The Brief

At first glance, Community First! Village looks more like an art commune or even a high-end summer camp than what it really is: Austin’s formidable, 51-acre solution to the homelessness crisis.

Nestled amongst picturesque tiny houses and RVs – home to about 350 formerly unhoused people – are a ceramics studio, an outdoor movie theater and a game room. Quiet, winding roads lead past a pond stocked with catfish, a hydroponic vegetable garden and a yurt visitors can rent on Airbnb. The ashes of 36 former residents are interred in a columbarium on the property.

If you want a souvenir, there’s even a gift shop of sorts – a convenience store that sells hats, infant onesies and other swag branded with the community’s slogan: “Goodness.”

Alan Graham, founder, President and CEO of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, and Community First! Village, at his desk in Austin, Texas on May 12, 2023.

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“Right up underneath that windmill is where we have the farmer’s market every Saturday morning,” says village founder Alan Graham, CEO of nonprofit Mobile Loaves & Fishes, pointing from a golf cart as he gives a tour of the village. “We have a hair studio here. We got over 300 fruit and nut-bearing trees growing all over the property. This is a big, old pear tree right here. It’s loaded with pears.”

It’s the same tour he and his team have given to multiple California officials and service providers, all of whom came looking for new answers to the Golden State’s dire homelessness crisis. As a result, villages inspired by Austin are now popping up in California.

These developments put a new spin on the “housing first” philosophy that prevails among California homeless programs. In these Austin-influenced villages, the predominant belief is that housing alone simply isn’t enough – one needs community, too.

An employee plants sunflowers at Community First! Village in Austin, Texas on May 12, 2023.

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Jordan Vonderhaar

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CalMatters

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Left: Chickens and other farm animals provide food to residents at Community First! Village in Austin, Texas. Center: Leafy greens and other vegetables are grown in an aquaponic greenhouse. Right: Tilapia are raised as part of an aquaculture food operation.

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Jordan Vonderhaar

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CalMatters

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The nonprofit Salt + Light is building an Austin-inspired permanent housing village near Visalia, in the San Joaquin Valley. Dubbed The Neighborhood Village, it will consist of 53 mobile homes with perks including a dog park, garden, columbarium, pop-up movie theater, art classes and mobile medical clinics. As in Austin, they’ll also have “missionals” – volunteers who live on-site, look out for their formerly homeless neighbors 24/7 and help build a sense of community.

Salt + Light CEO Adrianne Hillman first visited Austin’s tiny home village in 2018.

“The first time I went, I cried, actually, when I got there,” she said. “I was pretty overwhelmed with the beauty of it. It resonated with me on a soul level.”

Convinced someone had to bring the model to California, Hillman upended her entire life, started a nonprofit and got to work.

She’s not the only Californian to be taken in by Community First’s utopian village of small, cutesy dwellings, lovingly landscaped gardens and roads with names like Peaceful Path and Goodness Way. Another copycat project took root in the East Bay city of Livermore. Two more are trying to get off the ground, one in Silicon Valley and the other in Bakersfield.

Two city council members from Richmond in the East Bay Area attended a symposium at Community First in April and came home with a vision to replicate what they saw.

“I was really, really impressed,” said Councilmember Gayle McLaughlin. She wants to partner with Contra Costa County and local nonprofits to build something similar – though smaller – on a 3.5-acre site outside the city limits.

Not enough tiny homes for all who want them

Community First offers multiple tiny home options. Its 200-square foot micro-homes, for example, provide electricity but no plumbing (residents share communal bathrooms) and have room for a bed and a small living area that comes with a refrigerator, freezer, microwave, crock pot and coffee maker. The village has larger models, too, including manufactured homes that are about 400 square feet and fully plumbed. They have a bedroom, living area with a couch and small dining table, mini kitchen and bathroom with a toilet, sink and shower.

With land at a premium in California, it would be difficult to build enough tiny homes to make a noticeable difference in the state’s homelessness crisis. Even Austin’s tiny home village hasn’t solved the problem.

Tiny homes used as residences at Community First! Village in Austin, Texas on May 12, 2023.

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Jordan Vonderhaar

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CalMatters

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Encampments still proliferate in the city’s greenbelts, and the estimated number of homeless residents in the county grew 40% between 2019 and 2022, according to the federally mandated point-in-time count. In 2021, fed-up Austin voters passed a law banning public camping, and activists say unhoused people now are forced to move from camp to camp because there aren’t enough shelter beds or long-term housing.

Matt Bradley, 39, said it would be “lovely” to move into the tiny home village and stop constantly worrying that someone will steal his belongings. Bradley, one of many people living in a tent in the woods behind Austin’s South Town Square shopping center, said he’s been on a housing waitlist for three years. Periodically, police come by and check on him and his neighbors.

“They reassure us and say help is coming,” Bradley said. “But you know, we’re still waiting.”

Austin vs. California

Left: Travel trailers serve as residences at Community First! Village in Austin, Texas on May 12, 2023. Right: A Tiny Home Village, for an affordable solution towards housing the homeless, in Sacramento on Sep. 29, 2022.

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Left: Jordan Vonderhaar. Right: Rahul Lal

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CalMatters

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In some ways, California homeless providers are predisposed to like what they see in Austin. State and local leaders have doubled down on tiny homes as a solution to homelessness ever since the pandemic, when worries about COVID-19 spreading in crowded shelters shaped state policy. Gov. Gavin Newsom is in the process of doling out 1,200 tiny homes for unhoused residents in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Jose and San Diego County.

But there are some major differences between Austin’s tiny homes and most of the similar programs in California.

In California, tiny homes are almost exclusively considered temporary shelter. Residents are expected to move out of the micro-dwellings and into traditional housing – sometimes within a period of mere months, and often with low success rates. Community First, by contrast, is permanent housing. Residents pay rent (between about $370 and $440 a month for a tiny home including utilities, or $450 for an RV – plus electric and propane) and can live there until they die.

The sheer size of Community First also distinguishes it from other tiny home projects. It is likely the largest in the country for homeless residents. Built on 51 acres just outside the city’s limits, its nearly 400 occupied dwellings house 345 formerly homeless people and 40 missionals, with plans to increase to 530 homes by the end of the year. In addition, construction is underway on another 600 homes across the street, set to be completed over the next six years. Travis County recently contributed $35 million toward building another 750 homes on a separate property 15 minutes away.

The county’s commitment marks the first time the organization has received public funding. Until then, it relied on private contributions and major gifts from wealthy donors like Michael and Susan Dell. That’s another departure from California, where tiny home projects tend to rely heavily on city, county and state funding.

Could the Community First model work in California?

In the big California cities where homelessness is most prevalent – Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego, for example – it’s nearly impossible to find giant parcels of land that could fit hundreds of tiny homes.

“The tiny homes are often just not at a scale to be helpful,” said Marybeth Shinn, a professor at Vanderbilt University specializing in homelessness.

And there is debate about whether tiny homes should be accepted as permanent housing. About two-thirds of the tiny homes in the Austin village have no plumbing, forcing residents to leave their units to access communal bathrooms.

The units without bathrooms don’t meet the housing quality standards set by the federal government, which has given some activists pause.

A resident cooks breakfast for their neighbors in one of the shared kitchen spaces at Community First! Village in Austin, Texas on May 12, 2023.

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Jordan Vonderhaar

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CalMatters

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“The focus has to be on housing somebody,” said Alex Visotzky, senior California policy fellow for the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “And housing means having a bathroom, kitchen, a sense of privacy, the rights of tenancy and the stability that comes along with it. That has to be the end goal. That’s what ends somebody’s homelessness.”

Austin’s Graham says that’s “bullshit.” If people want to live in a small unit they can afford with no bathroom, that should be their right, he said. Besides, no one in his community has to walk more than 100 feet to a bathroom, he said.

“People should have a choice,” Graham said, “and we should get people out from under the misery that they’re living in as fast as we can.”

A sense of belonging

Graham, who lives in the tiny home village himself, describes the community as joyful with a “side salad of tension.” Many residents have mental health conditions, and it’s not unusual to see someone walk naked down the street, he said. The program doesn’t require residents to be sober, and many have addictions. But after moving into the village, residents who use drugs self-report using an average of 80% less than they did on the street, Graham said.

Blair Racine, who lived on the streets for years before becoming a resident of Community First! Village in Austin, Texas on May 12, 2023.

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Jordan Vonderhaar

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CalMatters

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Blair Racine, 69, has lived at Community First in Austin for five years. He pays about $500 a month to rent an old RV from the 1990s – one of the original dwellings set up before the organization began building fancier tiny homes. A graduate of the University of Minnesota and a former realtor, Racine said he fell into homelessness after an ex-business partner landed him in financial trouble and he had no family support to fall back on. He spent four years on the street and in homeless shelters.

Now, Racine feels like he belongs. People here call him “the Mayor,” and he spends his days lending a listening ear and emotional support to his neighbors. He plans to live here until he dies. Then, he wants to be interred on-site.

“I came out here and found this is my place,” he said. “And the rest is history.”

Beyond the Rose Bowl and historic bungalows, Pasadena has stranger tales to tell. David Kalbeitzer has been seeking out those stories where rocket science meets the occult and ghosts haunt the city’s grandest buildings.

For Kalbeitzer, a Disney executive who investigates the paranormal in his free time, his fascination with the city’s mysterious side started when he bought a Victorian north of Old Town.

He sensed a spirit at the open house a dozen years ago and took it as a reason to move his family to Pasadena. Then he started learning the city’s history.

David Kalbeitzer, a paranormal investigator from Pasadena, is giving a talk about the city's strange history Saturday night in Old Town.

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Courtesy of David Kalbeitzer

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“I realized, ‘Oh, this place called us just as much as we were looking for it,’” he said.

On Saturday night, he’s sharing the lore he’s collected at Mesmer Mesmer an Old Town shop and event space. While the event is full, there’s a waitlist, and more talks featuring Kalbeitzer are in the works.

A city of ghost stories 

Ask Kalbeitzer about haunted Pasadena, and the list stretches from alleyways to the Colorado Street Bridge to Castle Green, the turreted former hotel overlooking Central Park.

“The Pasadena Playhouse theater is, you know, very haunted,” he added.

He says playgoers have reported hearing disembodied voices.

“And you look, and there’s no one there, or apparitions that have been seen sort of standing in the corner, and then you walk up, and they kind of disappear,” he said.

As for the spirit that helped draw him to his current Pasadena home?

Kalbeitzer says she’s still around — and a psychic friend says she has a name: Dolores.

“It’s actually haunted by a very kind ghost that looks out for the house, protects my family and has been able to activate our alarm,” he said.

Having a Dolores in the house might send some people running, but Kalbeitzer said he grew up in a haunted house in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

And when his family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a teenage Kalbeitzer started seeking out places known for paranormal activity.

Rocket science, ritual magic and mind-reading

Having lived in different neighborhoods in L.A., Kalbeitzer says there’s something uniquely otherworldly about Pasadena — and it goes beyond ghost stories.

He said the city has an energy that draws people exploring the unknown, perhaps most famously Jack Parsons.

The rocket pioneer who helped launch the Jet Propulsion Laboratory also practiced ritual magic at his Pasadena home with the likes of L. Ron Hubbard before he founded Scientology.

“Many people call it the occult. I don’t know that I fully subscribe to that, but there is spiritualism and occult mixed in there,” Kalbeitzer said.

Then there was Upton Sinclair, the muckraking author of The Jungle, whose interests while living in Pasadena extended to telepathy and séances.

Upton Sinclair, pictured with his wife Mary Craig Sinclair in 1935, several years after he published a book examining her reported telepathy.

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Los Angeles Times via Wikimedia Commons

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In 1930, Sinclair published Mental Radio, a book about experiments in mind-reading. Albert Einstein provided a preface. Yes, that Einstein, who would spend the following winter at Caltech expanding on the theories of relativity and cosmology.

“Like it’s the craziest mixture of things that were happening at that time and all of it at the same time,” Kalbeitzer said.

A presence in the shop 

The event couldn’t have found a more appropriate venue.

Since opening five months ago in Old Town, Mesmer Mesmer has embraced the dark and mysterious, offering tarot and crystal readings and hosting events on subjects such as hip-hop’s relationship with ghosts.

At that event, a medium told owner Tyke O’Brien she could sense a presence in the shop, which formerly housed a bridal store.

“She goes, ‘Do you ever feel it?’” O’Brien recounted, “And I’m like, ‘I am such a bummer. I really wish I could. How wonderful would that be to be able to?’”

The same can be said for this writer who’s lived and worked in and around Pasadena for years without so much as a brush with the otherworldly.

Kalbeitzer, on the other hand, reports supernatural encounters all around town.

“I think that how you see yourself in the world has a lot more to do with it, and whether you want to have those experiences,” he said.

Los Angeles officials expect construction of a fence around MacArthur Park will start in November and continue through fall 2027. 

At a community meeting Thursday night at MacArthur Park Elementary School, officials said fence installation is now expected to continue through fall 2027, overshooting the previously announced spring 2027 completion date.

Thursday’s meeting highlighted the divide over the city’s plan to fence off MacArthur Park, with tensions rising during public comment. The Los Angeles Police Department says the fence will make drug enforcement easier, while some in the community who volunteer around the park questioned whether it will improve safety enough to justify the cost.

The city has allocated $2.3 million for the project, but officials have not said whether that will cover the full cost.

Installation of the green metal fence around the park’s perimeter is expected to begin in November and take about a year. A second phase, adding decorative elements to the fence, is planned for fall and winter 2027. Officials said the schedule could change because of weather or other unforeseen circumstances.

The park is expected to remain open during construction.

Capt. Ben Fernandes with the LAPD’s Rampart Division said the fence would create a barrier along Alvarado Street and other areas where officers have seen people using narcotics. That would allow police to focus more of their enforcement efforts inside the park, he said.

“So if people are going deeper into the park to use, that’ll make it easier for us to go in and do enforcement on them and arrest them for that use,” Fernandes said. 

MacArthur Park will close every night once an 8-foot-tall fence goes up around the green space, with Los Angeles police officers sweeping the park for encampments and people sleeping there before the gates shut. The Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners approved the plan Thursday.

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LA Recreation and Parks

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“I’ve been an officer for 29 years, and I’ve always known I can go buy drugs there, and I did as a narcotics officer. So what I’m saying is, we are trying to make it not convenient,” he added. 

Fernandes also said the city plans to enhance the park’s existing camera network. LAPD officers and Los Angeles Park Rangers will be able to monitor the cameras from their respective stations, he said. City officials are still evaluating whether additional cameras will be needed to address blind spots in the park after construction is complete.

Ariana Walker, who visits MacArthur Park every Saturday with a group of friends who pool their own resources to distribute food and hygiene kits, questioned whether the city had shown that the fence would improve safety and how much it would cost to maintain.

“The fence is a $2.3 million fence at the base level,” she said. “And they haven’t given us any indication of how much more it’s going to cost for upkeep, to keep anybody safe. There’s no conclusive evidence that a fence is going to stop crime the way that they’re suggesting.”

The meeting grew tense when John Alle, a local property owner whose family owns the building that houses Langer’s Delicatessen across the street from the park, objected to having his comments read from a written comment card rather than speaking directly to officials. Alle has been a vocal critic of the city’s response to drug activity and public safety concerns around MacArthur Park.

He was allowed to comment during the meeting and said the city needs to take a tougher approach to drug use and sales around the park. 

“We see knife attacks at all hours of the day. It’s out of control. And it’s not gotten any better,” he said. “We want to bring it back to where it was 15 or 20 years ago.”

Los Angeles officials expect construction of a fence around MacArthur Park will start in November and continue through fall 2027.

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Gary Coronado

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The LA Local

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Alle pointed to public events at the park, including an upcoming Día de los Muertos celebration and a Labor Day weekend picnic hosted by Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman as positive developments for the space. But he added those events do not reflect conditions throughout the park.

Officials also outlined other planned improvements, including restoring access through the tunnels connecting the park’s north and south sides, making accessibility upgrades and providing free Wi-Fi for parkgoers. 

Residents who want to provide input on the fence’s decorative elements can email admin@themorcosgroup.com or call (310) 479-4727 for more information.

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