Thank you, Heather Jo Flores, for the video message you posted about land access and the class struggle. I am one of those subscribers to your email list who has been following you and casually checking out some of your videos but never signed up for a course or reached out to connect. I've known pretty clearly since 2019 what I want to cultivate in my life--a little ecovillage or homestead of sorts that I can call home and create an oasis for the young adults in my family who are also struggling to stay housed and find a place in this world.
Your story deeply moves me, Heather. I related to almost everything you said. Apologies in advance for the long message, but I became very isolated during the pandemic and experienced a lot of trauma and loss, and I have an enormous amount of shame about what feels like failure, despite working myself half-to-death my whole life in the scramble to achieve a stable spot in the middle class. I'm 55-years old (and getting tired). I grew up poor raised by a single mother and was legally emancipated and financially supporting myself by 17. I have spent most of my life scrambling for housing and once I became a single mom at 30, I felt thereafter forced into whatever work or career path would enable me to keep my son housed and better off than I was. Despite hard work and some success in meaningless corporate jobs where I contributed to consumerism, I actually did buy a house finally in 2006, but I ended up losing everything in the global financial crisis after 2008. I was the perfect candidate for the bank bailout that banks were obligated to fund as a trade for being bailed out by the taxpayers. My house was auctioned off for $400k in 2011 and is now worth $1.3 million. I won $5,000 in a class action suit against the banks, but the investor who had the cash to buy my home made almost a million dollars while I have essentially been without stable housing ever since.
I went back to school to finally earn a college degree, graduating with honors from UC Berkeley in 2015 at 47 years old with an English degree (Dumb! But I still had no financial literacy and I needed too many credits to become a nurse before my funds would run out). Despite having achieved my dream of getting a degree, I feel a sense of utter failure and shame that I am finding it harder and harder to stay housed. My adult son (27) was doing really well because he is a tech person, but the good job he had (making $90K) was eliminated as a result of the interest rates hikes that were designed to shrink the economy (because labor was making too much?). He and his girlfriend now have no where to go because the town where she is from that they were living before he moved to take the good job has experienced a tripling in rent over the last three years. Almost all rentals were converted to airbnb and every affordable fixer house was purchased by investors, flipped, and put back on the market at twice the sale price.
I also see that any little niche that a working class person and those without wealth might turn to for a healthy life (as an alternative to soul-killing corporate jobs)--such as permaculture or the healing arts--is taken over by monied practitioners and savvy marketers who use their leverage and the same corporate profit-making strategies to take over and corner opportunities, launching huge projects that other people labor on behalf of but never get ahead in creating stability for themselves.
I feel traumatized by my experience, as well as the responses I get from friends and family who do not relate to what I am experiencing, and it has negatively impacted my mental health. I feel more separated and alone in my struggle than I ever have, but I am a fighter and a survivor and trying not to cave in to despair.
The very good, hopeful news is that as part of my work as a book editor I was introduced to a professor who heads up a sustainable architecture and design program in the Bay Area. He designed a tiny home project for unhoused youth in Oakland, which was built entirely by volunteer labor via an interfaith ministry that drew hundreds of people from many different faiths and congregations together to help these kids. The architect and his students are involved in amazing projects like this all over the planet as part of an initiative to provide solutions for marginalized populations--including unhoused youth, Indigenous Americans, and low-income communities of color. In our meeting, I was bold and asked the architect, what about the rest of the population? And what about permaculture? Although he is permaculture certified he was not including a permaculture component in his designs and admitted that he should, and then asked, "maybe that's your piece? Maybe that's how you can get involved?" He is working on another tiny home project for unhoused youth, this time six houses on a small lot. There is no permaculture component and he invited me to meet the coordinator of the project and to use the site as a lab! Wow!! Wish I had been actually enrolled in the courses here or anywhere because I have almost no knowledge to even do a survey of the site let alone make a plan.
My longterm vision is to use the corporate skills I honed and my fearlessness as someone who has had to hustle to survive my whole life to develop little ecovillages, kind of like trailer parks that can be scaled out with green modular housing organized around a community food forest with knowledge available for residents to regain the agency to live good healthy lives for themselves and their children. Pipe dreams? But I know there must be venture capitalists and green developers with the funds and the will to invest in society again. I must believe that is true in order to remain hopeful.
But for now I have this little tiny home project that I get to be a part of for unhoused youth. So, Heather Jo Flores, let's talk! I'd also love to know where you landed after you left Spain?It would be great to connect with you--in addition to enrolling in your courses because now I have access to a real site and a low-stakes opportunity to put this learning into practice.
Thank you! I look forward to connecting with other people in this space--once I figure out how to navigate it.