Community — Not Housing — First
An old story concerns a man who believes the earth could not possibly be soaring through space. He insists that the world sits on a giant turtle. When asked what the turtle sits on, he ponders and replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.”
That response connects to our inability to make much progress on homelessness. We can conjure up all kinds of programs to get people off the streets, but almost all of us are heavily influenced by our childhood environments — and our parents learned from their parents, for better or for worse. Turtles all the way down: Most of the 70 formerly-homeless people I’ve interviewed in recent months had to survive neglectful parents and/or multiple foster care moves.
That interviewing has left me with questions about what leads to substance abuse. Can people, laden with childhood traumas plus the hard experience of years of homelessness, overcome their pasts? On a Monday afternoon in May, I threw that question at Alan Graham, founder and CEO of Austin’s Community First! Village (CFV), where close to 400 formerly homeless humans now live.
CFV is familiar to long-time readers of this column: On July 29 and August 5, 2022, I described my two earlier trips to CFV, when the site had 325 residents. CFV has since continued to receive copious coverage from the New York Times and other newspapers and magazines, along with megabucks in local funding from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation and many businesses. With colorful architect-designed homes, CFV is a pretty place.
Soon, 500 residents will occupy CFV’s 51 acres at Hog Eye Road. An expansion plan projects 127 additional acres and 1,400 more residents. As we toured the village in his golf cart, Graham exchanged “hellos” with pedestrians — he knew some by name. As Graham drove, he told me about Robin Dunbar, the British anthropologist who said a group, to be strong but cohesive, should have about 150 people.
“Dunbar’s number” is not plucked out of the sky. Studies show 150 is about right for offices, communes, factories, residential campsites, military organizations, and even Christmas card lists. It’s a “cognitive limit”: Go beyond it and human beings become numbers or faces only, with growing alienation. Graham wants CFV growth to reflect Dunbar’s insights, with the Village, as it grows, becoming villages.
Graham is a fan of marijuana — “It makes people happy, hungry, and sleepy” — but notes now that it’s often fentanyl-laced. He pulled up on high ground and waxed sarcastic about typical suburban living. He gestured toward the nearby Woodland Hills development, with its “hermetically-sealed single-family sarcophaguses.” He’s annoyed with the U.S. government, which “takes no risks [and] needs to figure out a way to help risk-takers. Washington shouldn’t be dictating to Austin or Poughkeepsie.” But local government policies are also a problem: “Zoning is the greatest impediment” to providing more housing.
When we stopped at a bustling CFV community center, Graham said he’s more certain than ever that “community first” is the key way to fight homelessness, but “there has to be intentionality.” It’s easy to fall into a “transaction model” of providing material in return for outward conformity. It’s harder to form caring relationships, but Graham said it starts by “multiplying touches and knowing names.”
Graham critiqued the official national “Housing First” policy, which supports passing out apartments with no questions asked, but he also doesn’t favor a no-drugs-allowed policy. Almost all new CFV residents receive federal money via SSI or SSDI programs because of physical, mental, and addiction issues, but no one is told what not to do at home. Graham sees some of the drug and alcohol use arising out of loneliness: As people become involved with their neighbors, he says drug use drops 80 percent and alcohol consumption 50 percent.
The question: Can community keep us from being “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in the last sentence of The Great Gatsby? Graham said CFV has an annual turnover of 15 percent. Two-fifths of that is due to death, three-fifths to drug and alcohol use, with the first 18 months of residency being the most vulnerable time. Residents sometimes have problems with each other that are almost always related to substance use.
I wrote last fall about my six days at Eden Village in Missouri, a good place but not paradise. CFV has beauty and I was almost thinking of it as Edenic, until near the end of our drive when a resident, maybe artificially agitated, zig-zagged in front of the golf cart and shouted obscenities.