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swestrupThere is a group in Atlanta calling themselves the Mad Housers. They build the most affordable housing ever, $350 per unit, and give it away to the homeless.
The shelter people
By BO EMERSON
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
In hidden corners of Atlanta and environs, huts for the homeless just
seem to spring up. Call it . . . stealth housing.
Nick Hess, the smooth-domed leader of one of the oddest construction
crews in Georgia, gathered buckets of nails, bundles of hammers and
his battery-powered circular saw last Sunday and hiked under dripping
skies to a small grove of hardwoods in a concrete wilderness within
view of Midtown's skyscrapers.
Once at the site, Hess, 32, and a half-dozen colleagues went to work,
laying a simple concrete block foundation and raising modular walls.
These builders, most of them computer geeks, are not skilled with the
Skilsaw, but within two hours they were putting the roof on the
finished structure. A homeless man who'd been sleeping under plastic
tarps was waiting to take possession.
"We do the most affordable housing in the metro area," said Jim
Devlin, a 41-year-old Little Five Points resident in an Aussie hat, as
he pounded nails. "We build it and give it away."
These are the Mad Housers, a band of volunteers who deal with the
problem of homelessness by cutting to the chase: Every Sunday they
build houses.
Very small houses.
The base model is only 6 feet wide by 8 feet long, with a ceiling
that's 10 feet high at the peak. Cost to the Mad Housers: about $350.
Cost to the client: zero.
For someone who's been burrowing in kudzu, sleeping in Hefty bags or
hunkering under a highway bridge, 48 square feet of floor space makes
a world of difference.
It's a weathertight, insulated miniature home, with roll roofing, a
locking front door and a cheery wood stove piping in the corner.
One of their clients is Walt Turman, a 52-year-old auto mechanic and
tree service worker, who has added a room to his hut plus space for
the portable toilet. "This is the way I came up," says the former farm
boy, surveying his cluttered domain a few miles away from Sunday's
construction site. "I know about cooking on a wood stove 'cause my
mama had to get up every morning and make breakfast on one."
Granted, what the Mad Housers do is at the margins of the law. Their
huts, which they give away, are generally sited on property that they
don't own. But for Mad Houser Vice President Hess, the choice between
doing the right thing and doing the legal thing is a no-brainer.
"We've been yelled at before and we'll probably get yelled at again."
Beth McCracken, who is studying to be a social worker at Kennesaw
State University, wrote a paper on the Mad Housers for a class on
grass-roots movements, and was so impressed she launched a fund-raiser
to pay for a new hut. "Technically they try to fly under the radar,"
says McCracken, 34. "I think they're awesome. They're taking on a
cause that's overwhelming -- the city can't handle it -- and they're
helping out, one person at a time."
According to longtime member Frank Jeffers, 59, the original Mad
Housers, who first cohered in 1987, were politically provocative. They
built huts in "ostentatious places" to raise awareness of the homeless
problem.
But quality control was low. The plywood was thin, the huts
uninsulated, the windows too big. "They leaked heat like a sieve and
they were totally unsecure," says Hess. "It was a good first pass."
Like many of their huts, that group fell apart in the mid-1990s. The
Mad Housers regrouped about two years ago, focusing on shelter, not
politics.
Today the Mad Housers succeed by thinking inside the box. For example,
consider their unique wood stove design, created by Jeffers: It is
built of four nested galvanized shop buckets, with a lid and a
2-inch-diameter vent pipe to carry smoke up through the roof.
Perforations at the base control air flow. Cost: about $30. (Clients
receive instruction in using the cheap stove, and its safety record is
good, says volunteer Kurt Haas.)
The low-budget group, composed of activists, software writers and the
formerly homeless, works the same way. The Mad Housers operate on a
minimum of fuel, efficiently turning income into shelter. Their huts
are exactly the length of two sheets of plywood and the width of one
and a half, meaning a minimum of cuts per sheet. Classed as "emergency
shelter," the huts are intended to finesse housing codes that apply to
permanent dwellings.
Sometimes their overhead is so low they bump their noggins. At a
recent "build" they used a plastic bottle filled with water for a
level, and they were forced to flatten the hut site by digging in the
dirt with pointy pieces of wood and their bare hands.
"We need a shovel," says Devlin during a Mad Houser meeting at a
Midtown coffee shop. At the meeting they discuss the upcoming Sunday's
construction activities and ways to capitalize on National Hunger and
Homelessness Awareness Week, which starts Sunday.
They also talk about a van. Hess, a computer programmer at
Weather.com, reports that insurance on a "company" van will cost
$1,500, the entire Mad Houser bank account. No van, man.
Their profile is low and their donations are low too. Yet support
comes from a wide range of folks (including an anonymous donor who
communicates only through a Washington lawyer).
Middle school students from Atlanta and Boy Scouts from Lilburn have
helped on Mad Houser projects, with funds donated by the Georgia
Vietnam Veterans Alliance. A Powder Springs church joined them on a
build, and this summer the Furniture Bank of Metro Atlanta donated
warehouse space so they could do some of their carpentry inside.
But they've yet to be embraced by the mainstream. Folks in Habitat for
Humanity (where starter houses cost $46,000) prefer not to comment on
the guerrilla builders. Hess doesn't even want to approach the "big
box" retailers such as Home Depot for free plywood. He figures few
corporations want to claim charitable deductions to habitual
trespassers.
In the meantime, the slumping economy and promises of a cold winter
keep business brisk. All two dozen of their huts are full, and there's
a waiting list six deep, with requests for huts in places far from
downtown Atlanta. (There are potential clients camping in woods around
Marietta.)
Some supporters are troubled by the group's underground tactics, but
sympathetic to their goals. Phil Greeves of Lilburn says he'd prefer
it if the Mad Housers got permission instead of hiding their huts, but
he acknowledges that in most cases they'd be denied.
Adam, Greeves' son, built a hut two years ago to fulfill the community
service requirement for his Eagle Scout badge. The project changed
their opinions about the homeless. "These were not unproductive
people," says the father. "They were working Monday to Friday, and on
the weekends they'd come out and help with the house."
On the ethics of madhousing, Bill Bolling, founder of the Atlanta
Community Food Bank, comments, "I would say you ask forgiveness
instead of permission in this case. This is a small legal question vs.
a big social issue."
Mad Houser Peter Richards, a teacher at Paideia School, sums up the
question this way: "In America," he says, "you have two choices if
you're homeless: charity or trespass."
The city hasn't prosecuted any Mad Housers in recent memory, says
Sandra Walker, spokeswoman for Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, though
the city has asked that some structures be removed. "It's an
unfortunate situation," says Walker. "It's what [the Mad Housers] feel
they have to do, but certainly we have to respect the right of the
property owners, and follow the laws."
The Mad Housers will always remove huts if asked by the property
owner, says Haas. The group tracks ownership by checking plats, and on
at least one occasion disassembled a village when the property changed
hands. It will also take down a hut if a resident causes a problem for
the neighborhood.
Haas says he doesn't know whether the huts pose a liability risk for
landowners, but adds, "In general the sites where there is a clear
property owner, the property owner is tacitly aware they [the huts]
are there."
Many "hutters" stay a short while, saving enough money to get an
apartment or subsidized housing, at which point they turn their huts
over to the next in line. Others stay longer. "This reminds me of Boy
Scouts," says Joe, a Ghanaian expatriate who has been in his rustic
shelter for five years.
If constructing stealth housing is a trend, it's a quiet one. Jim
Reid, a perennial candidate for public office in San Francisco, has
designed a 10-by-10 house to be mass-produced for that city's
homeless, but none is currently in use, perhaps because of the $12,000
price tag.
A similar movement rose and fell in Chicago, and a group in Canada
called the Peterborough Collective is trying to raise interest in
similar shelters. "It can snowball, even if it's not a big ball," says
Richard Van Slyke, an independent videographer who has been taping a
documentary about the Mad Housers for four months.
One thing that Van Slyke and others notice about the group is that it
is motivated by a desire to do the right thing, even though few of the
Housers seem to connect that desire with a religious affiliation.
Salma Abdulrahman, a telecommunications software programmer, says her
urge to volunteer with the group doesn't grow out of her Muslim faith
as much as from her basic character.
"We're all human beings, we're all people, when you come down to it,"
says the 24-year-old. "I'd be doing this if I were any religion. It's
just part of my personality."
On a drizzly, mackerel-clouded Sunday at another hut site, Abdulrahman
is demonstrating her philosophy by hauling wheelbarrows full of
firewood from hut to hut, while Jeffers wields a chain saw.
This small village of huts is located on the bones of a ruined
amusement park called Funtown. Turman once visited Funtown as a child,
when school buses brought a pack of teenagers up from his Heard County
high school. Now he lives next to the defunct merry-go-round, which is
reduced to a weed-cracked concrete pad.
Here residents carry their water and heat with wood. They grow
vegetables and make their own charcoal under Joe's guidance. Turman
powers his portable TV with a 12-volt car battery.
"We're just trying to get society back into some kind of balance,"
says Jeffers, pausing for some cowboy coffee perking on a galvanized
drum fire. "Some people have got so much more and other people don't
have any heat."
What they provide, says Hess, is hope and dignity, along with a dry
place to sleep. "Once you give people a certain amount of hope," he
says, "civilization begins there."
_________________________________________________________________
Funtown: A Third World village in the middle of the city
The ferris wheel was hauled off long ago. The bumper cars are gone.
Algae grows in the empty swimming pool and the concession stands tilt
in slow-motion collapse.
Funtown, an amusement park that once drew revelers from around the
metro area, is a ruin. But there is new life on Funtown's grave.
In this wild, secluded corner of Southwest Atlanta, hidden among the
scrub mimosa that push up through Funtown's asphalt walkways and
parking lots, is a village of about 12 tiny huts, built by the Mad
Housers over the last 10 years.
While some residents of the village have gone on to less primitive
housing, others find themselves happy with this simple life: carrying
water, cutting wood for their durable homemade woodstoves, and growing
vegetables.
Walking on the nearby streets was scary for Barbara Ann Triplett, who
lived here for a few months, but once inside the village she felt
safe. "Every one of them [the other residents] was there to protect
me," she said.
Another resident from the early days of the village said the
mosquitoes and ants were a problem, not to mention the scary isolation
and the cold weather (this was before the huts were insulated), "but
other than that it was fine," she adds with a smile.
This resident left before the gen-car arrived. The gen-car changed
everything.
Always looking for ways to humanize the environment for the residents
of their huts, the Mad Housers, led by president Frank Jeffers,
figured out a way to turn a junked 1985 Mercury Capri into light and
hot water.
Jeffers, whose group builds emergency shelters for the homeless, calls
it the "co-generation car" -- gen-car for short. Mad Houser Bill
Callison bought it for $200 (it already had 250,000 miles on it), then
the transmission burned out. He had it towed to the site. Callison and
Jeffers began upgrading the Capri, and eventually had it outfitted
with two 90-amp alternators and an array of six golf-cart batteries in
the trunk. Nearby "hutters" connected themselves to a home-made
electrical grid, and, voila, there was 12-volt light.
By running the car for a few hours three times a week, the residents
could recharge the battery array enough to run lights and portable
television sets for the seven hutters who were interested.
Jeffers also retro-fitted the car's cooling system, running hot water
from the water pump to a coil of copper tubing in a nearby 50-gallon
drum. Water inside the drum was heated through this primitive heat
exchange, while water from the coil was returned to the car's
radiator. Residents had hot water for dishes and bathing.
"For less than $10 a week in gasoline we had power and hot water for
about seven people," says Callison.
Unfortunately the gen-car is no more. After five years supplying the
needs of the village, it died last spring. Still, says Callison, "that
was the best $200 I ever spent."
END
The shelter people
By BO EMERSON
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
In hidden corners of Atlanta and environs, huts for the homeless just
seem to spring up. Call it . . . stealth housing.
Nick Hess, the smooth-domed leader of one of the oddest construction
crews in Georgia, gathered buckets of nails, bundles of hammers and
his battery-powered circular saw last Sunday and hiked under dripping
skies to a small grove of hardwoods in a concrete wilderness within
view of Midtown's skyscrapers.
Once at the site, Hess, 32, and a half-dozen colleagues went to work,
laying a simple concrete block foundation and raising modular walls.
These builders, most of them computer geeks, are not skilled with the
Skilsaw, but within two hours they were putting the roof on the
finished structure. A homeless man who'd been sleeping under plastic
tarps was waiting to take possession.
"We do the most affordable housing in the metro area," said Jim
Devlin, a 41-year-old Little Five Points resident in an Aussie hat, as
he pounded nails. "We build it and give it away."
These are the Mad Housers, a band of volunteers who deal with the
problem of homelessness by cutting to the chase: Every Sunday they
build houses.
Very small houses.
The base model is only 6 feet wide by 8 feet long, with a ceiling
that's 10 feet high at the peak. Cost to the Mad Housers: about $350.
Cost to the client: zero.
For someone who's been burrowing in kudzu, sleeping in Hefty bags or
hunkering under a highway bridge, 48 square feet of floor space makes
a world of difference.
It's a weathertight, insulated miniature home, with roll roofing, a
locking front door and a cheery wood stove piping in the corner.
One of their clients is Walt Turman, a 52-year-old auto mechanic and
tree service worker, who has added a room to his hut plus space for
the portable toilet. "This is the way I came up," says the former farm
boy, surveying his cluttered domain a few miles away from Sunday's
construction site. "I know about cooking on a wood stove 'cause my
mama had to get up every morning and make breakfast on one."
Granted, what the Mad Housers do is at the margins of the law. Their
huts, which they give away, are generally sited on property that they
don't own. But for Mad Houser Vice President Hess, the choice between
doing the right thing and doing the legal thing is a no-brainer.
"We've been yelled at before and we'll probably get yelled at again."
Beth McCracken, who is studying to be a social worker at Kennesaw
State University, wrote a paper on the Mad Housers for a class on
grass-roots movements, and was so impressed she launched a fund-raiser
to pay for a new hut. "Technically they try to fly under the radar,"
says McCracken, 34. "I think they're awesome. They're taking on a
cause that's overwhelming -- the city can't handle it -- and they're
helping out, one person at a time."
According to longtime member Frank Jeffers, 59, the original Mad
Housers, who first cohered in 1987, were politically provocative. They
built huts in "ostentatious places" to raise awareness of the homeless
problem.
But quality control was low. The plywood was thin, the huts
uninsulated, the windows too big. "They leaked heat like a sieve and
they were totally unsecure," says Hess. "It was a good first pass."
Like many of their huts, that group fell apart in the mid-1990s. The
Mad Housers regrouped about two years ago, focusing on shelter, not
politics.
Today the Mad Housers succeed by thinking inside the box. For example,
consider their unique wood stove design, created by Jeffers: It is
built of four nested galvanized shop buckets, with a lid and a
2-inch-diameter vent pipe to carry smoke up through the roof.
Perforations at the base control air flow. Cost: about $30. (Clients
receive instruction in using the cheap stove, and its safety record is
good, says volunteer Kurt Haas.)
The low-budget group, composed of activists, software writers and the
formerly homeless, works the same way. The Mad Housers operate on a
minimum of fuel, efficiently turning income into shelter. Their huts
are exactly the length of two sheets of plywood and the width of one
and a half, meaning a minimum of cuts per sheet. Classed as "emergency
shelter," the huts are intended to finesse housing codes that apply to
permanent dwellings.
Sometimes their overhead is so low they bump their noggins. At a
recent "build" they used a plastic bottle filled with water for a
level, and they were forced to flatten the hut site by digging in the
dirt with pointy pieces of wood and their bare hands.
"We need a shovel," says Devlin during a Mad Houser meeting at a
Midtown coffee shop. At the meeting they discuss the upcoming Sunday's
construction activities and ways to capitalize on National Hunger and
Homelessness Awareness Week, which starts Sunday.
They also talk about a van. Hess, a computer programmer at
Weather.com, reports that insurance on a "company" van will cost
$1,500, the entire Mad Houser bank account. No van, man.
Their profile is low and their donations are low too. Yet support
comes from a wide range of folks (including an anonymous donor who
communicates only through a Washington lawyer).
Middle school students from Atlanta and Boy Scouts from Lilburn have
helped on Mad Houser projects, with funds donated by the Georgia
Vietnam Veterans Alliance. A Powder Springs church joined them on a
build, and this summer the Furniture Bank of Metro Atlanta donated
warehouse space so they could do some of their carpentry inside.
But they've yet to be embraced by the mainstream. Folks in Habitat for
Humanity (where starter houses cost $46,000) prefer not to comment on
the guerrilla builders. Hess doesn't even want to approach the "big
box" retailers such as Home Depot for free plywood. He figures few
corporations want to claim charitable deductions to habitual
trespassers.
In the meantime, the slumping economy and promises of a cold winter
keep business brisk. All two dozen of their huts are full, and there's
a waiting list six deep, with requests for huts in places far from
downtown Atlanta. (There are potential clients camping in woods around
Marietta.)
Some supporters are troubled by the group's underground tactics, but
sympathetic to their goals. Phil Greeves of Lilburn says he'd prefer
it if the Mad Housers got permission instead of hiding their huts, but
he acknowledges that in most cases they'd be denied.
Adam, Greeves' son, built a hut two years ago to fulfill the community
service requirement for his Eagle Scout badge. The project changed
their opinions about the homeless. "These were not unproductive
people," says the father. "They were working Monday to Friday, and on
the weekends they'd come out and help with the house."
On the ethics of madhousing, Bill Bolling, founder of the Atlanta
Community Food Bank, comments, "I would say you ask forgiveness
instead of permission in this case. This is a small legal question vs.
a big social issue."
Mad Houser Peter Richards, a teacher at Paideia School, sums up the
question this way: "In America," he says, "you have two choices if
you're homeless: charity or trespass."
The city hasn't prosecuted any Mad Housers in recent memory, says
Sandra Walker, spokeswoman for Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin, though
the city has asked that some structures be removed. "It's an
unfortunate situation," says Walker. "It's what [the Mad Housers] feel
they have to do, but certainly we have to respect the right of the
property owners, and follow the laws."
The Mad Housers will always remove huts if asked by the property
owner, says Haas. The group tracks ownership by checking plats, and on
at least one occasion disassembled a village when the property changed
hands. It will also take down a hut if a resident causes a problem for
the neighborhood.
Haas says he doesn't know whether the huts pose a liability risk for
landowners, but adds, "In general the sites where there is a clear
property owner, the property owner is tacitly aware they [the huts]
are there."
Many "hutters" stay a short while, saving enough money to get an
apartment or subsidized housing, at which point they turn their huts
over to the next in line. Others stay longer. "This reminds me of Boy
Scouts," says Joe, a Ghanaian expatriate who has been in his rustic
shelter for five years.
If constructing stealth housing is a trend, it's a quiet one. Jim
Reid, a perennial candidate for public office in San Francisco, has
designed a 10-by-10 house to be mass-produced for that city's
homeless, but none is currently in use, perhaps because of the $12,000
price tag.
A similar movement rose and fell in Chicago, and a group in Canada
called the Peterborough Collective is trying to raise interest in
similar shelters. "It can snowball, even if it's not a big ball," says
Richard Van Slyke, an independent videographer who has been taping a
documentary about the Mad Housers for four months.
One thing that Van Slyke and others notice about the group is that it
is motivated by a desire to do the right thing, even though few of the
Housers seem to connect that desire with a religious affiliation.
Salma Abdulrahman, a telecommunications software programmer, says her
urge to volunteer with the group doesn't grow out of her Muslim faith
as much as from her basic character.
"We're all human beings, we're all people, when you come down to it,"
says the 24-year-old. "I'd be doing this if I were any religion. It's
just part of my personality."
On a drizzly, mackerel-clouded Sunday at another hut site, Abdulrahman
is demonstrating her philosophy by hauling wheelbarrows full of
firewood from hut to hut, while Jeffers wields a chain saw.
This small village of huts is located on the bones of a ruined
amusement park called Funtown. Turman once visited Funtown as a child,
when school buses brought a pack of teenagers up from his Heard County
high school. Now he lives next to the defunct merry-go-round, which is
reduced to a weed-cracked concrete pad.
Here residents carry their water and heat with wood. They grow
vegetables and make their own charcoal under Joe's guidance. Turman
powers his portable TV with a 12-volt car battery.
"We're just trying to get society back into some kind of balance,"
says Jeffers, pausing for some cowboy coffee perking on a galvanized
drum fire. "Some people have got so much more and other people don't
have any heat."
What they provide, says Hess, is hope and dignity, along with a dry
place to sleep. "Once you give people a certain amount of hope," he
says, "civilization begins there."
_________________________________________________________________
Funtown: A Third World village in the middle of the city
The ferris wheel was hauled off long ago. The bumper cars are gone.
Algae grows in the empty swimming pool and the concession stands tilt
in slow-motion collapse.
Funtown, an amusement park that once drew revelers from around the
metro area, is a ruin. But there is new life on Funtown's grave.
In this wild, secluded corner of Southwest Atlanta, hidden among the
scrub mimosa that push up through Funtown's asphalt walkways and
parking lots, is a village of about 12 tiny huts, built by the Mad
Housers over the last 10 years.
While some residents of the village have gone on to less primitive
housing, others find themselves happy with this simple life: carrying
water, cutting wood for their durable homemade woodstoves, and growing
vegetables.
Walking on the nearby streets was scary for Barbara Ann Triplett, who
lived here for a few months, but once inside the village she felt
safe. "Every one of them [the other residents] was there to protect
me," she said.
Another resident from the early days of the village said the
mosquitoes and ants were a problem, not to mention the scary isolation
and the cold weather (this was before the huts were insulated), "but
other than that it was fine," she adds with a smile.
This resident left before the gen-car arrived. The gen-car changed
everything.
Always looking for ways to humanize the environment for the residents
of their huts, the Mad Housers, led by president Frank Jeffers,
figured out a way to turn a junked 1985 Mercury Capri into light and
hot water.
Jeffers, whose group builds emergency shelters for the homeless, calls
it the "co-generation car" -- gen-car for short. Mad Houser Bill
Callison bought it for $200 (it already had 250,000 miles on it), then
the transmission burned out. He had it towed to the site. Callison and
Jeffers began upgrading the Capri, and eventually had it outfitted
with two 90-amp alternators and an array of six golf-cart batteries in
the trunk. Nearby "hutters" connected themselves to a home-made
electrical grid, and, voila, there was 12-volt light.
By running the car for a few hours three times a week, the residents
could recharge the battery array enough to run lights and portable
television sets for the seven hutters who were interested.
Jeffers also retro-fitted the car's cooling system, running hot water
from the water pump to a coil of copper tubing in a nearby 50-gallon
drum. Water inside the drum was heated through this primitive heat
exchange, while water from the coil was returned to the car's
radiator. Residents had hot water for dishes and bathing.
"For less than $10 a week in gasoline we had power and hot water for
about seven people," says Callison.
Unfortunately the gen-car is no more. After five years supplying the
needs of the village, it died last spring. Still, says Callison, "that
was the best $200 I ever spent."
END
