Defying Poverty with Housing

I’ve been on a bit of a tangent lately, exploring various models of effective housing and the creation of interactive, human-scale communities. I suspect some selfish motivation since I’ve passed my fiftieth year and should be wondering where my feeble body is going to prop itself toward the latter part of my next fifty (being a slow learner, I figure I’ll need another fifty to make any sense of all of this).

The other, and far more prominent motivation has come from seeing my friends and acquaintances shut themselves away in isolated houses, alone after work or simply alone. The most ambitious of them schedule activities, which they leave their house to attend in other parts of town, but between those activities the seclusion presses in.

Defying Poverty with Bicycles, is all about providing the freedom and dignity of personal mobility to people in the greatest need. It also delves into career development and inspiring social entrepreneurs to start their own bicycle businesses. It covers transportation, education, income generation, even social interaction during the day, but it does not address the places where people go when all the action is finished for the day.

There’s something terribly wrong with the direction our communities are going in the developed world. Only a hundred years ago everyone expected to interact with their neighbors. Housing was clustered either in downtowns or in rural villages and mixed with businesses and community activities. I understand the long-gone motivation to move away from toxic downtowns into housing-only neighborhoods and suburbs. Unfortunately, that fix and the cleanup of downtowns led to segregated, single use zoning that not only keeps people from choosing to bicycle, it keeps people from other people who seem different from them.

So I started this new learning adventure by researching cohousing. I had been inspired by a cohousing community in Denmark highlighted in the fabulous movie Happy. This Danish cohousing community is a group of a dozen or so families living in houses clustered around a common building where they cook, meet, and play together. Unfortunately, cohousing seems to be something for the well-off.

So I looked into community development that includes the most disadvantage people and found an excellent book called Tent City Urbanism: From Self-Organized Camps to Tiny House Villages. With empathy and a good understanding of the struggles homeless people face, the book shows readers how to create places where homeless people are allowed to sleep. It goes into great depth on case studies of successful camps and even tiny-house enclaves that are sanctioned by cities in order to house “the homeless.”

My problem with this book, the case studies, and all the similar projects I’ve found is that they are following the exact pattern of the segregated zoning that has divided our towns and cities. Every project has a mission of serving “the homeless.” They all seek funding and charity donations because they are serving “the homeless.” There’s no recognition that “the homeless” are anything like the people leading or funding these projects. Even the projects that boast of leadership roles for their residents, still talk about serving “the homeless.”

I get that the best way to raise funds and donations, such as land and building materials, for such a project is to talk endlessly about “the homeless.” I’m afraid I can’t stomach it.

I faced a similar problem when developing One Street’s Social Bike Business program as well as capturing our recommendations in our book Defying Poverty with Bicycles. Leaders of organizations that are providing bicycles to impoverished people often see no harm in appeasing funders. If funders want to give charity to a segregated group of people who they believe are entirely different from them, what’s the harm? I say such one-way, charity thinking is at the very core of the problem and is in fact the most harmful thing we can possibly do. You’ll find in that book as well as Cures for Ailing Organizations a loud and clear message to avoid such charity mindsets.

I’m afraid that the tent city and tiny house movements are suffering from this same temptation. While I was thoroughly inspired by the details of the book such as allowing campers to develop their own camp site and inspiring them to help one another, I missed any mention of integrating such camps into a total community.

My hunt continues for model communities that are truly reinventing what we, in the developed world, lost over this past century – neighborhoods and villages that are designed specifically to welcome the most disadvantage people and thus welcome people, and their animals, from all income levels, abilities, and ages. Places where all-ages means that seniors and young people work and play together; where all-abilities means that even the most disabled people can contribute, perhaps overseeing a playground, running deliveries by electric wheelchair, or welcoming visitors. I’ve found this in developing countries and tribal communities, but these have existed since before records were kept. What I can’t find are models of such communities started from scratch.

I have this vision of a gated, cohousing community (don’t gag yet) that is gated only because dogs run free. Cars enter through the double gates that ensure the dogs cannot get out and park immediately in the single parking lot. From there the pathways lead to the mixed housing, businesses and workshops run by residents as well as the common areas and parks.

Yes, there is a tent area that ensures that the temporarily destitute have a place. There are also tiny houses – love these. But anyone can choose a tent or tiny house whether they have ever been homeless or not. The largest houses would be reasonable, perhaps 1,000 square feet max. A community garden would include gardening classes and result in a surplus sold at the community’s grocery store. The dog park would welcome nonresidents and mark dogs and other pets needing a home. The businesses, parks and ball courts would attract nonresidents to learn about the village and interact. The very design of the village and its homeowners’ association (HOA) charter would ensure that residents and visitors alike pitch in to help everything run smoothly and improve.

The biggest difference from this vision and the cohousing and tent city projects I’ve found so far is that it would follow conventional new development steps. It would be presented as a mixed-use development. Period. Home buyers would purchase their homes in various ways – most often through mortgage loans, sometime full cash, and others through a mix of labor and loan. Owners could rent their properties within the HOA guidelines. From the tents to the largest houses, every resident would be treated the same.

Why have I not found a project like this yet? Are there any out there that I have missed?

Bicycles remain my primary fixation for improving communities, but lately housing keeps creeping into my thoughts. I’d so appreciate any ideas and experience you can offer to help streamline my search. Please write them into the comments section. I’m looking forward to reaching that point in this learning adventure where integrated bicycle and housing programs converge. That will be cool!

Sue

Defying Poverty with Bicycles – The Book

I’ve been receiving encouraging responses to our book, Defying Poverty with Bicycles, the inspiration for this blog. Readers are taking the trouble to contact me and describe how they have used the book to build their own social bike business program. Many of these readers were helping to lead small, volunteer-run programs before they got their copy. Now they are doing the work needed to create an infrastructure that can handle growth. This growth will allow them to serve many more disadvantaged people with bicycles than they did before.

This book is for anyone considering building a program and eventually a whole organization around the goal of helping people with bicycles. This excerpt from the preface will help you decide if it would be a useful tool for you:

“Because people who live in or even near poverty are so consumed by the daily stress of survival they cannot engage in society. This often means isolation from community activities and even well-meaning programs designed to serve them. Unfortunately, such charitable service programs neglect to actually engage the people they are meant to serve, the very people who understand the struggle and language of their neighbors.

The Social Bike Business program is designed to bridge all of these gaps by guiding struggling people toward their own entrepreneurial success. Advantaged people are well served by bike shops, collectives and co-ops. Now it’s time to create the places that invite our most disadvantaged neighbors to purchase their own bike—refurbished or manufactured locally through the program—and engage in a new career that will enable them to lift themselves out of poverty. Even obtaining a quality transportation bicycle can save a person several hours each day if they had been walking and save them thousands of hard-earned dollars each year. Bicycles shrink cities at no charge. But this program does far more than that. It establishes bicycle community centers where struggling people can learn from each other about transportation bicycling and careers in bicycle business and beyond.

In the following chapters, you will learn how to plan for and launch your own Social Bike Business program, adapted to the needs and specialties of your particular community to ensure you reach your most disadvantaged neighbors. Your program can be as small as needed to succeed or as immense and complex as you believe you and your team can achieve. Think of this book as a menu to pick from rather than a prepared meal. Start where it makes sense for you and your team and go as far as you need to go. You might already have a small shop that would suffice as the main center for your program, so keep this in mind as you read about large centers designed for larger programs than yours needs to be. You and your team might want to focus on job training and refurbished used bikes. Then skip the chapter on bicycle manufacturing. This book is yours to do with what you like. Pull out the pieces that sing to you and shut the volume off on all the rest.

As you read, you will learn how to place the most disadvantaged people first and how to help them purchase their own bike through micro credit and subsidy qualification so they will value their bike. You will learn how to spot talents in people and offer a variety of career paths all based on bicycles, but designed to help them find work in many different fields, from business management to customer service to mechanics to owning their own business. You will learn proven business practices that ensure all employees of your program are paid a market rate salary. You will find ways to overcome the relentless stress and fear of poverty. And from this insight, you will learn how to choose the most effective means of reaching and engaging your community’s most disadvantaged residents—their preferred way of communicating, the locations most inviting to them, what they need in order to attend a meeting or workshop including food and childcare, and many more vital details that are commonly forgotten in today’s bicycle businesses and programs.  

Be sure to study Chapter 1 because that is where you will have to be honest with yourself and your local leadership team. Are you envisioning a more casual and fun volunteer program that gives bikes away? A co-op or collective might be a better fit. Such programs can build the bike culture. You might also be a budding for-profit business owner. For-profit bike shops are necessary elements of every bicycling community and a very honorable path to take.

If you choose Social Bike Business, one important requirement is that you must live in the community and be prepared to help lead the organization that takes on the program. I have encountered several well-meaning people who are enthusiastic about the program but expect others to take it on without their assistance. They see its potential in another community or believe that an organization they do not lead should take it on. In fact, the only way for you to succeed with the program is to step into a leadership position and inspire others to join you in building this program so it serves the community where all of you live. No program can thrive if it is started or run by outsiders.

We understand that Social Bike Business is not for everyone and, in order to succeed, each local program must compliment rather than compete with existing for-profit bike shops and co-ops/collectives. Each Social Bike Business program must fill an unfilled niche. That niche is service to and full engagement of the most disadvantaged people in each community. By filling that niche, Social Bike Business is designed to enable people to find their own path out of poverty through bicycles. Eighty percent of the world’s population is living in poverty (World Bank 2008). The Social Bike Business program opens a world of opportunities to them through bicycling. For this, they will continue to ride and perhaps even take up sport cycling. This will grow the whole bicycle movement and boost the bike industry as these formerly-poor join the advantaged bicycle enthusiasts of their community.

Social Bike Business is not about profits or charity. It is about helping people stand up against and defy poverty. Social Bike Business is about giving impoverished people the tools they need to leave poverty behind forever.”

Does that sound intriguing? You can buy your copy at any book vendor – local book store or online – or buy it through our website at www.OneStreet.org .

Do you already have a copy? Please leave a comment about how you have used the book to build your program.

Sue

Bicycle Industry Stagnation

Tomorrow I’ll go to Las Vegas to attend the annual Interbike trade show for the bicycle industry where One Street will have a booth once again. I’m looking forward to talking with attendees about our Bike Shift Levers and books. I may even be lucky enough to connect with unusual attendees who are interested in our Social Bike Business program and ways of serving disadvantaged people with bicycles.

This will be my 25^th Interbike in 26 years. More than half of those visits were as a bike shop owner having founded and operated Ironclad Bicycles here in Prescott for 13 years. Now my husband Jim owns the shop. He’ll go with me tomorrow and on Wednesday accept an award for Ironclad as one of America’s Best Bike Shops. That’s mighty cool.

But I’ll be at the show for One Street and I’m already feeling the dull thud of disappointment. I know I’ll walk onto the showroom floor only to see the same high tech, high priced bicycles that litter the glitzy floor each year. Of course the booth personnel will tout them as new and improved, but from One Street’s perspective, all I will likely see will be more ways to entice money from the same, aging, hardcore bicycle enthusiasts the industry has been selling to for all those 26 years. If I’m lucky, I’ll come upon a far off corner, perhaps in the basement where few attendees go, where visionary bike builders of affordable basic bikes will be sequestered.

This is why the American bike industry has stagnated, even regressed, since my first Interbike in 1990. This year in America, about the same number of bikes were sold as in 1990, but our population has grown. The bicycle organizations we work with through our Social Bike Business program all work with used bikes because the bike industry no longer makes basic, durable, affordable bikes. Read more about this problem in my previous post, Planned Obsolescence in the Bike Industry.

In my dreams I’d enter the Interbike show floor to find booth after booth filled with basic bikes that come equipped with racks, fenders, baskets, and lights, all for retail prices under $300. Their frames and forks would be simple steel tubing, no shocks or space-age materials. None of them would have a model year and all their parts would be interchangeable and repairable. The booth personnel would show photos of the American factories where their bikes were welded and assembled. If they were from another country, their bikes would be made in their country. They’d tout the appeal of their bikes for the majority of people. They’d talk about their programs for training and hiring disadvantaged people. They’d boast about their bike-design focus groups comprised of people who ride daily for their living.

If I bothered to take the time in such a dream, I might allow for a far off corner, perhaps in the basement, for specialty, bouncy bikes that cater to aging bicycle enthusiasts who might like to buy another bike.

Instead, I am bracing myself for the same old *&^% because our bike industry seems happy to wallow in its stagnation, sell to the same customers, and watch sales numbers drop along with those customers.

I did come upon a flicker of hope recently when I read a staff editorial in Bicycle Retailer & Industry News called “The real problem is stagnation – no matter how suppliers sell bikes.” Unfortunately, they don’t post staff editorials online or I’d link to it. The author responds to a recent buzz about bicycle manufacturers selling directly online, but points out the stagnated number of sales I just mentioned.

They grabbed my attention with this line: “There appears to be a fundamental disconnect between the bicycle industry and 99 percent of Americans.” Then they captured my heart with this one: “Our general message to consumers is one of aggressive athleticism – a message that for most is a turnoff.” This was printed in our main bike industry publication!

The editorial wraps up by repeating that online sales in not the problem. It leaves the stagnation issue unresolved. But to read such self-incriminating statements in the main publication for the American bicycle industry was a welcome breath of fresh air I’ll take with me onto the fusty showroom floor tomorrow. 

Are you just as frustrated with our bicycle industry as I am? Please leave a comment.

Sue

Transforming Kampala for Bicyclists and Pedestrians

This article from The Guardian does an excellent job capturing the current struggle to create safe travel corridors for cyclists and pedestrians in Kampala, Uganda. Thankfully, the projects have been approved and should be under construction soon. When they are finished, they will be some of the finest models of bicycle and pedestrian street redesign in the world. I can hardly wait to post before and after photos on our Street Design page.

To go from such a chaotic, dangerous situation to this modern, high-standard design will not only inspire cities throughout the developed world, but will show developing cities they no longer have any excuses. Thanks to Kampala’s courage, any city that remains dangerous to cyclists and pedestrians will know they are being left in the dust.

But as you will read in the article, even as the projects are moving forward, many voices are still shouting concern. I especially appreciate the defense of the projects that points to the 60% of Kampala’s travelers who do not drive.

One Street board member, Amanda Ngabirano is quoted several times. Here’s my favorite: They’ve deliberately picked the most “hostile” and “complicated” part of the city to start with: “where the people are, and where there is demand,” she explains. “Once we succeed there, we will be able to change other places very quickly.”

This underscores what a terrific street redesign model this will be, not only for the rest of Kampala, but the rest of the world.

Then there’s this quote from Amanda, referring to current cyclists: “When it’s not safe it’s for the person who has no other choice, and the person who has no other choice is poor, you cannot deny that relationship.”

And that is why this article and these projects are such a great fit for this blog. They are defying poverty with streets designed for all bicyclists, especially those who must ride. Enjoy!

Sue

Defying Poverty with Bicycles PowerPoint

I’ve posted a few times about attending the Velo-city conference in Nantes, France this past June. While there, I had the opportunity to present on One Street’s Social Bike Business program. I was very pleased by the response from attendees, many of whom spoke with me afterward about their own, similar program or their dreams of launching one. Some asked for a copy of the presentation. I’ve also had this request since returning to Arizona.

So I just uploaded the PowerPoint presentation to our Social Bike Business web page (linked above) and am also posting it here for those of you interested in seeing it. You’ll find an overview of the program as well as some excellent model programs from around the world.

Enjoy and let me know if you’d like more information about any of it.

Sue

DIY Cargo Bikes with Custom Sidecars

At One Street we’re always looking for easy projects that make bicycles even more efficient transportation machines. Our One Street Components program identifies particular parts that need to be redeveloped and simplified. But turning a regular bike into a cargo bike using common items can be a daunting project. This is because a wheel usually needs to be added to support the load. By adding it to the back, the drivetrain becomes terribly complex. By adding a wheel to the front, the steering becomes complex.

Fortunately, there’s s third option: sidecars. Motorcycles have used them for decades, but sidecars are rare on bicycles. I’m not sure why, because this sure seems like a simple solution for a cargo bike conversion.

Here are some great examples of DIY projects:

• Bicycle sidecar for carrying a child

• Bicycle sidecar for carrying a dog

• Customized bicycle sidecars

Whether you take on a sidecar project or just enjoy the designs, these examples show how looking beyond the usual bicycle world can offer great inspirations for transportation bicycle projects.

Enjoy! And if you know of similar DIY cargo bike projects, please post them in the comments section.

Sue

Bike Works in London as Social Bike Model

I’m back from my big trip to Europe and the UK and now enjoying the inspiring memories. While in France and England I was able to visit with several bicycle organizations and bike shops.

One in particular stands out as particularly inspiring. Bike Works, a social bike business in London, presents a humble storefront and website, but even as I pushed open the door, I realized it was special. The bike shop at the front is clean and welcoming, offering both new and used bikes as well as a nice assortment of parts and accessories.

I spoke with one of their staff about their work with disadvantaged London residents, especially those who have been out of work for some time, which makes finding a job harder. They train them in bicycle mechanics so that even someone who never held a wrench will graduate knowing they can repair most bikes. Each receives a well-respected certificate and help from Bike Works finding a job. The staffer said with a laugh that they keep the best graduates to work at Bike Works. They also offer cycling skills courses for people of all abilities, even those with significant disabilities.

In the back, there’s a long building packed with bicycles, frames, and parts neatly sorted into easy-to-find sections. One half of this building is dedicated to a repair and rebuilding shop where their trainees rebuild donated bikes to sell and support their programs.

While all of this was very impressive to me, a small detail may be the piece that most stunned me – their displayed of used parts for sale. I can’t count the number of arguments I have had with well-intentioned leaders of volunteer-run bike programs who refuse to sell bikes and parts. They believe that by giving away everything their good intentions will be repaid by recipients helping to build the program. Instead, after some time, these leaders are usually left doing all the work and without bicycles or parts to fulfill their mission. I also go over this problem in great detail in our book, Defying Poverty with Bicycles.

 

But at Bike Works they not only sell used bikes and parts at market prices to sustain their programs, they do so in style. Their used parts are packaged with Bike Works branding and displayed professionally amidst their new parts. A small detail that shows that Bike Works is serious about serving the needs of disadvantaged people. Well done!

Do you know of other great models of social bike businesses? Please note them in the comments section.

Sue