Social Justice Issues

When Rukaiyah Adams left a New York City–based hedge fund in 2010, a non-compete clause forced her to take an extended break from work. Missing her mom, who had just been in a car accident, she flew to her hometown of Portland, Oregon.

“I went for a run in Forest Park. It was raining lightly, and the sound of rain tapping against the leaves, the smell of soil...” and that’s when it came to me: I am not a New Yorker.”

Nine months later, she packed her bags and moved to Portland, a decision that had major ripple effects. Not only did living in Portland reignite her relationship with David Chen, a lawyer in the Bay Area, it helped her switch gears professionally.

Brittany ran away from home when she was eight years old to escape an abusive situation and has lived without a permanent home in Portland, Oregon for much of the time since. During these years, she resided under bridges, in yurts in the forest, in a self-governed encampment for people experiencing homelessness and even in a treehouse before landing in a community called Agape Village.

After just four months of living at Agape, Brittany, now 36 years old, transitioned into her own two-bedroom apartment.

“Agape Village gave me a safe space to just be me,” she says. “It showed me that I needed to really get a hold of my life. I had been in the wind a long time.”

Santiago Garza Martinez, now 47, was a young man when he started working for Anne Amie Vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley in 1999. He began as an equipment operator, and today, 21 years later, he’s the field manager, overseeing a crew of 38 vineyard workers, all but eight of whom are seasonal employees. They weed, plant vines, and pick Pinot Noir grapes for Anne Amie’s acclaimed bottles. And like many seasonal farmworkers, their access to health care is precarious at best.

“The majority of the farmworkers in my crew don’t have primary care physicians,” Garza Martinez says. Even if they did, paying for the care would be a challenge for many of them. There are 2.5 to 3 million farmworkers in the United States, and many lack access to health insurance, according to Silvia Partida, CEO of the Texas-based National Center for Farmworker Health.

By intervening early, often with small rent payments, a Portland shelter kept nearly 100 families out of homelessness last year, saving thousands of dollars in future rehousing costs.

Portland, Oregon, has been a pioneer in using the trendy mini-homes as homeless shelters, but debates about the effectiveness of the approach persist.Since late December, home for Jonathan G. has been an eight-by-eight-foot shelter on a parking lot in southwest Portland, Oregon. Inside, there’s just enough room for a mattress and some shelves. But the tiny pre-fabricated structure has something very important to its lone occupant: a door that locks.

“Before, I’d go to lunch and come home [to my tent] and half my stuff was taken,” says G., who has been living in homelessness since 2021 and requested anonymity. “Here, you don’t have to worry about leaving your place and having stuff stolen.”

Faced with an influx of homeless neighbors, a Southeast Portland neighborhood association got creative.

On a chilly December day three years ago, I made the radical decision to get to know my houseless neighbors. This was at the height of the pandemic, when a homeless camp had formed around Sunnyside Environmental School, and members of the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association decided to introduce ourselves.

When Rukaiyah Adams took the podium at Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, two weeks ago to announce Phil and Penny Knight’s $400 million donation to the 1803 Fund her voice wavered with emotion. It’s understandable why: Thanks to the contributions of the Nike founder and his wife, the scale of the assets she’ll be managing as chair of the newly formed fund will be game-changing for Portland’s Black community, which her family has been a part of for four generations.
“At $400 million, I’ll be managing almost more than all Black women in venture capital,” Adams tells me by phone a week later. “I don’t think there’s a Black woman who has ever raised more than a few million dollars for a historically Black community.”

Alex "Fitz" Fitzgerald volunteers in the kitchen of the PorchLight Eastgate shelter in Bellevue, Washington. One day last summer when he was cooking, shortly after the facility opened, a deer wandered up to the back patio, where everyone could see it through the cafeteria’s floor-to-ceiling glass windows. "It lifted everybody up," says Fitz, who was formerly unhoused. "People started breaking out their cell phones, taking live feeds, ya know? Being close to nature has a psychological effect. It makes them think about their wellness."

On a single night in January 2022, 582,462 people were experiencing homelessness in the United States. Sixty percent were staying in locations like emergency shelters or in accommodations provided by transitional housing programs, and 40 percent were living on the street or somewhere similar, according to an annual U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development report. (The pandemic impacted the accuracy of homelessness data collection in 2021, however, and the number of people without a home is likely far higher.) Meanwhile, across the country, many housing advocates and government officials are embracing a practical short-term solution to the homelessness crisis: the rapid construction of tiny-home villages—some with upward of 50 units, others with just 10 tiny homes, or pods. The hope is that with access to a personal, lockable shelter and some essential services (laundry and showers, as well as housing and employment assistance programs), unsheltered people will be able to find permanent, affordable housing quicker than if they were still fending for themselves on the streets.

In Oregon, one of the states at the forefront of the country’s homelessness crisis, cities like Portland and Salem have already invested in tiny-home communities. The City of Portland alone has contracted with five different tiny-house makers to develop six new Safe Rest Villages using American Rescue Plan Act funds. Tiny-home villages, which have appeared in states from Oregon, Washington, and California to Texas, Michigan, and Massachusetts, have gotten a fair amount of press for their ability to be a part of the emergency response to the crisis. We spoke to three residents of micro-shelter communities in Oregon to get a sense of what the tiny homes are actually like to live in and how the alternative-housing villages function.