I recalled a protest held in 1988, when the city tried to enforce the camping ban. A group of homeless men “kidnapped” a gosling named Homer (actually, they’d bought him at a country store, for sixteen dollars and eighty-seven cents) and threatened to eat him if the city didn’t propose various reforms, including affordable-housing measures. Roger Swanner, one of the goosenappers, told the Austin American-Statesman, “We just want the people of this city to realize that we’re human beings and should be treated that way.” To keep Homer out of police custody, they launched a Styrofoam barge into the lake, complete with a makeshift cabin. It reminded me of Huck Finn and Jim floating down the Mississippi. Homer the Goose became a celebrity. He got to meet Willie Nelson. He led parades down Congress Avenue. He was detained during a housing protest. The city council ultimately agreed to meet with the homeless delegation, to little effect. In 2004, a handsome shelter opened downtown, but it had about a hundred beds—far fewer than needed. Homer ended his days in an animal sanctuary, but he succeeded in making homelessness an issue in a characteristically Austin fashion. The politics of the city weren’t as brutal then, but they were just as feckless where homelessness was concerned.
Texas was the first state to pass a law, based on a model bill issued by Joe Lonsdale’s Cicero Institute, that makes camping in public places a Class C misdemeanor, punishable by a five-hundred-dollar fine, and prohibits state funds from going to any city that doesn’t enforce the ban. It’s designed to keep homeless people out of public view.
In 1998, Alan Graham, a former real-estate developer, took aim at the problem, as an act of Christian charity. Two years earlier, he had been on a Catholic men’s retreat and was inspired to create Mobile Loaves & Fishes, which delivered food to homeless Austinites. Then, in 2014, he built Community First! Village, in eastern Travis County. The development currently provides housing for four hundred people. An official head count in 2021 found nearly thirty-two hundred Austinites experiencing homelessness, including people living in shelters. A more recent head count in San Francisco, a smaller city, tallied nearly eight thousand—the great majority unsheltered.
Graham took me around Community First! Village in a golf cart. “We focus exclusively on chronic homelessness,” he told me. To qualify for residence, a person must have been on the street for at least a year; the average time is ten years. Residents live in manufactured housing, R.V.s, or micro-homes—one-bedroom houses without kitchens or bathrooms. (Communal facilities are provided.) Graham’s creation has evolved into one of the most consequential social innovations in the country. He and his wife live in the middle of the village, in a manufactured house with an attached porch and some treasured junk out front: an old Coca-Cola sign, a rusted wagon wheel, the rim of a hubcap from a Stutz Bearcat.
Graham, who is sixty-seven, has a ruddy face, glasses, a sideways grin, and a glistening white beard. He wears a silver San Damiano cross, which he bought on a pilgrimage to Assisi, and a blue gimme cap advertising goodness. He studied physics at U.T. before dropping out to become a real-estate developer and a “serial entrepreneur.” He saw his business crushed by the 1986 oil bust, which pummelled real estate in Texas.
“Mommy and Daddy were just wrestling.”
Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen
Graham handed me a sketch that he’d made bearing the legend “Homelessness exists at the intersection of many broken systems and layers of trauma.” These include foster care, mental-health issues, substance abuse, and criminal justice, but the main route—“the interstate highway of homelessness,” Graham explained—is a “catastrophic loss of family.” Community First! Village aims to replace those broken family ties with a caring social structure.