What I learned from Community First! Village

I'm republishing this article I wrote in October of 2022.

About six weeks ago, I got a personal tour of Community First! Village, the communityof tiny homes for formerly homeless people operated by Mobile Loaves and Fishes that sits in between FM 969 and Decker Lake Rd, just east of city limits. 

The tour, which was given by Mobile Loaves & Fishes founder Alan Graham, was long overdue. Homelessness has been one of the top political issues in Austin in recent years, and CFV is regularly invoked by critics of the city’s approach to homelessness. 

Those who claim the city’s “housing first” model is a failure often point to CFV as the solution. It’s not uncommon to hear people wonder why the city doesn’t just take all of the money it’s spending on homelessness programs and give it to Alan Graham, since he’s clearly got it figured out. 

“Go talk to Alan Graham!” one reader told me shortly before my visit. “He’ll tell you what a disaster the city is. He refuses to work with them!” Another told me the city won’t collaborate with Mobile Loaves & Fishes because it is a faith-based organization. Conservatarian District 5 candidate Aaron Webman, who claims the housing first model “has always failed,” pointed to CFV as an example of a better model in a recent interview. 

Underpinning many of these assertions is a fundamental misunderstanding of the community. Many seem to believe that, in contrast to conventional social programs, which they imagine to be no-strings handouts, CFV demands sobriety, piety and industry from its residents. 

So I was sincerely surprised to learn that almost none of this is true. 

“100% of the people who move into our village will have to be subsidized for life,” said Graham, who estimates that it cost roughly $22,000 a year in charitable donations to support each resident. 

It’s important to note that while many millions of Americans experience housing insecurity or bouts of homelessness where they are sleeping in a car or bunking up with friends or family, CFV is focused on the chronically homeless. On average, a CFV resident spent nine years unhoused. 

While he is proud to highlight the work that residents do on the property, including the great variety of artwork that some sell for a profit, Graham says few of the residents are able to hold a traditional job. 

“Our neighbors are some of the most despised, outcast people in our community,” he said of the residents. “They have physical disabilities, mental disabilities, substance abuse issues. Many come from violent, traumatic backgrounds that don’t allow them to work an 8-to-5, W2 job.”

I ask him to be more specific.

“There’s a level of disobedience from people who have been jacked around for most of their lives,” he said. “To have a drug addict or alcoholic in your place of employment turns out to be a very difficult situation.” 

There is a certain fatalism in Graham’s description of the chronically homeless that sets him apart from almost everyone else I hear opine on the issue. Liberals prefer to view homelessness as nothing more than extreme poverty that can be remedied through the provision of housing; gainful employment will naturally follow. Conservatives prefer to view it as a symptom of poor work ethic and drug use that can only be cured if people commit (or are forced to commit) to a more wholesome lifestyle, which would naturally include gainful employment. It’s rare, however, to hear anyone simply state that some homeless people should not be expected to hold a job. 

The catastrophic loss of family

Graham rejects both the left’s materialistic explanation of homelessness and the right’s focus on personal responsibility. The source of the problem, he says, “is the profound, catastrophic loss of family built on a foundation of pretty heavy duty trauma.” 

In other words, the chronically homeless are people who have no one left to turn to. They were very likely to have experienced severe physical or sexual abuse as children. Many grew up in the state’s notorious foster care system. 

Graham describes drug and alcohol abuse as a convenient excuse people use to justify ignoring the plight of the homeless. 

“No one at the age of 12 dreamed of being a crack addict prostitute living under a bridge,” he said. “That’s not a choice.” 

So, what about Housing First? 

As its name suggests, Community First! Village seeks to offer a sense of communityto people who have been without it for years, perhaps their entire lives. 

So, is the “community first” model a rejection of “housing first”? 

“The Community First model was literally built on top of the premise of Housing First,” he said. “We just believe that humans need more than housing. They need connection.” 

“The ones who are calling Housing First a failure are not right,” he added. 

I think part of the misperception about CFV comes from the fact that the communityrequires its roughly 325 residents to pay rent. However, that doesn’t mean they’re required to hold full-time jobs or pay market-rate for their homes. Most of them pay a portion of the market-rate from income they receive through federal programs: Supplemental Security Income, Social Security Disability, Veterans benefits etc. 

What about the city? 

When I ask what he thinks about the city’s efforts, Graham described the problem as far too large for the city to address, at least in the short-term. 

“There is no one program that is going to solve this problem, including our CommunityFirst model,” he said. 

As for the city, “I think for the most part,” he said, “I think the money is pretty reasonably spent.” 

Granted, Graham does have relationships with the city 

He recalled looking at the roughly $65 million the city was spending annually on homelessness-related programs a couple years back and finding little he could disagree with. However, that level of spending, he said, won’t come close to the enormity of the “homelessness pandemic,” as he describes it. 

There are of course some problems that are inherent to government, which is naturally “risk averse” and bureaucratic, he said. But he described those working on the issue at the city as having “an enormous amount of compassion.”

One thing he feels strongly is that cities should allow people to engage in street commerce, as is common in many other countries, such as by selling art work, food, beverages or services. Right now, he said, the only way the homeless are allowed to make money is by using “their first amendment right to speech to beg.” 

He has mixed feelings about the debate over public camping. Allowing camping in public places “had a very negative impact” he said, but outlawing it simply “pushes people deeper into the woods.” 

He utterly dismisses the idea that the city’s policies have increased the homeless population by attracting people from other cities. Homeless people are not traveling around the country in search of warmer weather or more welcoming political climates.

“Those are urban myths,” he said. 

He is familiar with the perception from some that the city would be better off simply outsourcing management of homelessness to his own organization. He’s flattered by the trust Mobile Loaves & Fishes has earned, but doesn’t believe the city should give up on all of its other efforts: 

“That’s the last thing I want the city to do is give us all the money.”

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