Portland State Magazine Spring 2017

SPRING 2017 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 11 SHELTER FOR THE HOMELESS HOMELESSNESS IN PORTLAND is at a crisis point. At last count, an estimated 3,800 people in Multnomah County were homeless and thousands more were living in unsafe or unstable conditions. For women, being homeless comes with greater risks of sexual assault or other violence. Soon 14 previously homeless women in the Kenton neighborhood of North Portland will begin to rebuild their lives after months or years of living on the street. Their new home is the Kenton Women’s Village, a community made up of tiny “sleeping pods.” When they lay their heads down at night, they will do so in their own beds, in their own cozy little homes, complete with locking front doors, bathroom facilities and a kitchen nearby, and a community of peers surrounding them. The Kenton Women’s Village is the product of nearly a year’s worth of efforts by community groups under the organizing force of PSU’s Center for Public Interest Design (CPID) in the School of Architecture. In 2016, Village Coalition, a group of homeless advocates, local activists and people who have experienced homelessness, came together with CPID in response to the state of emergency on homelessness declared by the city of Portland. They asked themselves, “How can architecture and design help?” The Partners on Dwelling (POD) Initiative was born. “We knew what we didn’t want: impersonal, warehouse- style shelters that treated houseless people like cattle. Instead, our goal was to create personal, well-designed, safe structures that would be welcomed by neighbors and residents alike,” says Todd Ferry, a CPID research associate who helped spearhead the project. He says the group was inspired by the recent successes of homeless communities such as Portland’s Hazelnut Grove and Dignity Village, where residents worked together to build small structures to help them transition out of tents and create a shared community. FOR THE POD INITIATIVE , the first major step was to hold a brainstorming session to generate design solutions. More than 100 architects, designers and community members, including dozens of PSU architecture alumni, showed up. They listened to the needs of homeless individuals and housing advocates, and spent the day generating a plethora of “sleeping pod” designs, which they presented to the group. The architects embraced the project, and a majority signed up to form professional design-build teams, many of which were sponsored by their architecture firms, including SERA, LRS, Holst, S|EA, Mackenzie, Communitecture and others. Under Ferry’s leadership, a PSU senior undergraduate architecture studio class formed one of the 14 teams, and CPID students and faculty fellows formed another. The POD Initiative challenged each teams to thoughtfully design and build a full-scale, maximum 8-by-12-foot prototype of a sleeping pod that would be safe, warm and structurally sound. Each pod had to include a lockable door Architecture students and faculty help plan and create a village of sleeping pods WR I T T E N B Y KAR EN O ’ DONNE L L S T E I N >