HomeLandLab Podcast

In exploring the intersection of homelessness and public space, I have sometimes heard comments like, “Why should we build more parks, if they’re just going to be overrun by the homeless?” This was a challenging sentiment the first time I heard it, but it became only more so the third, fourth and fifth times it was expressed in public forums. What this idea revealed to me was that the forces of civic distrust that we see playing out on the national level are also finding purchase in localities across America, and left me with the question: can we rebuild those bonds of belief in a shared, mutually-beneficial purpose? Which is why I had to talk to today’s guests: Suzanne Nienaber is the Partnerships Director with the Center for Active Design, which recently published the groundbreaking Assembly Civic Design Guidelines that suggests ten strategies for rebuilding civic trust. Joining Suzanne today to discuss how these ideas are playing out in San Francisco are Lena Miller and Cassie Hoeprich. Lena is the Founder and Executive Director Hunter’s Point Family and Director of the Bay Shore Navigation Center in San Francisco, and Cassie is a Strategist with Mayor London Breed’s Fix-It Team. On the HomeLandLab website, you can see images of some of the work of each of today’s guests, including the Civic Center Commons that Cassie and Lena discuss, as well as some of the key findings from Assembly that Suzanne shares.

Designers who have watched the homelessness crisis expand during their educational careers seem to have a heightened sense of the design community’s opportunity to creatively engage the issue of homelessness. During this episode, I speak with two young designers: Barron Peper and Jescelle Major, who are trained as an architect and a landscape architect respectively. While working together at the mutli-disciplinary design firm MITHUN, they helped the Low Income Housing Institute or LEEHIGH develop a tiny house village in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood.Barron’s story is particularly interesting for long-time listeners to the podcast because his first engagement with homelessness was with the Community First! Village in Austin, Texas that I discussed with Alan Graham in Episode 25, and he now works with Rex Holbein and Jenn LaFrenierre at The Block Project, which we discussed in Episode 3.On the homelandlab.com website, we’ve included a selection of site plans and images from the project Barron and Jescelle discuss.To start the conversation today I asked Jescelle and Barron: What is a tiny house village?

On today’s episode I wanted to move the conversation away from the big cities and talk about how homelessness impacts some of the smaller communities that may fly under the radar in our national dialogue. In Olympia, Washington, which lies roughly half-way between Seattle and Portland, the city’s Parks and Recreation staff are, like so many other parks departments, becoming the front line in confronting homelessness in their community. Recently, Olympia’s Parks Director Paul Simmons and Sylvana Niehuser who Oversees Stewardship and Environmental Programs, were able to sit down with me and discuss how homelessness has impacted their community and what their agency is doing to confront the crisis with compassion.

On this episode of the HomeLandLab podcast, I’m very pleased to have Jonathan Martin, Editor of Project Homeless for The Seattle Times and Scott Greenstone, reporter, producer and engagement editor for Project HomelessWith me to discuss the nexus between journalism and homelessness and how one influences the other and vice versa. Though I had been following the work of Project Homeless, I got to meet Jonathan and Scott, and, importantly, see the passion and thoughtfulness with which they worked when I was invited to give an Ignite talk for them. Coming at the issue of homelessness as journalists has afforded them the opportunity to dive deeply into the data from a “outside-in” perspective, that has helped the general public understand the complexities of the issue, and perhaps break down some of the myths in our public discourse. We started our conversation by talking a little bit about what The Seattle Times is for the City of Seattle.

About a year ago, I happened to be in Washington, DC visiting the National Building Museum, one of my all time favorites. There, in an exhibition on, the changing idea of home in contemporary America, I learned about Austin’s Alley Flat Initiative. This innovative effort to build more housing units on underutilized lands was something I wanted to learn more about, so I reached out to Marla Torrado, the Program Coordinator for the Alley Flats Initiative. In the garden of their East Austin offices, I started my conversation with Marla talking about her work at the Austin Community Design and Development Center and what is meant by the term “community design.”

While I was visiting Austin, recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Natasha Ponczek Shoemake. Natasha works for Austin Public Health, where she helps oversee the various human service contracts that the City uses to partner with various non-governmental agencies in addressing homelessness in their community. With this unique perspective, Natasha is able to see—at the 10,000 foot level—the whole ecology of human services in Austin. Taking a break from her work, Natasha was kind enough to provide a primer on social service provision, what the challenges are, and the number one need that Austin has to keep the homelessness crisis in check.

A couple of weeks ago, my family and I had the opportunity to travel to Austin. Among visits to too many taco and barbeque joints, I also had to go visit Alan Graham and his team at the Community First Village. The visit was a revelation and Alan, who has an exceptionally busy schedule, was gracious enough to make time to sit down with me. Alan is, the Executive Director and CEO of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, which runs a tripartite mission to help serve people who are currently or have experienced homelessness. I had first heard about Alan’s work when Sarah Dooling mentioned his work during Episode 4 of the podcast. I then watched his TED talk and read his book and was struck by how innovative, entrepreneurial and transferrable the work of Alan’s team was to other areas of the country. To start our conversation, I wanted to talk about Alan’s preoccupation with narrative. To give a sense of what the Community First Village looks like, I’ve shared some images on the HomeLandLab website.

Close your eyes for a moment and think of the face of homelessness. What is the face that you see? Is that person male or female, white or black, young or old. Or maybe the person some where in between these choices? For Corina Luckenbach and Melanie Granger, the faces of homelessness that they saw when they closed their eyes were very much like them: young, female and surrounded by taboos. Out of this space, Corina and Melanie hatched an audacious plan to raise One Million Tampons for Seattle’s homeless women. In the process they have garnered the support and attention of people from around the world and have recast the face of who is homeless in the city’s collective consciousness. One recent morning, as the breakfast rush trickled away, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Melanie and Corina at West Seattle’s Admiral Bird café to talk about their project. We started our conversation talking about the origins of the One Million Tampons campaign.To give to the campaign, please find a link to the One Million Tampons Amazon list here.

“I actually think emergency isn’t quite the right framing now. I think the right framing is that we have a refugee crisis, except [people experiencing homelessness] are not refugees from another country. These are refugees from our own economy.” From 2009 to 2013, Mike McGinn served as the Mayor of Seattle. During his time in office, his administration confronted the challenge of homelessness in a variety of public policy venues from homeless sweeps to aggressive panhandling to housing policy to sanctioned and unsanctioned encampments. With a vantage point that few of us will ever have, Mike offers a candid and insightful look back into the policy challenges that confronted his administration with regards to homelessness, and offers several ways that cities can begin to mitigate the crisis in their own backyards. I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did recording it.

Tim Harris is the Executive Director of the street newspaper, Real Change and currently serves as the North American representative to the International Network of Street Papers. I recently sat down with Tim to discuss the roles street papers have within the multiple public spaces of the city: the physical public space where the vendor sells the paper, the civic space, where his paper influences the ongoing public dialogue in the community, and, finally, the political space that is expanded when street newspaper vendors are encouraged to use their latent political power to show up at council meetings or at the voting booth. Yet before we got there, I started our conversation with a more fundamental question: What is a street newspaper and what is the function it provides?

Designers Sara Zewde and Sloan Dawson were startled by the differences in how homelessness was manifest in West Coast cities, including their new home in Seattle, compared to cities in the east. Surprised and disquieted by how desensitized so many residents seemed to be and how commonplace visible homelessness had become, they sought to find a creative outlet to respond to the people they saw struggling to survive. In speaking with Sara and Sloan, I started our conversation by asking, as East Coast transplants, the what did you notice about homelessness that was different on the West Coast.

John Malpede, the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, has been working with the housed and unhoused community members of Skid Row since the mid 1980’s. Through his work, he helps empower community members through art performances and exhibitions. By creating programs that tell the story of this unique community, the LAPD has not only strengthened community bonds, but have also helped to acknowledge the hardships overcome and celebrate the recognition received by people who, in so many ways, have been told their lives are less than.I caught up with John during the 8th Annual Festival for All Skid Row Artists at Gladys Park in Los Angeles last fall. Amongst bands, visual artists and a warm southern California sun, we discussed the work of the LAPD and the importance of arts in recrafting the narrative of the Skid Row community. I hope you enjoy the conversation with John, with the background of performers from the community singing and celebrating with one another.

When I began this project, I wanted to speak with as many people as possible , from as many as many perspectives as possible, about the overlap of homelessness and public space. I assumed I would speak to City Council members, representatives from non-profit organizations and people who had experienced homelessness, but I’m not sure that I ever thought that I’d be speaking with an Assesssor. Then I met John Wilson. With a career in public service, John has thought about how the housing affordability crisis has led to an increase in homelessness. When he was elected to his position in King County, WA, John decided he could help change the conversation about the role that public lands could play in solving homelessness. To learn more, I recently sat down with John to learn more about what he’s doing.

I first met Tamika Butler when she was the director of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. Brilliant, funny, and not prone to pulling punches, she is simultaneously personally magnetic and politically unapologetic, holding those of us who have a hand in shaping the built environment to account. Now serving as the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, she brings the lens of a civil rights attorney to her work, helping to reveal and correct the inherent built environment inequities for people of color, people who are poor, and/or who may be experiencing homelessness. Given her diverse background, I wanted to hear Tamika’s perspectives on how homelessness intersects with transportation and open space in the City with the highest unsheltered population in America: Los Angeles. Her insights did not disappoint, and I hope that you will enjoy this conversation with Tamika. One of her previous speeches, the keynote address at Transportation Alternatives' Vision Zero Cities conference in 2017, is referenced in the recording. You can watch it here.

On today’s podcast I interview Allen Compton, Principal and Founder of SALT Landscape Architects and Rachel Allen of Rachel Allen Architecture, who, among other projects, are helping to reimagine one of the more contested public spaces in America: Pershing Square. Our conversation in their studio space in Downtown LA’s Fashion District, was discursive and exploratory, probing the themes of homelessness, architecture, landscape architecture and urban design and exploring how those design disciplines are poised to respond to the challenges of homelessness in a city where the phenomenon is most prevalent and widespread. We explore the deliberate design of Skid Row, Allen’s work for the Skid Row Housing Trust and the future of downtown LA’s open spaces, but we started the conversation with their reflections not as designers, but as Angelinos.

One of the ways that housing insecurity is arriving in cities is through the growth of people who are turning to vehicular living as an affordable housing arrangement in the urban context. Whether sleeping in recreational vehicles or simply in their own cars, people who have been priced out of traditional housing stock are now turning to the public space of the right of way to find a safe space to sleep. Yet with the growth of this type of housing, municipalities are finding the need to develop new policy tools to address the safety, security and concerns about how people are using this public resource. To discuss this phenomenon, I sat down with Seattle City Councilmember Mike O’Brien’s tenure has seen the issue of vehicular housing or vehicular living grow, and, recognizing the limitations of current policies, Councilmember O’Brien has proposed draft legislation to try a new approach in Seattle.

Sometimes an interview comes together through serendipity. While in Los Angeles for a concert, a friend shared an in-depth article about the history of LA’s housing stock called Forbidden City: How Los Angeles Banned Some of its Most Popular Buildings by Mark Vallianatos, one of the co- founders and planning director for of Abundant Housing LA and a member of the urban change think tank LA Plus. Quickly I reached out to Mark to see if he would be able to get together on short notice, which is how I found myself sitting on a bench in one of Los Angeles’ Union Station’s courtyard, talking with Mark while the business of the station played out in the background. While the story that Mark lays out here is about Los Angeles, its broad strokes have played out in cities across the united states. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

There is a level of opacity surrounding so much related to homelessness, and perhaps no area is more shrouded and misunderstood than the laws that guide where and when unhoused people can eat, sleep, and live in public spaces. To get one perspective about where the law and homelessness intersect, I recently sat down with Breanne Schuster of the ACLU of Washington to speak about what laws guide municipal responses to homelessness and how the ACLU works with cities to ensure those laws are adhered to.

One of the most insightful and eye-opening books I’ve read this year has been Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and in his authoritative account of this chapter of our history, he tracks laws, policies and regulations from the early 1900s through to contemporary America to show how specific government actions either created or fortified existing patterns of residential segregation throughout the country. In laying bare this history, Rothstein shows how these governmental actions have continuing ripple effects that we, as a country, are still confronting today and he invites us to confront this legacy for the betterment of our democracy. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Richard, and I invite you to read his book. Toward the end of our conversation, Richard mentions a speech by New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu. The text of that speech can be found here.

In every community, one of the city agencies most impacted by homelessness are parks departments. For people who don’t have anywhere else to go, parks become refuges of safety within the city, but the impacts of homelessness can also erode the public’s perception of parks as a public place that is safe and welcoming to everyone in the community. To understand how the City of Denver balances these competing perspectives on homelessness, I sat down with Scott Gilmore, Denver’s Deputy Executive Director of Parks and Planning to hear how his agency is addressing the homelessness crisis, and to begin, I started by asking Scott to introduce me to Denver’s park system.

As the unofficial “concierge of Skid Row,” Wendell Blassingame has earned his reputation as an “angel” and as a “saint.” A man of deep wisdom, kindness, and patience, Wendell was gracious enough to sit down with me at the James M. Wood Community Center in Los Angeles as he was getting prepared to host his Sunday afternoon Nickel Movies in Skid Row. To start our conversation, I asked Wendell to tell me how his story and the story of Skid Row became intertwined.

Technology has revolutionized just about every aspect of our existence over the last two decades. Now tech and human service providers are working together to develop new ways to quickly move people out of homelessness by connecting unhoused individuals with donation and services. WeCount has built one of those bridges, connecting online giving with real-world needs within your local community. To learn more, I sat down with their Executive Director Graham Pruss.

For people who are housed, and housed comfortably, there is much about the experience of homelessness that is opaque and not easy to understand. From threats of violence, to perceived dangers from law enforcement, to uncomfortable sleeping situations, homelessness is a series of large and small traumas. One of the more simple, modest yet important of those deprivations is the difficultly of having to sacrifice one’s daily personal hygiene habits. Into this gap stepped the Bay Area based organization LavaMae. Their organization provides mobile shower units to help people maintain their cleanliness and, at the same time, their sense of self-worth. To begin my conversation, I asked Leah Filler, LavaMae’s Impacts and New Programs Director, about their practice of radical hospitality.

“Is that person a homeless person or is that person my neighbor?” – Roger Valdez In discussions about homelessness, I’m always interested in hearing from people who stray from their inherent tribal orthodoxies. Roger Valdez, who directs Smart Growth Seattle, is one of those people. Our wide ranging conversation swings from people camping in parks to migrant housing and name checks Jesus, Hayek, and Milton Freidman along the way. We began our conversation asking about what his organization, Smart Growth Seattle, does and how he began writing about homelessness.

In a scene that sounds like it was straight out of Breaking Bad, Harley Lever says the tipping point for him was when a mobile meth lab burst into flames on his street. With that, he and his neighbors started “Safe Seattle” to push the city to find “better solutions” for how homelessness and public space intersect, particularly the overlooked space of the public right-of-way where different rules, regulations and enforcement mechanisms are available to managers.

In this episode, Brice offers his initial reflections on why the HomeLand Lab project and podcast exist, and how we--as people responsible for the policies, places, politics, and programming that govern our built environment--can begin to affect the conversation around homelessness.

In many cities and town’s there’s often a neighborhood where poverty is concentrated. At certain times in their histories New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Los Angeles’ Skid Row bore this dubious distinction as the synonyms for chronic, intractable, concentrated poverty and were held up as exhibit a as a built indictment of urbanism in general. Seattle’s Pioneer Square could easily have been on that list of neighborhoods, yet today’s visitors to the center of the neighborhood—at Occidental Park—would be astonished by the diversity of public life. Whether food trucks or foozeball, ping pong tables or public basketball courts the space is simultaneously filled to capacity, yet graciously accommodating to new arrivals. For communities wrestling with how to manage public space in the face of a rising tide of people experiencing homelessness, Pioneer Square’s story is one instructive for what it did and did not accomplish. Rather than ignoring, the community confronted. Rather than divesting, the community invested in relationships and each other, and, critically, rather than excluding, they committed to inclusion. The success of the neighborhood’s public spaces certainly rests on many people’s shoulders, but Leslie Smith’s shoulders may be the first amongst equals. As the Executive Director of the Alliance for Pioneer Square, she has helped transform Occidental Park into the destination that it is today. and her lessons, candor and insights are instructive for anyone trying to understand how to empathetically engage in the process of transforming urban space into welcoming place for everyone.

There are very few voices out there who would question the nearly panacea like effects of adding more community greenspace. In popular media and academia, new research seems to be emerging daily documenting the significant health, developmental, biological and economic boon that investing in high-quality open space affords cities, and marquee projects like the High Line, Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Olympic Sculpture Park, and Millenium Park seem to reinforce that to be a 21st Century city and attract 21st century talent, you need to invest in open space. Yet what if that was only a part of the story? What if, to tweak Richard Florida’s recent framing, there was a New Urban Greenspace Crisis that offered a contradictory narrative of displacement that harmed some of the most vulnerable people in our communities? Are those concerns real? And if so, what do we do about them? These are just some of the difficult questions that Sarah Dooling confronts us with. And her critiques--and where she sees the greatest opportunity for advancement—challenge the owners, builders, designers, engineers and politicians who shape the built environment. Ultimately, Sarah invites us to define a new way of building—calling for a more synthetic practice that includes politics and economics—to make stronger, more resilient communities. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

If you could, would you? That’s the question The Block Project asks us to confront. If you could help someone experiencing homelessness, would you? And not just help by sharing your pocket change or buying some food, but would you help by sharing one of the most valuable things about you—where you live. With it’s network of successful professionals, it’s excessive food and materials, and it’s scenes of safety. Today we’re going to hear from the architects Jennifer LaFreniere and Rex Hohlbein, who haven’t just designed a home, but are trying to design a way to integrate people who have experienced homelessness into stable neighborhoods. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

A few Saturday’s ago, I was able to participate in a student-led panel discussion on homelessness at the University of Washington. The format of the day was that each panelist was to give a brief overview of our own perspectives on homelessness. The first person to speak was the subject of this podcast: Anitra Freeman. What was amazing to watch was how, in her 10 minute discussion, Anitra shared her story and then broadened it to encompass discussions about the importance of community, the origins of dignity, and the hostility of the built environment to those experiencing homelessness. In re-listening to our conversation, what stands out is just how broad Anitra’s perspectives and insights are. Re-listening also reminded me that so many of these themes deserve deeper reflection and consideration, which I hope to give them during some future episodes. But for now, I hope you’ll accept the invitation to listen to and reflect on Anitra’s story.

Seattle City Councilmember Sally Bagshaw represents Seattle District 7, which includes much of the city's downtown core. She currently chairs the Human Services and Public Health Committee. In this episode, Brice speaks with Sally about the challenges of navigating constituent concerns while also serving the most vulnerable members of her community, the strategies that are working for Seattle and asks what role the private sector has to play in addressing homelessness in the Emerald City.