Community First - Designing to End Homelessness in Austin, TX with Shelby Blessing

Link to listen to the Community First! Village podcast interview on Shared Space with Erin Peavey.

What is the most talked about neighborhood in Austin, TX? The Community First! Village, a 51-acre master planned village that fosters independence, friendship and community in service with the homeless. 

Shelby Blessing, AIA is a design architect, impassioned activist, and Austin-based design for equity leader, with Page/. In this episode of Shared Space, she shares with us stories from designing for, working with, and learning from the Community First! Village.

Episode Show notes

(Transcript from our interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.)

Erin: What's your earliest memory of being aware that architecture design exists as a field and how it could impact you?

Shelby: I think the first time I remember really thinking about it as a profession was when I was in 7th grade. We had a medieval fair at our school and each person had to choose a medieval profession. I was captivated by a girl who chose to be an architect, so that she could design a medieval castle as her project. I started to envision in my head that this was a profession that I could choose, as I realized that it combined the different interests that I had. I was interested in Art but really good at Math. I liked the interdisciplinary nature of architecture and the fact that it requires a lot of different and sometimes conflicting skill sets.

Tell us about origins of the Community First Village project, and how you got involved?

I first got involved with Community First Village back in 2014 through a design competition that AIA Austin put on, called Tiny Victories. Community First Village is a master planned community East of Austin that houses formerly chronically homeless individuals. It was started by a nonprofit in Austin, called Mobile Loaves and Fishes. They have been working with the homeless population in Austin for over two decades, providing food to people on the streets who were in need. Over the years, Alan Graham, the founder of Community First Village, realized that they were treating the symptoms of homelessness, but they were not necessarily addressing the root cause. They started on an individual level, working with a few of the homeless folks and helping them get into RV parks or trailer homes, and trying to get them off the streets.

It was great on the individual level at the start, but they were pulling someone out of the community and social support network that they had built on the street. They were putting them in a community where suddenly they did not know anybody. So really, the vision for Community First Village was to do that on a much bigger scale where they could actually build that community and support network at the village. It started as an RV park on steroids, but they realized that that there was a real value to bring in and seek help from architects and designers. So, they have adapted their model over the years to focus a lot more on creating a permanent community. A space that is special, where the residents could feel like they can stay as long as they want, and it is not temporary or transitional.

What does the Community First Village look like?

About half of the village started as an RV park, so it is a mix of RV homes and tiny homes. Over the years, they started to switch to park model RVs and more permanent models that have built-on porches. The other side has about 150 tiny homes in Phase One, and there is also a Second Phase that is being constructed. The tiny home area includes hugely eclectic variety of different home designs. When somebody moves into Community First Village, they get to tour different houses and pick the one that meets their needs. People coming out of homelessness, they often have not gotten to make many choices while they are homeless, so I think it is something amazing that just the design of the village offers that choice right away.

Community First! Village: https://mlf.org/community-first/#iLightbox[image_carousel_1]/24

What are the core design principles and considerations behind Community First Village?

When I first got involved, I did not really know any of that. It all started when we decided to appear as a team in the AIA competition. We were working with limited information from the design brief for the competition, designing a micro home for an individual who has experienced chronic homelessness. It should be under 200 square feet, have no kitchen or bathroom, because those are in shared facilities on site. So, it is just a bedroom and living space for one person. Originally, we were designing them to not have any plumbing or air conditioning either, which is has evolved overtime too. We were designing for a somewhat generic abstract client, who we have not talked to and did not have any personal experience ourselves. We came down on the idea that the house should provide the basic needs, but also made sure that the house left some options and flexibility. This would allow people to come in with their own ideas, interests, and continue to evolve the house to meet their needs.

The key considerations for what make a good home for someone who has experienced homelessness is not any different from what makes a good home for us. A place where you have comfort and security. Where you have the ability to lock the door if you want and decide who gets to come in and out of your space. A place for all your belongings and to express who you are and your interests. The ideas of Alan Graham, the founder of Community First Village also influenced our team during that process. Some of them are inspired from the book Beyond Homelessness, which outlines the intangible aspects of a house like permanence, personal expression, belonging and identity. What made our designs stand out and win the competition was the fact that we tried to make them beyond just a shelter and really thought about how you make a house, a home.

“the intangible aspects of a house like permanence, personal expression, belonging and identity…beyond just a shelter and really thought about how you make a house, a home.”

How has the design of Community First Village increased human connection and creation of community?

There are a lot of things that are baked into the design of the homes and the design of the site that are meant to encourage connection and community. One was that the tiny houses were all required to have a front porch, which would help neighbors build connections. The original design brief was that every house had a limit on square footage, but it was required to have a front porch that faced the main pedestrian pathways that go through the neighborhood to encourage those connections. The big priority was to create a space that could be more than just sitting out with chair, but actually a space for hosting, a job, a hobby or other activities.

As mentioned earlier, the houses do not have kitchens or bathrooms, everyone has shared outdoor kitchen facilities where they can cook and heat and share meals together. I think that really helps to encourage connection in those neighborhoods. Same thing happens with the bathrooms to some degree as well.

What are the communal spaces like and what is number of people and houses in the neighborhood?

In Phase One, the definition of neighborhoods came about later. They do not have roads going up to all the tiny houses but rather pedestrian pathways. All of the homes that are on the same pathways have house numbers that start with the same number. They also have their own local government that has a community council member for each of those little mini neighborhoods that represents the residents in their area and helps to make decisions for the community. In the future, they are looking to be a lot more intentional about really defining the scale of a neighborhood and thinking about it, as they look at scaling up the community they have or starting some additional communities to help serve more people. It is more important as they grow to really lean on the unit of the neighborhood to be the place where those relationships are formed first within a larger community.

Community First! Village.

“It is more important as they grow to really lean on the unit of the neighborhood to be the place where those relationships are formed first within a larger community.”

Is Community First Village a space for families or single residents?

For most of the residents who are formerly homeless, the microhomes are all for one individual. There are some who have either come in as couples or developed couples since they moved in, they usually end up moving into one of RVs, which has a little more space to accommodate or keep two tiny houses. There are some families as well. About 10% of the folks who live at Community First Village have never experienced homelessness and are instead choosing to live there to be in service to their neighbors, help support the community, and that includes a lot of families with young children. So, that is something that the village designed so far partially accommodates those, but something that they are looking to add in the future.

In order to qualify to live at Community First Village, they have to be chronically homeless, which is defined by either repeat experiences of homelessness or duration of homelessness. They also have two qualifying disabilities which includes a range of physical, mental and substance abuse issue. The folks that Community First Village is serving are among the most vulnerable, chronically homeless population, and that's typically not families. Their focus has been on individuals experiencing chronic homelessness. A lot of whom are older and struggling with a wide variety of problems like disability or medical issues.

What are the lessons that you have learnt that you would say both apply to as a Community First Village grows but also other similar types of villages in the future?

I was part of the original design competition, not really knowing much about Community First Village when I started. Ours was one of five that got selected to be built in Phase One. So, I ended up working a lot with the builders, coming out on site, volunteering with the teams that were that were out there to help build the houses. Then, I also got involved with AIA Design Voice, which is the committee that put on the competition. So, I decided that I wanted to learn more about them, get more involved and help continue that relationship of their work with Community First Village. A year or so after Phase One had started construction and people had moved in, I learnt from a staff member about which houses tended to get chosen first and why. I was really fascinated with this because as architects, we do not often have the opportunity to go back and evaluate our designs.

So, along with AIA design voice, I helped initiate a post-occupancy study to go back and interview residents from Phase One. We asked questions about the individual microhome design, but also about the larger community design and tried to answer the question of how well the built environment at Community First Village was serving the needs of its residents. In the light of results, we made specific recommendations to Community First Village. The biggest overriding one was that the things that matter in a tiny home for a formerly chronically homeless person are the same as the things that matter in your home, in my home. Some of those, though, might have been missed by designers in Phase One. A really obvious one is that a lot of the homes in Phase One were not designed with ample storage. That was an immediate lesson learned that the houses really needed to better accommodate storage.

Another one that came out was that the houses with a screened porch had an advantage, as it becomes lockable and gives you outdoor storage space. The houses with more than one space were really useful, because that allowed a resident to make one space more private, one space more public, and be able to control who they let in and how far they let them into their personal space. It also gave an opportunity for residents to host visitors, which is something that maybe was not thought about too much in design either.

“The houses with more than one space were really useful, because that allowed a resident to make one space more private, one space more public, and be able to control who they let in and how far they let them into their personal space.”

What about for the larger community level?

At the community level there are a variety of different community spaces, a lot of which are focused on providing services or job opportunities for residents. We heard a lot of really great feedback about how important those job opportunities worked for residents, partially for income, partially for having a thing to do, but also really important to the fabric of the community and building those relationships. Those relationships that are built overtime just through proximity and shared experience are important and the job opportunities really helped with that. So that was, I think, a great confirmation of the decision that Community First Village had made early on to provide those opportunities for residents.

One of the things that I wondered was that why are architects not doing a better job at going back, doing research, and understanding how things worked out. I learned in the process that the reason why we do not do it is that it takes a lot of time and effort, and it is not a part of our normal design services. In this case, we were able to do it with a team of volunteers. So, that is a big question I'm continuing to ask in my career, what is the light version of that that we can do more often, or how do we convey the value to clients, so that we can make that part of our standard services, especially for clients who are doing repeat building types and can really benefit from that research of their own buildings.

“Those relationships that are built overtime just through proximity and shared experience are important and the job opportunities really helped with that. ”

What has been happening with everything that is going on right now with COVID-19?

It has been amazing to see the ways that they have adapted and in some ways, they didn't actually have to adapt as much because they already were set up pretty well for social distancing. All of the tiny homes are standalone structures that don't share air with the surrounding buildings and are separated by a lot of open-air circulation. Just that basic fact of the community has made it easy for them to keep all of their residents safe. A lot of their spaces already have a lot of indoor-outdoor connection, great air circulation, and that was part of their community from day one.

During COVID-19 they have installed stations throughout the village where they have installed extra hand washing stations because as mentioned, not all the houses have plumbing. They have shared bathroom facilities and so in order to have more frequent places to wash hands, they put extra sanitation stations throughout the village. They shut down and limited the visitor access to the site really early.  

Community First! Village: https://mlf.org/community-first/#iLightbox[image_carousel_1]/24

Can you share any personal stories of residents or their experiences with our listeners to be able to help picture of this life and community?

There was one woman that I spoke with, who had been homeless and estranged from her family. One of the things that really came up again and again when I interviewed her and heard about her experience was the way that she has found family at Community First Village. That includes Alan and Trisha Graham, the founders, who she regards as parent figures. It is like they have really adopted her, and she has kind of boundless trust in them and that they will help lookout and take care of her. This forged family that they have made on site with all these relationships between individuals. This woman that I spoke to, I think I asked her a bit naively about how long she plans to stay at Community First Village, and she looked me straight in the eyes and said, I am going to live here until I die. I am not going anywhere else. This is my community this is my home and that is something.

I think it is really beautiful and wonderful that they have set up the community in this way where it is not viewed as transitional housing, that's not supposed to be a steppingstone to help people get back on their feet and get into some other “normal” looking situation. This is the community that people want to be in. I think it is something that a lot of us wish we had in our communities and neighborhoods.

Is there something else that you are involved in that you would like to mention?

A couple of years ago, I worked with some other folks here in Austin to start a leadership program in Austin that is explicitly focused on increasing equity and leadership in profession. This grew out of a lot of conversations that we were having years ago around a Women in Architecture exhibit that came to Austin and one of the organizers of that exhibit challenged me with the question-- if we raised a bunch of money for this exhibit, what should we do with it to help women in architecture in Austin? So, we started talking about it. The thing that we saw was the gap that women experience between going to architecture school, getting licensed and that really there is a big drop off when you look at advancement to who is leading firms, who is winning design awards. who is getting the recognition and promotion to help lead the work that we all, as designers are doing and how can we help create a more diverse leadership in our profession?

This is in service of a bigger goal which is, as designers we are shaping the built environment that affects our entire community. When we do that with a group of people who do not represent our entire community, we are probably missing a lot of opportunities and ways that the design could serve those people the best. I think it is hard to do that without diversifying our leadership. The program has been our effort to start or help work on that here in Austin, and it has just finished its third year. It has been amazing to watch many people go through that program and then watch them become more involved as leaders in their firms as leaders and in our local AIA chapter.

We are not building buildings just to look at them. We are not building buildings just to show how creative we can be. We are building buildings to solve the problem and to serve a need, and that need is generally for the people who are going to experience those buildings. So, the more that we can engage with and understand, and really dig into what those needs are and make sure that the building serves it.

What do you wish people would use to inform their design decisions to design for connection?

I think the biggest thing is being a really good listener and being a good observer of the world around you, and the way that people are interacting. Every design is hopefully building on the body of knowledge that we already have as designers and hopefully allows us to get better and better at those things. It is naïve to think that any single building or one designer is going to solve that and come up with the perfect answer to any question. I think it is all about communication and checking in on those things and really clearly articulating what the goals are and being able to talk to everybody involved to make sure that those goals are met.

“I think the biggest thing is being a really good listener and being a good observer of the world around you, and the way that people are interacting.”

Where to Find Shelby Blessing & The Community First! Village

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelby-blessing/

Community First! Village: https://mlf.org/community-first/

Resources Mentioned

 Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement by Steven Bouma-Prediger