What immediately strikes you in the largest mini-house settlement for the homeless in the USA: how brightly colored everything is here. The artist Zach Hsieh has painted the 117 houses with candidates from his casting show “Instant Influencer”. You can now see sunsets on the walls, butterflies, roses, laughing hearts, cartoon characters and grinning turtles munching on melons. “The people who come here have experienced very bad things,” says Hsieh, who painted happy bumblebees and friendly monsters on a house: “Art should be a distraction and bring a little joy.”
The settlement is located in Highland Park, an area in northeast Los Angeles, right off Interstate 110, one of the busiest roads in the United States, next to which – and this is important – hardly anyone wants to live. White tarpaulins all around, three meters high, protect against noise and smog. Inside, in the houses, you discover the three things that homeless people often want.
In the mini-house settlements, homeless people have the bare minimums to live on for a limited time: security, bed and shelves, sanitary facilities as well as psychological counseling and help with finding a job.
(Photo: PATRICK T. FALLON / AFP)
First: a bed and a roof over your head, plus a lock on the door. So protection and privacy. Many report that they have to sleep outside on the street with their eyes open, otherwise they would be harassed, beaten up or, really, robbed. Second: a storage facility to lock off, otherwise you would always have to carry all your possessions around with you. Now you can put your things on shelves, whether it’s clothes, pots, photo albums or just water bottles. Third, the most important: electricity and air conditioning, showers, toilets, washing machines in common areas. So you don’t have to lie on the hot asphalt at 40 degrees Celsius in summer and can wash yourself and your clothes or charge your phone. All things that you take for granted if you are not homeless. The first residents moved in at the beginning of November, and the word that one hears most often when visiting: Dignity. Would.
Such a house has six square meters of floor space, inside there is a bed and a shelf; in front of it a tiny entrance area for a folding chair or a plant. It’s pretty much the opposite of luxury, but neither are people supposed to live here forever; They should be here for a maximum of six to eight months. There is help with drug problems, psychological counseling and offers for further training and job search. At best, homeless people should only live here for 90 days and then move to another, better place to stay.
What else is there: Tables and chairs made of iron as a meeting place for the residents, three meals a day; Two security guards around the clock guarding the only entrance to this mini-settlement, which was built in just three months in a parking lot that no one had used anyway.
Outside the tiny houses, residents can meet and have their meals.
(Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP)
“I am absolutely thrilled,” says Maria Pernudi. She lives with her husband just two blocks away, next to Arroyo Seco Park: “It’s much better than having to sleep under that underpass over there. It’s safe here, people can get help and get back on their feet.”
That is one, the positive reading of these settlements, of which there are now six in Los Angeles, all in the north of the city. Alderman Kevin de Leon is the big proponent of non-profit settlements Hope of the Valley organized and funded by both the city and private donations – the largest in the US cost $ 5.1 million, plus $ 55 a day per resident; that’s $ 3,300 a month, a lot of money. “It’s about giving a little hope to people whose lives have been shattered into thousands of pieces,” says de Leon: “This crisis affects us all.”
De Leon wants to become mayor of Los Angeles, one of the most important issues in the election campaign in the coming year: homelessness in California. According to very conservative estimates, there are currently more than 200,000 homeless in the US state on the Pacific coast, more than half of the homeless in the US; in the Los Angeles district there are more than 60,000, and the question is then: A mini-house settlement with a total of 224 beds in 117 houses – that should be the solution?
Many Californians would rather send the homeless into the desert
Another approach that one hears very often and behind the scenes from numerous Californians: transporting the homeless in buses from the residential areas and accommodating them in homes away from the big cities in the east of the state – in the desert. Only because they have already tried it in individual cases: Almost everyone who is carted into this desert on the bus and put in a prison-like structure is back on the beach a few days later. Nobody likes to be carted away and locked up.
Recently, numerous prejudices against the homeless have been stoked. “Most of them are drug addicts and insane, we can no longer accept that,” said right-wing populist radio presenter Larry Elder. The message behind it: You don’t want them to live on the streets where you have your houses! Many Californians have developed an attitude called “Not in My Backyard”. Solutions, yes, but not where you live – better buses into the desert.
The Tiny Home Village is a completely different approach, more like “Yes, in My Backyard,” and you can see the real concept when you drive over to the Chandler Boulevard development in North Hollywood. From above it looks like a pizza slice shaped Monopoly field. Nobody wanted this property: much too small for a factory, unsuitable for residential buildings. There was rubbish lying around, it stank – now there are 40 houses for 75 residents.
So the idea: Find that one city-owned property that nobody wants in as many areas of LA as possible: a run-down roller hockey field or an unused parking lot, for example. According to Hope of Valley, such a settlement can be built in just 90 days and the cost of a house can be reduced to less than $ 6,000; currently it’s about $ 40,000.
There are currently 1500 beds in mini-settlements in the LA area
The city council has granted a $ 1.2 billion aid package to fight homelessness, and by 2025 there should be thousands of beds in mini-settlements in LA, now there are 1,500 total. If each of them is used by more than one person, no one should Staying for more than eight months would be a quick fix and then get to the heart of the problem.
Scientists agree that there is far too little affordable housing. The main reason for homelessness is the rapid rise in rents and purchase prices – which, by the way, can also be observed in German cities. In the USA, there is also the fact that social security and state aid are interpreted as a preliminary stage to socialism.
“I would like to have a normal life, in an apartment,” says William Jackson. He lives in the Alexandria Park Settlement (103 houses, 200 beds) just a few minutes away from the one on Chandler Boulevard. He had slept in his car for six years, now he lives in a squeaky-colored house that gives him one thing above all else: dignity and hope.