Neighborship

Neighborship

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, and the skyrocketing cost of living in the United States, many people turned to tiny homes and mobile homes as a means to survive. Tucked in a small lot at the edge of West Oakland lies a tiny home community known as Neighborship. Founded by Adam Garrett-Clark and other pedicab drivers in 2015, Neighborship is a resilience space in a variety of ways, from their energy resilience to their response to various legal and zoning challenges unfortunately common to many tiny home communities throughout the Bay Area.

Off-Grid Living

Neighborship is composed of several mobile homes, all with a variety of innovative climate solutions. The community is truly a resilience hub in that it is  completely off-grid, with each home outfitted with its own solar panels and battery back up. 

Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

The combination of the limited financial resources with limited  energy from their batteries and solar panels have prompted the residents of Neighborship to become experts at energy conservation. All of the homes have energy efficient appliances, while the community also sports a wind turbine which is essential during prolonged periods of minimal sun visibility such as heavy smoke days. 

 

The community is also food resilient. Built on a former junk yard with a history of toxic heavy metals in the soil, the residents have had to get creative with their gardening. All of their edible and medicinal plants are grown in raised beds and pots and are pollinated by the several hives of bees that live on site. 

 

Despite their model resilience practices, the community is under constant threat of closure. The residents have become outspoken advocates for zoning code reform and leaders in the struggle to legalize tiny home communities, as highlighted in this recent San Francisco Chronicle article. Their local partners and collaborators in this struggle include the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, Sustainable Economies Law Center, Northern California Land Trust, and Bottom’s Up Community Garden. 

 

Recently, their efforts have seen some success with Oakland’s New Ordinance to Increase Housing Affordability which would give communities like Neighborship a legal designation and protection. But these efforts are a double-edged sword: the requirements stipulated in the ordinance will increase financial burdens that could jeopardize their very affordability. 

 

Community Asset Mapping 

Inside Neighborship, there is an informal understanding of both the skills and vulnerabilities of the residents. Since many of the residents have been pedicab drivers, there is extensive use of bicycles and knowledge to prepare them. To keep things affordable, they are also skilled in water conservation and are constantly looking for new ways to save and store water. 

 

Disaster preparedness is one area of growth for the community. The site does have a 72 hour supply of food and water, but they do not have sufficient supplies of other emergency materials such as masks, air filters, and radios. They used to meet on a regular basis to discuss disaster preparation, but since the start of the pandemic, these meetings have become less frequent. Recognizing these deficiencies, Adam is interested in formalizing disaster response procedures and adding capabilities to be able to respond to a variety of different emergencies. 

 

Although their community faces many challenges, Neighborship stands as a model for how tiny homes can effectively fight the housing crisis, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and increase community resilience. 

 

Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

Case Study and Interview: Canticle Farm

Case Study and Interview: Canticle Farm

In this interview, I spoke with Robin Bean Crane, who talked about the numerous and wonderful projects happening in the urban farm in Oakland. After our interview, I headed over to one of Canticle Farm’s garden parties with my friend, Ishaana, and helped them plant some tomato seeds. I also took a few pictures, which are included in this article, but to truly experience the peaceful and communal atmosphere, you might want to go support Canticle Farms by attending one of their events. 

Q: Can you tell me what Canticle Farm does? 

Crane: We’re an intentional community experimenting at the intersection of faith-based, race-based, and earth-based activism. It’s a platform for figuring out how to live together across differences and how to serve our hyper-local community and neighbors. Our theoretical pillars are non-violent communication, restorative justice, and work that reconnects.

Q: Can you paint a picture of what you do at Canticle Farm?

Crane: Picture seven houses between two busy streets in Fruitvale (a neighborhood in Oakland), with all the fences knocked down between them. This creates an open, common, guiding space. 

These seven houses each have their mission within the larger whole. There’s a house that focuses on neighborhood work, there’s a house that focuses on restorative justice work, there’s about to be an asylum seeker program, and there was a house dedicated toward gardening and restoration. Our mission is to learn together in a beautiful way. 

We have many different land projects that also fulfill this mission, such as rainwater garden beds, demonstration projects for our neighbors (on how to grow edible and native plants), and we’re trying to remove invasive plants and replace them with natives. We have a childcare program, where we have our neighbor’s kids over and take care of them. We also have a program with high schoolers, and on Thursdays we do food distribution and give out free food and herbal medicine consultations. There’s an interfaith service on Sunday, and we’re about to open a community kitchen project. It’ll be exciting where the community can come. A living, learning laboratory. 

Q: Can you talk about your resilience hub work some more? 

Crane: We have a solar panel and battery project. Part of the work with a resilience hub is that, when sh*t goes down, people can come and find resources. We also have food distribution services, so we want to be a place where people in the neighborhood can come, even when there’s not a disaster. 

People can also come and learn about the Earth. We have a water remediation project, where we’re putting in drought-resistant plants and water remediating plants, and then filtering the water through pumping it from this really old well. We then pump that water into a fish pond, and there the fish poop and add nutrients to the water. This then gets funneled to the plants that clean the water, and then it makes its way down the land, so the creek gets cleaner and cleaner. This ties in to the creek restoration project, where we invite anyone and everyone to come help us “daylight” this creek. 

It’s really deep to me, because this water has been in cement tunnels and underground for centuries and generations, and now it will get daylighted and be around bees and birds; the ecosystem will be alive again. That’s exciting! We’re inviting people to come and restore the riverbanks. 

Little demonstration projects like that are part of what it means to be a resilience hub, as well actually distributing resources. 

Q: Going back to something you said earlier, you said you wanted to be ready for when sh@# goes down, whether it’s the solar batteries or growing your food. What kind of disasters do you see affecting your area? 

There are already the disasters of racism and capitalism, alive and well. That ends up creating food insecurity crises. So we’re working with our neighbors to avoid the charity model of food distribution, we want to plant a seed for deeper collaboration. 

How do we support each other past food? One thing that we talked a lot about is having crisis intervention training, and teaching each other self defense tactics that avoid calling the police and ways to intervene in escalated situations. That happens a lot in our neighborhood, and we’re trying to train each other around that form of crisis. 

In terms of natural disasters, there are earthquakes, and in that case we have our kits. We distributed a bunch of earthquake prep kits during a block party. We want to do more stuff like that: integrating emergency prep into fun stuff. In terms of fires, we distributed masks, and bought a couple of air filters for everyone in our immediate community. Another thing is the drought. A lot of our gardening work, rain garden work, native plant work, creek restoration work, is centered around how we live in a drought affected place and with water scarcity. 

Q: It sounds like Canticle Farms are reaching out to the people most vulnerable in the face of climate change. 

Crane: The people who live at Canticle, and who are in those populations most affected by climate change, have talked about how living in community is a part of the healing process. 

Also, a lot of our neighbors have recently immigrated, and still are getting their footing in this wild society of ours. We are a place for them to ask questions, like how do I navigate the school system? How do I fill out this paper work? We also serve the wider community. There’s internal and external service work, and we try to orient that around people who have been historically oppressed. 

It sounds like Canticle is at the nexus of a lot of different communities and identities! Can you tell us what’s in Canticle’s future? 

We want to expand our food preservation work with our community kitchen, and invite people to come work on  fermentation, canning, and preserving projects. We also want to invite them to use the kitchen space. Also, we hope to be able to stipend teams in our neighborhoods for them to do this earth-based work, whether it’s roles for youth to do food cooking and delivery, or maybe composting. We don’t have plans yet, just daydreams around taking care of our neighborhoods. No one gets paid right now, but maybe in the future, if we could stipend people, that would be great.  

Case Study: La Colina Community Circle

Case Study: La Colina Community Circle

 

La Colina Community Circle is a model resilience neighborhood situated in the hills of El Sobrante, California. Founded on the vision of breaking down walls of isolation and strengthening connection between neighbors, the Community Circle has grown into a thriving community in an environment challenged by climate change. Through frequent events like block parties and crop swaps, the bonds between neighbors have blossomed. By pooling their skills and resources, they have strengthened community resilience through disaster preparation, permaculture and various work projects. Unlike a traditional hub housed at a single facility, the organic and familiar nature of this resilience neighborhood model allows the site to more effectively care for the needs of individual community members. 

The community itself is a unique blend of working class families of various races and ethnicities. There is a core constituent of dedicated members who find the time in their busy lives to work on the multitude of neighborhood projects to build both resilience and community.

A model for Permaculture: food growing and water catchment/conservation

The neighborhood itself contains a multitude of gardens that grow a variety of fruits and vegetables including olives, blackberries, and tomatoes. Chief among these gardens is the food forest at Rising Spring garden, home to community organizer Jessica Bates and the focal point of resilience for the neighborhood. Their innovative water systems help to support her garden; Rising Spring contains three 208 gallon tanks, a single 10,000 gallon tank, an in house water filtration system, water-efficient appliances,a laundry to landscape greywater system, and various drought-resistant landscaping. Other neighbors also have innovative sustainable features, from  gardens to drought tolerant landscaping. One neighbor has a full-house grey water system and a home made composting toilet. These measures are an essential element of community resilience and will be vital community resources during California’s persistent droughts. 

 

La Colina is also well prepared to respond to natural disasters. 

 

Similar to many other hubs, La Colina is constantly finding new ways to build resilience. One priority area is disaster preparedness. For example, there is one member who is becoming CERT certified, while multiple community members have prepared go bags and have stockpiled 72 hours’ worth of food and water. They also have a Ham radio tower which is connected to East Bay CERT (community emergency response team) and is stationed on the hillside next to La Colina neighborhood. At their community meetings every third Sunday, neighbors often  discuss how they would respond to various disaster scenarios, including evacuation plans. Since the community abuts part of Wildcat Canyon Regional Park, neighbors are currently working on becoming trained to become a “FireWise ” community. One dangerous source of vulnerability for the community are earthquakes as many of the homes in the neighborhood currently not retrofit for a sizable shock. Beyond this, the community itself is well connected, with clear lines of communication and extensive asset mapping to assist vulnerable residents during disasters. Rising Spring is also developing mobile off-grid power through solar with battery backup.

 

Looking to the future, La Colina Community Circle is ambitious in its efforts to create a more resilient community. Though busy with her toddler, Jessica has bold ambitions at her Rising Spring home garden that include creating a shared shaded area for community meetings, setting up a community kitchen, and building a mobile charging solar station. These efforts and others will go a long way to further the Community Circle’s goals of breaking down barriers between neighbors and strengthening their connections with one another. As a resilient neighborhood, La Colina neighborhood is a shining example of the power of cooperation and standing together in the face of adversity.