Creative Housing Solutions

Since girlhood, I have been obsessed with finding a place for everybody, and the idea that everyone belongs.

Facing acute gang-bullying in my life, which marked my social experiences at ages 9, 12, 40 and 44, helped to initiate me into my full self, pushing past subconscious fears of not belonging.

Political and material exile express themselves even more brutally than social bullies: theft of home, limb, community, country and international rights. The unjust, systemic exposure - of so many people to these forms of physical exile - combined with my personal experience of “otherness”, drives a passion in me to work creatively around the conundrum of displaced people.

Mucking around with poverty is always a mess.

.. Yet in my experience, serving economically challenged people provides the exact types of growth and learning that I most need as a resourced, white, American person.

Below are three projects I’ve been working with around these matters.

Elemental Villages

I developed Elemental Villages in 2023 as a detailed plan to house 6 people on a property adjacent to my home. I believe many Americans would benefit from considering these types of ideas for their life, resources and land.

Unwitting Landlord

A 2026 OpEd about the untidy experience housing vulnerable people in my five-bedroom farmhouse:

The Hardwick Gazette, VT Digger, The Times Argus.

Onion River Boarding House

A 2025 documentary trailor about the process of transforming a single family home into a multi-party boarding house. 

Note: the footage refers to Onion River Campground but is moreso exploring the utilization of the onsite farmhouse, (since camping in winter is not viable in Vermont).