Past Issues :: 2006 August 18 :: Cover Story
London calling: Dignity Village co-founder fires up the tent city movement overseas
It has been nearly six years since a group of eight homeless people, including Rasta poet and activist Jack Tafari, rallied from under Portland’s bridges and launched what was to become Dignity Village, a tent city cum eco-village where people on the streets could create a better life and regain their independence.
This winter, Tafari was back sleeping under a bridge: this time in London, where he and the other “rough sleepers” decided to follow Portland’s lead. Tafari went there for healthcare, not homelessness, but that’s another story. What happened was a little bit of déjà vu.
“We formed up under the Waterloo Bridge on the banks of the River Thames, where we camped with and without tents for most of last winter in sometimes bitterly cold weather,” Tafari writes from London in an e-mailed interview. “It can be difficult finding even a place to sleep indoors in this city as services are so over-stretched and demand is so great and finding work is difficult, as it is in the United States, if you're apparently homeless. Many people are relegated to living under bridges, some by law, as I was last winter.”
From under the Waterloo Bridge emerged the Homeless Front UK, a name adopted from the Homeless Front in Portland that launched the campaign to create Dignity Village. London, they decided, needed a tent city of its own.
“We finally got fed up with the freezing night temperatures and the daily discussions about our tents with London's Finest and decided to take a certain police inspector's advice to squat a vacant building,” Tafari said. “The Homeless Person's Unit of the Metro Police began looking up vacant buildings for us to squat on the Internet and bringing us printouts of possible locations that would be vacant for long periods, usually far from central London where we'd been camping. We opted to live, instead, a little closer in to town and chose a fine, four-story privately owned mansion on Keats Grove, in tony Hampstead Heath, located right across the road from romantic poet John Keats' old house, which had been vacant for two years.”
Tafari described the place as being in a state of disrepair, but with electricity and water. They were there for about three weeks before a neighbor notified the building’s owners, an American couple.
“I was awoken that morning by shouts of ‘hullo, hullo’ coming from the first floor kitchen and, when I went downstairs to investigate, found two women and a man intruding in our squat!” Tafari said. “The man and I both shouted simultaneously, ‘Who the hell are you?!’”
“’I'm the owner,’ he replied. 'Well, I'm the squatter,' I countered.
“‘Get the hell out of my house,’ he ordered.”
In London, there’s a legal process for establishing and evicting a squat, according to Tafari, and the squatters had followed process and posted the required paperwork in the front window, he said.
“‘But this is our second home,’ his wife wailed,” Tafari said. “It is my belief that property left vacant like their second home, with so many people living on the street, is a scandal and a crime. I told them so.”
Ultimately, however, the Homeless Front UK agreed on a cash settlement to vacate. The Homeless Front relocated its headquarters in a new squat, a compound with high walls and good security, Tafari said.
Following the pattern of Dignity Village, the Homeless Front UK is seeking to create a tent city that would develop into a green, sustainable, urban village for people on the streets. People could live there while they sought more permanent housing, and access service referrals and a support network.
In the immediate sense, a tent city would end the cycle of makeshift camps and police rousting with a more comfortable and stable place to sleep. In the larger scope, the campaign is to create a “community of peers” to help people overcome homelessness and find permanent housing. It’s a place where people can keep their belongings secure while they look for jobs and services, and a place where families don’t have to be separated to acquire sanctioned shelter. The underlying philosophy is that the people who know homelessness best are the ones experiencing it, and that they can work together in a supportive environment to find a solution.
The Homeless Front UK is still in its early stages, but it has the advantage of hindsight from tent-city pioneers in Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles, complete with a Tent City Toolkit created by Dignity Village and filmmaking partners Kwamba Productions. The London model incorporates tent-city tenets such as zero-tolerance for drug use and equal participation in governance and maintenance of the camp.
In his own words, Tafari fell into homelessness after being unfairly dismissed from a factory job in Salem and waiting several months to receive unemployment benefits. Moving to Portland, he began vending Street Roots to earn an income and became interested in writing for the paper as a way to improve sales.
Living in a Portland doorway for several months at the turn of the millennium radicalized Tafari, he says, and challenges to the camping ban in September 2000 galvanized a number of homeless activists and doorway dwellers. They included Bryan Pollard (former editor of Street Roots) Alex Lilly, Ibrahim Mubarak, J.P. Cupp, Tim Brown and Tafari, who together organized and initiated the Out of the Doorways campaign that created Dignity Village.
In London, life on the streets is not unlike that in the United States.
“Generally, homeless people are ignored on the streets and left to their own devices, with random and occasional acts of violence and kindness occurring all the time.”
The homeless in London have a bounty of services at their disposal, Tafari said, but the organizations are overcrowded and housing isn’t keeping up with the rise in demand.
“There is a veritable plethora of services in London for homeless people — day centers where 'rough sleepers' can go six days a week for hot showers, laundry facilities, free or inexpensive clothing, endless cups of tea, sympathy, and what passes for coffee in this country, also inexpensive meals,” Tafari said. “There are also night centers where, if you meet certain criteria, you may sleep for the night (sometimes sitting in a chair with your feet up on another one) and a limited number of hostels, some 'wet' although most dry, where people can stay longer while awaiting council (permanent) housing, which can take anywhere from a year to years depending on your place on the housing list.
There’s also a National Health Service in England, which was why Tafari, a British citizen, went there in the first place. On the whole, he said, the people on the streets in London are less damaged than people living on the streets in the States.
“In the U.K., people have a right to their health unlike in the U.S., where King George (Bush) makes the outrageous claim that 40,000,000 Americans are uninsured and have no health coverage because they 'choose' to be!”
People have a right to housing here, too, he said, but London’s population has gone up 60 percent in the past 10 years, and social housing services are overcrowded, Tafari said. “Social housing is being eroded and the property market for houses is hot as the proverbial rassklaat.”
People await permanent housing in hostels, Tafari said.
“The term 'transitional housing' is not part of the lexicon of the 'homeless industry' (here), so people aren't merely transitioned into more transitional housing and kept transient, as they are in Portland. Here there isn't the monopolization of flophouse rooms as in Portland by outfits like Central City Concern.”
Many of the hostels are dirty, crime-ridden places, Tafari said, housing people with drug and alcohol issues and where theft is a common problem.
“The time you're allowed to live in hostels in limited, so there's a lot of people being recycled from the streets to the hostels and back again. Hostels have greater vacancy rates in the summer with the mild weather when living on the streets is easier. Here you don't see missions like Portland's Rescue Mission, and so one must assume that the missionary position — sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder on thin mats on floors in what must look from above like below decks on Middle Passage slave ships — is less popular here.”
The campaign is still forming, but Tafari expects some resistance from the usual suspects as they try to set up an organized homeless village.
“The poverty pimps won't like grist escaping from their mill, and a segment of the public housing itself on public land I'm sure will offend some,” Tafari said.
Homeless Front UK has a Web site — yet to be registered — for organizing and raising funds. But there is a glitch.
“We have a Web site and funding, with more rolling in all the time although, ironically, no bank account, as opening a community account with two signatory requires a legal address.”