More than three million Americans, or close to one percent of the population, experience homelessness annually.² Emergency shelter capacity is limited while local governments are unable to provide even temporary housing. States and cities have declared homelessness to be an emergency. Moreover, unsheltered homeless populations prefer the street over formal emergency shelters given the lack of privacy, safety, and autonomy plaguing most shelters.³ Typically, shelters limit occupancy to overnight dormitory-style stays, requiring residents to cart their belongings throughout the day — more than a physical obstacle to fulfilling daily needs. Indeed, as Tent City Urbanism author Andrew Heben observes: “The question of where one will sleep on a given night — consumes significant mental resources and limits the capacity to focus on other tasks.” ⁴ Nor do emergency shelters provide transitional assistance or wraparound social services, equally important as a shelter in helping residents to recover their independence. 

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center designed a homeless transition village for a local homeless service provider to replace a tent city in the woods near downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas (Fig. 2). Designed as a kit-of-parts to accommodate both professional and volunteer construction labor, the village prototypes an affordable shelter-first solution ⁶
which can be replicated in other cities. Transition village planning begins with the intelligence embedded in the informal genre of tiny home villages, camps, and tent cities—all based on the productive relationship between individual sleeping units and communal facilities. However, municipal codes governing residential land use employ the autonomous dwelling unit as a minimum regulatory standard requiring plumbing, electrical, sanitation, and cooking services. Sleeping units may offer some or none of these services. Our housing settlement pattern was not permittable under the city’s regulatory framework, which, like most cities, is based on the International Residential Code and the International Building Code among others. Without having to change zoning and building codes, our village design was granted a five-year conditional use permit from the City of Fayetteville to test its viability as a transitional community. The project reconciles key gaps between workable informal building practices and formal sector regulations to secure a permittable and affordable solution, albeit with conditions. The long-term objective is the legalization of both the transition community as an interim land use and its more permanent offspring, the tiny house community. Currently, outside of the formal sector, micro-housing typologies are missing solutions in addressing the nation’s affordable housing crisis. 

 Since half of local fire deaths result from homeless populations cooking, smoking, or providing heat in their tents,⁸ the sleeping unit will not be the sole source of services for individuals. Instead, cooking and sanitation facilities are provided in the community super-porch, discouraging residents from hibernating in their sleeping unit. While A-frame cabins have certain functionality challenges, their ease of construction by amateur contractors and volunteers, material efficiencies and affordability, portability, and familiar domestic iconicity fulfil multiple criteria. 

Residents share communal facilities, including a kitchen, sanitation facilities, laundry, offices for counseling, and workspaces clustered under a community super-porch. Shared facilities are supported by a day kennel (many have dogs, inconvenient when searching for housing and jobs) and a community hall, which can be plugged into the super-porch in a later phase of development. Visiting social work professionals provide wraparound counseling services along with transitional assistance in securing housing and employment. Akin to the cooperative relationships ordinarily forged in informal settlements, the village’s covenants with residents requires self-governance, accountability, and service to the village as reciprocity for boarding. The village’s size is scaled to the workload manageable by one caseworker and the optimum resident count for maintaining quick communications while having economies of scale. 

Clearly, there are demographic trends as to who becomes homeless. In our partnership with Serve Northwest Arkansas, an established local homeless services provider, we learned that the average length of homelessness is thirteen months and in Northwest Arkansas, 30% of homeless adults are chronically homeless — homeless for one year or more, homeless at least four times in the last three years, and presenting a medical condition. In Northwest Arkansas, a high-growth region with low unemployment, the homeless population is predominantly male (70%), single (68%), white (85%), and the median age is forty-two years. A chronic condition is reported at least once by 70% — mental health (45%), substance abuse (40%), physical disability (25%), and domestic violence (15%). Approximately 30% are veterans according to Kevin Fitzpatrick, a professor of sociology with national expertise in homelessness and a board member at Serve Northwest Arkansas,⁹ which will build and manage the transition village, called New Beginnings. 

The intersectionality of poor health, unemployment, and lack of resiliency associated with isolation is compromising people’s ability to secure stable housing. Fitzpatrick, who has studied the local homeless community for well over a decade outlines the chronology of needs beginning with shelter/housing first — a reversal of the mainstream “continuum of care” approach that mandates behavioral changes as prerequisites to acquiring permanent housing.¹⁰ Fitzpatrick writes:

Unquestionably a number of important themes have emerged. One, significant health care needs are missing and attention to these needs must be an important part of any service provision —
particularly mental health care needs related to monitoring of pharmaceuticals and counseling. Both of these health concerns are important to maintaining a stable and secure environment for clients with an effort to secure and maintain stable housing security. Two, many unsheltered clients lack adequate bridge housing (housing that can support their transition from unsheltered living to more permanent housing). As such, we are the only service provider that is actively engaged in developing bridge housing that can be vital to providing stability and security that is necessary to begin the arduous work of finding permanent, secure, stable housing. Regardless of the issues that persons experience, research clearly shows that some degree of housing stability is important to begin work on combatting a host of other problems that keep people in the cycle of poverty and homelessness (shelter/housing first model). Finally, job security is certainly something that most desire and without some stability in housing, working on securing a job that can provide support for housing security is impossible. Individuals cannot get to job interviews, work on their job applications, make phone calls and write emails without some housing/shelter security.¹¹

A secure perimeter provides safe habitat among homeless populations who routinely experience violence, personal transgressions, and countless indignities in both formal shelters and pop-up tent cities. Tent cities can be volatile and unpredictable places, simultaneously exhibiting the worst dysfunctions and the highest levels of cooperation within short spans of time. Effective self-governance and village management stemming from a secure environment are key to winning acceptance from neighbors and overcoming the NIMBYism (NIMBY: Not in My Backyard) that discourages municipalities from issuing conditional or discretionary use permits.

A 150 ft. [46 m] long community super-porch fronting the street serves as a platform for the efficient delivery of shared sanitation, waste, provisioning/food, and social services, which closes the gaps on health and life safety standards plaguing informal settlements (Fig. 5). 

Patterns transmit information, ways of knowing or epistemologies, and often nestle legacy solutions from multiple traditions. Amidst a national housing crisis, the emergence of tent cities and other informal settlements indicates the need for replicable shelter/housing solutions near downtowns where homeless populations benefit from close access to jobs, transportation, and services. Yet, many settlements are forced to locate in unincorporated areas to escape municipal regulation, further complicating the transition to securing employment and permanent housing.

Principle 3: Prefabrication for Disassembly and Reuse, not Demolition

Given the village’s five-year lifespan, all construction is componentized and designed for disassembly and reuse, whether as whole building units, structural systems, or wall and floor panels (Fig. 7).

The community superporch is a more complex plug-and-play armature accommodating services and hosting integral subassemblies, including a kitchen and a warming tent made of vinyl, a toilet/shower trailer, accessible sleeping units, modified A-frame offices, screened social room, and future plug-ins as needed. The porch’s main section consists of wood-sandwich space trusses topped by a metal awning frame supporting a stretched fabric canopy. Porch floor modules made from structural insulated panels (SIPs) are weatherized, housing water supply and electrical services (we are in a temperate climate with freeze-thaw cycles). For general safety, trussed fence panels secure porch and village edges (Figs. 9, 10, 11).

Municipal codes require property owners improving their properties to concurrently improve right-of-way on which their properties front. Owners are obligated to bring right-of-ways into compliance with current codes usually involving installation of sidewalks with curb and gutter, setbacks, and street trees/tree lawns beyond the necessary connections to water, sewer, communication, and electrical utilities. However, conditional use permits like those granted to our project should trigger waivers from making permanent upgrades to street infrastructure if they do not compromise public health and safety.

The transition village’s conditional use permit is based on having a sponsoring organization — in this case, Serve Northwest Arkansas — responsible for construction, compliance, and village operations. Some cities may even require the organization to own the land.¹⁷ Transition villages can also be sponsored by a host local government that ensures compliance in construction and operations. Note that the federal government’s 2000 Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act grants churches automatic right to sponsor transitional housing on their properties pursuant to their ministries, overriding local zoning authority.¹⁸

Zoning needs to be at least R24 - max. 24 units/acre [60/ha] - to permit the village’s desired unit count of twenty, including eventual expansion to thirty units. Sleeping unit layout is land consumptive due to fire separation requirements between units and required setbacks from the right-of-way.

Informalization is traditionally associated with the “topography” of unplanned hyper-growth in developing nation economies, differentiated from advanced market economies and the design disciplines that shape the latter’s built environments. As stated earlier, rather than see the informal as simply a physical environment, our project highlights informality as a mode of reform, an important distinction articulated by Ananya Roy in her examination of informality.²¹ Mode foregrounds the role of agency in reshaping urbanization within advanced regulatory environments, and such agency is not necessarily limited to low-income actors. Informality transcends class and is “demand” simply stepping in to meet the needs unfulfilled by regulated and limited supply — recalling Sassen’s notion that informality is produced by the state itself (a point reinforced by Roy). Familiar examples of informality include neighborhood food

trucks, childcare, shadow banking through check-cashing and moneylending services, farm-to-table food supply (community-supported agriculture or CSAs popular among middle-class households), and an affluent peer-to-peer economy led by Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Getaround, Ebay, Zaarly, and TaskRabbit, the last being a freelance labor broker. In the case of our homeless transition village, the informal is an interim solution to meet emergency demand for shelter and community support that was once met through a flexible supply of affordable downtown housing in our nation’s cities. Downtown micro-housing, once a staple of affordable housing, especially that servicing extremely low-income individuals, has been systematically eliminated over the past sixty years through urban policy.

The rise of transitional villages parallels the emergence of more communal real estate products in the form of tiny house villages, micro-housing apartments, and co-housing economies not yet susceptible to financialization. This includes revival of outlawed single room occupancy hotels (SROs) where the bed, and not the house, was the basic unit of dwelling.²² Downtowns were once extensive landscapes of residential hotels and rooming houses providing a range of room and board services for the poor and wealthy alike. Since the demise of the versatile twentieth-century residential hotel as a legal housing option in the 1960s, policy, as Heben reminds us, “Has largely held the development of low-income housing to middle-class standards.” ²³ Consequently, affordable housing cannot be developed without subsidies. Structural long-term housing shortages coupled with declining purchasing power will compel even the once-middle-class toward new cooperative structures of living again, urbanizations unfamiliar to the last three generations of Americans. A bourgeoning alternative housing economy beyond that for the homeless — seen in the rise of outlawed accessory dwelling units, SROs, pocket neighborhoods, cohousing, as well as in the ever more common practice of multiple families sharing a single-family home — is signaling the arrival of new forms of urbanization instigated by the informal.

North American cities are scrambling to re-entitle villainized housing forms compelled by the informal sector’s reframing of supply and demand, most commonly seen in the widespread re-legalization of accessory dwelling units in urban neighborhoods. Perhaps any local design effort like our transition village can at least foreground legitimate claims within the informal, countering its criminalization by the formal sector. But we also hold out for changing rather obdurate regulatory frameworks to embrace workable interim solutions. The bigger picture identifies what architect Valeria Frederighi views as informality’s larger power to interject “negotiable value in constantly reframing the rules of the game.” ²⁴ In her book The Informal Stance (2018), Frederighi poses a set of questions to design culture highlighting greater possibilities for designers’ meaningful participation when the informal is understood as a mode rather than simply a picturesque sector to be upgraded. Cautioning against the unwitting “aestheticization of poverty” in nudging the political economy forward, the big question for her is not “how to combine formal and informal in a way that retains the advantages of both while resolving [or not] their failings?” Rather, it is: “How is it possible to recognize the powers at play in the making of cities? How does any kind of design work enter and carry any weight in a landscape of networks and flows? How does an individual or a firm take rides within a system of covert political and market-driven mechanisms?” ²⁵

Thus, the informal emerges as an important design epistemology in advanced market economies given the polarization of their impacts and the need for distributive justice, especially among disadvantaged groups. The formal sector routinely undervalues the benefits and transformative capacities in the informal, particularly in the latter’s adjustment to new ways of knowing, or epistemologies. The role of design and planning, then, is to negotiate possibilities from spontaneous social and organizational action in the informal with regulatory frameworks and work through rather than against formal systems of authority. In discussing the dilemma of planning and policy orientations on this account, I return to Ananya Roy who invokes the line of feminist poet Audre Lorde: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” ²⁶ Our transition village captures the three pressing re-negotiables for design culture in confronting the planning apparatus as outlined by Roy: “Moving from land use to distributive justice, rethinking the object of development, and replacing best practice models with realist critique,” all repositioning informality as “an important epistemology for planning.” ²⁷ One way to empower the informal is to codify patterns and prototype solutions for distributed application, which is precisely how great small towns all over the U.S. were built pre-1930s. Many American cities were built from pattern books without professional designers, though designers and architects as the embodiment of the formal developed those very patterns that were replicated. Interestingly then, the ordinary American city up to the early twentieth century was a product of informality, benefitting from the transmission of formal expertise to informal local actors who developed and built cities of similarly high quality (Fig. 14).