Here's a kind and informative blog entry about the Housers from the Energy Vangaurd blog. It's not often that we get blog entries that are as in-depth as EV's; clearly, the author lives and breathes his work. If you're a construction nerd like I am, you'll want to check out the EV blog - it's well-written, informative, and updated often - something we need to do here...
The radio article in WABE was very nice, and it demonstrated what I call the "win-win-win" nature of the Housers outreach.
In the article, the reporter met not only our client for the build, James, but also a family whose house backs up to the lot where we deployed the shelter. James' having a shelter made the family happy, because by keeping criminals away from his area, he also keeps them away from their house. So stabilizing James' situation also helps to stabilize the neighborhood, which is win-win; but also, because James and the community are mutually supporting each other, the Housers don't have to worry about the site, either - so it's win-win-win.
This is an aspect of our outreach that many folks don't recognize: that once a homeless person has a stable shelter in the neighborhood, they become invested in that neighborhood. Before having a shelter, a client has nothing to lose; but once a client has his own place, he's less interested in trouble that could hurt his own household. They now have a stake in their future and in their community's future, and that stake makes a big difference.
Now, I'm not going to argue that every homeless person is perfectly rational operator or that there aren't idiots among the homeless. But that holds true for the population at large!
At the end of the day, we should ask ourselves: would we rather know who our neighbors are or not? As long as we pursue a strategy of sweeping homeless away, we'll never know for sure who's staying in that patch of woods. Ultimately, helping our neighbors helps ourselves.
Atlanta's public radio station WABE (90.1 FM) will have a segment on the Mad Housers on their "City Cafe" program, which runs from noon 'til one, this upcoming Monday, December 5. Give it a listen!
Yesterday, a team of us went out to see a cluster of small camps in a south Atlanta suburb, to make a few repairs and ensure that people would be able to weather winter safely. While out there, we saw two recently built structures with easy-to-make construction flaws, the types of things that can happen when you're inexperienced or you're moving too fast and get sloppy.
I'm not showing these to shame the folks who built them; in each case, there's a way to correct the errors, and we'll go over them. Instead, these mistakes illustrate two important principles: first, that minor mistakes can have major consequences; and second, that minimal design can give you the flexibility to adapt your structure to its environment and recover from mistakes easily.
Continue reading Mistakes were made.
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