with his hands comes naturally to him.

He’s put his skills to work at River Haven, contributing to the community.  Corliss Porter, the Clinical Director at Turning Point Foundation, was the project coordinator on the one-day U-Dome installation, and she’s a key player in the ongoing administration of River Haven. She spent two rainy nights in a River Haven dome and found it pretty comfortable. “One little kerosene lantern warmed the place up even with wind,” she said. But she’s also spent more than two decades managing psychosocial rehabilitation services. The question that’s occupied her all those years is this: “How do you create a sane community to support personal growth?”

Personal growth comes, she’s found, when external structures are in place. “If the external structure is clear and fair, above all fair, that affects how people start working on their internal chaos.”

A resident has found that if you hang up a few mementos, like your old grade school report cards, a dome can  feel like home.

Put any of us out on the street, Corliss explained, and in two weeks or less our thinking becomes minute-to-minute. How do I get warm? Where do I go to the bathroom? Where’s my next meal coming from? “People on the street have a basic form of PTSD. [Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder]. Some of them more, some of them less.”

In that situation, you don’t make decisions coming from your best emotional state. You can’t focus on the problem – it simply overwhelms you. But with some structure and a sense of community such as River Haven provides, you have a shot at staying focused, at transitioning, at beginning to heal.

Last year at River Haven, they started doing peer mediation training for residents. “It altered the community,” Corliss said. “It shifted the way they attended to the problems and the community came along with it.”

River Haven residents pay $250 monthly rent. They have to stay clean and sober, participate in community meetings, and keep looking for work. Finding work – tough in this economic climate. “A lot of people are out of work these days,” Mike Casper told me. He’s keeping busy. There’s still a lot to do at River Haven, now that the new refrigerator that runs on propane has been donated.

___________

Lee Schneider is the founder of DocuCinema, a media production company based in Los Angeles.  Partnered with Adventure Picures, the company is producing the movie SHELTER.

If you enjoyed this post, why not Subscribe to SHELTER in your favorite reader?

Sign up for our email list.

Housing Fresno’s Homeless: A tale of lawsuits, lost identity and innovation

Photo by Jeff Pflueger

Written by Jeff Pflueger

Fresno, California

The city of Fresno, California is struggling under enormous pressures due to poverty.

A 2006 Brookings Institution report, using 2000 census data, ranks Fresno as having the 4^th highest poverty rate in the nation – at 26.2%. But Fresno ranks 1st on a perhaps more important figure; with a 43.5% concentrated poverty rate, or the percentage of poor individuals in high-poverty neighborhoods, Fresno’s poor are geographically concentrated like nowhere else in the nation.

By city estimates, roughly one in a hundred people in Fresno, California are homeless. According to some homeless advocates the number is much higher; if the homeless also includes the people who are “displaced,” i.e. without a home, but living temporarily in some form of shelter like a motel room, the number could be as high as 1 in 20.

Across the city homeless encampments have swelled into villages. Each has is name like “The Hill,” “New Jack City,” and “F Street.”

They are comprised mostly of camping tents packed closely together. Sleeping bags, blankets and tarps are often draped over the tents to provide additional insulation and weather proofing. Some homes within the encampments are shanties made of freely available materials such as pallets, plywood and blankets.

Fresno, Cal Trans and the Fresno Police addressed the homeless situation by conducting coordinated “sweeps” of the encampments. After police ordered residents to leave, bulldozers scooped up entire settlements and literally threw them away. People were stripped of everything that they owned – and literally their identity – as birth certificates, identification, family photos, along with their meager possessions were heaped into bins destined for the landfill.

In October of 2006, a Federal Judge issued a temporary restraining order to stop the city from its illegal sweeps. Soon after, the homeless of Fresno won a rare victory: a $2.35 million dollar class action lawsuit against the city of Fresno and Cal Trans. Funds from the lawsuit went to the individuals whose possessions were destroyed in the illegal sweeps, as well as into an account to provide housing and medical care for the individuals in the class.

Photo by Jeff Pflueger

Since the settlement, the city of Fresno has changed its behavior. Fresno now pays consenting motels $65 a night to house a homeless person. After the voucher period is over, the people are most often back on the streets. Many of these hotels are dangerously run down. Recently, the city of Fresno closed the “StoryLand Inn,” one of the voucher motels, evicting as many as 100 residents for building code violations regarding mold, broken windows, and bad plumbing.

Fresno also began housing homeless people in tool sheds.

In October 2009, Fresno dismantled the “H Street” camp and relocated the estimated 150 residents at a cost of $700,000. Many of H Street residents were moved into “The Village of Hope”, a settlement made of dozens of plywood tool sheds packed into two fenced lots. Residents live two to a shed, without electricity, water, or insulation. Nobody can be in a shed between the hours of 8am to 5pm.

As bleak and violent as the homeless situation has become in Fresno, Fresno is a city desperately in need of creative solutions. Local architect Art Dyson believes that he can help.

After Dyson received a Masters of Architecture, he served his architectural apprenticeships with Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff, and William Gray Purcell. His work has received over 150 local, state, national, and international design awards and he is featured in more than 400 publications and in over two dozen books.

If anything, Dyson’s work is integrative, drawing upon many traditions and ideas. His approach to helping the homeless situation is perhaps the most integrative of all – and the most visionary.

“All marvels of history would have been history without bold decisions,” Dyson writes in the proposal for his project to help the homeless situation.

Dyson is creating a visionary program through Fresno Pacific University. The program is interdisciplinary, integrating sociology, anthropology, planning, architecture, and revolutionary ideas from sustainable building to create “Eco Villages” to house the homeless. The students in the program will design and ultimately build the villages with the assistance of volunteers and the homeless themselves.

Each village will be limited to 20 residents. Small private shelters, built from reused and sustainable materials, will be arranged around common community space and centered on a small scale local economy such as the production of bamboo, and crafts created from bamboo.

Photo by Jeff Pflueger

Due to the recent housing collapse, land is cheap in Fresno, and the villages themselves can be built for next to nothing claims Dyson, since the materials will be either reused or donated.

Dyson dreams that the villages will be easily replicable, making their work in Fresno a model for how cities around the globe can help people without homes.

As ambitious and technical his plans are, Dyson’s vision is rooted in a deeper passion about engaging and connecting people experientially through the process of the project. Dyson writes in his proposal, “The program will help cultivate a culture of mutual acceptance and respect, solidarity and compassion, open communication and cross-cultural outreach by example. The program will serve as a catalyst to produce the highest aspirations of humanity into a practical reality.”

The program has already started. Al Williams and Cynthia Green, two of the homeless people named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the Fresno for the sweeps of the encampments, were able to collectively invest $16,000 to purchase a home that will become the Pamela Kincaid Neighborhood Center.

Art Dyson and some other investors also chipped in to purchase the $28,000 dollar home that sits on 1/3 of an acre. The center is to be a place to help the homeless.

Dyson already has plans drawn for the development of the center and is actively looking for land now to allow his students and the Fresno community to build the first of the Eco Villages in Fresno.

_____________

Jeff Pflueger is a San Francisco based photographer with work published in the New York Times, National Geographic Adventure and other publications. This piece is from Jeff’s personal project about poverty in California. Read more about the project at CAStories.com.

If you enjoyed this post, why not Subscribe to SHELTER in your favorite reader?

Sign up for our email list.