Looks like Olympia, Washington’s Poor Peoples Union (PPU) beat London’s Homeless Front UK (HFUK) to the punch in their effort to replicate and adapt the Dignity model.

Here’s the front page story from Sunday’s Olympian followed by the PPU’s Declaration of Victory.

HFUK is delighted, of course, by the victory of our brothers and sisters in Olympia, Washington. We wish them many more victories along the way to building the green, sustainable, urban village that will improve not only the quality of their own lives but the quality life in general for all the citizens of Olympia, Washington.

“Olympia’s tent city looks to Portland camp as model”

Subtitle: “Dignity Village, once illegal, now close to signing 10-year lease on site”

Matt Batcheldor
The Olympian

PORTLAND – Aaron Smith flew and bummed rides to get from Homer, Alaska, to the outskirts of Portland, walking for miles to reach his destination. In the middle of the night, he planted his tent on a little plot the locals call Dignity Village.

Smith, 19, awoke to the sight of sunlight filtering through the makeshift houses and tents on a 0.7-acre plot of what might be the nation’s only tent city allowed on city property.

The camp provides a model that residents of Olympia’s tent city hope to follow. As Olympia decides what to do with the tent city here, it can look two hours to the south to see one that has evolved from an illegal encampment to being close to signing a 10-year lease on city property.

Dignity Village is home to 60 people in their late teens to late 60s, most of whom were homeless when they arrived. It has a communal kitchen, propane-heated showers, four portable toilets and an office with six computers with Internet access, as well as a telephone and a mailing address.

Smith, who says he had been homeless off and on for a year and two months, said he found
out about Dignity Village on the Internet. It’s a place to stay while he looks for work in Portland, as the rent in the city there is too expensive, he said.

“It’s an alternative between that and being homeless, sitting in a doorway somewhere,” he said.

The location has its flaws.

The constant drone of low-flying planes from nearby Portland International Airport fills the camp. To the north are piles of rotting leaves at Portland’s compost station; to the south is the state prison. It’s 2 miles to the nearest grocery store, and rain leaves big puddles, one of which the campers called Lake Dignity.

Still, camp residents say it’s a good alternative for people who can’t get into shelters because there’s no room or want to avoid shelters’ strict rules, echoing comments by residents of Olympia’s tent city.

The camp is self-sufficient; it pays its power and sanitation bills and gets building materials and money from donations. Only the front office has electricity.

Elsewhere in the camp, “Light, cooking, heat either comes from a 12-volt car battery or propane,” said Laura Brown, vice chairwoman of the camp.

The site began as a collection of tents, similar to Olympia’s, and now contains mostly structures made of discarded lumber, plywood sheets and the like. New residents sleep in a tent under a tarp-roofed shelter; longer-term residents have makeshift houses, one with a rooftop deck.

Dignity Village history

Police rarely have to visit the site, said Sgt. Brian Schmautz, spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau.

“They’re pretty self–contained,” he said. “They do kind of their own law enforcement deal.”
Police records show officers have made 82 runs there since October 2001, shortly after the camp moved to its current site. The number of runs has fallen each year, from 24 in 2001 to three last year.

It wasn’t always this way. The first year of the tent city, in 2000, consisted of a series of showdowns between residents of the then-illegal camp and the Portland police.

Police evicted the campers, who moved to another city site. The cycle of evictions and moves continued, attracting the city’s and news media’s attention.

Political support for the tent city grew, and in September 2001, the Portland City Commission voted to allow the campers to stay for 60 days on part of the leaf-composting site, Sunderland Yard. More than five years later, they’re still there.

Campground status

In 2004, city commissioners voted to legitimize the site by giving it campground status, bringing the makeshift houses and tents into its zoning codes. Dignity Village is about to sign a 10-year lease.

It is the only government–sanctioned tent city on city property in the United States, said Michael Stoops, acting director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C. Tent cities elsewhere, including in Seattle, have met the same fate as Olympia’s: local governments have attempted to shut them down.

Olympia’s tent city took over a city lot Feb. 1 to protest the first day of the pedestrian–interference ordinance, which bans sitting and lying on parts of city sidewalks. The organizers, members of the Olympia-based Poor Peoples Union, said they also wanted to bring attention to the homeless issue and rally for a permanent tent city similar to Dignity Village.

After city officials’ repeated demands that the campers leave, Olympia police broke up Camp Quixote eight days later. The tents were moved to a site at Out of the Woods homeless shelter in west Olympia. The owner of the site, the Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation, says it will allow the camp to stay there for three months.

Inspiration for camp

Rob Richards, an advocate for the homeless who helped found the Poor Peoples Union, said Dignity Village was the inspiration for Camp Quixote.

“I think the No. 1 thing that inspired us was just the sense of community that people have,” he said. “It was a group of people that were together a long time that pulled together.”
Richards envisions a permanent camp such as Portland’s, with structures, not tents. He wants to have a commune that grows food and is self-sufficient. He said it might take two years to find a site. In the meantime, the group met last week with a half-dozen churches about moving the tent city to another church site after it leaves its current grounds.

Differing viewpoints

The city of Olympia continues to oppose having a tent city at any site, and advocates for the homeless disagree about whether tent cities are a good idea.

City spokeswoman Cathie Butler said tent cities sap resources that would be better spent on transitional and permanent housing and that solving homelessness is a regional concern, not just Olympia’s.

“There’s a reason that structured housing is preferred,” she said. “You can have amenities like toilets and running water and basic life essentials.”

Portland leaders have declared Dignity Village a success. John Doussard, a spokesman for Mayor Tom Potter, said, “Tom’s been a tremendous supporter of Dignity Village. Very much a fan. He’s always been a fan.”

Potter ran for mayor in support of the village in 2004 and defeated then-City Commissioner Jim Francesconi, an outspoken opponent of the village.

Francesconi did not return a call seeking comment.
Stoops said that within his organization, the National Coalition for the Homeless, leaders disagree about the usefulness of tent cities. He supports them.

“It’s actually a growing movement, and I think it’s homeless people wanting to take more control over their own lives,” he said. “There’s not enough shelter or housing slots available in any city.”

Brown said most people use the camp until they can find traditional housing.

What residents say

In Olympia, camp resident Kandace Jones praised the safety of the city’s downtown tent city during a City Council meeting Feb. 6.

“As temporary as it might be, it’s safe,” she told the council.

Camp Dignity’s residents also praise their camp’s safety and effectiveness.

Brandy Morgan, 37, said she came to the camp two weeks ago, after her husband began a sentence at the penitentiary next door for felony possession of a firearm. He is set to be released Feb. 23, 2008, she said.

Morgan said that without an income, she found herself on the street. She said she’s working to get back on her feet and that the camp is a safe place that gives her peace of mind while she looks for work.

Resident Mark Riche, who said he has been homeless intermittently for 20 years, found a place to stay through the Homeless Veterans’ Reintegration Program. He’s moving into a house that offers free rent for two years, and he hopes to restart his carpentry career.

For tent cities to be useful, “The big part is just getting them started … without the government shutting them down,” he said.

Gaye Reyes, 62, who has been at Dignity Village for six years, had some advice for Olympia.

“I want to encourage Olympia to allow this,” she said. “Give them at least a year and ask them, ‘How did they do?’ ”

Matt Batcheldor covers the city of Olympia for The Olympian. He can be reached at 360-704-6869 or mbatcheldor [at] theolympian [dot] com. On the Web

Dignity Village’s Web site is www.dignityvillage.org. Resident Tim McCarthy is in charge of the site, which is maintained at the camp by McCarthy and other residents.

Olympia’s tent city

RULES: No drugs, alcohol, theft or violence.

GOVERNMENT: Leaders of the Poor Peoples Union say the tent city is run by majority vote.

HISTORY: Camp Quixote began when its residents pitched tents on a downtown city lot Feb. 1 to protest the pedestrian-interference ordinance.

FUTURE: The Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation will allow the camp to be on land it owns for three months. The camp could move to another church site afterward. The congregation has been told by the city of Olympia that it needs a conditional-use permit to maintain the camp.

Portland’s Dignity Village

RULES: No violence, theft, alcohol or drugs or constant disruptive behavior. Everyone must contribute 10 hours a week working in the camp.

GOVERNMENT: The camp has its own democratic government, and all residents must sign an agreement and can be evicted if they don’t follow rules, a camp leader says.

HISTORY: Camp Dignity began when eight homeless people pitched five tents on public property in downtown Portland in December 2000.

FUTURE: The camp is on the verge of signing a 10-year lease.

GET INVOLVED

People are invited to share their thoughts about Olympia’s tent city at 7 p.m. Monday at Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 2200 East End St. N.W.

Poor Peoples Union declares victory, prepares for next stage

Olympia, Washington — The Poor People’s Union (PPU) won a standoff with city officials last month. Despite ongoing objections, the PPU won the right to re-establish the tent city, Camp Quixote, on a new site. According to one of the organizers of Camp Quixote, Rob Richards, “This is a major victory. We get to stay together. We get a place for now, and dialogue has been opened for a permanent site. We developed leadership, organization, and a plan. Now we’re getting ready for what comes next.”

On February 1st, the day that the City of Olympia banned sitting, panhandling or performing on public sidewalks, the PPU set up a tent city in downtown Olympia. Over the next seven days, the encampment grew to 50 people with 25 tents, a kitchen, portable toilet and communal hall. Throughout that time, residents organized trash brigades to clean up the neighborhood, made decisions collectively, and banned drugs and alcohol. Support came from throughout Olympia.

During the standoff, as poor people organized to demand their rights, local government and police threatened to destroy what was built. According to a PPU press release, “Our crime is acting independently and effectively, being organized, and caring for all the people of this community especially each other — those without permanent shelter ?” Tim, Organizer with the PPU, emphasized the importance of the tent city, “This is about basic human rights. This is like the civil rights movement for poor people. People are isolated out in the woods — out of sight, out of mind. But here together we’re safe and able to accomplish a lot.”

On February 6th, the city manager and police chief entered the camp and gave a verbal order to disperse. At the City Council meeting that night, City officials made it clear that they were not going to change their minds: the camp had to go and could not be set up anywhere else. The City wanted the camp community to simply scatter and disappear.

The day after the city council meeting, Carol Harmon, a PPU member, was arrested on a five-year-old warrant after she vocally challenged the city council about their threats to shut down Camp Quixote, “I’m one of the homeless people you’re trying to run out of town, but I’m not going anywhere.”

City officials, concerned primarily with development and tourism, sought to defend property over people. The city government showed little concern for poor people who have a right to housing. On February 8, the City distributed fliers: on one side it promised the arrest of Camp Quixote residents and on the other listed phone numbers for shelters. Many at the camp felt insulted and suggested that the numbers were a PR gesture. According to Kandace Jones, an organizer with the PPU, “They gave us a bunch of numbers for referral services. Most of the numbers are for places that don’t have any available space and some of the numbers don’t even work. They don’t care about us.”

She when on to say, “The goals of Camp Quixote are to get people and the City to realize that there is no option left for us. We want land that’s ours, that we can build on, that the people can run. Real democracy — not this sham and police threats. We are people.”

Jesse Shultz, a PPU member, explained further, “We have millions living on the streets around this country. We have rights. We are here to demand our rights: the right to freedom of assembly, to housing and to live. If you structure society in this way, you should expect [tent cities] like ours.”

The American people have to demand that this country provide adequate housing for all people — but the fight is also bigger. Homelessness in this system is incurable. It results from the elimination of jobs by corporations looking for the cheapest labor and using automated production that eliminates the need for workers. The fight for housing is an important part of building a movement for a new society based on human need, not private property and corporate profit.

Homeless Front feature in the new issue of The Pavement, London’s premier homeless magazine. There’s a centrespread photo and Cobbett’s copy appears verbatim below:

Homeless Front Launch

Homeless Front UK, who featured in Issue 15, are practicing what they preach and have launched their Out of the Doorways campaign.

The campaign, which officially began 11th December at St Pancras Church Hall, is based on an internationally successful model of self-help, and the formation of alternative shelters for those on the streets.

Jack Tafari, of Homeless Front UK, told The Pavement: ‘There are 10 fewer people sleeping in the gateway on Surrey Street and in various and assorted doorways in Westminster today, because of the policy and action of the Homeless Front’s Out of the Doorways campaign.

‘Of the 11 homeless people that the Homeless Front UK has housed since its formation, 10 are currently housed at our current HQ or have transitioned on to better circumstances. Only one individual was unable to live up to the five basic rules of our residence agreement and is currently living back on the street.’

Asked to explain the basic premise of Homeless Front UK (HFUK), Tafari said that it is about ‘housing former rough sleepers without the help of any government funding whatsoever and without burdening the British taxpayer. Because one of the bases on which we do not discriminate is that of nationality, HFUK is able to provide shelter to foreign nationals who do not meet the criteria of many of the night shelters and hostels.’

This new organisation is currently applying for charitable status and has begun to secure funding for its activity.

· Cobbett’

― For more information about the Out of the Doorways campaign meetings, go to their website, of call Jack Tafari on 07944 056135. For information in Polish, ring Karolina on 07748 839560.

We’ve upgraded the site to a newer version of the excellent Open Source content management system Drupal. Stay tuned whilst we iron out any bugs, and add a photo page.

Homeless Front UK held its first annual general meeting on 11th January 2007 for the purpose of adopting a constitution and electing its officers.

The constitution we adopted is the standard one recommended by the Charity Commission for newly forming charitable associations. Our association has four objectives. In no particular order they are

― To build community with love and respect;
― To provide more housing options for rough sleepers;
― To provide a clean, safe, drug and alcohol free place or places where people who might otherwise inhabit doorways or sidewalks can have their basic needs met until such time as they are able to access permanent housing;
― To build a green, sustainable, urban village.

We are pleased with the outcome of our elections. We now have officers with Jack Tafari elected chair, Lee Walker secretary, and Karolina Stempien treasurer. We are confident in the abilities of our newly elected officers and look forward to the coming year.

The HFUK began as a company of equals. And although we now have the officers required for legal constitution, we remain a company of equals in spirit and firm in our commitment to a rigorous, grassroots democracy.

There’s a tent city meeting again at St Pancras Church Hall on Monday, 18 December, 2006, sponsored by Homeless Front UK as part of its Out of the Doorways campaign. The meeting’s between 4 and 6 PM. The hall’s a nice space, there will be a speaker or two, lots of hot tea, real coffee, and, as it’s the season, eggnog and maybe a mince pie or two also. Everybody’s welcome to come join us.

This meeting we’ll be familiarizing ourselves with the DVD CD-ROM Tent City Toolkit, a multimedia grassroots primer that’s jam packed with all sorts of fascinating information about the tent city model we wish to replicate and adapt. We’ll also be setting up our site selection, media, and legal teams in preparation for January’s direct action. Mainly, though, this meeting will be about networking with interested parties and kicking it with our friends.

For more information about this and future Out of the Doorways meetings, ring Lee (07815 287 847), Leeroy (07708 771 895), or Jack (07944 056 135). For information in Polish, ring Karolina (07748 839 560). And if you miss out on one of the fliers going around, keep an eye on the news section of the Homeless Front’s website.

Everyone’s welcome and we hope to see you there!

Homeless Front UK’s Out of the Doorways campaign kicks off officially this coming Monday, 11 December, at the St Pancras Church Hall, Lancing Street, WC1, which is conveniently located on bendy bus route #73 and just a two minute walk from Euston Station.

Our campaign kicks off at 4 PM and we hope you will join us there. There’ll be lots of hot tea, real coffee, interesting speakers and people, and a full-on film crew who are filming our campaign for a sanctioned tent city for a documentary.

The church hall only holds seventy people and, as our campaign is generating considerable interest and support, it would be best to get there on time. For more information ring Lee (07815 287 847), Leeroy (07708 771 895), or Jack (07944 056 135). For information in Polish, ring Karolina (07748 839 560).

Everyone is welcome, we hope you come join us and we look forward to seeing you there!

‘Replicating Dignity” sees ink in issue 15 of the Pavement, the free magazine for London’s homeless. Here’s the text of the article:

Dignity Village, the former tent city in Portland, Oregon, is the greatest accomplishment of the American poor since Rosa Parks refused to get off the bus. It is the physical embodiment of a dream and hard work on the part of the most oppressed people in this society. Imagine a homeless community coming together with a challenge to a draconian piece of legislation, a camping ban, and living in tents on public land! Tents were a giant step up from the doorways they had been living in.

Dignity’s ‘original soldiers” refused to disband and return to the doorways despite being force-marched by the police from site to site. They were swept five times! Their tactic of the shopping cart parade as they circled Jericho, waiting for cracks to appear in the City’s walls, captured the public imagination.

The Homeless Front’s tenacity and persistence eventually paid off. Dignity Village won legal sanction on its sixth site in 2004 when it was officially designated a campground under an extant but little known state statute.

Dignity Village was birthed in the fire of direct action. When Portland’s camping ban was challenged on two constitutional grounds in September 2000, its homeless community immediately began organising its Out of the Doorways campaign. History had thrown down a gauntlet and Portland’s homeless admirably rose to the challenge and picked that gauntlet up.

The original Out of the Doorways campaign was as popular as it was inclusive. Right away it attracted media attention and not only from the street newspaper that was its initial sponsor. It also pulled aboard a great deal of support in the wider community. Its supporters included everyone from artists to architects to attorneys, from poets to radio personalities to presidents of family foundations, from students to religious leaders from churches and the local mosque to everyday homeless people. Much of Dignity’s vision sprang from those early, tumultuous meetings.

When the Homeless Front’s first eight soldiers occupied their first piece of public ground in December 2000, they were armed with the vision of the green, sustainable, urban village they wanted to create. They fought hard for the sanction they finally won and their dwellings evolved from the tents they began with into the eco-friendly structures and community spaces villagers enjoy today. Dignity’s most recent proposal to the City of Portland says, ‘Dignity Village is the only place-based community in this town that practices grass roots democracy with an ecological vision. It is the only walkable community not invaded by cars, and it is the most cost efficient self-help model for transcending homelessness in the nation.”

The Dignity model has numerous advantages over more traditional shelter facilities. Most people are homeless for a period of less than a year. Communities like Dignity are flexible and expandable and are therefore able to accommodate fluctuations in demand. Compared to conventional facilities, tent cities are inexpensive to build and operate. They also minimise impact on the land they occupy and are easily transported and moved when necessary. When combined with more permanent facilities such as showers, toilets, cooking and washing facilities, community spaces, common areas, and offices, communities like Dignity are designed to meet the needs of the temporarily displaced.

It should be pointed out that the term ‘tent cities” is a bit of a misnomer and is not meant to imply that housing structures are limited to only nylon and metal pole construction. Dignity Village, for example, currently has what is probably the largest assembled collection of eco-friendly dwellings using cob and straw bale constructive techniques in the Pacific Northwest.

The Dignity model is one that cries out for replication and adaptation to the current British political, legal and social geography. Too many people in London are relegated to living in doorways and under bridges for a number of reasons. Many homeless people including couples and A8 workers are underserved in the current configuration of social services. And there is a built-in disincentive to seeking and finding steady employment in many of the hostels that makes them a less-than-desirable option for those actively seeking work.

Right now and to this end London’s newly-formed Homeless Front UK in its current Out of the Doorways campaign is holding meetings and looking at promising sites on which to set up our first tent city. We have to help us in our endeavour some funding and a Tent Cities Toolkit jointly developed by Dignity Village and media partners Kwamba Productions. We urge all homeless people and activists interested in getting a sanctioned campsite to ring us at (0) 7944 056 135 or contact us through http://squat.net/homelessfront/.

We’re pleased to post playwright Helen Hill’s magnificent short story “THEATER OF THE UNDETERRED” which reads like a play within a play. The story’s set in Dignity Village and namechecks the original Out of the Doorways campaign that led to the birth of the Village.

THEATER OF THE UNDETERRED

On my way out of town, I veer off at the Hope Chest Thrift Store; suddenly what I’m wearing feels hopelessly wrong. I grab the first $2 dress that seems to say: “sincere and humble playwright” Perfect, except for the shiny faux gold buttons. Too upscale resale. I buy it anyway, and realize I’m in way over my head even as I hand over the two bucks, realize I’m rushing headlong into a void in a polyester dress that smells like a stranger’s perfume.

God I’m nervous. A bundle of copies of the new play are on the seat beside me, fresh and throbbing like a raw, chapped newborn, tentative and untried. Going public with new work always feels like stretching my neck across a chopping block, but to top it off, the destination of this new work is an infamous village full of strangers whose lives I can’t begin to imagine.

Almost there, I think. But where is this place? I’m lost in the outback. Lonely industrial warehouses scattered among peeling farmhouses, weed-choked idle acres and the whine of converging freeways in the distance; I’m out where God lost his shoes, it seems. Where else would the city of Portland put an acre full of homeless people?

I spy a low patchwork of tar-paper shacks and tents like a jumble of hodge-podge hives, hard to see from the road, but I recognize the yellow plastic “Dignity Village” flag atop a tower of angled sticks, snapping in a chilly wind funnelling down the Columbia Gorge.

I’ve seen pictures on the web, on television and in the newspapers, but this is not what I expected. I imagined the Village would be showcased like the paradigm busting oddity that it is: an autonomous homeless encampment run entirely by the 65 plus or minus residents and granted tenuous status to exist independently (from day to day) by their uneasy landlords; the City of Portland. It’s three years old, and has been written about in the NY Times, the Italian press, and provided a model for homeless camps in Montreal, Japan, Seattle, LA, London and Denver. With all that, it’s easy to miss.

Several years ago, when a new law banning camping within city limits was passed, Portland’s growing homeless population found themselves prodded, poked, tasered, booked, fined and jailed for the crime of having nowhere to sleep. Pockets of poor were swept daily from encampments under bridges, bushes, inside doorways and off dead end streets in the dead of night and told to move along, move along. But there was nowhere to move along to. The shelters were bursting, the social workers exhausted. Long lines began forming at 9 every morning for a chance at a bed 12 hours later and a few hours sleep in a room often full of contagious, coughing people. Couples were split, possessions unsecured, no pets allowed.

The cold winter of 2001 found a core group of homeless fighting back in an effective and original way. With planning and staging, the “Out of the Doorways Campaign” was born; a series of agit-prop actions designed to call attention to the lack of affordable housing and the plight of the homeless. The activists conducted stately parades through downtown Portland with loaded shopping carts, carrying signs and chanting. They camped in strategic places such as open greenways beside upscale housing developments. Wealthy condo owners opened their floor to ceiling curtains to enjoy an espresso in the morning sun and found themselves face to face with tent cities that had bloomed overnight. Newspapers were full of articles about a moveable band of humans, undeterred, with a simple message: “We are a river of people with nowhere to go, and the river is growing wider every day”

Along the way, they acquired a name for their vision of a place to rest and arrest the downward spiral. Dignity Village; a Zion in the heart and mind where fruit trees grow, birds sing, and it’s safe to sleep at night. It took a year, but a red-faced city finally caved to pressure and allowed them to occupy a near-acre in a thinly populated area out by the airport. The vision was realized, though no one ever guessed Zion would look like a wind-swept, asphalt-covered leaf composting yard surrounded by a heavy chain link fence.

I park across from the Village’s neighbor to the south, a sprawling county corrections unit with a twenty foot high razor wire fence, grab the stack of plays and duck as a pair of F15 fighter jets screams into the sky from the nearby National Guard runway. Perfect placement on the part of a city still intent on pressing these independent undeterred into a mold. On either side of them and in the sky above are constant reminders of the power and authority of the military industrial complex, of the system they’ve been displaced out of, are bucking.

There’s a sluggish green slough channeled beside the entrance, (full of jet de-icer run-off and two headed ducks deformed by chemicals, I later learn), leading to what appears to be a small plywood security shack. I see an American flag in the window and a little Scotty guard dog yapping, tail wagging furiously, pulling tight on his chain to greet me. His loopy fur sprouts over button eyes, and I reach down to clear his view of the world. I have to laugh, he looks like he’s about to come apart, he’s so happy, and for a moment I forget how scared I am to cross this unknown threshold, and in that moment, a beaming man in a fluoro-orange vest emerges from the shack with a clipboard and I think this security post seems more like a fragile rib cage protecting a heart.

“Hi! Welcome to Dignity Village!”
“I’m here about a play. I called last week.”
“Oh right, we talked about that at the meeting last night. I’m Ben.”

He extends a warm hand. How silly of me to worry about gold buttons on a dress, he is looking into my eyes. I look into his and understand there won’t be any awkward questions asked of me, no quick judgments of the sort I’m used to. He wants to know only what I want to tell him. I feel exposed and accepted at the same time. Forgiven. No need to invent or expand, every reason not to. Let’s just get on with the business of being human.

Ben leads me past dozens of plants in black plastic pots reaching for a weak late winter sun. There are raised boxes, compost piles, container gardens everywhere. They’ve turned Joni Mitchell’s paved over paradise back into a green Garden of Eden in an upside down reclamation project: they’ve buried the thick pavement with worms and dirt, tomatoes and dill.

We enter the Common Room, a large, circular structure tagged together with old windows, plastic sheeting, warped formica and plywood panels. Inside are couches that look like they’ve been thrown off a cliff. Seats torn from cars. Cats dozing. A can of chilli with a spoon stuck in it heats up on a blazing wood stove leaking cherry light at the seams. Old, young and middle-aged, any race. Laughter, dogs, ghetto blankets. There’s a line of faucets to one side with an open drain for brushing teeth and washing pots. Ben disappears and someone says “have a seat.”

A squall outside builds, hits, a drumming rain deafens on a roof built around a center pole, built with anything that tends to shed water: wood, plastic, tin, cardboard. Raindrops leak and sizzle on the wood stove. I just sit with the din, it’s impossible to talk, sit mute with copies of the play in my lap and try not to feel like an idiot. I can feel people looking at me. Oh God, have I made a terrible mistake? I distract myself from this thought and read the hand painted signs on the “walls” One has the five rules of the Village. #1: No violence to others #2: No violence to yourself. #3: No stealing. #4: No drugs or alcohol within 220 yards #5: No loud or obnoxious behavior.

Someone passes me rice in a saucepan with a fork in it. I take a bite and I am two things; I am a hopeful, irrelevant playwright from a fantasy world where people can indulge in the luxury of theatre and I am a grateful guest in this large living room that has a deep sense of common ground, of friendship, failure, recovery.

The squall subsides and a woman across the room flashes me a smile.
“Hi, my name’s Chocolate.” Her boyfriend takes a long drag on his cigarette and exhales smoke through a metal hole in his throat. I try not to stare at it. It seems rude not to explain myself, so I say; “I’m here about a play, are any of you interested in being in a play?”
“Oh, Honey”, says Chocolate, “We just don’t do that kind of thing.”

The stack of plays in my lap suddenly feels very heavy. Maybe I can say the rain made the ink run and the plays are ruined. Maybe that way I can leave Dignity Village with some Dignity Intact. A man in green army fatigues sitting beside me senses the kamikaze dive of my self-confidence and says, “Don’t worry, Jack will be here soon.” He says Jack like a nurse would say The Doctor.
“First time here?”
“Yeah.”
“Want a tour?”
“Sure.”

My guide’s name is Dave, he walks with a limp. Tells me he’s been at the Village a few weeks. Got his leg mashed on a job and couldn’t get disability, couldn’t work for over a year. Lost everything. Things are looking up though, he tells me. Lucky he found this place. Now he’s working steady hours driving truck, saving up for a place of his own. He proudly lifts a blue plastic tarp doorway to show me his cot in the windowless Quonset hut tacked on to one side. It’s too dark in there to see much, but I say “cool” anyway.

Dave shows me the Council Chambers, just off the Common Room, explaining that this is where the business of the Village is conducted. The room is full of light from windows screwed together in a rough circle, just big enough for a large round plywood table painted with a many-pointed star. Dave tells me each point reaches out and includes those sitting around the table, keeping everyone a part of the discussion. A ghostly visage of Jesus is pencilled on one section of wall, and stacked up ten feet high
against another are dozens of loaves of Wonderbread, making a solid circus of yellow, red and blue balloons with the word “Wonder” over and over again.

“Sometimes we get a whole truckload donated”, Dave tells me. “It’s months old, but it never molds. What do you think they zap it with?” He tells me they use it for kindling to start fires.
“Would you eat that shit?”

The squall lets up, and Dave offers to show me the “neighborhood”. We walk a narrow path on raised pallets above standing water; between cluttered dens, tents, box structures built on skids. “Here’s where Hippie lives”, he says, “and that’s Jack’s Chilli Pad. Jesus lives over there”, he’s pointing now to a formless mound, like an animal den made of whatever. Jesus emerges carrying a dead duck by the feet. He tells us he killed it with a slingshot.
“Really?” I say. Jesus laughs, pins me with his eyes.
‘You white people don’t know nothing’, Jesus says, swinging the duck at me. ‘Here, you take it. Cook it.’
‘Um. No thanks, I don’t eat duck, but thanks.’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Jesus says and Dave steps in and rescues me again, tells me not to pay any attention to him. Tells me Jesus lives to tease, loves to talk about how we owe his people 200 years of back rent.
‘Two hundred and FIFTY!’ sneers Jesus.

We go on our way. There are shopping carts full of odds and ends, rusted bicycle parts, dogs on long leashes, dog shit, doorways made of shredded blankets, upended tables, tarps. Piles of anything discarded that might be useful; lumber stuck with nails, broken windows, torn sections of ancient countertops. A woman named Sunshine invites me into her structure. There’s barely room to turn around, but she’s proud to show me her dry bed, a clean rug on the floor, and a tiny corner kitchen with cups neatly on a shelf, a window hung with lace and colored glass beads.

‘We call this Lakefront Property’, Dave says, pointing to a wide, stagnant puddle of water in the middle of the Village. ‘We have sailboat races here sometimes’. Some tents on pallets perch on the edge, part in, part out of the scummy water. A fat rat scurries by. ‘Yeah, there’s tons of ’em. The dogs and cats are afraid of ’em.’

We circle back to the Common Area, where I sit again and wait for this man Jack, who I learn is the acting Chair of the Village Council. He arrives finally and I remember thinking: he looks dangerous. He moves slowly towards me, rolling a cigarette with thick fingers. Beaded dreads down to his waist. Tattoos. Looks at me with one cruel eye, one kind eye, and quietly, so quietly, says; ‘I used to be a porn star in Amsterdam.’ Oh. He lies down full length and slow on the cracked naugahyde couch and takes a deep drag off the cigarette, exhales, assessing me through a haze of smoke. ‘So, you’ve got a play for us?’ he says.

Keith, who’s just come from Bible study class, must be the appointed Village Crier. With a nod from Jack, he steps outside and shouts at the top of his lungs that a play is being read, and people should get their ass over. Ross shows up, a wiry man made of rubber with pigtails that end in corkscrews. His girlfriend, Chrysler Chelle smiles a shy, pirate smile and keeps saying no way, no way, but she stays, listening around the edges. Ginger-Julie arrives with her giant wolf dog named Crystal-Ann. There’s Patricia, a white-haired woman who likes to sweep, and Al-Amin, a strapping young man who carefully spells his name for me, making sure I understand there’s a dash in-between the Al and the Min, and while we wait, he sings a verse of the Koran in a strong, clear voice, looking straight into my eyes the whole time. And Kat, a beautiful young woman in an oversized man’s coat who asks Jack for a ‘monkey fuck’, which I watch and learn is when you light one cigarette off another.

We settle around the star points of the Council Room table, pass out the play, but before we can start we’re drowned out by another squall. I discreetly shift my chair away from a thin stream of coffee-colored water pooling in my lap as another pair of fighter jets screams into the sky, obliterating even the squall. But mouths around the table keep moving; they must know how to lip read. As the planes begin to fade to dull thunder, I take my hands from my ears and Ross shouts that they send up one jet for surveillance, two for reconnaissance, three’s a scramble, and four means Armageddon. ‘We’ll be the first to know when the world’s gonna end!’ He laughs, eyes wide.

‘We’re losing light,’ someone says. ‘Let’s get started.’ Okay. I introduce myself, explain how I was asked to write a play about community for an upcoming conference in Portland called the Village Building Convergence, and that once I’d written the play, which is based on a true story, I realized I’d be a hypocrite if I asked anyone else but the residents of Dignity Village to perform it. ‘So what’s it about?’

Well, twenty years ago, there was an old ramshackle hotel perched on the cliff edge of the sea, not too far from Portland. It was a thriving community, plenty rough around the edges. There used to be lots of places like it, this one was typical; for several decades it had been a low-rent haven for retirees, WWII and Vietnam Vets, old fishermen, cannery workers, waitresses and single moms who paid only $50 a month’s rent. There were painters, not-quite-famous-yet-poets, sculptors, motel maids, retired nurses and runaways. They fought together, drank together, pooled food stamps, watched each other’s kids, covered for each other, and ate together in shifts on a grimy, oilcloth-covered table in the main room. The hallways smelled like piss and fish stew, the wind off the ocean rattled the rotten windows, but the view was worth a million dollars. It was a functioning community; a pauper’s paradise.

And then one day, a woman with money, connections, and dreams of a theme hotel saw the place, recognized its possibilities, and bought it for a song. She later described the hotel as ’empty’ or variously ‘full of transients’ in interviews she gave to newspapers and glossy travel magazines that featured stories of her new venture. Immediately after she bought the place, she issued 30-day eviction notices to the tenants. They fought the eviction in court, asked for an extension, but had no ammunition, no funds, no connections. Pretty themes and dreams drive moneylenders, and the poor and the gritty walk every time. They never had a chance. Their community broke apart and their lives came undone in just 30 days. They left shreds of black cloth hung on every doorway when they left.

There were plenty of rumors when the tenants scattered twenty years ago. Someone said the old fisherman from the 2nd floor died under a bridge that winter. Others lost children to the state, or went alone into institutions. Moved into cars. Disappeared. It was over. The old hotel had a new beginning. The new owner became a celebrity of sorts, her renovated hotel touted as a charming place for people who love literature, (especially literature of the oppressed), and a haven to experience raging storms in soft armchairs with books and mulled wine at the elbow. A haven for people with plenty of havens. For a few hundred dollars a night, one could book the ocean view ‘Alice Walker’ room, with ‘The Color Purple’, a novel about growing up black and poor, beside the bed. Or the austere Meridel LeSueur room, complete with a collection of her stories about labor unions, welfare recipients and the Great Depression.

No one seemed to notice the irony. Perhaps they were too charmed by chintz, too lulled by lace. At any rate, an invisible social curtain descended to hide the flagrant paradoxes; the hotel was even named for a woman who offered free sanctuary to homeless artists at the turn of the century. Poverty: lovely to read about with mulled wine at the elbow, unlovely to witness.

Jack speaks first. He wants to read the part of the crusty old fisherman who works hard to hide his soft heart, but he wants to change him to an old Rasta fisherman named Winston. Fine. Kat wants the part of the single mom trying to go straight. But she wants to be a prostitute on the side. Okay. Ross wants to play the new owner. He’s dying to mince around in a dress on stage, he can’t stop giggling about wearing a dress. Um I don’t know, Ross. Ross has so many ideas, I think he’ll explode. Ginger Julie wants the part of the retired nurse. Al-Amin the Vietnam Vet. We start reading, but the focus keeps getting derailed, there are endless jabs at each other, a random diatribe against Bush, the War, the Weather. Jack gets a phone call and disappears. Parts get mixed up, we start over. Jack reappears. Start over again. I begin to get a feel for the chaos of homelessness, begin to learn how focus is a luxury born of ease and security.

It gets hard to see the words. Can we turn on a light, I say? They laugh at me. Electricity? I just made a joke. A propane tank appears and is set in the middle of the table like a bulky centerpiece. The squalls have passed, but now there is the roar of a blue sputtering torch and more chaos as the giant wolf dog Crystal Ann lunges at a thin cat which claws its way up the wall of ancient Wonderbread, and I sink further into embarrassed depression. I’m dying here, my naïve presumptions are killing me. This play is not only bad, this whole idea has been a long distance call to nowhere. What was I thinking? How many more pages do we have to endure till I can slink out of here?

But as darkness falls, there’s a shift in the mood. Ross and Al-Amin quit bickering, Crystal Ann is put on a leash, and the characters begin coming to life. We read past the part where the tenants find out they have 30 days to vacate, past the part where they decide to fight for their right to keep their home. ‘She can get a bank loan, why can’t we?’ they ask. ‘She calls us transients in the newspapers, but what’s more transient than people who stay at a place one weekend a year?’ ‘It’s about class’, the ghost authors tell the new owner when they visit her in a dream one night. ‘You’ve squandered our intentions, my dear’, Meridel LeSueur tells her gently.

We get to the end of the play. The light sputters out. No one speaks. I ask the darkness; ‘So do you want to do the play?’ Not a word. I wonder again if I’ve crossed some line I had no right to cross. Ross breaks the silence from across the table, says that I don’t understand.
‘We’re not like other people’, he explains, ‘we can’t memorize all this. We can’t do things other people do, we’re rejects. We’ll fuck it up.’

I don’t argue, what do I really know? And you can hear a pin drop; and after the rain and the jets and the squabbling and chasing, the silence is deafening. Finally I whisper: ‘Is that true?’ More silence. Fidgeting. Then someone spits out one fierce word: ‘BullSHIT!’ And I know we’re on our way.

One week later, it’s clear no one was expecting me back, even though we’d set it up. I have to go through the hood, call out: ‘Play practice.’ They seem surprised I remember their names. Everyone’s lost the script except Jack. I get the impression that a lot of scheduled meetings are patched out, cancelled or forgotten. Their lives are like a field of dreams with seeds planted and dug up overnight, again and again.

For two months my friend Rachel and I come once a week, then twice. By early April I’m practically living there and I wonder why I was ever nervous that first day. With the warm days of spring, the nuts and bolts of life get easier for the Villagers, and we are making a sort of progress with the play, but if I ever imagined that I was in control of the project, I quickly come to my senses on this point. Our attempts at rehearsals are constantly challenged by true priorities such as runaway dogs, stolen teeth, (sold for a nickel of meth), cast members kicked out of the Village, cast members stuck downtown without bus fare, cast members picked up for prostitution at the truck stop down the road, a temporary skid back into the meth, a caved-in roof, the ever constant, imminent threat of closure by the city, job interviews, clear-cutting protests, a visiting free medical clinic, crowds of curious student groups visiting the Village for a social studies class. Worst of all is when the weekly Hostess truck dumps off a ‘charitable donation’ of stale Twinkies and bright pink Snowballs. The scramble for the mound of plastic wrapped poison permanently derails any hope of rehearsal; the sugar highs that follow disintegrate everyone’s sanity and my patience.

Emotions swing like crazy; violent, sworn enemies one week are rolling cigarettes for each other the next. It becomes obvious that the usual theater warm-up exercises designed to open us up to each other and to the work are ridiculous. Set-up improv situations disintegrate into brilliant, all-out hilarious brawls in which Ross usually takes on the role of a cop so he can throw everybody up against a wall.

Exercises designed to instil trust are also a joke. They tell me I’m full of shit. I think they have a point. Why set up trust games for people who routinely save and destroy each other? What use does Chrysler Chelle have for a bonding exercise when she’s been up all night, talking down her neighbor Larry who can’t stop screaming about giant purple rats coming for him in his windowless plywood box? My cast has been living together in some of the most fundamentally unabashed circumstances humans can possibly live in. They operate daily on a level of honesty that is non-existent outside of the Village. Not a pretty honesty, but an invasive, explosive, grinding honesty studded with grace and anger.

The challenge is clear, if not simple: ride the rollercoaster of drama, meth, displacement, raw deals and recovery and embrace the hollow failure of dreams mixed with the joy and chaos of a true, evolving community. Life and the play become indistinguishable. The play about community is becoming my education about community. And I find myself learning what has always eluded me; what is perhaps the most important and most difficult lesson for anyone involved in art and theater; I learn to be loyal to the journey, to throw the outcome out the window and to cherish first and foremost our time together and what we can learn from each other.

My education is non-stop. When Lydia moves into the common room, it isn’t such a nice place anymore. Her grey hair hangs in oily strings down her face, she has long stained fingernails that curve, a little dog with dirty whiskers. I’m afraid of her. She’s made a nest of grimy blankets on one of the couches and sits in wait with her tirades, lost down some maze. I wish she’d go away. But one day I witness JP, one of the original Dignity Soldiers, a tough, radical young revolutionary, calling out sweetly to her, carrying a plate full of roasted corn, ‘Lydia, O Lydia, I made you sweet corn on the cob!’

Tuesdays I pick Patricia up at Sisters of the Road Café and we ride to Dignity together for rehearsal. On the way, she usually falls into a rant, like falling down a flight of stairs. One minute we’re doing fine, talking about weather or lunch or cigarettes or how many wheels on her walker still work, next minute, we’ve slipped somehow and she’s yelling at me that they want to label her mentally ill or she won’t get any money to live on but then they’ll make her take scary drugs and her old landlord who kicked her out still won’t give back her things and he’s got a picture of her dead son and she really wants that picture back but her roof at the Village leaks and what if it rains on that picture of her dead son? She’s speaking of such intimate, fragile, confused and violent memories that I don’t feel I should try and understand, just listen.

She’s so terribly angry, but mostly, I think, she’s scared. Even though it’s months before winter, she’s scared because old people can’t handle the cold, and the wind rushes through the gaps in her structure, and the rats get in and she wants to fix that with some clay and straw. Will I help her? Of course I’ll help her, and the play comes into perspective finally, talking to Patricia. It’s fun, but it’s not going to really change much. A good roof, now that would change something. A plug for the rat holes, now that would be useful.

In my world the play’s the thing, in her world, the play’s ‘a’ thing, but living through the winter, that’s really the thing. Just when I’m overwhelmed by her despair, our inequities, we arrive and she stops talking and looks over at me with a wide, toothless smile, her blue eyes shining, her straight white hair combed back with a bright green plastic butterfly to keep her bangs out of her eyes and there’s suddenly a child beside me, so utterly charming, and I feel blessed just to be near her, I can’t say why.

Jack falls asleep a lot during rehearsals. Exhausted after what I think has been centuries of energy holding, eons of vibrational tuning, spliffing, whatever. I think he’s the weariest man I’ve ever seen, but there’s a force in him, a metal energy that could move mountains or build a village of homeless people on top of asphalt. It was Jack who directed the Out of the Doorways Campaign that led to Dignity Village, and now he lives for these people, this cause. If a thing is good for the Village, Jack will fight for it till there’s no breath left in him, if it’s bad for the Village, he will summon a strong danger always beneath his surface, and throw it like a lightening bolt. Jack holds the place together like a magnet and sleeps like a dead man, twitching. I look at his swollen hands, the emphysema is bad, if I ask him about it, all he says is: Rasta man live forever.

I worry how he’ll fare in the upcoming winter, and realize how crazy that is. For a man that’s been homeless for thirty years, fear of the weather must be like fear of honeybees. How he will hold an old woman on the street, if she needs that. How he will greet each homeless person as a brother or sister, how he refrains from talking badly of anyone. But one day when a pusher came to the Village to sell his wares, his ‘tweak’, I watched as Jack transformed into the gangsta of his youth, watched as he walked like a terrible lion towards the man. Who couldn’t feel it. The pusher stepped back, got in his car and left, whining. I’ve walked with Jack down the worst drug alley in downtown Portland without a fear in the world. Yea, though I walk through the alley of crack, I will fear no evil.

One evening Chrysler Chelle asks me to have dinner with her and Ross, and we sit on her veranda (only poor people have porches), surrounded by potted vegetables stuck with little found things; broken clocks and plastic dolls without arms and such, and we visit while she peels onions on a board on her lap, then zucchini and broccoli, and there’s good bread from the donation table and rice fluffing in a pan. Chelle feels like someone I’ve known for years, someone you want to respect you; someone who brings out the best in you. She shares with me how it wasn’t long ago she had a beautiful home, children, a good marriage. But one weekend her husband brought meth home for them to try; just to try. Just once. She was one of the unlucky ones who got hooked first time out.

The spiral down went fast. They divorced because her husband was destroyed by what he’d done to her, what he couldn’t fix. Couldn’t face. Only took a year till she was living under bridges. She tells me how she became the one who checked on everybody through the coldest winter nights, waking every hour to make the rounds and cover bodies back up if they’d rolled out of their blankets. That’s how so many meth addicts and alcoholics die outside in the winter; she tells me, they roll out of their blankets and freeze
to death.

Chelle and Ross and I eat dinner together as the sky full of fighter jets and two-headed ducks turns indigo and a steady wind off the Gorge sends tiny black flecks drifting into our food from the leaf-composting yard next door.
‘It’s like a Petrie dish’, Ross says, ‘they sweep everything off the streets and dump it in our back yard, turn it every few days. You don’t want to think about it too much.’

The stars come out and for now the Villagers own an infinity of diamonds. We listen to the sounds of the night: laughter, doors closing, pots and pans clanging, tarps rattling. There’s smoke from scattered cooking fires, layered.

How isolated and colorless the rest of the world begins to feel when I leave the Village. I am lost and lonely in a new way. Who of the grey suit and tweed skirt hurrying by might break into a spontaneous rendition of T. S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in Rasta verse? What shopper, arms full of purchases, might stop to expound on redemption and the circles of hell? Is there a bank loan officer who would offer the shirt off his back, without hesitation, still gratefully awestruck that he isn’t dead under a bridge with a needle in his arm? The Villagers haven’t lived a subdued life in any recent memory. I’m exhausted by them even as I’m awakened.

Friends from home, my sons and daughter, arrive to buoy the effort in many ways; they help run lines and construct the giant puppets that will be the ghost authors. Time flies as we hurtle towards our one win-or-lose-all, debut performance like a runaway train with a three-ring circus inside. I don’t see how we will be ready; some have their lines down, some simply don’t seem able to memorize, meth can burn out a mind like acid, and a play, like most things, hinges on teamwork. Ross’s comment that first visit haunts me.

The night of the big performance finally arrives. The Pine Street Theatre is packed, standing room only, with hundreds of people. We run lines one last time in a back room, circle up and join hands. I’m the only one who is a nervous wreck, the cast is calm and completely unruffled, and then I remember how their lives are constructed of situations exponentially more terrifying than this. Everything’s relative. I leave them to find a seat as the lights come up on a set designed by an original evicted resident of the old hotel, an artist we located living in his van in the Arizona desert, and the play begins.

And I am mesmerized. I have never been so proud in all my life. I can’t take my eyes off them. I honestly can’t tell you if they were good or bad. I honestly don’t care. I just know they were completely at home in their own play. I know they broke it wide open. I know they got a full standing ovation as the lights of the last scene faded, and the audience stomped and cheered them. I know that afterwards, they danced all night to a marimba band. I go home alone and creep into bed and unexpectedly find myself crying. Their lives are so hard, and I don’t know why. And I miss them.

I’m back in the other world again. Among people who wonder what to order off a menu. It’s a duller world, but the wear and tear is so much less. Questions without answers aren’t hiding behind every interaction, there are no challenges to comfortable assumptions. But I miss the full-throttle honesty. I miss my friends.

I go back and visit for an evening around the wood stove now and then. It’s so good to see them all, catch up on changes. A few have found housing, jobs, and have moved on, but most are still around. Chrysler Chelle is in charge of the building committee and she’s a superhero now, a strong-armed framer and roofer turning hodge podge hovels into solid structures with windows and doors.

Later Jack and I go out for a beer. He puts reggae on the jukebox and draws a picture on a napkin of some cards he’d like to make to sell for the Village. We talk about doing a tour of the play, maybe starting a Village press. The infighting is getting him down and he’s thinking of resigning as Chair, but he’ll die working for the homeless he tells me.

I don’t know if a theme hotel that offers visitors peace and inspiration is worth the unexamined destruction of a community, and I don’t know if an explosion of expensive homes is worth the destruction of a forested hillside and the peace and inspiration of the settled residents. These are baffling equations to pose. I only know we’ll need more and more Dignity Villages in the wake of development. That part of the math seems a certainty.

To Jack the Lion and Tim with his Merlin’s beard, to Gaye who is still in shock at the turn of events that made her homeless fifteen years ago, to my big beautiful friend Kadafy and his tremendous bear hugs, to Lydia; her dog and her blankets, to Chrysler Chelle and all the other Villagers ashamed to tell their children where they are; I have more money than I need and I am afraid of so much, but I wish you a clear, quiet sky full of clean, warm air. I wish you sweet roasted corn, respect, and a different world altogether.

Perhaps I was assigned a role, and you yours, and in the end it isn’t about how others will rate the success of our performance. In the end perhaps the important thing is the journey we are taking towards one another, and that we try and understand what it is we can do for each other; to string together minutes, hours, lifetimes, made only of that.

Helen Hill hellonwheels2_813 [at] hotmail [dot] com 503 842 7013 PO Box 353 Oceanside Oregon 97134. Pictures of Dignity Village and of the play can be found at www.dignityvillage.org. Follow links to The Filmore Hotel first performed in May 2004. Also at this site is a review of the play from Portland Indy Media. We took “The Filmore Hotel” on the road in the fall of 2004.

So people may know what we wish to replicate and adapt, check out the Dignity Proposal to the City.