A hint of exasperation creeps into Andrew Heben’s preternaturally relaxed demeanour as he talks about some of the ways his work has been reported on. “I never said that this was the solution to homelessness. It’s one experiment, we need more.”

As we walk around the neat, colourful collection of tiny houses in Opportunity Village, sitting on an acre of grassy city land in Eugene, Oregon, it’s clear that the problem he’s trying to solve is not homelessness as such: it’s housing.



In conversation, and in his book, Heben offers a diagnosis that overlaps with what other people in the so-called Tiny House Movement say. Since 1950, the American family home has become two and a half times larger, even as fewer people on average are living in them. Housing and utilities are claiming an ever-greater share of our income, whether we’re renting or paying a mortgage.



Developers and legislators will say that it’s all demand-driven – we want more space, we’re wealthier. But what about all that unmet demand we can see among the homeless, in the streets and parks, bikeways and bridges of every city in America?

A tiny house in Dignity Village on the outskirts of Portland. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian



Part of the problem is the widespread withdrawal of social housing and mental health services. But Heben also points to the tiers of affordable housing that once existed, and which have been zoned and coded out of existence.



Those disappeared in the second half of the last century as the middle-class single-family home became the model that policy was structured around. This was and still is unaffordable for many: the best governments could offer was a subsidy to live in a home that exceeded your means, and probably your needs. For many of those without access to such support, options dwindle until they find themselves living on the street. “We lost affordable options and made people more dependent,” Heben says.



The main current of the Tiny House Movement offers an individualistic solution to the problems of contemporary housing. You can sacrifice space to get more time away from working to pay your mortage, and savings mean you can give more attention to procuring a tricked-out miniature house with all the mod cons. For its adherents – frequently middle-class downsizers, hipsters or alternative lifestyle experimentalists – it plays on one of the oldest dreams in American life: self-reliance.

A tree in bloom at Opportunity Village. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian

But Heben’s version is less Henry David Thoreau, more Emma Goldman. Partly influenced by the solidarity between the housed and unhoused that he witnessed as a participant in the Occupy movement, the model he facilitates emphasises not self-reliance, but mutual aid. That ethic is the real core of this experiment.



A top-of-the-line tiny house with RV-like conveniences can set you back $60,000 or more. The 30 dwellings at Opportunity Village, made of prefab donated materials, cost “around $3,300 a unit”. The savings come from the fact that they are basically detached bedrooms, with no utilities or running water. Cooking, washing and technology use all take place in shared facilities which the village’s 35 residents use and maintain in common.



Along with common stewardship comes self-government along the lines of direct democracy. Though the agreement with the city of Eugene means that Heben’s NGO maintains an “oversight role” in ensuring the village plays by the rules, day-to-day decisions are taken by residents. Some are delegated to an elected council, and others are voted on directly by everyone. This includes everything from the allocation of resources to basic decisions about who is admitted from the community’s long waiting list, and what should happen to those who break the community’s rules forbidding drugs, alcohol, stealing and violence on site. “We’ve lost around 12 people who just didn’t make it,” he says.

All colours in Dignity Village. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian

Adherence to the rules comes less from external compulsion than from a shared interest in the community’s wellbeing. The ordered provisions, gleaming surfaces and manicured lawns of the common areas are a product not of coercion, but commitment. Pets are allowed, and “couples can live together”, unlike in the more disciplinary spaces of charitable homeless shelters. In a word, Opportunity Village is nice. It’s a long way from the stereotypes and cliches that colour so much reporting on homelessness.

Heben’s training as an urban planner positions him well as a facilitator and evangelist for such experiments. His next project involves creating another option for the unhoused: a community of more expensive, self-contained units with a nominal rental charge which will allow residents to build equity. But he candidly admits that he learned much of what he knows from the activism and experimentation of homeless people themselves.

Perhaps the most prominent and important example he is building on is Dignity Village, two hours’ drive north, on the outskirts of Portland. The city’s Portlandia sheen obscures the fact that per capita, it has the fifth-highest rate of homelessness in the US, and that by some measures, it is the most rapidly gentrifying city in the country. It’s also illegal to camp, and therefore effectively illegal to be homeless.

Dignity Village began in 2001 as a “tent city”, and a protest against the city’s harassment of homeless people. Because it was partly a protest, if the city closed it down it would be in murky constitutional waters. Instead, they allocated the protesters two acres out by the airport. From 2003, the tents were replaced with tiny homes. Since then, the village has successfully offered housing on the communalist model that Opportunity Village is patterned on.

Lisa and Scott (they don’t tend to do surnames in the village) have been here five years. The usual limit is two, but Lisa explains that “if you take on responsibilities, you can get an extension”. They are looking for a manufactured home on a trailer park, because Lisa came into a small inheritance, and “it’s time to move on”. But it’s going to be difficult. “For the majority of villagers, this is home. People get bound up in each other’s lives. They find it hard to leave. We’ll find it hard, too.” She talks of one resident who moved out and for months came back and spent every day there.

I can see why. As we sit and chat under a garden umbrella, as other residents drop in and out of the conversation, I am struck by how relaxing is it to be here. Despite the noise of planes taking off and landing nearby at PDX, the village is remarkably peaceful, even soothing.

Flamingoes in Dignity Village. Photograph: Jason Wilson for The Guardian

When she and Scott came, Lisa says, they told themselves: “Get a job, get your shit together, get out, and DO NOT GET INVOLVED.” Since then, they have both held several executive positions on the village board, and Lisa acts as a kind of informal community counsellor (she’s considering returning to school to get a formal qualification).

Self-government means that people are passionately involved in the day-to-day management of group affairs, but they can’t afford to let their disagreements get in the way of future cooperation. Lisa talks about being “nose-to-nose shouting” at another resident in a meeting, upon the conclusion of which the two of them walked home together telling jokes.

The residents pay $25 a month to cover insurance and some of the utilities, but the accommodations mean people spend a lot of time outside interacting. “You’re never lonely. There’s always someone to talk to. And people will give each other whatever they need. No one starves.” It reflects a mutual commitment to a shared project of wellbeing. Who could say the same of their own neighbourhood?

The residents’ affection for and investment in their community tells us something important: we can’t understand the villages properly if we just think of them as desperate measures. Instead, we need to consider them as “intentional communities” that not only model one approach to homelessness, but remind us that another world is possible. Those who say, simplistically, that the Occupy movement “failed” also need to take account of the way its principles derived from and resonate in projects that offer a living riposte to neoliberal orthodoxy.

And those who would patronise the residents as people with no other choices are not only incorrect – they miss the point. Rather they are people with less to lose, and therefore less to fear, in committing wholeheartedly to a different, maybe better way of life.

In the face of mounting economic and environmental crises, Heben says, “everyone needs to think harder about how we house ourselves”. As the model pioneered by Dignity Village spreads around the country, we all have an opportunity to learn from it.