Jan has spent so many nights sleeping on pavement that the cushion of a thick twin mattress feels foreign.
Standing in her new home—an eight- by 12-foot hexagon-shaped building—she hesitates before spreading a brown blanket over the bed’s crisp sheets. Since moving in over a week ago, Jan has been falling asleep tucked inside her familiar sleeping bag over a thin camping pad. Tonight, she says, she thinks she’ll sleep under the covers.
“It’s the decompressing that gets to a person,” says Jan, 58, who spent the last year sleeping under an Interstate 405 overpass in Northwest Portland, and who asked to be identified only by her first name. “It takes a while to get used to the fact that I’m inside a place—that I have a bed, that I don’t have to keep my eyes open all the time. You gotta learn how to be around people again.”
Jan’s cautious acceptance of her new home is a transition that her neighbors, members of her new community, Kenton Women’s Village, are all familiar with.
The village, a collection of 14 tiny buildings (with enough space for a bed, shelving, and a solar-powered electrical outlet) in a secluded lot just north of Kenton Park, is meant for cis and transgender women transitioning out of homelessness—and the trauma that comes with it. When it opened in June 2017, the village was meant to test the efficacy of a women-only “pop-up” shelter that would serve as a stepping stone between homelessness and permanent housing. The pilot program, backed by both public and private dollars, wasn’t meant to last longer than a year.
But the village has exceeded its founders’ cautious expectations. Of the 23 women who’ve lived in the village, 14 have successfully moved into permanent housing with the help of on-site case workers. All current residents are enrolled in a health insurance plan—allowing many to be treated for chronic health issues—and all have replaced missing or lost identifying documents that have kept them from finding work or applying for housing aid. While four residents have been asked to leave for violating village rules, the Kenton village hasn’t brought with it an uptick in crime in the North Portland neighborhood, nor an influx of other homeless camps in the area.
