Guerrilla City
A homeless settlement in Portland has its own government,
urban plan, and skyline.
By Randy Gragg
It's Wednesday night and the weekly council meeting has commenced
at Portland. Oregon's homeless camp-turned-experimental community,
Dignity Village. Eight months ago the villagers were ferrying
shopping carts between empty lots. Now, in a seven-acre settlement,
they have an elected government. They even have a town hail,
complete with solar panels and a curtain wall of salvaged
windows.
The agenda tonight is packed. As the village's sergeant-at-arms,
Watchdog, calls the meeting to order, chairman Jack Talon
passes the "talking stick" (a broken microphone)
around to council members far news and announcements. A consultant
from Northwest Renewable Resources has offered to advise the
village on its sustainable building and living practices.
The council must decide whether to prosecute villager Coyote
Rose, accused of embezzling village funds. Longtime residents
kendall and Sonia announce to applause they ore deporting
from Dignity for on apartment. And a student from Pacific
University needs a signed consent form to begin researching
a thesis project on Dignity's "space." Since December
2000. 60-some men and women hove been pioneering their own
homegrown version of transitional housing. They began with
donated tents under a bridge. Now they are living in cottages
and community buildings constructed out of donated and salvaged
materials an land temporarily leased from the City of Portland.
The next step, they hope. is to acquire a permanent place
for their self-governed, economically self-reliant, environmentally
sustainable community.
The village is an eclectic stew of born-agains, Catholics,
Muslims, gays, hip-hap heads, ex-addicts, and Rastofarians.
A self-described "Eastern European anarchist," Attila,
came recently for "the sense of belonging and support,"
a phrase frequently invoked by the people here, The villagers
share a distaste for homeless shelters and a resolve to overturn
public perceptions that the homeless are dirty, dangerous,
or deadbeat. "We want to dispel all the vulgar bogeyman
myths," says J. D. Cupps, a village cofounder and coordinator
of Digsville, its 10-acre farm.
Dignity Village's inspiration was Justiceville, a Los Angeles
homeless camp. Using a local architects plastic domes for
shelter, Justiceville eventually became a sanctioned transitional
housing project called Genesis 1, permanently sited on a downtown
L.A. parking lot. But as a melange of Portland's libertarianism,
wide-ranging community patronage, and grassroots city planning,
Dignity has taken its own organic form.
Dignity's first green light was a municipal court ruling
overturning a Portland anti-camping ordinance. Armed with
government survey maps of vacant publicly owned land, the
group pitched the first "Camp Dignity" beneath a
downtown bridge. But the group quickly distinguished itself
from any mere "homeless camp." Working with longtime
community activist and architect Mark Lakeman, they designed
the settlement in community-promoting "pods"--small
clusters of tents surrounding a central commons and kitchen.
With an elected government, the catchy name, and quick-tongued
spokesmen, the settlement blossomed into an effective political
force.
For the first 10 months of 2001, the village moved from place
to place, and with each public meeting, newspaper interview,
and crisis over the next camp spot, the campers refined their
arguments for self-determination. Eventually, Lakeman wrote
an official 40-page plan. "Dignity Village 2001 &
Beyond: Outlining Strategies for a Sustainable Future"
outlines four phases: "Nomadic Beginnings," "Settlement,"
"Development," and "Village Complete."
"As the villagers build themselves as a community,"
the plan reads, "they will also build the physical village
as a reflection of their collective process with one another."
Though novel as a solution to homelessness, the village blueprint
is a page right out of Portland's larger urban-planning pattern
book, with its emphasis on connectivity, public buildings,
and plazas. Lakeman, whose father was a city planning director,
compares it to ancient precedents.
"Villages are to people as nests are to birds,"
Lakeman says. "Most everybody is missing a communal sense
of self. But the villagers had enough [of that sense of self]
to understand that what they were after was archetypal."
The Portland City Council gave the experiment a chance with
a temporary site last September, after a patron stepped forward
with $20,000 to cover the city's administrative costs. The
land is a former composting site just beyond the runways of
the Portland International Airport, near a county jail. Here,
Lakeman has helped the villagers realize phase two: "Settlement."
Because the site's asphalt surface collects water rather
than draining it. Dignity Village has the musty ambience of
Venice. Every building and tent sits among the puddles on
wood pallets. Using little more than junk lumber and salvaged
windows and doors. Lakeman worked with villagers to build
a series of structures. The cylindrical, window-walled town
hall is equipped with an inflected radial truss system, cut
with an oculus-part Pantheon, part Gothic cathedral, part
Pueblo kiva. Next door is the community center, where scrap-wood
trusses support an undulating roof. A flag-topped tower anchors
the skyline.
Meanwhile, the villagers have steadily replaced their tents
with sturdier, better insulated, and ever more ornamented
homes, ranging in form from tepees to cottages. After only
a week, the anarchist Attila, far instance, erected (notably
outside of any pod) a muscularly beautiful, skylit. gable-roofed
house out of salvaged, rough-sawn planks.
Dignity is far from being a storybook society, however. It
remains a collective of contrarians (and numerous barking
dogs) whose personal difficulties and resistance to living
by societal conventions has resulted in several less-than-utopian
moments. Eighteen police calls over a two-month period earned
a stern warning from Mayor Vera Katz, who nearly terminated
the experiment. (And after a reprimand from the village council
for stealing, Attila left the settlement at the end of March.
Now Tafari and another villager room together in the anarchist's
former home.)
Not all the villagers love Lakeman or his architecture .
"A lot of us were saying, 'Fuck the tower, we want a
shower.'" says village cofounder Gaye Reyes. "All
he built was his vision, and the roof still leaks." Yet
even Reyes concedes that the plan Lakeman helped write has
kept the group moving forward.
Certainly something--the like-mindedness of the villagers.
Lakeman's pads, the plan, the architecture and/or the collectivist
spirit of Portland--has enabled a homeless camp to grow itself
into a fully organized community.
"These are broken people," Lakeman says. "You
have to take things into a cartoon realm. To keep the public
and city council engaged requires a certain amount of theater."
"I was as surprised as anyone that things have held
together this tong," says City Commissioner Erik Sten.
who with his staff has alternately fought and helped the group
during several political crises. "I think we're having
a conversation that not a lot of other places can say they're
having."
Indeed, the newspaper editorialists, government bureaucrats,
and wary neighborhood leaders seem to only inspire the group
to grow more sophisticated. The village recently became a
nonprofit corporation. Its Web site. www.outofthedoorways.org,
now sells "Dignity Village" logo coffee cups. T-shirts,
and tote bags.
The lease on the current site expires July 1, and village
chairman Tafari says the group is reviewing four future sites,
writing grants, and quietly building alliances it hopes will
calm neighborhood opposition wherever the village moves next.
Lakeman is working with the city on resolving building-code
compliance issues while developing housing prototypes that
use everything from passive solar power to recycled-sweater
insulation. And every day brings a steady stream of people
willing to help and wanting to study Dignity's path to the
"Village Complete."
"From the structure comes the organization, comes the
reparation of the people." Tafari says in his milky Rastafarian
patois. "Mark Lakeman gave us a visual of what we could
have and a vision to present to the city. We no longer have
to play hide-and-seek, even if we still have to play a little
cat-and-mouse."
**A separate page featured these interviews, with portraits
of each person.**
LYDIA KUSHNER, 64
"I came to Dignity when my son and his wife were murdered.
They were my only family. I like city culture. I like the
outdoors. This has some of both. We need a washing machine.
The village needs to be located near hospitals and a university.
They made me a new shelter today. It's got wood floors and
a real window and a potbelly stove in front. It's like an
efficiency apartment. But I'd like a door. At my age, you
sometimes want to slam the door on the world."
JACK TAFARI, 56
"What we have is the common denominator of homelessness,
the need for food, clothes, and shelter. When you get to the
common denominator of nylon over your head, it's elemental
enough that people will fight for it. And because at that
everybody here thinks of themselves as middle class. I would
like more social cohesion. But I'm quite happy. I hove carpet,
skylights, windows, and a built-in bed. I have a desk. I need
nothing else. I'm a minimalist."
ELIZABETH SPRY, AGE UNKNOWN
"Most everybody watches out for each other. People see
to it nobody goes hungry. There's a lot of visiting, in our
pod especially. It creates a sense of closeness. When you
come out here, people make friendships quicker, stronger,
and deeper. A couple we got to know here got an apartment
a couple of weeks ago. I was devastated. We're working an
a patio now which we're going to enclose for a nice place
to sit."
IBRAHIM MUBARAK, AGE UNKNOWN
"On the street you are by yourself. Here we recognize
each other's needs. I liked it better when it was more free-spirited.
We had only four rules: no drugs or alcohol, no stealing,
no disrespect to others, no violence. Now there's bylaws and
committees. You give people who've had nothing too much too
quickly and they get power hungry. It's getting more like
what we were trying to get away from. My shelter is a regular
tent with a wood frame and plastic around it. I'm a dinosaur.
Everybody else these days is doing plywood."
RANDY GRAGG WRITES ABOUT ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN FOR
THE OREGONIAN, PORTLAND'S DAILY NEWSPAPER, ALONG WITH OTHER
PUBLICATIONS.
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