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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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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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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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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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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“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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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.”

A long-running court battle between California veterans and the Trump administration will continue, as federal officials consider asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s order to build more housing for unhoused L.A. veterans.

A federal appeals court on Thursday agreed to temporarily pause the order to construct more than 2,500 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West L.A.

Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs, told LAist the delay could spell life or death for unhoused veterans, especially as the region braces for strong El Niño-driven storms.

“These are veterans who risked their lives and suffered both the visible and invisible wounds of war,” Rosenbaum said. “What the government is saying to them is, you're supposed to stay on the street."

VA officials did not immediately respond to LAist’s request for comment.

Veterans' lawyers in a court filing called a possible appeal to the Supreme Court a “hopeless shot.”

“The government has lost every time they have taken this to court. No court has ruled for them on any of these matters,” Rosenbaum told LAist. “This is part of the administration’s war on its own veterans, and it’s time for that war to come to an end.”

Could long-running case end up at the Supreme Court?

The litigation was initiated in 2023 by L.A. veterans struggling with homelessness. The case has centered on the 400-acre V.A. campus, which U.S. District Judge David O. Carter has ruled should offer more housing to the approximately 2,250 veterans experiencing homelessness in L.A. County.

In 2024, Carter ordered officials to add thousands of temporary and permanent homes, and end leases with UCLA, a private K-12 school and an oil drilling company, which he said did not serve the needs of veterans.

An appeals court last month blocked the federal government’s efforts to halt the housing construction. But veteran advocates knew that federal officials could ask for further delays as the case winds through the courts.

VA officials now have until Dec. 10 to decide whether to appeal their fight to the Supreme Court. Judges with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told lawyers for the federal government that if they do not decide to appeal by Dec. 10, “the stay will be lifted immediately.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District shortened the application window for specialized academic programs this year, and will no longer accept paper forms.

Applications for the district’s magnet, dual language and affiliated charter schools for the next academic year opened Oct. 1 and are due Nov. 6, 2026.

How does it work?

If you want your child to attend their neighborhood school, enrollment is fairly straightforward. There’s a separate process for the district’s specialized programs called Choices.

There are two windows to apply — on-time and late. The latter consists of all the spaces left after families who applied on time accept their offers.

Here’s the timeline for the 2027-28 school year:

• Sept. 2026: School fairs start.
• Oct. 1, 2026: Choices application opens.
• Nov. 6, 2026:  Deadline to apply online.
• Dec. 1, 2026:  Late applications begin. 
• February 2027: On-time applicant results sent. 
• March 5, 2027: Deadline to accept or decline school offers for on-time applicants. School assignments for late applications follow the processing of on-time applications. Students may be offered a spot through the start of the spring semester. 
• Aug. 12, 2027: The school year begins.

LAUSD will no longer accept paper Choices applications. If families do not have a computer, they can use a smartphone to complete an application. LAUSD will also allow families to use computers at school parent centers.

How to prepare

Every child within LAUSD boundaries is assigned a school — find yours through the district’s “resident school identifier.”

But there are also hundreds of other programs available through the Choices process.

Those include:

• Magnets: Programs on a specific theme, such as science, math, language, advanced studies or art. These programs were originally established to integrate segregated schools and have a unique “points” system to prioritize applications. 
• Dual language or immersion: Students learn in English and in a second language such as Spanish, Mandarin, Korean or Armenian. 
• Affiliated charter schools: District-run schools with more freedom to try different types of teaching or other programs. 

No one type of school is inherently better than another, and no one metric defines a great school — there are many factors beyond test scores to consider, and we go over some of those here.

By far the most frequent piece of advice we’ve heard is to go on an in-person school tour if possible.

“The very best thing that people can do is go to the school and try to watch the way that educators interact with students, the way that students interact with each other, and the way that families are included or not in the life of a school,” said Jack Schneider, a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, education researcher and parent. “Once you do that, you really get a sense of what kind of place kids are going to school.”

Some schools post tour information online, but you may need to call for details.

LAUSD also hosts fairs, organized by geographic region, where multiple schools table and share information about their programs, through mid-October.

The Justice Department found Thursday that the law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, illegally considered race in admissions.

The announcement follows a similar finding against the university’s medical school and comes as President Donald Trump’s administration ramps up scrutiny of colleges’ processes for selecting students. The administration also has accused the UC Berkeley Law School and the medical school at the University of California, San Diego, of illegally discriminating against white and Asian applicants.

The UCLA School of Law said in a statement that it was committed to making admissions decisions in compliance with all applicable laws.

“Students are admitted through a comprehensive, merit-based review process that considers each applicant’s achievements and experiences,” the statement said. “We are confident in our process.”

Affirmative action in college admissions has been illegal since a 2023 Supreme Court ruling forbade it. The same ruling said colleges could continue to assess how applicants’ backgrounds might speak to broader characteristics, but Trump has accused colleges of using applicants’ personal statements and other proxies to consider race in admissions — which conservatives view as illegal discrimination.

The Justice Department’s investigation found UCLA’s law school discriminated against white and Asian American students by favoring Black and Hispanic applicants in its 2023, 2024 and 2025 incoming classes. Its analysis found the mean LSAT score was lower for admitted Black applicants than for admitted white applicants.

The department also said admissions staff at the law school instructed applicants during recruitment efforts, including one called the “Diversity Admissions Open House,” how to reveal their race in essays.

“Like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin,” said Harmeet Dhillon, head of the department’s Civil Rights Division, in a news release.

California voters ended affirmative action in college admissions in a 1997 ballot measure. In a brief filed in the Supreme Court case, the UC system said the change led to a precipitous drop in underrepresented minorities, especially at the system’s most selective campuses. The brief said UC went on to implement a range of race-neutral measures to increase diversity.

The Trump administration also has sued over the main UCLA campus’s response to allegations of antisemitic harassment. The administration’s latest finding sets the stage for a voluntary resolution to bring UCLA into compliance with the Justice Department’s legal interpretation or, if none can be reached, potential legal action.

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Artist Hedy Torres asked a 20-something student from Cal State Northridge to sit for a portrait nearly a decade ago. Using charcoal on paper, she drew the dark-haired young man in black and white — but she deliberately kept the portrait unfinished.

The idea was that she would complete the piece if her subject, a DACA recipient named Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas, ever attained lawful permanent residency.

And now he has.

DACA, which stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, is a program that provides two-year work permits and deportation relief for people who were brought to the U.S. as children. The permits can be renewed, but the program does not grant a pathway to citizenship. 

In late September, Pérez Cuevas — who is now married, a father, a green card holder and an adjunct instructor at his alma mater — sat with Torres once again.

Torres’ project involves interviewing subjects as she sketches them. This year, she invited the public to watch her complete the portrait as she spoke to Pérez Cuevas about what it took for him to get a green card and what that means for his life.

About two dozen people gathered at a community center in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park to see her add details to the piece that speak to the passing of time.

“I just wanted to make people empathetic to what [immigrants] go through during this process,” she said. “You have to be very patient. There is a lot of uncertainty.”

Responding to the potential loss of relief

Pérez Cuevas, who was born in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, was brought to the U.S. by his parents when he was 2.

When Torres drew him in 2017, he was pursuing a master’s degree in kinesiology at Cal State Northridge. That year, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced intentions to rescind DACA, which had enabled him to set goals without the fear of being deported. A 2020 Supreme Court decision allowed the program to continue.

Torres was once undocumented herself, so she understood the 2017 announcement was earth-shattering for the approximately 800,000 people who were then in the program, she said.

The original, unfinished portrait of Lino de Jesús Pérez Cuevas.

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That year, Torres was also a student at CSUN, working toward a master’s in fine art.

She recalled recently that she wanted people to see DACA recipients as people, not numbers. And so, for her master's project, she proposed creating portraits of DACA beneficiaries.

The portraits would be rooted in interviews conducted as she drew her subjects. Leaving them unfinished, she said, would symbolize the precarity of the moment.

The pieces would have enough detail for viewers to see the subjects’ faces clearly, particularly their eyes and expressions. Other elements, including their bodies and clothing, would be more of an initial sketch.

The university greenlit her project and gave her a grant to pursue it. There was just one problem: Torres had to convince reticent DACA recipients to share their stories.

Building trust 

When Torres first messaged Pérez Cuevas about the project, he ignored her for two weeks, he said. But because they had a mutual friend, he eventually agreed to meet with her.

“I was trying to see whether this person was just an academic trying to complete a project for her own benefit, or whether she really cared about the community,” he told LAist.

They met at a coffee shop. Pérez Cuevas learned about the artist’s journey from the Mexican state of Colima and everything she’d lived through since.

Before 2015, for example, an undocumented person in California could not get a driver’s license. When she was undocumented, Torres was stopped by police and had her car impounded. She said she had to cobble together thousands of dollars to get her car back from a tow yard.

Pérez Cuevas could relate. He had experienced the same thing.

He decided to trust her.

After she drew him, Pérez Cuevas helped Torres connect with more DACA recipients at the university. She drew four other portraits, which were also left unfinished.

These works were acquired by the university, with the agreement that Torres would be able to borrow and complete them when — and if — her subjects attained lawful permanent residency.

Community members watch Artist Hedy Torres update the portrait at Plummer Park in West Hollywood.

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‘A sense of freedom’  

As she worked on the portrait, Torres added soft lines rendered in charcoal to the image of Pérez Cuevas’ face, along with a robust mustache. And she continued the interview.

“What did you imagine your life would be like when you were young?” Torres asked.

Thinking back to high school, Pérez Cuevas said he realized then that not having a social security number barred him from decent-paying work.

“I didn't really understand what I was doing with my life,” he said, adding that he used to not think higher education was for him even while he was at CSUN. “My state of mind was really dark back then.”

He credited a college counselor with helping him navigate school. He earned his degree in 2017.

Pérez Cuevas said he has intimate knowledge of what it’s like to live with constant uncertainty: not knowing how he would pay for college because he did not qualify for federal financial aid; not being able to travel outside the country; and waiting anxiously for federal officials to make decisions on immigration laws that could transform his life.

“I can't stress enough how difficult it is psychologically to wait because it's something that can revolutionize your life,” he said. “You're betting your whole life on this approval and just that suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting, living with that anxiety.”

Torres completed her portrait of Pérez Cuevas in September 2026. Four other portraits remain unfinished.

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U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to process renewal requests for existing DACA recipients, but the agency is no longer approving first-time applications.

Under the second Trump administration, DACA recipients are also experiencing significant delays with renewals. Some have lost their jobs. Recipients have been deported. According to the agency, the median processing time for DACA renewals was one month in 2023. Currently, it’s taking seven months to process most cases.

Pérez Cuevas said he was able to adjust his immigration status after marrying a U.S. citizen and consulting with an attorney. His lawyer helped him secure a document that allowed noncitizens to travel abroad and seek legal re-entry.

“Did getting permanent residency give you a sense of freedom, a freedom you probably didn't have when you were under DACA?” Torres asked him.

“Absolutely,” Pérez Cuevas said. “The biggest freedom was psychological freedom. You have this weight that you've been carrying all these years that finally just gets thrown off your shoulders.”

One of the things he feared most was long-term separation from his parents, he said.

When his mother and father migrated to the U.S., they did not see their own parents — his grandparents — for 40 years, Pérez Cuevas added. After his parents moved back to Mexico during the pandemic, he feared they would also go decades without seeing each other.

But having a green card enables him to travel and see his family.

Pérez Cuevas told Torres that, paradoxically, the threat of losing DACA made him “weirdly ambitious."

He said he doubled down on his studies and took on every internship he could. He figured that if the U.S. decided to deport him, he’d still have his education and work experience.

“Even on the days where I didn't necessarily have the greatest energy or the greatest state of mind, I showed up for myself,” Pérez Cuevas said.