Eugene's Tiny House Experiment Expands To Emerald Village

Refugee camps save lives in emergencies – but often refugees languish there for decades. Two columns on programs that allow refugees to live normally in cities, with an ATM card taking the place of a camp.

Through the Burbank Senior Artists Colony - a community created by EngAGE - low-income seniors learn how to become artists. The recreational classes hosted by the community keep people feeling phsyically and mentally young, allowing them to focus on recreation instead of financial hardship.

New Orleans implemented an extraordinary 10-year plan that engaged unprecedented cross-sector collaboration between government, non-profit, and private entities to provide housing and housing services to the city's homeless veterans. The city's success in providing homes for every single veteran formerly on their streets motivated cities across the nation to tackle the crises using similar means, leading to a 1/3 decline veteran homelessness since 2010.

By the 1980s, Roxbury and north Dorchester had been devastated by the disinvestment and white flight of the 1960s and 1970s. Racist banking and housing policies (“redlining”) had segregated people of color from opportunity, barring them from getting home loans except in certain neighborhoods. So the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) brought together residents to develop their own comprehensive plan to revitalize their community, building a community food system along the way.

Milwaukee County’s mental health system put more resources in expensive emergency care rather than invest in programs that offer continual care. As a result, Milwaukee County identifies nine solutions from other cities that have had success in repairing mental health systems. Solutions include the ending of reliance on emergency care, expand community support programs, change laws, and supportive housing.

Should housing be considered a form of healthcare? New York State thinks so, and is funding "supportive housing" through the state's Medicaid program.

People need a place to sleep and eat, they need privacy, but they also need community. Seattle had a recent boom in micro-housing which offers a community living model where individuals have a personal tiny room and bathroom but share a kitchen.

In San Francisco, 23 percent of homeless people return to the street after transitional housing programs. A New York program gives the mentally ill and homeless individual apartments alongside average New Yorkers and has had an 84 percent retention rate.

Civic leaders in the U.S. struggle to effectively help their distressed neighborhoods. East Lake, Atlanta, created a replicable model that mixes residents of differing socio-economic status, and focuses on education and health in the area.

American humanitarian aid and programs by the United Nations have proved beneficial to equip Middle Eastern refugees with resources for self-settlement outside of camps. The self-settlement model has empowered refugees to become more productive members of society when they return home.