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By Lucy Tompkins
Photographs by Eli Durst
Lucy Tompkins reported on Community First! Village while working as a reporter in Austin covering housing and homelessness. Over the course of a year, he visited the village several times to interview citizens and staff.
On the outskirts of Austin, Texas, what began as a fringe experiment has quickly become central to the city’s efforts to reduce homelessness. To Justin Tyler Jr., it is home.
Mr. Tyler, 41, lives in Community First!Village, which is intended to be a permanent housing style for chronically homeless people. In the fall of 2022, she joined about 400 villagers and moved into one of her typical spots: a small, two-hundred-square-foot single-room space furnished with a kitchenette, bed, and recliner.
The village is a self-contained, 51-acre community in a sparsely populated area just outside Austin. Stepping onto its grounds feels like entering another realm.
Small, eclectic homes cluster around communal kitchens, and neat rows of mobile homes and manufactured homes line cul-de-sacs.
There are cooperatives, two orchards, a convenience store. . .
art and jewelry studios, a medical clinic and a chapel.
Roads stretch far and wide, but citizens typically get around on foot or in an eight-passenger golf cart that makes normal stops around the property.
Mr. Tyler chose a home with a cobalt-blue door and a small patio in the oldest part of the village, where residents’ cactus and rock gardens created a “funky, hippie vibe” that appealed to him. He arrived in rough shape, struggling with alcoholism, his feet inflamed by gout, with severe back pain from nearly 10 years of sleeping in public parks, in vehicles and on street benches.
At first he went alone. He locked the door and slept. He went to the clinic and started taking medication. After about a month, he ventured out to meet his neighbors.
“For a while I didn’t need to be noticed or known,” she said. “Now I prefer that. “
Between communal meals and movie screenings, Mr. Tyler also works in the village, preparing homes for the dozen or more people who move each month.
As we pointed out in the story you just read, “small settlement villages” are an increasingly popular intervention to address the affordable housing shortage crisis. Community first! The village has many facets that make it distinctive, such as its combination of housing types, denominational elements, and permanent dwellings. This means that it has never been tested at the scale it is about to be. Now we’d like to hear your perspectives on this community, your style and customers for your growth.
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