HomeLandLab Podcast HomeLandLab

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 Homeless
With 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.”