By Matthew Moore for KUAF-FM.
Broadcast version by Danielle Smith for Arkansas News Service reporting for the KUAF/Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation-Public News Service Collaboration.

A barrier of plastic orange fencing surrounds an odd-looking structure just north of Vol Walker Hall on the University of Arkansas campus. John Folan removes a bungee cord that’s loosely holding up the fence and leads the way to what looks like an unfinished home. The whir of construction happening next door at Mullins Library hangs in the air, but is mostly halted at the entryway of a full-scale model of a new kind of home being designed by the Urban Design Build Studio, a part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

“It's going to come apart, and it's going to be put back together,” said Folan. “We're going to have community engagement out here. It's a way for people to kick the tires with technology and the spatial configurations that are being proposed, but it has a very simple form. Materials are very simple, but actually what's being done here is pretty sophisticated.” 

We walk through a doorway into one of the two interior rooms of the house. The ceiling is tall, more than 10 feet at its lowest point, with a strong angle upward. One room features a loft above it for sleeping. And a distinct element of this home is how much lumber is used and seen in its construction. 

“Where we're standing right now is not a full-scale representation of what the home is,” said Folan. “This is just giving you a sense of what the space might feel like with the wood exposed. Over the course of the spring, we'll be adding windows, there'll be an exterior cladding that goes on the outside. The lumber on the north face will remain exposed and then we'll be adding the finishes on the inside. There's stairs that go up to a sleeping loft. And again, that's not the full size of the sleeping loft. It just gives you a general idea of what the layout is.”

The wood is a key component of this structure. Folan describes it as wave layered timber. Imagine the stereotypical drawing you’d see of an elementary student making waves: small rounded peaks and shallow valleys down the length of a piece of wood.

"It’s a material that is shaped in a way this meshes together like that,” said Folan, as he laid the two pieces of lumber on top of each other. “And then there are threaded rods which go through it. There's no adhesives that are used. We’re able to put this together without insulation on certain surfaces. It develops a weather tight airtight bond and that weather tight air tight bond means that when this building has completed its serviceable existence, it can be taken apart and these pieces can be used for other purposes.

“It employs what's known as ‘designed for deconstruction principles,’” Folan continues, “which is something we've been working with for quite some time. We're working with this technology through an exclusive license agreement with WLT Capital Oy, which is a group out of Helsinki, Finland, collaborating with them and this will be the first time that this technology is employed in North America.

The current structure on campus is only 54 square feet, but Folan said do not confuse this for a new kind of tiny home.

I can understand thinking this is a tiny home being here,” said Folan. “The width of the home will be a little wider than twice this width. So it's going to feel a lot broader. The length of the home is around seven feet in length.

Folan said they’ve been working with residents to show them drawings and large scale models of the homes. “They've been saying ‘Wow, I can't believe that. It that looks like a much larger house than I would have thought it was.’ So, what we're trying to do is make sure that everybody has the amenities that they would have in a house. But we're just looking at efficiency. It’s an essay in design and it's not about trying to minimize everything. It's where do you find efficiencies and understanding how people occupy homes, how they use them in different ways and then just providing universal spaces for that.

This home, as cool and technologically advanced as it is, is more than just a class project for Folan and his students. It’s their attempt to help with affordable housing in northwest Arkansas. He said there’s really just three factors when it comes to the issue of affordable housing.

“It’s labor, land and lumber,” said Folan. “If you're going to address this in a sustainable and a responsible way, we have to understand and accept the fact that labor prices are going to fluctuate and they're going to be subject to what market forces present. Same with lumber. The materials are going to cost what the materials cost and the land is going to cost what it costs. And if you're in an environment like northwest Arkansas, it's going to escalate significantly.”

It can be especially hard for people looking to become first time homeowners in a region where labor, lumber, and land are all three very expensive. The United Way has named a subset of households as ALICE – Asset Limited, Income Constrained, and Employed. That is to say, people who have jobs, but may have to decide between saving money for a down payment on a house or paying for childcare. In Arkansas, that’s 1 in 3 households.

Folan said these homes can be built in higher density and on smaller pieces of land. The objective is to customize and modify to meet the needs of the owners while also being environmentally friendly, efficient, and perhaps most important, affordable.

“I think the recognition of ALICE is probably one of the most significant moments and understanding the contemporary housing crisis,” said Folan. “At the AR Home Lab, Urban Design and Build Studio, and Fay Jones School, we've been working on another home prototype with Go Forward Pine Bluff and the Pine Bluff Urban Redevelopment Authority, and it's targeted specifically for the ALICE program that they had been working on in collaboration with Simmons Bank in central and southern Arkansas. So, it's interesting that you brought that up becausem again, it further reinforces that this is a very tangled web and these are all related considerations.

Another demographic to consider with these housing prototypes is Folan’s students. He said one of the advantages of this is having a finger on the pulse of the next generation of potential homeowners.

“There's always a discussion about ‘So who's living in the home,’” Folan said. “Oftentimes, someone will raise their hand and say ‘Oh, well, it's a single mother with two children.’ Or they'll say ‘it's a nuclear family,’ but it's interesting because they have a very firm idea of who's going to occupy the home, and what it does is it opens the conversation to, well we've now constructed 30 different narratives of who might live there, and they're all going to live in there in a very different way.”

When it comes to the students themselves, members of Gen Z, he said their priorities are very different as well when it comes to the design, implementation, and location of the homes.

“Homeownership is not that important to a lot of students,” he chuckled. “That's not necessarily something that they're concerned with. It'll be interesting to see whether that changes with time. I think we've been seeing that trend now for I would say the last 20-30 years where they have this vision of owning their own home. And what we're seeing with a lot of the students is [their priorities are] travel and experiences. What I have found interesting is that, after a period of time, we are finding that adults further on in their life are coming back to that norm of homeownership. It will be interesting to see, but we don't know.

What Folan does know about this generation of students is how they value the natural beauty of the state and their care for sustainability and the environment. 

“One of the things that's emerged from that is, do you really need a large home?” said Folan. “So much of what's valued is actually outside and around the home. So, if you can find ways to have the home find these external spaces that everybody appreciates, you're expanding the footprint without any cost. I think that's been really beneficial in the process.

While there’s just 54 square feet of interior space in the prototype on the Vol Walker lawn, a sliding barn door shows a spacious exterior.

“One of the significant components that's missing right now is we have a long bench and a railing system that goes around the edge of this deck,” said Folan. “The idea is that if there's a group of potential homeowners, they can sit there and we can present information to them about what the actual house would look like. We're going to work with virtual reality and other tools so that they can experience what those spaces might be like. It's going to be a hybrid of looking at drawings, seeing the physical materials experiencing facsimiles of the space, and we hope to get feedback on that so that we can refine everything.

“One of the things that we've been looking at that the deck illustrates is — and the advantage of using this material is — you don't have to use brand new material for this. We've been incorporating reclaimed lumber, we've been diverting from the landfill and waste streams. We're also showing how that can be used to develop patterns. Just kind of blending different. It’s just a full scale experiment at this point.”


Matthew Moore wrote this article for KUAF-FM.


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The North Dakota Legislature is considering bolstering funding to help military veterans facing homelessness. Key voices say more details need to be sorted out. The state Senate this week unanimously approved a bill that, under its original intent, directed gaming tax proceeds from support organizations, such as pull tabs at an American Legion, to programs and funds for veterans with specific needs. Stable housing is among them.

Christopher Deery, veterans service director leads veterans services for Cass County, said during recent testimony that offices like his want to get a roof over the head of all past servicemembers. But challenges still get in the way, such as pandemic relief drying up.

"We have a lot of veterans with a lot of needs. We're slowly running out of options here, and we just need a little bit of help so we can get that number to zero," he explained.

The bill has cleared both legislative chambers without opposition. But a primary sponsor says because of changes during the voting process, there's still discussion about final language - namely what the funding levels should look like. That suggests additional votes this session. There was chatter during debate about opening the floodgates for support groups for other causes.

Through its Supportive Services for Veteran Families program, Community Action Partnership of North Dakota says it handled an additional 70 cases last year. Of those seeking help, all were either on the brink of homelessness, or already without a home.

Max Pontenila, program specialist veteran and program specialist for the group's Minot office, said as they cobble together resources, they're balancing the need of building trust with clients.

"As veterans, and this is true even on a personal level, raising your hand saying, 'Hey, I need help,' that is a hard experience," he said.

Advocates suggest that hard experience could become more common if the resources aren't there. Nationally, the number of veterans experiencing homelessness declined last year. But there was a 7% increase the previous year, marking the first such spike in a while.

By Angela Hart for KFF Health News.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the KFF Health News-Public News Service Collaboration

As flames engulfed a nearby canyon, dozens of residents in a sober-living home fled to an unoccupied building about 30 miles south. The evacuees, many of whom were previously homeless, watched helplessly as their home burned on live TV.

When they awoke on air mattresses the next morning, loss set in. Some feared uncertainty. Others were jolted back to lives they thought they’d left behind.

“I had nothing but the clothes on my back. It just brought back all of those feelings of being homeless and a drug addict,” said one resident, Sean Brown. “Kind of like I was back at square one.”

The large two-story Altadena house, known to staff and residents as Art House, was surrounded by fruit trees and rugged mountains. For many, it was a safe space that enabled them to achieve and maintain sobriety, rebuild relationships, and hold down jobs.

Brown, 35, was among nearly 50 people displaced in January after the massive Eaton Fire destroyed one property and damaged another operated by the nonprofit Los Angeles Centers for Alcohol and Drug Abuse. Supported by public dollars, the organization provides housing and behavioral health treatment to people struggling with addiction, many who had been living on the streets. Operators say both properties are uninhabitable and that they are searching for permanent housing for those displaced.

“Our residents are still in temporary lodging. Right now we’re looking for something on an interim basis, but we still need to identify long-term housing for them,” said Juan Navarro, CEO of the nonprofit. “And we need even more beds. We’re seeing even bigger demand for treatment and services after the fires.”

In the weeks since one of the nation’s costliest natural disasters, it’s become evident that the Los Angeles wildfires have not only displaced people who had dug themselves out of homelessness and gotten into housing, but also dealt a blow to the region’s homelessness response. That far-reaching system of care formed by government agencies and local nonprofits has been buoyed by billions of dollars from the city, county, and state in recent years to combat California’s homelessness epidemic.

Now, wildfires are adding pressure to a system already under tremendous strain in getting chronically homeless people indoors. Homeless service operators and street medicine providers have been putting pressure on state and local leaders to allocate more funding to house people on the streets, but they are running up against competing demands for wildfire recovery — and tighter budgets.

“Many of the people we work with have already lost everything and they’re trying to rebuild their lives, and now there’s a whole other group of people doing the same thing and competing for the same resources,” said Jennifer Hark Dietz a licensed clinical social worker and the CEO of PATH, which provides services and housing for homeless people.

In recent years, state and local leaders have leveraged unprecedented investments to open thousands of shelters and temporary and permanent units. That’s helped Los Angeles County and the state notch meaningful gains, even as more than 187,000 people remain homeless in California, including 75,000 people across Los Angeles County.

The 2024 homelessness tally showed a 45% increase in the number of people who in the past year moved off the streets into permanent housing, and the number who moved from tents into temporary housing rose 32%, according to Va Lecia Adams Kellum, CEO of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which leads the countywide homelessness response system. That’s nearly 30,000 permanent housing placements across Los Angeles County.

And while homelessness rose 18% nationwide from 2023 to 2024, according to the most recent federal estimate, it increased only 3% in California. More strikingly, Los Angeles County reduced overall homelessness, albeit slightly.

The number of people living outside fell 5.1% in Los Angeles County, and in the city of Los Angeles, the number of unsheltered people dropped 10.4%.

That hard-fought progress is now in peril as the wildfires displaced tens of thousands of Los Angeles residents and destroyed more than 16,000 structures. Affordable housing, already in short supply, is being further strained.

Formerly homeless people who have experienced addiction, domestic violence, or mental illness now worry they won’t be prioritized for placements, despite losing their homes and qualifying for state and local homelessness initiatives to get people indoors. Many homeless people who have long waited for housing will be forced to wait even longer, as more displaced people face homelessness and compete for costly housing.

Homeless Again

It’s unclear how many formerly homeless people are homeless again. Street medicine providers and other front-line workers say some are temporarily living in hotels, while others moved in with friends or family members.

There’s evidence that some have fallen back into homelessness.

“We’re already seeing some people have moved into their vehicles because they don’t have the money to pay for even temporary housing,” Adams Kellum said. “Before the fires, we were already seeing very vulnerable people unable to manage their rents, so this competition for housing puts people at even greater risk for homelessness.”

Adams Kellum said coordinating resources and services across a vast region has led to major progress but that more money is needed to help move people from short-term to permanent housing.

For now, residents of the burned-down Art House will be allowed to reside in an empty building in Santa Fe Springs that the nonprofit had planned to redevelop for residential treatment, Navarro said. He said the nonprofit is looking for more stable housing for those displaced but that rehousing them at Art House remains out of reach for now.

Residents grieve the loss of the Art House’s transformative setting, which they call an “empowerment campus.” Brown said that he has embraced that ethos, even as he has been displaced and remains traumatized by the wildfires. He is currently working two jobs and taking classes toward a bachelor’s degree.

Paul Rosales, a 24-year-old in recovery from meth, said Art House was a place of healing. “That’s where I found myself; it’s where I built my recovery. There was a beautiful orange tree, and the mountains were just a short walk away where you could meditate and watch the sunset.

“It was away from Skid Row. I knew I was safe,” Rosales said. “That’s all gone now.”

Residents say they’re grateful they aren’t on the streets, but anxiety grows by the day, especially for queer and transgender people who had formed a community there.

“It’s constant stress of not knowing if I’m going to be in a stable housing situation,” said Alexandria Castaneda, 29, who was addicted to meth but got sober after getting indoors.

Battle for Resources

Sarah Hoppmeyer, chief program officer for Union Station Homeless Services, which provides housing for people on the streets, said she worries about dwindling resources. She and other providers stressed the importance of not overlooking people currently stuck in homelessness, many of whom have been waiting years for housing.

“We don’t want the wildfires to de-prioritize people who were already experiencing homelessness,” she said.

Elected leaders have pledged to preserve the gains Los Angeles County has made in reducing homelessness by allocating existing resources and demanding more. Several voter-approved initiatives in Los Angeles are critical, they say, but so too is lobbying for state support.

“Without continued and expanded support and resources, we risk losing ground” in reducing the number of people living on the streets, said Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, chair of the county board.

Previous massive fires have led to increases in homelessness, including in 2018 in Sonoma County and in 2024 on Maui, whose homelessness rate soared the year after fires.

State Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Los Angeles County that burned in the wildfires, said she will continue pressing for additional homelessness funding as a member of the Senate budget committee. While Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration says the state has plowed an unprecedented $27 billion into local homelessness response and prevention initiatives, he didn’t include any new money for battling the homelessness crisis in his proposal this year.

“Unfortunately, this year we didn’t see additional money being placed into that fund,” Pérez said. “But we have to keep making these investments.”

Newsom said Monday the state should not continue to “fund failure.” He said he is open to negotiations with cities, counties, and state lawmakers so long as any new homelessness funding comes with greater accountability, meaning that local governments use the money to clear encampments, dismantle tents, and reduce unsheltered homelessness.

Newsom officials stressed that the state budget is tight — it’s narrowly balanced and under greater strain than in previous years, with threats from the Trump administration and the potential loss of critical federal funding for programs such as Medicaid. The governor said he is “hopeful that we can land on an agreement,” but he warned the state could claw back funding if local governments aren’t adequately addressing street homelessness.

“We have been too permissive as it relates to encampments and tents. We need them cleaned up,” Newsom said. “We’re providing unprecedented support. Now we need to see unprecedented results.”

Assembly member John Harabedian, another Los Angeles-area Democrat, said additional homelessness spending is critical for wildfire victims and to continue combating the crisis statewide.

“Those folks who were already homeless, who just got into some sort of housing stability but then lost it again — they’re going to need immediate attention,” he said. “Our system is failing people.”


Angela Hart wrote this story for KFF Health News.


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There are only 26 affordable housing units in Colorado for every 100 low-income households, according to a new report listing Colorado as the sixth least-affordable state in the nation.

The report links the lack of affordable housing to decades of underinvestment at both the federal and state level.

Kinsey Hasstedt, state and local policy director for Enterprise Community Partners in Colorado, said rents and mortgages have become too high for many essential workers.

"We've seen for a long time wages not keep up with the cost of living here," Hasstedt pointed out. "I think this is particularly true for folks who are working in lower-wage jobs, often having to work multiple jobs."

Eight in 10 Coloradans who work in low-paying jobs -- in education, health care and the service industry -- spend more than half their income just to stay housed. Private developers have constructed plenty of homes for top earners and investors. There are currently 22,000 vacant housing units in metro Denver alone, more than five empty homes for every Coloradan experiencing homelessness.

The Trump administration has fired federal workers and frozen housing assistance funds as it works to remake government and reduce waste. Hasstedt noted ending HUD's Green and Resilient Retrofit Program would put existing affordable housing stock at risk of being turned into market-rate homes.

"If we lose funds like that federal program, that are able to help preserve buildings and their affordability, then the addition of any new affordable development is really just going to be kind of adding to a bucket that's leaking out of the bottom," Hasstedt argued.

Colorado lawmakers are considering measures aiming to streamline homeless support infrastructure and keep people from losing their housing, including domestic violence survivors.

Hasstedt emphasized it is important to be strategic when investing limited public resources.

"We really need to be targeting and prioritizing those funds to the households and the people of Colorado who need them most," Hasstedt contended. "What we have seen in recent years is an interest from lawmakers in directing those funds into serving higher-income households."


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