A place for the homeless
Pulaski County Judge Barry Hyde isn’t the typical county judge, an elected official worried mostly about roads and bridges. As chief administrator of the state’s most populous county, he tackles issues one wouldn’t normally associate with the office.
Among the out-of-the-box issues on his plate is homelessness.
Most of us think of homelessness as a Little Rock problem, especially those who work downtown and must deal with panhandlers on a daily basis. I’m among those downtown workers. Little Rock city government traditionally has done a woeful job addressing the issue. Hyde stepped into the void with the idea of a homeless village that will provide housing for those coming out of chronic homelessness.
The village is planned for a 150-acre tract in a rural part of southwest Pulaski County. The village will occupy about 60 acres of the site and use $5 million in federal pandemic relief funds. A nonprofit organization will oversee the village once it’s built. An advisory committee has been put in place by Hyde.
Hyde got the idea for the homeless village from Community First Village in Austin, Texas. Roger Marlin, who chairs the advisory committee, said of the
Texas facility: “They’re doing it right. People were neighbors, and these are people who had been homeless for years and years and years. It truly amazed me. … We came back and said, ‘Wow, this is something that our community needs.’”
Community First was featured earlier this year in a story about Austin in The New Yorker. The article was written by Lawrence Wright, a staff writer for the magazine since 1992. Wright joined the staff of Texas Monthly in 1980 when Austin was far different from the tech-centric boomtown we see these days.
“The population then was a little more than 300,000—the current size of Lexington, Ky.,” Wright writes. “Thirteen percent of Austin residents were University of Texas students; another 5 percent were faculty and staff. The only other significant presence in town was the state capitol. You could park free on most streets.
“Of the limited offering of restaurants in town, we favored the Raw Deal, a greasy spoon where, for five bucks, you could choose between the pork chop and the sirloin, accompanied by red beans and Pabst Blue Ribbon. … Life in Austin was offbeat, affordable, spontaneous, blithe and slyly amused, as if we were in on some hilarious secret the rest of the world was unaware of.”
Now Wright speaks of the “disaffection so many of us feel because of the pace of change and the loss of qualities that once defined the city. Austin is now characterized by stifling traffic and unaffordable restaurants.”
And homeless people on the streets— lots of homeless people. In 2019, a liberal city council voted to “decriminalize homelessness” by lifting a ban on public camping. Tent cities popped up under highway overpasses and in city parks.
One of the people fighting the problem is Alan Graham, a former real estate developer. He began work on Community First in 2014.
“The development currently provides housing for 400 people,” Wright writes. “An official head count in 2021 found nearly 3,200 Austinites experiencing homelessness, including people living in shelters. A more recent head count in San Francisco, a smaller city, tallied nearly 8,000—the great majority unsheltered.”
To qualify for Community First, a person must have been on the streets for at least a year. The average is 10 years. Residents live in manufactured housing, recreational vehicles and what are known as micro-homes.
“Graham’s creation has evolved into one of the most consequential social innovations in the country,” Wright writes. “He and his wife live in the middle of the village in a manufactured house with an attached porch and some treasured junk out front: an old Coca-Cola sign, a rusted wagon wheel, the rim of a hubcap from a Stutz Bearcat.
“Graham, who is 67, has a ruddy face, glasses, a sideways grin and a glistening white beard. He wears a silver San Damiano cross, which he bought on a pilgrimage to Assisi, and a blue gimme cap advertising Goodness. He studied physics at UT before dropping out to become a real estate developer and a ‘serial entrepreneur.’ He saw his business crushed by the 1986 oil bust.”
The land for Community First was donated, and the micro-houses were designed and built by area architects and contractors. Graham hopes to add enough houses to shelter 1,400 more people, which would be almost two-thirds of Austin’s chronically homeless population.
“We launched a $150 million capital campaign,” Graham says. “We’ve already raised $136 [million]. … The concept around Community First is that, if you want to mitigate this pandemic of homelessness, the whole community is going to have to get involved.”
We’ll see in the next few years if Pulaski County can achieve similar success. I’m at least happy that Hyde has decided to give it a shot. This isn’t a problem we can wish away.