The revolutionary Portland architect talks to Street Roots about the impact of the village mentality
America is short some 7 million affordable apartments for those living in poverty, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2018 report. With conventional approaches falling behind the pace, artists and visionaries are stepping up to the plate, creating paradigm-busting solutions that challenge traditional ideas of housing.
Portland has been the wellspring and incubator for some of the most innovative projects for providing shelter in America, beginning with the city-sanctioned Dignity Village, conceived in 1999. Dignity’s success directly seeded Right 2 Dream Too (R2DToo), Kenton Women’s Village, Hazelnut Grove and, most recently, Veterans Village, a code-compliant housing project developing in Oregon City.
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Portland native Mark Lakeman has been in on the ground floor of many of these projects. As a self described “old man” of the homeless village movement, he has been deep in the trenches for the past two decades, using his pencil and drafting table and the force of the organizations he’s created, including Communitecture, his architecture firm, and City Repair, a nonprofit that fosters inclusive, sustainable communities. Lakeman’s passion is to keep alternative housing models paramount in the conversation about affordable housing, either as stepping stones to traditional housing or as an end in and of themselves.
In 2003, Lakeman was awarded the National Lewis Mumford Award by the international organization Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility for his work with Dignity Village. He received the Governor’s Livability Award for place-making in 1999. He is a five-time recipient of awards from the American Institute of Architects. He travels extensively, seeding and supporting innovative, village-building initiatives. He’s assisted other village-building efforts in Japan, in Canada and across the United States.
Street Roots met with Lakeman at his architectural firm Communitecture in inner Southeast Portland, where he was finalizing site plans for Acceptance, a developing intentional community and retreat center for individuals on the neurodiversity spectrum.
Helen Hill: Give us an overview of how your work creating villages for the homeless began.
Mark Lakeman: In 1999, the founding editor of Street Roots, Bryan Pollard, came to a presentation I gave about villages at the Red Rose School for Activists. I was organizing projects to transform neighborhoods into villages. After my presentation, he said, “I really think you need to come to these organizing meetings with a group of people trying to do something extraordinary.” He could have said, but he didn’t use these words, that they are regenerating the place where justice begins. That was the start of Dignity Village. I was invited to just come listen, and I was absolutely compelled to return over and over again.
Up until this time, I was all about villages, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. With the Dignity initiative, I realized if you were able to help a group of people start creating shelter for themselves, their inherent proclivity would be to create a village, just like a bird makes a nest. And that for me is the most exciting thing in the world, that’s what keeps me relentlessly involved with helping houseless people make villages because there are all these ranges of impact up to the biggest one, which is the restoration of essential human habitat for all.
A lot of people who are houseless and who start creating these kinds of projects realize the implications. They are challenging everything and changing the world. We live and work in places where we are mute, isolated and living separate lives – the opposite of a village. Villages are a place where you have a voice, they are about the integration of living and working so that people have full-spectrum lives and relationships.
H.H.: Dignity was a nationally ground-breaking project that succeeded against many odds. Why did it succeed?
M.L.: Dignity succeeded because it took a stand in terms of a set of benchmarks, goals and language that the region had already adopted relating to livablility, sustainability, youth engagement and other pressing concerns, including justice, equity and diversity. We realized if we could articulate Dignity in terms of what the region said it would do, then we could persuade them. Instead of saying we will create a tent city that nobody can relate to, if we say we will create a village that is walkable and eminently talkable, that is modeling sustainability and participatory culture, you’ve got Portland through the nose at that point, because that is the stuff of the religion of Portland. And I’d say that’s what happened.
All kinds of people were stepping in and out of that process; reverends, the Unitarian Church, Street Roots was always there, Sisters Of The Road. I was there to represent City Repair; something just really had me connected.
When all of us were standing with Dignity – including Eli Spevak, which was a big deal because he was a low-income-housing developer – there was a huge skill set present and the city couldn’t say it was impossible because all these professionals that make it happen all the time were standing there. That was really key.
H.H.: How did the work go forward after Dignity?
M.L.: The first models created the conditions for the next ones to be even better and to thrive. The paradigm changed and became more receptive, places like Dignity and R2DToo started to engage the system and affect bureaucratic cultures and the next ones that happened had status from the beginning because of the work of the innovators.
Because of Dignity, Opportunity Village in Eugene happened, and then Emerald Village, a world-changing affordable-housing project owned by houseless people. Then Hazelnut Grove and Kenton Women’s Village. They were able to start at a much higher level because Dignity had proven it was possible. And now Agape (Village, a project of Portland Central Church of the Nazarene) is starting at an even higher level of receptivity and more flexibility from the system, where (Portland Mayor Ted) Wheeler’s office is like, you guys just do it and we won’t bother you.
As Dignity was rising and I was learning, my presentations were increasingly enhanced. I went to Seattle back when they were trying to start Nickelsville. I worked with Olympia to get Quixote Village off the ground. Folks in Madison, Wisc., called and wanted a presentation on houseless villages, so I went there with technical design support. We learned with Dignity that there is nothing like having a picture. It helps people take you more seriously when you have documents.
H.H.: Who are your collaborators?
M.L.: The Village Coalition of houseless people is always credited first. It is by and for them. We are always acting in their service. We act on the directive of the Village Coalition, and that’s official.
The larger collaboration is far stronger now than ever because of an organization at Portland State University called the Center for Public Interest Design. CPID is an aspect of professional design culture that has become intentionally engaged in real needs, and I differentiate that from usual professional design culture because mostly the culture is set up to be monetized.
The CPID at PSU is a revelation. They are training all these younger architecture students that are coming in and asking how we can create a better world through design. They are designing libraries in places like Nepal or helping with disaster relief, and lately they’ve been working on houseless villages with us in Portland. They are now designing the permanent site for Kenton as well as Agape. We’ve helped get the site plans going on both those villages.
H.H.: What is the history of the Village Coalition?
M.L.: About two years ago, The Rebuilding Center (a salvaged home-supply outlet) started hosting gatherings called the Village Coalition. Representatives from all the houseless villages, both the ones that have legal standing and ones that are just camps that have risen, they all sent representatives.
Kenton Women’s Village started when the coalition was meeting to start a nonprofit, and the architects got up and stepped out of the meeting. All this talk of bylaws, we are builders and designers, what are we going to do? Right there we hatched a plan. Let’s have a charrette (a meeting in which all stakeholders in a project attempt to resolve conflicts and map solutions), get all the architects in the city and design the shit out of tiny-home concepts. It was really exciting.
What happened is completely opposite from what usually happens in corporate culture. Corporate culture often requires a developer who is motivated, then all these people get paid. It’s largely motivated by profit and is designed and planned down to the last nail before anything happens. In this case, the magic of houseless people caught everybody and the process was completely opposite.
H.H.: Define the magic of houseless people.
M.L.: Houseless people have to act in the moment, and even if they don’t have permission, they have to create shelter; they have to act. Normally you propose something to the mayor, and he sits there thinking whether or not to support your completely conceived idea. There was no completely conceived idea. We did it in reverse.
We all got beautifully infected by this, and it just blossomed. We had some of the greatest firms in the world. We brought design and beauty into the mix. We had no negative press; not even Lars Larson dared to say anything negative about Kenton’s Women’s Village.
Now 15 women live there. Construction costs including volunteer recruitment was about $50,000. We did for $50,000 what no one is supposed to be able to do.
At Veterans Village (in Oregon City), we went on to build 15 units with 15 more on the way with common buildings like kitchens, laundry, showers, gathering places, infirmary, ADA compliant systems, huge bio swales for $750,000, and it still breaks world records. Veterans Village came in at just over $70 a square foot instead of $250 a foot, the going rate for new construction in Portland.
FURTHER READING: Portland's homeless villages use restorative justice to inform self-governance (commentary)
H.H.: Tell me more about Veterans Village.
M.L.: Many things about the village are innovative. We took a prototype from Kenton, and we worked it over so that it was legal, because in Kenton, code wasn’t so much the issue. Veterans Village had to be legal, so we worked it through the system so it would meet seismic codes with all the civil, sewer and electrical systems code compliant.
We got to actually evolve the model and transition it to become a type that others now can replicate across the country. Fifteen have moved in, and those 15 are building the next 15. They are installing a workshop where the veterans will get job training to create more housing for other unhoused veterans.
H.H.: How does the Affordable Housing Bond interface with these projects?
M.L.: We should be asking ourselves what are the models that have the highest impact for the least cost. When we look at shelters, permanent housing and at tiny-home villages, there is a whole spectrum of benefits and costs. I would say there are few if any low-income housing models in our city that give the same quality of experience (as tiny home villages).
For multiple sustained years, they have had the lowest measured crime rate, more than three years and not a call to the police, and they have the lowest carbon footprint conceivable. They are a model community that costs about $4 a night per person compared to a government shelter that costs taxpayers $100 a night.
At a shelter, you get kicked out in the morning, you give up your pets, they break apart families and separate them into different shelters. That’s dehumanizing. In a place like Dignity, you are in a social support network that has continuity and that offers you, actually commands that you will contribute, so you must be accountable. I think that is a really powerful thing.
Subsidized housing has to meet certain building and zone code requirements, and that translates into some pretty high costs; one housing unit may cost $180,000, and you can easily build an entire tiny-home village for that.
Local and regional governments will argue the need to be legally defensible because their role is to make sure everything complies with health and safety standards. Veterans Village accomplished this. It was code compliant, so it’s a question of political will.
Portland has innovated so many unique models that we keep seeing people from all over the world come visit to learn what we’ve done. Urban design, transportation, green architecture, social experiments, culinary culture, music and art; we are innovating all the time.
But what ends up happening over and over again is the creative culture comes forth, and then the political culture can make it hard to innovate. Through the resilience of our community we tend to win or affect the outcome so that Portland is better than other places, but it’s often harder than it needs to be.
Everyone knows we have to transform the systems that are creating houselessness. The movement we are part of is a resistance movement against historically entrenched systems of power and privilege that are propelled by compounding ignorance and greed.
That’s the big picture, but the juice that can help us succeed is when we engage this challenge creatively. It’s a movement of compassion, empathy, resiliency and determination, a drive towards justice. We are trying to set up propitious conditions for future generations. People in this movement are working on behalf of people who aren’t even born yet.
When we innovate these models to regenerate human fabric and human habitat inside of that, it’s just gleaming. I find so much hope.
H.H.: Where do we go from here?
M.L.: For the people who are bottom lining this bond, we should demand the most for this investment, and we should be demanding that we not just build shelter but build community. There are people who know how to do this. We do this all the time, bring in people who know how to build socially impactful ecological models.
The core piece I know for sure is the piece of being in a culture of our own volition and not always asking permission. That will always be part of the answer. When you just give a person a room and say, “Here, this is all paid for,” it can perpetuate the endemic problem that our cities, landscapes and residential areas are created as products for us to inhabit. There needs to be more.
Everything we build should support what is local. We should engender the strongest possible connection between the resident community and the new facility so that people identify with it and see it as an expression of community because they were engaged to make it.
This is a time of compounding crisis. We need to use money like this to create new models of how to do things, and ways to expand our thinking.
Politicians are always saying homeless people should work to pay for their housing or food stamps, but the last thing the system wants is for people to have agency and to become a resource as creative problem solvers. That’s why Dignity experienced opposition from the beginning. It goes contrary to the story that these are people who do nothing and should not have agency.
The truth is that the houseless people have relevant, valid ideas and solutions for their own needs. Others should join in the conversation and say, “You should be able to solve your own problems. We respect you, and we will help.”
Street Roots is an award-winning, nonprofit, weekly newspaper focusing on economic, environmental and social justice issues. Our newspaper is sold in Portland, Oregon, by people experiencing homelessness and/or extreme poverty as means of earning an income with dignity. Learn more about Street Roots
