One evening a few months ago, the awkward details of a love triangle spilled out in a humble plywood structure next door to a municipal composting facility in Portland, Ore.
The building, known simply as the Commons, serves as the communal kitchen, living room and courtroom of Dignity Village, a community of approximately 60 people living in hand-built tiny homes on the site. All previously homeless, they manage the place on their own — likely the only such community in the country that is not just city-sanctioned, but fully self-funded and self-governed.
The village council had gathered that evening in the cluttered, dimly lit Commons to adjudicate a disagreement between a woman, her boyfriend and an ex. The ex had filed an incident report with the village’s security department which stated that the current boyfriend had been harassing and intimidating him.
The meeting was a curious blend of bureaucracy and bickering friends, much like the village itself — part homeless camp, part homeless services agency. After some debate, a compromise emerged: the ex-boyfriend pledged to stop sending the woman a constant stream of texts and the two men agreed to avoid each other for the foreseeable future. The words of village elders sealed the deal.
Dignity Village is an intriguing answer to some of the thorniest questions posed by the homelessness crisis. Encampment sweeps are on the rise, fueled by a 2024 Supreme Court decision that overturned federal protections for those inhabiting public property if they had nowhere else to go.
But the question of where to put those who have been swept remains intractable. The core idea behind Dignity Village is to allow them to figure it out for themselves.
“Welcome to our radical experiment in collective self-empowerment to end homelessness!” exclaims the village manual. Residents are expected to contribute 10 hours of work each week to maintain the village, substance use must be confined to private spaces, and disputes are resolved by an elected council.
“Peer support is the best way to lift yourself up,” says Scott Layman, a longtime resident who credits the “familyship” of the village with helping him coexist with the voices in his head, without medication, and recover from alcoholism.
Dignity Village’s annual budget is also an order of magnitude less than most shelters.
Representatives of villages attempting self-governance in Portland gather once a month as the Village Federation. At a recent gathering, they welcomed Mitch Green, an economist turned city councilor, whose downtown Portland district includes much of the city’s unhoused population. He was flabbergasted by Dignity Village’s annual operating budget: $60,000, or about $1,000 per person. He said Portland’s city-run tiny home villages cost taxpayers approximately $40,000 per person annually.
“I’m inspired by self-governed villages that center folks who are living in the situation,” he told the federation. Noting that spending on shelter programs was the “biggest driver” of the city’s recent $170 million budget shortfall, Mr. Green said, “I am going to be looking for opportunities to take money away from the city’s shelter system and divert it towards enabling more of this.”
Established in 2001, Dignity Village is the nation’s longest running experiment in what happens when the anarchic structure of an encampment gives way to a more permanent community. City leaders have not embraced its self-governed approach, but many homeless advocates hold it up as a reference for how peer-based solutions can sometimes succeed where bureaucratic solutions fall short. Dignity Village’s residents have found ways to survive, and even thrive, despite addiction, mental illness and extreme poverty, crediting the village’s messy, exhausting, small-D democracy as nonetheless critical to their stability.
“What we’re here trying to do is help people, and when we do that, we help ourselves, and everybody rises,” says Mr. Layman. “That’s the theory anyway.”
A campground, not an encampment
The vision for Dignity Village emerged among a group of unhoused residents living under bridges in downtown Portland who were fed up with being repeatedly evicted from their camps. After a series of “shopping cart parades” in 2000 captured national media attention, they settled on city-owned land next to the composting facility, where the government has reluctantly allowed them to remain.
What started as a collection of tents slowly grew into solid structures with the help of legions of volunteers. Under an obscure state law, the city designated the place as an urban campground, allowing some flexibility around building codes.
Current infrastructure includes a guard shack, computer lab, communal bathhouse and a greenhouse that doubles as an overnight shelter for people who show up needing relief. The individual tiny homes lack running water, but since 2025 have been powered by roof-mounted photovoltaic panels, a gift from a local solar energy company.
The community accepts donations from the public, but much of their operating revenue comes from monthly dues — currently $100 per resident — and microbusinesses such as a landscaping operation and firewood sales. According to the city, taxpayer costs for the project are minimal, mainly for annual safety checks by the fire marshal.
Tiny home villages for the homeless have spread rapidly across the country in recent years. Like congregate shelters, most have a long list of rules, enforced by nonprofit operators. Consequently, many without housing still reject them in favor of the relative freedom of the street.
But Dignity Village differs radically from its municipally-controlled counterparts.
The community’s governance structure eschews hard and fast rules in favor of strategies to maintain community cohesion and well-being. People are expelled only in extreme instances, usually involving violence. Rules meant to keep the place clean, discourage hoarding and prevent fires are enforced to the extent necessary to satisfy the fire marshal and environmental regulators. Transgressions tend to be met with peer pressure, formal incident reports and collective kindness.
“Your peers hold you accountable if you’re slacking or engaging in negative behaviors, which hits a lot different than if a staff member of a traditional shelter nags you or gets you in trouble,” said Victory Lafara, a social worker and longtime advocate for the community. “It means more and actually motivates people to make the changes they need to make.”
A constant balancing act
Numerous unhoused communities across the country have attempted to become permanent and self-governing, but they are typically shut down quickly. Several have emerged in Portland in recent years, including Right to Dream Too and Hazelnut Grove, and while the city has not evicted them, it also hasn’t encouraged the approach.
“The City of Portland does not believe independent villages are scalable, replicable models,” said Alison Perkins, a city spokesperson, noting issues with sanitation, fires and water pollution that “pose life-safety, health, equity and infrastructure issues for both residents of the self-operated shelter and the surrounding community.”
Portland’s formal alternative is a network of seven city-run tiny home communities, called Safe Rest Villages, that are heavily rule-based, with a 120-day limit on length of stay. In contrast, Dignity Village’s lack of time limits draws criticisms from the city. Its model “generally does not provide in-depth case management and does not prioritize moving individuals into permanent housing,” Ms. Perkins said.
Jim Hawes, a Dignity Village resident who was previously housed at a Safe Rest Village in Portland, says he was evicted because he had not done enough to procure items like a driver’s license that are necessary to apply for subsidized housing and other benefits. “If you don’t meet all of these milestones that they’ve established, then they kick you out, regardless of whether you were trying or not,” he said.
Elana Pirtle-Guiney, the Portland city councilor for the district in which Dignity Village and Right to Dream Too are located, sees the self-governed and city-governed models as complementary. Ms. Pirtle-Guiney said her district’s self-governed communities prioritize “building community and creating safe spaces for people. And from there, some people choose to move into traditional housing and some don’t. They have a different set of goals.”
But Dignity Village has kept detailed records since 2018 about length of stay and where departing residents go. While the average stay ranges from one to two years for most residents, the percentage who exit to some form of permanent housing is significantly higher than the city-run sites — about 60 percent, compared to 42 percent.
Nellie Herron, 57, became homeless at the age of 11, and has been in and out of Portland’s shelter programs. Ms. Herron recently got into permanent supportive housing after a year at Dignity Village, and credits its self-governed model with motivating her progress. “If you don’t feel good about yourself, then you’re not going to do anything about your situation,” Ms. Herron said. “It all figures into being housed.”
Andrew Heben spent several years researching encampments and tiny home villages for his 2014 book, “Tent City Urbanism.” He believes unhoused communities need external support to make the model widely replicable.
Mr. Heben helped spearhead a community called Opportunity Village in Eugene, Ore., which was modeled on Dignity Village. He also cofounded a likeminded venture called SquareOne Villages. Unlike Dignity Village, whose founders created a nonprofit of their own, Opportunity Village’s associated nonprofit is run by an external board of directors — housed residents who support an elected council of village residents who oversee daily operations.
“You visit these camps and you see all these positive elements of self-organizing, direct democracy and mutual aid, but they’re also far from ideal living situations,” Mr. Heben said. “As soon as you try to formalize them there needs to be some top-down rules.”
The tension between the independence Dignity Village’s residents credit for the community’s success and the city’s disapproval of its anarchic atmosphere hung over the Dignity Village Council meeting. The aroma of decomposing waste penetrated the walls from the compost facility next door, along with the occasional roar of a jet taking off, as the group trudged through the agenda items — bills to be paid, policies for evicting vicious dogs and the delicate work of resolving a love triangle’s domestic disputes. Village elders issued ardent reminders to keep trash from accumulating and to remain vigilant about fire risks, lest the city pull the plug on their 25-year experiment.
Ray Stanczak, a 76-year-old resident, spoke to the perennial paradox the community faces: they may feel like their model trumps the city’s, but they sit on city-owned land. “I don’t think they’re going to shut us down,” he said. “But they might try to run us.”
The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.
The post The Homeless Community That Became a Self-Governed Village appeared first on New York Times.
