Across California, groups of people who have experienced homelessness are turning away from state-organized aid to create their own solutions to homelessness. This weekend, Los Angeles-based activist groups are raising awareness and funds to try and replicate “Homefulness,” a community-run housing model from Oakland.
“It’s time that we recognize our own capabilities. That we are able to meet the needs of our communities directly,” said Carla Orendorff, a San Fernando Valley-based organizer.
Orendorff is part of Aetna Street Solidarity, a community that organizes against the criminalization of the poor, and Street Views, an autonomous newspaper published by unhoused community members, mutual-aid organizers and allied activists in LA that aims to “amplify the voices of those on the streets.”
Aetna Street Solidarity, alongside Reclaiming Our Homes, a group of Angelenos impacted by the housing crisis who reclaimed vacant Caltrans homes in El Sereno, is hosting the Oakland-based organization POOR Magazine, to share and discuss “people-led solutions to homelessness.”
The event titled “Homefulness Tovaangar – Poetry, Prayer, Poverty Scholarship and Intention for Radical Interdependence & ComeUnity Reparations” will be held at Church in Ocean Park (235 Hill Street, Santa Monica) at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 29.
Orendorff said LA organizers have been working with POOR Magazine for over a year, visiting and learning about the Homefulness housing model in Oakland.
“I saw a world in which poor people were able to exercise their own self-determination and meet their own needs and provide for others,” said Orendorff.
Since POOR Magazine’s founding in 1996, it has operated as a self-described “poor and Indigenous-led media organization and education program.”
In 2011, they began the co-housing project Homefulness, which provides up to 10 permanent housing units for unhoused and marginally housed families. After a decade, the project opened in 2020, additionally providing community services including a school, community newsroom and radio station, library and a “Sliding Scale Cafe.”
“Homefulness needs everyone to be involved, housed and unhoused, privileged and poor, Indigenous and settler, working together to implement radical sharing and a concept we call ‘ComeUnity’ reparations so we can together work to ‘UnSell’ mama Earth,” said Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, co-founder of POOR Magazine and one of the five first residents of Homefulness.
Homefulness functions similarly to a community land trust, removing the duplex – purchased in East Oakland through donation funding – from market pressures. Residents pay for utilities and taxes, but the complex is community-run housing, with no landlord and no rent.
“This is a really beautiful example of what we need here in LA,” said Orendorff. “We have more than 75,000 people who experience homelessness right now, on the streets in LA – in their cars, in RVs. People who can barely afford to pay rent, who are one paycheck away from ending up on the street.
“Bringing Homefulness to Los Angeles, or what we hope to do on Sunday, is really bring people into this idea that it is possible for poor and houseless people to determine their own futures.”
Though there may be criticisms of the scalability of this solution, Orendorff and Gray-Garcia see it as a long-term solution different from the “band-aids” the state provides.
“Both of these powerful LA-based movements of houseless communities [Atena Street Solidarity and Reclaiming Our Homes] are working to build real solutions to our problems as houseless people,” said Gray-Garcia. “Because we know that the city and state only present more sweeps, carceral systems and never affordable housing.”
Since the City of Grants Pass v Johnson Supreme Court decision, which gives local governments a greater ability to enact and enforce criminal penalties for acts like public camping or sleeping, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s subsequent order directing state agencies to urgently address homeless encampments, many unhoused people say local mayors, including LA Mayor Karen Bass, have increased encampment sweeps.
Orendorff said that these decisions “gave a green light order to LAPD” to dismantle encampments.
In addition to increased sweeps and the criminalization of homelessness, Orendorff said unhoused communities in the San Fernando Valley have been experiencing an increase in vigilante violence against them.
Despite Bass celebrating an increase in housing people through programs like Inside Safe, Orendorff said these are temporary solutions that “don’t accommodate family structures,” instead implementing “forced separation” policies.
The unhoused community on Aetna Street entered the Inside Safe program about a year ago. Since then, Orendorff said four out of the 25 people in the program have passed away. She considers these “negligent and preventable deaths” that can be attributed to the lack of community care structures.
She believes the only way forward is to empower those who have the experience of being unhoused to create their own solutions to homelessness.
“I think that it’s those who live on the streets that have a way forward for all of us,” said Orendorff. “That’s what homefulness really means for us. It’s a way out. It’s a way through. It’s a way forward that actually takes into account what being forced to live in poverty does to the human body, spirit and condition.”
On Saturday, Sept. 28, POOR Magazine will also offer a free “Theatre of the POOR/Poverty Scholarship” workshop at El Sereno Community Garden.
For more information, email poormag@gmail.com.