HomeLandLab Podcast

Designers who have watched the homelessness crisis expand during their educational careers seem to have a heightened sense of the design community’s opportunity to creatively engage the issue of homelessness. During this episode, I speak with two young designers: Barron Peper and Jescelle Major, who are trained as an architect and a landscape architect respectively. While working together at the mutli-disciplinary design firm MITHU...

On today’s episode I wanted to move the conversation away from the big cities and talk about how homelessness impacts some of the smaller communities that may fly under the radar in our national dialogue. In Olympia, Washington, which lies roughly half-way between Seattle and Portland, the city’s Parks and Recreation staff are, like so many other parks departments, becoming the front line in confronting homelessness in their commun...

On this episode of the HomeLandLab podcast, I’m very pleased to have Jonathan Martin, Editor of Project Homeless for The Seattle Times and Scott Greenstone, reporter, producer and engagement editor for Project Homeless

With me to discuss the nexus between journalism and homelessness and how one influences the other and vice versa. Though I had been following the work of Project Homeless, I got to meet Jonathan and Scott, and, im...

About a year ago, I happened to be in Washington, DC visiting the National Building Museum, one of my all time favorites. There, in an exhibition on, the changing idea of home in contemporary America, I learned about Austin’s Alley Flat Initiative. This innovative effort to build more housing units on underutilized lands was something I wanted to learn more about, so I reached out to Marla Torrado, the Program Coordinator for the A...

While I was visiting Austin, recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Natasha Ponczek Shoemake. Natasha works for Austin Public Health, where she helps oversee the various human service contracts that the City uses to partner with various non-governmental agencies in addressing homelessness in their community. With this unique perspective, Natasha is able to see—at the 10,000 foot level—the whole ecology of human services i...

A couple of weeks ago, my family and I had the opportunity to travel to Austin. Among visits to too many taco and barbeque joints, I also had to go visit Alan Graham and his team at the Community First Village. The visit was a revelation and Alan, who has an exceptionally busy schedule, was gracious enough to make time to sit down with me. Alan is, the Executive Director and CEO of Mobile Loaves and Fishes, which runs a tripartite ...

Close your eyes for a moment and think of the face of homelessness. What is the face that you see? Is that person male or female, white or black, young or old. Or maybe the person some where in between these choices?

For Corina Luckenbach and Melanie Granger, the faces of homelessness that they saw when they closed their eyes were very much like them: young, female and surrounded by taboos. Out of this space, Corina and Melanie hat...

“I actually think emergency isn’t quite the right framing now. I think the right framing is that we have a refugee crisis, except [people experiencing homelessness] are not refugees from another country. These are refugees from our own economy.”

From 2009 to 2013, Mike McGinn served as the Mayor of Seattle. During his time in office, his administration confronted the challenge of homelessness in a variety of public policy venues fr...

Tim Harris is the Executive Director of the street newspaper, Real Change and currently serves as the North American representative to the International Network of Street Papers. I recently sat down with Tim to discuss the roles street papers have within the multiple public spaces of the city: the physical public space where the vendor sells the paper, the civic space, where his paper influences the ongoing public dialogue in the c...

John Malpede, the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, has been working with the housed and unhoused community members of Skid Row since the mid 1980’s. Through his work, he helps empower community members through art performances and exhibitions. By creating programs that tell the story of this unique community, the LAPD has not only strengthened community bonds, but have also helped to acknowledge the hardshi...