Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. All right. Hello, Alan. Hey. What's happening? Well, I'm here on the Joe Rogan experience, man. That's what's happening for Alan.

Push this thing up. Get it pretty close to your face. Yeah, great. There we go. Yeah. Thanks for doing this, man. I was very curious to meet you, and I heard so much about you from John Paul DiGiorio and what you're doing. We've always wondered, there's always been forearm of Thomas, guiding that finger in in the most gentlest way. The boys looking over the top of that deal. means. There's no end to that. Try to think about how far that goes back. And don't let that thought go. I thought about that almost every day of my life. From a guy that I met when I was 13 years old. Still do. Yeah. Every now and then, you get a really good teacher.Time being the same.He was also a guy who fought in Vietnam. I think that he had this perspective that he was trying to relay to us. You don't have a long time here. You got to figure out what you like and get after it. This is not what you think it is, and you're going to lose people along the way.Yeah, there's a great a poem out there called Profits of a Future, Not Our Own, about how insignificant we actually are. We're just a puff of smoke in this infinite space-time, particularly time-space. We're only here, you and I are sitting on this history of human time. It's not even measurable. We can't even see it. We'd have to have a microscope in order to be able to really look at it.Yeah. And we are so trapped in our own life and what we're trying to achieve and what we're trying to do in our social circle and all the nonsense that we have going on in our life that we lose our perspective. And that's really unfortunate because even our perspective, just to think about how small we are in this life and how quick this life goes by, that In the universe, this planet is nothing. Like, nothing that you can see in the night sky is anything. It's just too much. It's so big. I think that's one of the reasons why, in a similar way, people who live by the ocean are very chilled out. I think there's something about being by that ocean that makes you go, Oh, what is this? What the fuck is this? This is all bullshit. Look how much water there is. Or the same thing about mountains. People that live in the mountains, they have a- And food. And food? Oh, because there's plenty of food there. That's true, too. That's where all the food is. Right. But there's something about the humbling of the environment. Like mountains are another example of that.There's a humbling of the person by their environment. I think one of the main problems that we have in civilized society is light pollution. Because of light pollution, we're not humbled by the night sky like our ancestors were. Our ancestors investors every night, they got to view the most spectacular thing a human being ever gets to witness, the vastness of the cosmos, right above their head every night. And now we don't even see it. We sacrificed that so we could take our Toyota to 7:11 at 10:00 PM.Yeah. Well, we can travel and look at those. We got little spots.Right. Yeah, but not much. But you only get a little dose. You're supposed to get vitamin D every day. I think you're supposed to get vitamin space every day, too. Yeah. No. I think you are. I think the sun gives you vitamin D, and it makes you healthier. And I think space makes you mentally healthier.I like vitamin space.Vitamin space is legit, man.I'm going to adopt that.I went to the observatory on the big island and the Keck Observatory. I've gone a few times since then, but one time I caught it perfect. One time, me and my family, we went up there and it was no moon at all. The moon was hidden. So the sky was just everywhere you looked, there was just billions of stars. And you could see the full Milky Way with the naked eye. And it felt like we were what we actually are. It felt like we were on an organic spaceship that's hurling through the vastness of the universe.And the satellites screaming across.I didn't see any of those. You didn't see any of those? No, I didn't see any of those. I mean, maybe there was less of them back then. We're talking about like 2009, I guess. 2008, probably 2008, when this really rocked me. I just remember thinking, watching it. You know what? I know for a fact, it's 2007. I remember thinking, this is such a travesty that we don't have this view every night. I think it would change the way people think. It would change the way people feel about the mystery of life itself, just to be confronted by the stars, just confronted by this inescapable greatness that's just mesmerizing.Now we're living in the Truman show.Yeah, a little bit. I think it's spiritual, too. I really do. I think there's a spiritual aspect of looking out into the universe that's undeniable, and I think it imparts something into people. I think it imparts this sense of humility and wonder that we're missing. I think it's one of the other reasons why we're so sick.You really mean it's stripping us of that wonder because we don't get to look out and dream the way that we used to dream as we looked out there into the unknown?Yeah.On the Camino, you end up in this place beyond Santiago called Mujet and Finisteri, that was believed to be the end of the world. And it was just a coastline in Spain, out overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.So they thought that was it?That was it. And I've stood in this place where for centuries people stood and knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that they were at the end of the world. Well, And the dreams that got us beyond that, somebody thinking to themselves that, no, there's got to be more because they're looking up and they're seeing all of that vastness had to be looking across and being able to see a similar vastness that didn't end.It was just amazing who had the courage to take that first this boat trip wall and you would go off the edge. Wasn't there ancient depictions of what the Earth looked like? No, absolutely. That it would show a boat going over the edge?No, absolutely. That's what they believed, that it wouldn't go out there. It's amazing because we vilify Christopher Columbus now because we've- Found out he wasn't such a good guy. Well, he had his issues. Look, we all have to admit that we are a perverted species.Have you ever read the accounts of the priest that traveled with Columbus?Some of it, yeah.That's rough stuff. No, it's rough.It's scary.Yeah. Yeah, they were monsters.Yeah, but in Spain, he's a hero because he connected the European continent to the American continent. Right. It's a whole different. During September, when you're there, is his holiday and feast and all that stuff. They go nuts.Do they still have Columbus Day here or is it your colonize?No, I think they have Columbus Day, but I think he's gotten so beat up.Didn't they change it to Indigenous People's Day?Maybe they did.I don't know. Did they? Jamie, find that out. They changed Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day? I that people had to do. And I took a wrong turn once and IAir. Just stay right here. And it just stayed like that and grew. And was it the CISO Hotel? Was the documentary on? I watched a documentary on the CISO Hotel, which is in the middle of all that. It was this beautiful old hotel, and now that whole area is just chaos. And then now it's expanded, like considerably. So the fact that they have never done anything about that, it's only grown. And in fact, more people are hired to work on it and those people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not putting a dent in it just shows you how sick the culture is. It's an example. And I think what you're doing is an example of what can be accomplished with a healthy culture. I know you have a lot of really important, powerful people that have got your back and really love what you're doing. And because of that, you've managed to put together this enormous community. And now you have more land and you're expanding and building more of it.And if this can be done more, this might be the solution. I mean, what I saw from your place is the best example of a possible solution to this ever. Because you could see those people when they were walking Well, I own a place down there.I know you do.So I'm definitely a fan. I mean, I want it to be safer. But it's also I like the wildness of it. I like the fun. That street's fun. It's got a lot of energy to it. You're hearing live music from all over the place. There's people walking back and forth and great food trucks right there. It's fun. Yeah.That's what attracts and So how do we make that a part of the character of the deal without the extreme negative side effects that people experience sometimes?The extreme negative side effects of having the shelter there, you mean?Well, homelessness in general.They've made it better. Whatever they've done over the last year and a half, it has had a positive impact. You see less of it, less real problems. You're definitely going to see, unfortunately, some people that are still under the throes of drug addiction. There's a corner over by where Buffalo Billiards used to be. That's a red river-ish- Yeah. And I drove by the other day and there was 15 people just slumped over, some of them laying on the ground, some of them barely able to stand up, just rocking back and forth with whatever drug they're on. It's like, it's such a heartbreak. That's someone's kid. That's what it is. When you have children of your own, too, you look You get people like that and you go, Hey, that was someone's baby boy. And now here they are, half naked, scabs all over their body, slumped over, rocking back and forth in the breeze.Yeah. Devastating.And no one's doing anything. They're on their own. It's my feeling that in a healthy society, those people would be treated and cared for. They'd try to figure out a way to try to help those folks. It'd be better for everybody.When they get out of that misery and come into a place place like Community First Village, our statistical data that we've done over the past seven or eight years shows an 80% drop in drug use from the streets to the village, and about a 40 to 50 % drop in alcohol use.That's amazing.It is amazing. It's a harm reduction model. Because How are you going to live in the misery of being on the streets other than anesthetizing yourself to the back? So it's hard to blame people. I mean, we're anesthesizing all of us, right? I mean, One of the greatest drug dealing places is all of our pharmacies. We're all going to buy our pharmaceuticals. Look, there's some interesting things going on in the world that that I want to see explored, especially around addiction. And that's like the use of psychedelics in mitigating as a treatment mechanism for people. And I just would like for the world to come around and make things easier to bring relief to people, because when we bring relief to individuals, we're going to bring relief to the community as a whole, and we ought to explore a number of different things. I take the legalization of marijuana as an example. Look, I live in the middle of a village where it's all there. Everything is there, from fentanyl to crack cocaine to meth, marijuana. I will tell you, our potheads are happy, hungry, and sleepy. And the folks that are smoking or shooting meth and crack I think many of them have pretty profound problems as a result of that.I'd love to see some studies going on around the psychedelic nature to see if we can further help people through their addiction issues.I'd like to see that as well. There's some powerful tools out there that we're not utilizing.Yeah, we're just afraid of them.How does a person get involved in your... How do they get accepted? What if is on the street and they find out about your village, what is the process?Well, first of all, they have to be chronically homeless. So there's a definition that we use that basically comes out of HUD. It's an unaccompanied male or female with a disabling condition, having lived on the streets at least a continuous year, for us, they have to be in the Austin area because we're not going to take you from Dallas or Houston or Minneapolis, or episodically homeless, addingstreets myself, and you begin to build relationships with people through that process. So many of the early people that came into the village were coming through that network. Today, we're engaged. We have an organization in town called ECHO. They are our Continuum of Care lead in Austin, Texas, and a number of agencies are engaged with ECHO who refer people through ECHO and the HMIS system into the village. And they have a coordinated assessment. They call it something else, I think now, but there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals' vulnerability.So the goal from the Continuum of care folks is to get the highest vulnerable people up off the streets because allegedly, they cost us, the taxpayer, the most money, although there's some questions around that now, legitimate questions. We try to get a balance because we can't become a full-blown assisted living type of a deal. We need people that can live independently. So there's a structure that brings people in. It takes a while. We have a waiting list of about 150 people.Wow. So you have these 3D printed houses, too. Yeah. How did that come about? Did you design those specifically for your needs? Were these prefabbed? Is it something that was already made?No. We have The second ever in the history of the world 3D printed house on the property. Where's the first? The second one.Where's the first?In East Austin, in the backyard of a piece of property that the icon guys own. It was the one that they built that they launched at South by six, seven, eight years ago. I can't remember the exact years.They're great little places. They're phenomenal. That's one of the things that I was thinking when I got in there. When I was a young man, when I was single, it was like, Oh, I could live here. This is a sweet little spot. You got a nice little kitchen area. You got a little bedroom area. You got a table. You could put television there. Not bad at all.They're great entrepreneurs. I know them well. It's an Austin-based company. We're considered a pretty Austin entrepreneurial nonprofit Austin-based, Austin-founded, Austin homegrown. As they were starting to come up on the radar screen, we ended up coming together, and it just made sense that they could come out there and experiment and beta test their printers and build for us. And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart because normally, new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology. But here's a powerful new technology that's actually be benefiting people who could have never afford that technology, because that technology today is not cheap. They're beating it down, but it's not cheap. So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now. We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase, and there'll be another 50 over on Burleison Road by the airport where we're under construction there.And so you live in one community? Yes. Are you going to have people like you that are living in these other communities? How are you managing them?Well, there's a population of people that live in our community. It's about 10% of our population that we call missionals, just like a missionary would leave the United States and go overseas somewhere to be a missionary. There are people that have chosen and called by the gospel to live in community at Community First Village. There's about 50, 60 people that include 40 adults plus about 15 children that live, and more are coming our way. So that's one of the secret sauces of our community is mixing people in there throughout the community that have never experienced homelessness but are called to serve alongside not in with the formerly chronically homeless.I think another thing to bring up is that you had some resistance from the outside community, the people that were neighboring it. They were worried that you were going to affect property values, that things weren't going to be dangerous. But in fact, the opposite happened. You haven't had any problems. On top of that, the communities near you are now worth more money than ever. Yeah.It's pretty funny because initially, what we tried to do was partner with the city of Austin. So we're actually just outside the city of Austin. We share a property line with the city of Austin. But for several years, from 2006, roughly, 2005, roughly to 2010, I tried to collaborate with the city of Austin, provide us with attractive land anywhere, and we'll raise the money to build. In 2008, April of the city, unanimously, City Council granted us a long term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin. In July of '08, we went on to a neighborhood meeting. Myself, the sponsoring council member, some of our team members, system city manager, my wife, Trisha, that just turned into Armageddon. Police had to be called to escort us out of there. And What happened? Oh, we were assaulted and spit on, and the news media was there, and it was an unbelievably horrible experience. The next morning, the city council member, the sponsoring city council member, by the way, who is still a friend of mine, a hugging friend of mine, called a press conference to suspend finalizing that lease for 12 months, which put a bullet in the head of that deal.We regrouped and we began to look at other property. And one of the other properties that was going to be granted to us was the tract of land that the soccer stadium now sits on, on McCala Lane. And then we got the not my backyard deal from a large group of people in that neighborhood. And finally, in 2010, after complete frustration, I went to the then mayor of Austin, Lee Luffywell, good friend, great guy. And I said, look, I'm thinking about going outside the city of Austin where there's no zoning, getting an attractive land there. But I need the city to help us with transportation and utilities. And And he looked at me and said, Alan, you may be the smartest person I've ever met in my life, which was a funny thing to say, just a drop out. I mean, I'm not that dumb, but I'm not Stephen Hawking either. And that's what we did. We went and bought that site where I live today, and then bought the site next door to it, and then the one across the street with some great support of some of our big donors, and really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning We had the legal right to develop that property.There was no zoning and no body that could approve what we would build on that property. And so the big fear is crime and lower property values. Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010, I could buy any house next door for, call it plus or minus $150,000. Today, it's plus or minus $450,000. The other argument is crime. There hasn't been one reported crime that I'm aware of by anybody from our neighborhood in the neighborhood next door. And there have been 13 crimes by that neighborhood into our community, mostly juveniles, stealing our golf carts, our Polaris, shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, the random juvenile, the stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 years old. I love those guys. And we work with them to help them. But if you're going to put a barbed wire fence, it needs to be on their side of the deal, not our side. Now, look, we We got plenty of bullshit inside of our neighborhood. This is not nirvana. I don't want anybody walking away. We have plenty of stuff going on, but it's not the gunfight at the okay corral.Right. Well, Alan, thank you very much for being here. And thank you for doing what you've done, what you've accomplished. It's very inspirational. I think, as I said in the beginning, you're a guy who really lives that life. And I think it's a beautiful thing to witness. And I I think your story is going to move a lot of people. Tell people if they're interested, how they can get involved, where they can find out more.Well, you could go to our website at mlf. Org, like Mobile Loaves and Fishers, Mike lemafrank. Org. Our hashtag is poundMobilLoves. I published a book. We published a book, Harper College. One's back in 2017 called Welcome Homeless. You could go and get that book. It's a series of stories about encounters that I've had with about 11 or 12 different people over the course of my time working on the Streets. I think it's a fun book that people would really enjoy an emotional deal. So go check that out. If you really want to know more, get it on an airplane, fly to Austin, Texas, and come see what we're doing. We'd love to share this with you. If you're interested in coming to one of our symposium, we'd love to have you there. All right. We're very grateful for this opportunity, Joe. Thank you.I'm grateful for you to be here. Thank you. I really appreciate you. Thank you very much for everything.Yeah. Thank you. All right. All right.Bye, everybody.

forearm of Thomas, guiding that finger in in the most gentlest way. The boys looking over the top of that deal. means. There's no end to that. Try to think about how far that goes back. And don't let that thought go. I thought about that almost every day of my life. From a guy that I met when I was 13 years old. Still do. Yeah. Every now and then, you get a really good teacher.Time being the same.He was also a guy who fought in Vietnam. I think that he had this perspective that he was trying to relay to us. You don't have a long time here. You got to figure out what you like and get after it. This is not what you think it is, and you're going to lose people along the way.Yeah, there's a great a poem out there called Profits of a Future, Not Our Own, about how insignificant we actually are. We're just a puff of smoke in this infinite space-time, particularly time-space. We're only here, you and I are sitting on this history of human time. It's not even measurable. We can't even see it. We'd have to have a microscope in order to be able to really look at it.Yeah. And we are so trapped in our own life and what we're trying to achieve and what we're trying to do in our social circle and all the nonsense that we have going on in our life that we lose our perspective. And that's really unfortunate because even our perspective, just to think about how small we are in this life and how quick this life goes by, that In the universe, this planet is nothing. Like, nothing that you can see in the night sky is anything. It's just too much. It's so big. I think that's one of the reasons why, in a similar way, people who live by the ocean are very chilled out. I think there's something about being by that ocean that makes you go, Oh, what is this? What the fuck is this? This is all bullshit. Look how much water there is. Or the same thing about mountains. People that live in the mountains, they have a- And food. And food? Oh, because there's plenty of food there. That's true, too. That's where all the food is. Right. But there's something about the humbling of the environment. Like mountains are another example of that.There's a humbling of the person by their environment. I think one of the main problems that we have in civilized society is light pollution. Because of light pollution, we're not humbled by the night sky like our ancestors were. Our ancestors investors every night, they got to view the most spectacular thing a human being ever gets to witness, the vastness of the cosmos, right above their head every night. And now we don't even see it. We sacrificed that so we could take our Toyota to 7:11 at 10:00 PM.Yeah. Well, we can travel and look at those. We got little spots.Right. Yeah, but not much. But you only get a little dose. You're supposed to get vitamin D every day. I think you're supposed to get vitamin space every day, too. Yeah. No. I think you are. I think the sun gives you vitamin D, and it makes you healthier. And I think space makes you mentally healthier.I like vitamin space.Vitamin space is legit, man.I'm going to adopt that.I went to the observatory on the big island and the Keck Observatory. I've gone a few times since then, but one time I caught it perfect. One time, me and my family, we went up there and it was no moon at all. The moon was hidden. So the sky was just everywhere you looked, there was just billions of stars. And you could see the full Milky Way with the naked eye. And it felt like we were what we actually are. It felt like we were on an organic spaceship that's hurling through the vastness of the universe.And the satellites screaming across.I didn't see any of those. You didn't see any of those? No, I didn't see any of those. I mean, maybe there was less of them back then. We're talking about like 2009, I guess. 2008, probably 2008, when this really rocked me. I just remember thinking, watching it. You know what? I know for a fact, it's 2007. I remember thinking, this is such a travesty that we don't have this view every night. I think it would change the way people think. It would change the way people feel about the mystery of life itself, just to be confronted by the stars, just confronted by this inescapable greatness that's just mesmerizing.Now we're living in the Truman show.Yeah, a little bit. I think it's spiritual, too. I really do. I think there's a spiritual aspect of looking out into the universe that's undeniable, and I think it imparts something into people. I think it imparts this sense of humility and wonder that we're missing. I think it's one of the other reasons why we're so sick.You really mean it's stripping us of that wonder because we don't get to look out and dream the way that we used to dream as we looked out there into the unknown?Yeah.On the Camino, you end up in this place beyond Santiago called Mujet and Finisteri, that was believed to be the end of the world. And it was just a coastline in Spain, out overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.So they thought that was it?That was it. And I've stood in this place where for centuries people stood and knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that they were at the end of the world. Well, And the dreams that got us beyond that, somebody thinking to themselves that, no, there's got to be more because they're looking up and they're seeing all of that vastness had to be looking across and being able to see a similar vastness that didn't end.It was just amazing who had the courage to take that first this boat trip wall and you would go off the edge. Wasn't there ancient depictions of what the Earth looked like? No, absolutely. That it would show a boat going over the edge?No, absolutely. That's what they believed, that it wouldn't go out there. It's amazing because we vilify Christopher Columbus now because we've- Found out he wasn't such a good guy. Well, he had his issues. Look, we all have to admit that we are a perverted species.Have you ever read the accounts of the priest that traveled with Columbus?Some of it, yeah.That's rough stuff. No, it's rough.It's scary.Yeah. Yeah, they were monsters.Yeah, but in Spain, he's a hero because he connected the European continent to the American continent. Right. It's a whole different. During September, when you're there, is his holiday and feast and all that stuff. They go nuts.Do they still have Columbus Day here or is it your colonize?No, I think they have Columbus Day, but I think he's gotten so beat up.Didn't they change it to Indigenous People's Day?Maybe they did.I don't know. Did they? Jamie, find that out. They changed Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day? I that people had to do. And I took a wrong turn once and IAir. Just stay right here. And it just stayed like that and grew. And was it the CISO Hotel? Was the documentary on? I watched a documentary on the CISO Hotel, which is in the middle of all that. It was this beautiful old hotel, and now that whole area is just chaos. And then now it's expanded, like considerably. So the fact that they have never done anything about that, it's only grown. And in fact, more people are hired to work on it and those people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not putting a dent in it just shows you how sick the culture is. It's an example. And I think what you're doing is an example of what can be accomplished with a healthy culture. I know you have a lot of really important, powerful people that have got your back and really love what you're doing. And because of that, you've managed to put together this enormous community. And now you have more land and you're expanding and building more of it.And if this can be done more, this might be the solution. I mean, what I saw from your place is the best example of a possible solution to this ever. Because you could see those people when they were walking Well, I own a place down there.I know you do.So I'm definitely a fan. I mean, I want it to be safer. But it's also I like the wildness of it. I like the fun. That street's fun. It's got a lot of energy to it. You're hearing live music from all over the place. There's people walking back and forth and great food trucks right there. It's fun. Yeah.That's what attracts and So how do we make that a part of the character of the deal without the extreme negative side effects that people experience sometimes?The extreme negative side effects of having the shelter there, you mean?Well, homelessness in general.They've made it better. Whatever they've done over the last year and a half, it has had a positive impact. You see less of it, less real problems. You're definitely going to see, unfortunately, some people that are still under the throes of drug addiction. There's a corner over by where Buffalo Billiards used to be. That's a red river-ish- Yeah. And I drove by the other day and there was 15 people just slumped over, some of them laying on the ground, some of them barely able to stand up, just rocking back and forth with whatever drug they're on. It's like, it's such a heartbreak. That's someone's kid. That's what it is. When you have children of your own, too, you look You get people like that and you go, Hey, that was someone's baby boy. And now here they are, half naked, scabs all over their body, slumped over, rocking back and forth in the breeze.Yeah. Devastating.And no one's doing anything. They're on their own. It's my feeling that in a healthy society, those people would be treated and cared for. They'd try to figure out a way to try to help those folks. It'd be better for everybody.When they get out of that misery and come into a place place like Community First Village, our statistical data that we've done over the past seven or eight years shows an 80% drop in drug use from the streets to the village, and about a 40 to 50 % drop in alcohol use.That's amazing.It is amazing. It's a harm reduction model. Because How are you going to live in the misery of being on the streets other than anesthetizing yourself to the back? So it's hard to blame people. I mean, we're anesthesizing all of us, right? I mean, One of the greatest drug dealing places is all of our pharmacies. We're all going to buy our pharmaceuticals. Look, there's some interesting things going on in the world that that I want to see explored, especially around addiction. And that's like the use of psychedelics in mitigating as a treatment mechanism for people. And I just would like for the world to come around and make things easier to bring relief to people, because when we bring relief to individuals, we're going to bring relief to the community as a whole, and we ought to explore a number of different things. I take the legalization of marijuana as an example. Look, I live in the middle of a village where it's all there. Everything is there, from fentanyl to crack cocaine to meth, marijuana. I will tell you, our potheads are happy, hungry, and sleepy. And the folks that are smoking or shooting meth and crack I think many of them have pretty profound problems as a result of that.I'd love to see some studies going on around the psychedelic nature to see if we can further help people through their addiction issues.I'd like to see that as well. There's some powerful tools out there that we're not utilizing.Yeah, we're just afraid of them.How does a person get involved in your... How do they get accepted? What if is on the street and they find out about your village, what is the process?Well, first of all, they have to be chronically homeless. So there's a definition that we use that basically comes out of HUD. It's an unaccompanied male or female with a disabling condition, having lived on the streets at least a continuous year, for us, they have to be in the Austin area because we're not going to take you from Dallas or Houston or Minneapolis, or episodically homeless, addingstreets myself, and you begin to build relationships with people through that process. So many of the early people that came into the village were coming through that network. Today, we're engaged. We have an organization in town called ECHO. They are our Continuum of Care lead in Austin, Texas, and a number of agencies are engaged with ECHO who refer people through ECHO and the HMIS system into the village. And they have a coordinated assessment. They call it something else, I think now, but there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals' vulnerability.So the goal from the Continuum of care folks is to get the highest vulnerable people up off the streets because allegedly, they cost us, the taxpayer, the most money, although there's some questions around that now, legitimate questions. We try to get a balance because we can't become a full-blown assisted living type of a deal. We need people that can live independently. So there's a structure that brings people in. It takes a while. We have a waiting list of about 150 people.Wow. So you have these 3D printed houses, too. Yeah. How did that come about? Did you design those specifically for your needs? Were these prefabbed? Is it something that was already made?No. We have The second ever in the history of the world 3D printed house on the property. Where's the first? The second one.Where's the first?In East Austin, in the backyard of a piece of property that the icon guys own. It was the one that they built that they launched at South by six, seven, eight years ago. I can't remember the exact years.They're great little places. They're phenomenal. That's one of the things that I was thinking when I got in there. When I was a young man, when I was single, it was like, Oh, I could live here. This is a sweet little spot. You got a nice little kitchen area. You got a little bedroom area. You got a table. You could put television there. Not bad at all.They're great entrepreneurs. I know them well. It's an Austin-based company. We're considered a pretty Austin entrepreneurial nonprofit Austin-based, Austin-founded, Austin homegrown. As they were starting to come up on the radar screen, we ended up coming together, and it just made sense that they could come out there and experiment and beta test their printers and build for us. And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart because normally, new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology. But here's a powerful new technology that's actually be benefiting people who could have never afford that technology, because that technology today is not cheap. They're beating it down, but it's not cheap. So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now. We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase, and there'll be another 50 over on Burleison Road by the airport where we're under construction there.And so you live in one community? Yes. Are you going to have people like you that are living in these other communities? How are you managing them?Well, there's a population of people that live in our community. It's about 10% of our population that we call missionals, just like a missionary would leave the United States and go overseas somewhere to be a missionary. There are people that have chosen and called by the gospel to live in community at Community First Village. There's about 50, 60 people that include 40 adults plus about 15 children that live, and more are coming our way. So that's one of the secret sauces of our community is mixing people in there throughout the community that have never experienced homelessness but are called to serve alongside not in with the formerly chronically homeless.I think another thing to bring up is that you had some resistance from the outside community, the people that were neighboring it. They were worried that you were going to affect property values, that things weren't going to be dangerous. But in fact, the opposite happened. You haven't had any problems. On top of that, the communities near you are now worth more money than ever. Yeah.It's pretty funny because initially, what we tried to do was partner with the city of Austin. So we're actually just outside the city of Austin. We share a property line with the city of Austin. But for several years, from 2006, roughly, 2005, roughly to 2010, I tried to collaborate with the city of Austin, provide us with attractive land anywhere, and we'll raise the money to build. In 2008, April of the city, unanimously, City Council granted us a long term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin. In July of '08, we went on to a neighborhood meeting. Myself, the sponsoring council member, some of our team members, system city manager, my wife, Trisha, that just turned into Armageddon. Police had to be called to escort us out of there. And What happened? Oh, we were assaulted and spit on, and the news media was there, and it was an unbelievably horrible experience. The next morning, the city council member, the sponsoring city council member, by the way, who is still a friend of mine, a hugging friend of mine, called a press conference to suspend finalizing that lease for 12 months, which put a bullet in the head of that deal.We regrouped and we began to look at other property. And one of the other properties that was going to be granted to us was the tract of land that the soccer stadium now sits on, on McCala Lane. And then we got the not my backyard deal from a large group of people in that neighborhood. And finally, in 2010, after complete frustration, I went to the then mayor of Austin, Lee Luffywell, good friend, great guy. And I said, look, I'm thinking about going outside the city of Austin where there's no zoning, getting an attractive land there. But I need the city to help us with transportation and utilities. And And he looked at me and said, Alan, you may be the smartest person I've ever met in my life, which was a funny thing to say, just a drop out. I mean, I'm not that dumb, but I'm not Stephen Hawking either. And that's what we did. We went and bought that site where I live today, and then bought the site next door to it, and then the one across the street with some great support of some of our big donors, and really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning We had the legal right to develop that property.There was no zoning and no body that could approve what we would build on that property. And so the big fear is crime and lower property values. Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010, I could buy any house next door for, call it plus or minus $150,000. Today, it's plus or minus $450,000. The other argument is crime. There hasn't been one reported crime that I'm aware of by anybody from our neighborhood in the neighborhood next door. And there have been 13 crimes by that neighborhood into our community, mostly juveniles, stealing our golf carts, our Polaris, shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, the random juvenile, the stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 years old. I love those guys. And we work with them to help them. But if you're going to put a barbed wire fence, it needs to be on their side of the deal, not our side. Now, look, we We got plenty of bullshit inside of our neighborhood. This is not nirvana. I don't want anybody walking away. We have plenty of stuff going on, but it's not the gunfight at the okay corral.Right. Well, Alan, thank you very much for being here. And thank you for doing what you've done, what you've accomplished. It's very inspirational. I think, as I said in the beginning, you're a guy who really lives that life. And I think it's a beautiful thing to witness. And I I think your story is going to move a lot of people. Tell people if they're interested, how they can get involved, where they can find out more.Well, you could go to our website at mlf. Org, like Mobile Loaves and Fishers, Mike lemafrank. Org. Our hashtag is poundMobilLoves. I published a book. We published a book, Harper College. One's back in 2017 called Welcome Homeless. You could go and get that book. It's a series of stories about encounters that I've had with about 11 or 12 different people over the course of my time working on the Streets. I think it's a fun book that people would really enjoy an emotional deal. So go check that out. If you really want to know more, get it on an airplane, fly to Austin, Texas, and come see what we're doing. We'd love to share this with you. If you're interested in coming to one of our symposium, we'd love to have you there. All right. We're very grateful for this opportunity, Joe. Thank you.I'm grateful for you to be here. Thank you. I really appreciate you. Thank you very much for everything.Yeah. Thank you. All right. All right.Bye, everybody.

means. There's no end to that. Try to think about how far that goes back. And don't let that thought go. I thought about that almost every day of my life. From a guy that I met when I was 13 years old. Still do. Yeah. Every now and then, you get a really good teacher.

Time being the same.

He was also a guy who fought in Vietnam. I think that he had this perspective that he was trying to relay to us. You don't have a long time here. You got to figure out what you like and get after it. This is not what you think it is, and you're going to lose people along the way.

Yeah, there's a great a poem out there called Profits of a Future, Not Our Own, about how insignificant we actually are. We're just a puff of smoke in this infinite space-time, particularly time-space. We're only here, you and I are sitting on this history of human time. It's not even measurable. We can't even see it. We'd have to have a microscope in order to be able to really look at it.

Yeah. And we are so trapped in our own life and what we're trying to achieve and what we're trying to do in our social circle and all the nonsense that we have going on in our life that we lose our perspective. And that's really unfortunate because even our perspective, just to think about how small we are in this life and how quick this life goes by, that In the universe, this planet is nothing. Like, nothing that you can see in the night sky is anything. It's just too much. It's so big. I think that's one of the reasons why, in a similar way, people who live by the ocean are very chilled out. I think there's something about being by that ocean that makes you go, Oh, what is this? What the fuck is this? This is all bullshit. Look how much water there is. Or the same thing about mountains. People that live in the mountains, they have a- And food. And food? Oh, because there's plenty of food there. That's true, too. That's where all the food is. Right. But there's something about the humbling of the environment. Like mountains are another example of that.

There's a humbling of the person by their environment. I think one of the main problems that we have in civilized society is light pollution. Because of light pollution, we're not humbled by the night sky like our ancestors were. Our ancestors investors every night, they got to view the most spectacular thing a human being ever gets to witness, the vastness of the cosmos, right above their head every night. And now we don't even see it. We sacrificed that so we could take our Toyota to 7:11 at 10:00 PM.

Yeah. Well, we can travel and look at those. We got little spots.

Right. Yeah, but not much. But you only get a little dose. You're supposed to get vitamin D every day. I think you're supposed to get vitamin space every day, too. Yeah. No. I think you are. I think the sun gives you vitamin D, and it makes you healthier. And I think space makes you mentally healthier.

I like vitamin space.

Vitamin space is legit, man.

I'm going to adopt that.

I went to the observatory on the big island and the Keck Observatory. I've gone a few times since then, but one time I caught it perfect. One time, me and my family, we went up there and it was no moon at all. The moon was hidden. So the sky was just everywhere you looked, there was just billions of stars. And you could see the full Milky Way with the naked eye. And it felt like we were what we actually are. It felt like we were on an organic spaceship that's hurling through the vastness of the universe.

And the satellites screaming across.

I didn't see any of those. You didn't see any of those? No, I didn't see any of those. I mean, maybe there was less of them back then. We're talking about like 2009, I guess. 2008, probably 2008, when this really rocked me. I just remember thinking, watching it. You know what? I know for a fact, it's 2007. I remember thinking, this is such a travesty that we don't have this view every night. I think it would change the way people think. It would change the way people feel about the mystery of life itself, just to be confronted by the stars, just confronted by this inescapable greatness that's just mesmerizing.

Now we're living in the Truman show.

Yeah, a little bit. I think it's spiritual, too. I really do. I think there's a spiritual aspect of looking out into the universe that's undeniable, and I think it imparts something into people. I think it imparts this sense of humility and wonder that we're missing. I think it's one of the other reasons why we're so sick.

You really mean it's stripping us of that wonder because we don't get to look out and dream the way that we used to dream as we looked out there into the unknown?

Yeah.

On the Camino, you end up in this place beyond Santiago called Mujet and Finisteri, that was believed to be the end of the world. And it was just a coastline in Spain, out overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.

So they thought that was it?

That was it. And I've stood in this place where for centuries people stood and knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that they were at the end of the world. Well, And the dreams that got us beyond that, somebody thinking to themselves that, no, there's got to be more because they're looking up and they're seeing all of that vastness had to be looking across and being able to see a similar vastness that didn't end.

It was just amazing who had the courage to take that first this boat trip wall and you would go off the edge. Wasn't there ancient depictions of what the Earth looked like? No, absolutely. That it would show a boat going over the edge?

No, absolutely. That's what they believed, that it wouldn't go out there. It's amazing because we vilify Christopher Columbus now because we've- Found out he wasn't such a good guy. Well, he had his issues. Look, we all have to admit that we are a perverted species.

Have you ever read the accounts of the priest that traveled with Columbus?

Some of it, yeah.

That's rough stuff. No, it's rough.

It's scary.

Yeah. Yeah, they were monsters.

Yeah, but in Spain, he's a hero because he connected the European continent to the American continent. Right. It's a whole different. During September, when you're there, is his holiday and feast and all that stuff. They go nuts.

Do they still have Columbus Day here or is it your colonize?

No, I think they have Columbus Day, but I think he's gotten so beat up.

Didn't they change it to Indigenous People's Day?

Maybe they did.

I don't know. Did they? Jamie, find that out. They changed Columbus Day to Indigenous People's Day? I that people had to do. And I took a wrong turn once and IAir. Just stay right here. And it just stayed like that and grew. And was it the CISO Hotel? Was the documentary on? I watched a documentary on the CISO Hotel, which is in the middle of all that. It was this beautiful old hotel, and now that whole area is just chaos. And then now it's expanded, like considerably. So the fact that they have never done anything about that, it's only grown. And in fact, more people are hired to work on it and those people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not putting a dent in it just shows you how sick the culture is. It's an example. And I think what you're doing is an example of what can be accomplished with a healthy culture. I know you have a lot of really important, powerful people that have got your back and really love what you're doing. And because of that, you've managed to put together this enormous community. And now you have more land and you're expanding and building more of it.And if this can be done more, this might be the solution. I mean, what I saw from your place is the best example of a possible solution to this ever. Because you could see those people when they were walking Well, I own a place down there.I know you do.So I'm definitely a fan. I mean, I want it to be safer. But it's also I like the wildness of it. I like the fun. That street's fun. It's got a lot of energy to it. You're hearing live music from all over the place. There's people walking back and forth and great food trucks right there. It's fun. Yeah.That's what attracts and So how do we make that a part of the character of the deal without the extreme negative side effects that people experience sometimes?The extreme negative side effects of having the shelter there, you mean?Well, homelessness in general.They've made it better. Whatever they've done over the last year and a half, it has had a positive impact. You see less of it, less real problems. You're definitely going to see, unfortunately, some people that are still under the throes of drug addiction. There's a corner over by where Buffalo Billiards used to be. That's a red river-ish- Yeah. And I drove by the other day and there was 15 people just slumped over, some of them laying on the ground, some of them barely able to stand up, just rocking back and forth with whatever drug they're on. It's like, it's such a heartbreak. That's someone's kid. That's what it is. When you have children of your own, too, you look You get people like that and you go, Hey, that was someone's baby boy. And now here they are, half naked, scabs all over their body, slumped over, rocking back and forth in the breeze.Yeah. Devastating.And no one's doing anything. They're on their own. It's my feeling that in a healthy society, those people would be treated and cared for. They'd try to figure out a way to try to help those folks. It'd be better for everybody.When they get out of that misery and come into a place place like Community First Village, our statistical data that we've done over the past seven or eight years shows an 80% drop in drug use from the streets to the village, and about a 40 to 50 % drop in alcohol use.That's amazing.It is amazing. It's a harm reduction model. Because How are you going to live in the misery of being on the streets other than anesthetizing yourself to the back? So it's hard to blame people. I mean, we're anesthesizing all of us, right? I mean, One of the greatest drug dealing places is all of our pharmacies. We're all going to buy our pharmaceuticals. Look, there's some interesting things going on in the world that that I want to see explored, especially around addiction. And that's like the use of psychedelics in mitigating as a treatment mechanism for people. And I just would like for the world to come around and make things easier to bring relief to people, because when we bring relief to individuals, we're going to bring relief to the community as a whole, and we ought to explore a number of different things. I take the legalization of marijuana as an example. Look, I live in the middle of a village where it's all there. Everything is there, from fentanyl to crack cocaine to meth, marijuana. I will tell you, our potheads are happy, hungry, and sleepy. And the folks that are smoking or shooting meth and crack I think many of them have pretty profound problems as a result of that.I'd love to see some studies going on around the psychedelic nature to see if we can further help people through their addiction issues.I'd like to see that as well. There's some powerful tools out there that we're not utilizing.Yeah, we're just afraid of them.How does a person get involved in your... How do they get accepted? What if is on the street and they find out about your village, what is the process?Well, first of all, they have to be chronically homeless. So there's a definition that we use that basically comes out of HUD. It's an unaccompanied male or female with a disabling condition, having lived on the streets at least a continuous year, for us, they have to be in the Austin area because we're not going to take you from Dallas or Houston or Minneapolis, or episodically homeless, addingstreets myself, and you begin to build relationships with people through that process. So many of the early people that came into the village were coming through that network. Today, we're engaged. We have an organization in town called ECHO. They are our Continuum of Care lead in Austin, Texas, and a number of agencies are engaged with ECHO who refer people through ECHO and the HMIS system into the village. And they have a coordinated assessment. They call it something else, I think now, but there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals' vulnerability.So the goal from the Continuum of care folks is to get the highest vulnerable people up off the streets because allegedly, they cost us, the taxpayer, the most money, although there's some questions around that now, legitimate questions. We try to get a balance because we can't become a full-blown assisted living type of a deal. We need people that can live independently. So there's a structure that brings people in. It takes a while. We have a waiting list of about 150 people.Wow. So you have these 3D printed houses, too. Yeah. How did that come about? Did you design those specifically for your needs? Were these prefabbed? Is it something that was already made?No. We have The second ever in the history of the world 3D printed house on the property. Where's the first? The second one.Where's the first?In East Austin, in the backyard of a piece of property that the icon guys own. It was the one that they built that they launched at South by six, seven, eight years ago. I can't remember the exact years.They're great little places. They're phenomenal. That's one of the things that I was thinking when I got in there. When I was a young man, when I was single, it was like, Oh, I could live here. This is a sweet little spot. You got a nice little kitchen area. You got a little bedroom area. You got a table. You could put television there. Not bad at all.They're great entrepreneurs. I know them well. It's an Austin-based company. We're considered a pretty Austin entrepreneurial nonprofit Austin-based, Austin-founded, Austin homegrown. As they were starting to come up on the radar screen, we ended up coming together, and it just made sense that they could come out there and experiment and beta test their printers and build for us. And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart because normally, new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology. But here's a powerful new technology that's actually be benefiting people who could have never afford that technology, because that technology today is not cheap. They're beating it down, but it's not cheap. So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now. We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase, and there'll be another 50 over on Burleison Road by the airport where we're under construction there.And so you live in one community? Yes. Are you going to have people like you that are living in these other communities? How are you managing them?Well, there's a population of people that live in our community. It's about 10% of our population that we call missionals, just like a missionary would leave the United States and go overseas somewhere to be a missionary. There are people that have chosen and called by the gospel to live in community at Community First Village. There's about 50, 60 people that include 40 adults plus about 15 children that live, and more are coming our way. So that's one of the secret sauces of our community is mixing people in there throughout the community that have never experienced homelessness but are called to serve alongside not in with the formerly chronically homeless.I think another thing to bring up is that you had some resistance from the outside community, the people that were neighboring it. They were worried that you were going to affect property values, that things weren't going to be dangerous. But in fact, the opposite happened. You haven't had any problems. On top of that, the communities near you are now worth more money than ever. Yeah.It's pretty funny because initially, what we tried to do was partner with the city of Austin. So we're actually just outside the city of Austin. We share a property line with the city of Austin. But for several years, from 2006, roughly, 2005, roughly to 2010, I tried to collaborate with the city of Austin, provide us with attractive land anywhere, and we'll raise the money to build. In 2008, April of the city, unanimously, City Council granted us a long term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin. In July of '08, we went on to a neighborhood meeting. Myself, the sponsoring council member, some of our team members, system city manager, my wife, Trisha, that just turned into Armageddon. Police had to be called to escort us out of there. And What happened? Oh, we were assaulted and spit on, and the news media was there, and it was an unbelievably horrible experience. The next morning, the city council member, the sponsoring city council member, by the way, who is still a friend of mine, a hugging friend of mine, called a press conference to suspend finalizing that lease for 12 months, which put a bullet in the head of that deal.We regrouped and we began to look at other property. And one of the other properties that was going to be granted to us was the tract of land that the soccer stadium now sits on, on McCala Lane. And then we got the not my backyard deal from a large group of people in that neighborhood. And finally, in 2010, after complete frustration, I went to the then mayor of Austin, Lee Luffywell, good friend, great guy. And I said, look, I'm thinking about going outside the city of Austin where there's no zoning, getting an attractive land there. But I need the city to help us with transportation and utilities. And And he looked at me and said, Alan, you may be the smartest person I've ever met in my life, which was a funny thing to say, just a drop out. I mean, I'm not that dumb, but I'm not Stephen Hawking either. And that's what we did. We went and bought that site where I live today, and then bought the site next door to it, and then the one across the street with some great support of some of our big donors, and really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning We had the legal right to develop that property.There was no zoning and no body that could approve what we would build on that property. And so the big fear is crime and lower property values. Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010, I could buy any house next door for, call it plus or minus $150,000. Today, it's plus or minus $450,000. The other argument is crime. There hasn't been one reported crime that I'm aware of by anybody from our neighborhood in the neighborhood next door. And there have been 13 crimes by that neighborhood into our community, mostly juveniles, stealing our golf carts, our Polaris, shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, the random juvenile, the stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 years old. I love those guys. And we work with them to help them. But if you're going to put a barbed wire fence, it needs to be on their side of the deal, not our side. Now, look, we We got plenty of bullshit inside of our neighborhood. This is not nirvana. I don't want anybody walking away. We have plenty of stuff going on, but it's not the gunfight at the okay corral.Right. Well, Alan, thank you very much for being here. And thank you for doing what you've done, what you've accomplished. It's very inspirational. I think, as I said in the beginning, you're a guy who really lives that life. And I think it's a beautiful thing to witness. And I I think your story is going to move a lot of people. Tell people if they're interested, how they can get involved, where they can find out more.Well, you could go to our website at mlf. Org, like Mobile Loaves and Fishers, Mike lemafrank. Org. Our hashtag is poundMobilLoves. I published a book. We published a book, Harper College. One's back in 2017 called Welcome Homeless. You could go and get that book. It's a series of stories about encounters that I've had with about 11 or 12 different people over the course of my time working on the Streets. I think it's a fun book that people would really enjoy an emotional deal. So go check that out. If you really want to know more, get it on an airplane, fly to Austin, Texas, and come see what we're doing. We'd love to share this with you. If you're interested in coming to one of our symposium, we'd love to have you there. All right. We're very grateful for this opportunity, Joe. Thank you.I'm grateful for you to be here. Thank you. I really appreciate you. Thank you very much for everything.Yeah. Thank you. All right. All right.Bye, everybody.

that people had to do. And I took a wrong turn once and IAir. Just stay right here. And it just stayed like that and grew. And was it the CISO Hotel? Was the documentary on? I watched a documentary on the CISO Hotel, which is in the middle of all that. It was this beautiful old hotel, and now that whole area is just chaos. And then now it's expanded, like considerably. So the fact that they have never done anything about that, it's only grown. And in fact, more people are hired to work on it and those people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not putting a dent in it just shows you how sick the culture is. It's an example. And I think what you're doing is an example of what can be accomplished with a healthy culture. I know you have a lot of really important, powerful people that have got your back and really love what you're doing. And because of that, you've managed to put together this enormous community. And now you have more land and you're expanding and building more of it.And if this can be done more, this might be the solution. I mean, what I saw from your place is the best example of a possible solution to this ever. Because you could see those people when they were walking Well, I own a place down there.I know you do.So I'm definitely a fan. I mean, I want it to be safer. But it's also I like the wildness of it. I like the fun. That street's fun. It's got a lot of energy to it. You're hearing live music from all over the place. There's people walking back and forth and great food trucks right there. It's fun. Yeah.That's what attracts and So how do we make that a part of the character of the deal without the extreme negative side effects that people experience sometimes?The extreme negative side effects of having the shelter there, you mean?Well, homelessness in general.They've made it better. Whatever they've done over the last year and a half, it has had a positive impact. You see less of it, less real problems. You're definitely going to see, unfortunately, some people that are still under the throes of drug addiction. There's a corner over by where Buffalo Billiards used to be. That's a red river-ish- Yeah. And I drove by the other day and there was 15 people just slumped over, some of them laying on the ground, some of them barely able to stand up, just rocking back and forth with whatever drug they're on. It's like, it's such a heartbreak. That's someone's kid. That's what it is. When you have children of your own, too, you look You get people like that and you go, Hey, that was someone's baby boy. And now here they are, half naked, scabs all over their body, slumped over, rocking back and forth in the breeze.Yeah. Devastating.And no one's doing anything. They're on their own. It's my feeling that in a healthy society, those people would be treated and cared for. They'd try to figure out a way to try to help those folks. It'd be better for everybody.When they get out of that misery and come into a place place like Community First Village, our statistical data that we've done over the past seven or eight years shows an 80% drop in drug use from the streets to the village, and about a 40 to 50 % drop in alcohol use.That's amazing.It is amazing. It's a harm reduction model. Because How are you going to live in the misery of being on the streets other than anesthetizing yourself to the back? So it's hard to blame people. I mean, we're anesthesizing all of us, right? I mean, One of the greatest drug dealing places is all of our pharmacies. We're all going to buy our pharmaceuticals. Look, there's some interesting things going on in the world that that I want to see explored, especially around addiction. And that's like the use of psychedelics in mitigating as a treatment mechanism for people. And I just would like for the world to come around and make things easier to bring relief to people, because when we bring relief to individuals, we're going to bring relief to the community as a whole, and we ought to explore a number of different things. I take the legalization of marijuana as an example. Look, I live in the middle of a village where it's all there. Everything is there, from fentanyl to crack cocaine to meth, marijuana. I will tell you, our potheads are happy, hungry, and sleepy. And the folks that are smoking or shooting meth and crack I think many of them have pretty profound problems as a result of that.I'd love to see some studies going on around the psychedelic nature to see if we can further help people through their addiction issues.I'd like to see that as well. There's some powerful tools out there that we're not utilizing.Yeah, we're just afraid of them.How does a person get involved in your... How do they get accepted? What if is on the street and they find out about your village, what is the process?Well, first of all, they have to be chronically homeless. So there's a definition that we use that basically comes out of HUD. It's an unaccompanied male or female with a disabling condition, having lived on the streets at least a continuous year, for us, they have to be in the Austin area because we're not going to take you from Dallas or Houston or Minneapolis, or episodically homeless, addingstreets myself, and you begin to build relationships with people through that process. So many of the early people that came into the village were coming through that network. Today, we're engaged. We have an organization in town called ECHO. They are our Continuum of Care lead in Austin, Texas, and a number of agencies are engaged with ECHO who refer people through ECHO and the HMIS system into the village. And they have a coordinated assessment. They call it something else, I think now, but there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals' vulnerability.So the goal from the Continuum of care folks is to get the highest vulnerable people up off the streets because allegedly, they cost us, the taxpayer, the most money, although there's some questions around that now, legitimate questions. We try to get a balance because we can't become a full-blown assisted living type of a deal. We need people that can live independently. So there's a structure that brings people in. It takes a while. We have a waiting list of about 150 people.Wow. So you have these 3D printed houses, too. Yeah. How did that come about? Did you design those specifically for your needs? Were these prefabbed? Is it something that was already made?No. We have The second ever in the history of the world 3D printed house on the property. Where's the first? The second one.Where's the first?In East Austin, in the backyard of a piece of property that the icon guys own. It was the one that they built that they launched at South by six, seven, eight years ago. I can't remember the exact years.They're great little places. They're phenomenal. That's one of the things that I was thinking when I got in there. When I was a young man, when I was single, it was like, Oh, I could live here. This is a sweet little spot. You got a nice little kitchen area. You got a little bedroom area. You got a table. You could put television there. Not bad at all.They're great entrepreneurs. I know them well. It's an Austin-based company. We're considered a pretty Austin entrepreneurial nonprofit Austin-based, Austin-founded, Austin homegrown. As they were starting to come up on the radar screen, we ended up coming together, and it just made sense that they could come out there and experiment and beta test their printers and build for us. And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart because normally, new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology. But here's a powerful new technology that's actually be benefiting people who could have never afford that technology, because that technology today is not cheap. They're beating it down, but it's not cheap. So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now. We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase, and there'll be another 50 over on Burleison Road by the airport where we're under construction there.And so you live in one community? Yes. Are you going to have people like you that are living in these other communities? How are you managing them?Well, there's a population of people that live in our community. It's about 10% of our population that we call missionals, just like a missionary would leave the United States and go overseas somewhere to be a missionary. There are people that have chosen and called by the gospel to live in community at Community First Village. There's about 50, 60 people that include 40 adults plus about 15 children that live, and more are coming our way. So that's one of the secret sauces of our community is mixing people in there throughout the community that have never experienced homelessness but are called to serve alongside not in with the formerly chronically homeless.I think another thing to bring up is that you had some resistance from the outside community, the people that were neighboring it. They were worried that you were going to affect property values, that things weren't going to be dangerous. But in fact, the opposite happened. You haven't had any problems. On top of that, the communities near you are now worth more money than ever. Yeah.It's pretty funny because initially, what we tried to do was partner with the city of Austin. So we're actually just outside the city of Austin. We share a property line with the city of Austin. But for several years, from 2006, roughly, 2005, roughly to 2010, I tried to collaborate with the city of Austin, provide us with attractive land anywhere, and we'll raise the money to build. In 2008, April of the city, unanimously, City Council granted us a long term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin. In July of '08, we went on to a neighborhood meeting. Myself, the sponsoring council member, some of our team members, system city manager, my wife, Trisha, that just turned into Armageddon. Police had to be called to escort us out of there. And What happened? Oh, we were assaulted and spit on, and the news media was there, and it was an unbelievably horrible experience. The next morning, the city council member, the sponsoring city council member, by the way, who is still a friend of mine, a hugging friend of mine, called a press conference to suspend finalizing that lease for 12 months, which put a bullet in the head of that deal.We regrouped and we began to look at other property. And one of the other properties that was going to be granted to us was the tract of land that the soccer stadium now sits on, on McCala Lane. And then we got the not my backyard deal from a large group of people in that neighborhood. And finally, in 2010, after complete frustration, I went to the then mayor of Austin, Lee Luffywell, good friend, great guy. And I said, look, I'm thinking about going outside the city of Austin where there's no zoning, getting an attractive land there. But I need the city to help us with transportation and utilities. And And he looked at me and said, Alan, you may be the smartest person I've ever met in my life, which was a funny thing to say, just a drop out. I mean, I'm not that dumb, but I'm not Stephen Hawking either. And that's what we did. We went and bought that site where I live today, and then bought the site next door to it, and then the one across the street with some great support of some of our big donors, and really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning We had the legal right to develop that property.There was no zoning and no body that could approve what we would build on that property. And so the big fear is crime and lower property values. Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010, I could buy any house next door for, call it plus or minus $150,000. Today, it's plus or minus $450,000. The other argument is crime. There hasn't been one reported crime that I'm aware of by anybody from our neighborhood in the neighborhood next door. And there have been 13 crimes by that neighborhood into our community, mostly juveniles, stealing our golf carts, our Polaris, shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, the random juvenile, the stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 years old. I love those guys. And we work with them to help them. But if you're going to put a barbed wire fence, it needs to be on their side of the deal, not our side. Now, look, we We got plenty of bullshit inside of our neighborhood. This is not nirvana. I don't want anybody walking away. We have plenty of stuff going on, but it's not the gunfight at the okay corral.Right. Well, Alan, thank you very much for being here. And thank you for doing what you've done, what you've accomplished. It's very inspirational. I think, as I said in the beginning, you're a guy who really lives that life. And I think it's a beautiful thing to witness. And I I think your story is going to move a lot of people. Tell people if they're interested, how they can get involved, where they can find out more.Well, you could go to our website at mlf. Org, like Mobile Loaves and Fishers, Mike lemafrank. Org. Our hashtag is poundMobilLoves. I published a book. We published a book, Harper College. One's back in 2017 called Welcome Homeless. You could go and get that book. It's a series of stories about encounters that I've had with about 11 or 12 different people over the course of my time working on the Streets. I think it's a fun book that people would really enjoy an emotional deal. So go check that out. If you really want to know more, get it on an airplane, fly to Austin, Texas, and come see what we're doing. We'd love to share this with you. If you're interested in coming to one of our symposium, we'd love to have you there. All right. We're very grateful for this opportunity, Joe. Thank you.I'm grateful for you to be here. Thank you. I really appreciate you. Thank you very much for everything.Yeah. Thank you. All right. All right.Bye, everybody.

Air. Just stay right here. And it just stayed like that and grew. And was it the CISO Hotel? Was the documentary on? I watched a documentary on the CISO Hotel, which is in the middle of all that. It was this beautiful old hotel, and now that whole area is just chaos. And then now it's expanded, like considerably. So the fact that they have never done anything about that, it's only grown. And in fact, more people are hired to work on it and those people are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and not putting a dent in it just shows you how sick the culture is. It's an example. And I think what you're doing is an example of what can be accomplished with a healthy culture. I know you have a lot of really important, powerful people that have got your back and really love what you're doing. And because of that, you've managed to put together this enormous community. And now you have more land and you're expanding and building more of it.

And if this can be done more, this might be the solution. I mean, what I saw from your place is the best example of a possible solution to this ever. Because you could see those people when they were walking Well, I own a place down there.I know you do.So I'm definitely a fan. I mean, I want it to be safer. But it's also I like the wildness of it. I like the fun. That street's fun. It's got a lot of energy to it. You're hearing live music from all over the place. There's people walking back and forth and great food trucks right there. It's fun. Yeah.That's what attracts and So how do we make that a part of the character of the deal without the extreme negative side effects that people experience sometimes?The extreme negative side effects of having the shelter there, you mean?Well, homelessness in general.They've made it better. Whatever they've done over the last year and a half, it has had a positive impact. You see less of it, less real problems. You're definitely going to see, unfortunately, some people that are still under the throes of drug addiction. There's a corner over by where Buffalo Billiards used to be. That's a red river-ish- Yeah. And I drove by the other day and there was 15 people just slumped over, some of them laying on the ground, some of them barely able to stand up, just rocking back and forth with whatever drug they're on. It's like, it's such a heartbreak. That's someone's kid. That's what it is. When you have children of your own, too, you look You get people like that and you go, Hey, that was someone's baby boy. And now here they are, half naked, scabs all over their body, slumped over, rocking back and forth in the breeze.Yeah. Devastating.And no one's doing anything. They're on their own. It's my feeling that in a healthy society, those people would be treated and cared for. They'd try to figure out a way to try to help those folks. It'd be better for everybody.When they get out of that misery and come into a place place like Community First Village, our statistical data that we've done over the past seven or eight years shows an 80% drop in drug use from the streets to the village, and about a 40 to 50 % drop in alcohol use.That's amazing.It is amazing. It's a harm reduction model. Because How are you going to live in the misery of being on the streets other than anesthetizing yourself to the back? So it's hard to blame people. I mean, we're anesthesizing all of us, right? I mean, One of the greatest drug dealing places is all of our pharmacies. We're all going to buy our pharmaceuticals. Look, there's some interesting things going on in the world that that I want to see explored, especially around addiction. And that's like the use of psychedelics in mitigating as a treatment mechanism for people. And I just would like for the world to come around and make things easier to bring relief to people, because when we bring relief to individuals, we're going to bring relief to the community as a whole, and we ought to explore a number of different things. I take the legalization of marijuana as an example. Look, I live in the middle of a village where it's all there. Everything is there, from fentanyl to crack cocaine to meth, marijuana. I will tell you, our potheads are happy, hungry, and sleepy. And the folks that are smoking or shooting meth and crack I think many of them have pretty profound problems as a result of that.I'd love to see some studies going on around the psychedelic nature to see if we can further help people through their addiction issues.I'd like to see that as well. There's some powerful tools out there that we're not utilizing.Yeah, we're just afraid of them.How does a person get involved in your... How do they get accepted? What if is on the street and they find out about your village, what is the process?Well, first of all, they have to be chronically homeless. So there's a definition that we use that basically comes out of HUD. It's an unaccompanied male or female with a disabling condition, having lived on the streets at least a continuous year, for us, they have to be in the Austin area because we're not going to take you from Dallas or Houston or Minneapolis, or episodically homeless, addingstreets myself, and you begin to build relationships with people through that process. So many of the early people that came into the village were coming through that network. Today, we're engaged. We have an organization in town called ECHO. They are our Continuum of Care lead in Austin, Texas, and a number of agencies are engaged with ECHO who refer people through ECHO and the HMIS system into the village. And they have a coordinated assessment. They call it something else, I think now, but there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals' vulnerability.So the goal from the Continuum of care folks is to get the highest vulnerable people up off the streets because allegedly, they cost us, the taxpayer, the most money, although there's some questions around that now, legitimate questions. We try to get a balance because we can't become a full-blown assisted living type of a deal. We need people that can live independently. So there's a structure that brings people in. It takes a while. We have a waiting list of about 150 people.Wow. So you have these 3D printed houses, too. Yeah. How did that come about? Did you design those specifically for your needs? Were these prefabbed? Is it something that was already made?No. We have The second ever in the history of the world 3D printed house on the property. Where's the first? The second one.Where's the first?In East Austin, in the backyard of a piece of property that the icon guys own. It was the one that they built that they launched at South by six, seven, eight years ago. I can't remember the exact years.They're great little places. They're phenomenal. That's one of the things that I was thinking when I got in there. When I was a young man, when I was single, it was like, Oh, I could live here. This is a sweet little spot. You got a nice little kitchen area. You got a little bedroom area. You got a table. You could put television there. Not bad at all.They're great entrepreneurs. I know them well. It's an Austin-based company. We're considered a pretty Austin entrepreneurial nonprofit Austin-based, Austin-founded, Austin homegrown. As they were starting to come up on the radar screen, we ended up coming together, and it just made sense that they could come out there and experiment and beta test their printers and build for us. And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart because normally, new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology. But here's a powerful new technology that's actually be benefiting people who could have never afford that technology, because that technology today is not cheap. They're beating it down, but it's not cheap. So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now. We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase, and there'll be another 50 over on Burleison Road by the airport where we're under construction there.And so you live in one community? Yes. Are you going to have people like you that are living in these other communities? How are you managing them?Well, there's a population of people that live in our community. It's about 10% of our population that we call missionals, just like a missionary would leave the United States and go overseas somewhere to be a missionary. There are people that have chosen and called by the gospel to live in community at Community First Village. There's about 50, 60 people that include 40 adults plus about 15 children that live, and more are coming our way. So that's one of the secret sauces of our community is mixing people in there throughout the community that have never experienced homelessness but are called to serve alongside not in with the formerly chronically homeless.I think another thing to bring up is that you had some resistance from the outside community, the people that were neighboring it. They were worried that you were going to affect property values, that things weren't going to be dangerous. But in fact, the opposite happened. You haven't had any problems. On top of that, the communities near you are now worth more money than ever. Yeah.It's pretty funny because initially, what we tried to do was partner with the city of Austin. So we're actually just outside the city of Austin. We share a property line with the city of Austin. But for several years, from 2006, roughly, 2005, roughly to 2010, I tried to collaborate with the city of Austin, provide us with attractive land anywhere, and we'll raise the money to build. In 2008, April of the city, unanimously, City Council granted us a long term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin. In July of '08, we went on to a neighborhood meeting. Myself, the sponsoring council member, some of our team members, system city manager, my wife, Trisha, that just turned into Armageddon. Police had to be called to escort us out of there. And What happened? Oh, we were assaulted and spit on, and the news media was there, and it was an unbelievably horrible experience. The next morning, the city council member, the sponsoring city council member, by the way, who is still a friend of mine, a hugging friend of mine, called a press conference to suspend finalizing that lease for 12 months, which put a bullet in the head of that deal.We regrouped and we began to look at other property. And one of the other properties that was going to be granted to us was the tract of land that the soccer stadium now sits on, on McCala Lane. And then we got the not my backyard deal from a large group of people in that neighborhood. And finally, in 2010, after complete frustration, I went to the then mayor of Austin, Lee Luffywell, good friend, great guy. And I said, look, I'm thinking about going outside the city of Austin where there's no zoning, getting an attractive land there. But I need the city to help us with transportation and utilities. And And he looked at me and said, Alan, you may be the smartest person I've ever met in my life, which was a funny thing to say, just a drop out. I mean, I'm not that dumb, but I'm not Stephen Hawking either. And that's what we did. We went and bought that site where I live today, and then bought the site next door to it, and then the one across the street with some great support of some of our big donors, and really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning We had the legal right to develop that property.There was no zoning and no body that could approve what we would build on that property. And so the big fear is crime and lower property values. Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010, I could buy any house next door for, call it plus or minus $150,000. Today, it's plus or minus $450,000. The other argument is crime. There hasn't been one reported crime that I'm aware of by anybody from our neighborhood in the neighborhood next door. And there have been 13 crimes by that neighborhood into our community, mostly juveniles, stealing our golf carts, our Polaris, shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, the random juvenile, the stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 years old. I love those guys. And we work with them to help them. But if you're going to put a barbed wire fence, it needs to be on their side of the deal, not our side. Now, look, we We got plenty of bullshit inside of our neighborhood. This is not nirvana. I don't want anybody walking away. We have plenty of stuff going on, but it's not the gunfight at the okay corral.Right. Well, Alan, thank you very much for being here. And thank you for doing what you've done, what you've accomplished. It's very inspirational. I think, as I said in the beginning, you're a guy who really lives that life. And I think it's a beautiful thing to witness. And I I think your story is going to move a lot of people. Tell people if they're interested, how they can get involved, where they can find out more.Well, you could go to our website at mlf. Org, like Mobile Loaves and Fishers, Mike lemafrank. Org. Our hashtag is poundMobilLoves. I published a book. We published a book, Harper College. One's back in 2017 called Welcome Homeless. You could go and get that book. It's a series of stories about encounters that I've had with about 11 or 12 different people over the course of my time working on the Streets. I think it's a fun book that people would really enjoy an emotional deal. So go check that out. If you really want to know more, get it on an airplane, fly to Austin, Texas, and come see what we're doing. We'd love to share this with you. If you're interested in coming to one of our symposium, we'd love to have you there. All right. We're very grateful for this opportunity, Joe. Thank you.I'm grateful for you to be here. Thank you. I really appreciate you. Thank you very much for everything.Yeah. Thank you. All right. All right.Bye, everybody.

Well, I own a place down there.

I know you do.

So I'm definitely a fan. I mean, I want it to be safer. But it's also I like the wildness of it. I like the fun. That street's fun. It's got a lot of energy to it. You're hearing live music from all over the place. There's people walking back and forth and great food trucks right there. It's fun. Yeah.

That's what attracts and So how do we make that a part of the character of the deal without the extreme negative side effects that people experience sometimes?

The extreme negative side effects of having the shelter there, you mean?

Well, homelessness in general.

They've made it better. Whatever they've done over the last year and a half, it has had a positive impact. You see less of it, less real problems. You're definitely going to see, unfortunately, some people that are still under the throes of drug addiction. There's a corner over by where Buffalo Billiards used to be. That's a red river-ish- Yeah. And I drove by the other day and there was 15 people just slumped over, some of them laying on the ground, some of them barely able to stand up, just rocking back and forth with whatever drug they're on. It's like, it's such a heartbreak. That's someone's kid. That's what it is. When you have children of your own, too, you look You get people like that and you go, Hey, that was someone's baby boy. And now here they are, half naked, scabs all over their body, slumped over, rocking back and forth in the breeze.

Yeah. Devastating.

And no one's doing anything. They're on their own. It's my feeling that in a healthy society, those people would be treated and cared for. They'd try to figure out a way to try to help those folks. It'd be better for everybody.

When they get out of that misery and come into a place place like Community First Village, our statistical data that we've done over the past seven or eight years shows an 80% drop in drug use from the streets to the village, and about a 40 to 50 % drop in alcohol use.

That's amazing.

It is amazing. It's a harm reduction model. Because How are you going to live in the misery of being on the streets other than anesthetizing yourself to the back? So it's hard to blame people. I mean, we're anesthesizing all of us, right? I mean, One of the greatest drug dealing places is all of our pharmacies. We're all going to buy our pharmaceuticals. Look, there's some interesting things going on in the world that that I want to see explored, especially around addiction. And that's like the use of psychedelics in mitigating as a treatment mechanism for people. And I just would like for the world to come around and make things easier to bring relief to people, because when we bring relief to individuals, we're going to bring relief to the community as a whole, and we ought to explore a number of different things. I take the legalization of marijuana as an example. Look, I live in the middle of a village where it's all there. Everything is there, from fentanyl to crack cocaine to meth, marijuana. I will tell you, our potheads are happy, hungry, and sleepy. And the folks that are smoking or shooting meth and crack I think many of them have pretty profound problems as a result of that.

I'd love to see some studies going on around the psychedelic nature to see if we can further help people through their addiction issues.

I'd like to see that as well. There's some powerful tools out there that we're not utilizing.

Yeah, we're just afraid of them.

How does a person get involved in your... How do they get accepted? What if is on the street and they find out about your village, what is the process?

Well, first of all, they have to be chronically homeless. So there's a definition that we use that basically comes out of HUD. It's an unaccompanied male or female with a disabling condition, having lived on the streets at least a continuous year, for us, they have to be in the Austin area because we're not going to take you from Dallas or Houston or Minneapolis, or episodically homeless, addingstreets myself, and you begin to build relationships with people through that process. So many of the early people that came into the village were coming through that network. Today, we're engaged. We have an organization in town called ECHO. They are our Continuum of Care lead in Austin, Texas, and a number of agencies are engaged with ECHO who refer people through ECHO and the HMIS system into the village. And they have a coordinated assessment. They call it something else, I think now, but there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals' vulnerability.So the goal from the Continuum of care folks is to get the highest vulnerable people up off the streets because allegedly, they cost us, the taxpayer, the most money, although there's some questions around that now, legitimate questions. We try to get a balance because we can't become a full-blown assisted living type of a deal. We need people that can live independently. So there's a structure that brings people in. It takes a while. We have a waiting list of about 150 people.Wow. So you have these 3D printed houses, too. Yeah. How did that come about? Did you design those specifically for your needs? Were these prefabbed? Is it something that was already made?No. We have The second ever in the history of the world 3D printed house on the property. Where's the first? The second one.Where's the first?In East Austin, in the backyard of a piece of property that the icon guys own. It was the one that they built that they launched at South by six, seven, eight years ago. I can't remember the exact years.They're great little places. They're phenomenal. That's one of the things that I was thinking when I got in there. When I was a young man, when I was single, it was like, Oh, I could live here. This is a sweet little spot. You got a nice little kitchen area. You got a little bedroom area. You got a table. You could put television there. Not bad at all.They're great entrepreneurs. I know them well. It's an Austin-based company. We're considered a pretty Austin entrepreneurial nonprofit Austin-based, Austin-founded, Austin homegrown. As they were starting to come up on the radar screen, we ended up coming together, and it just made sense that they could come out there and experiment and beta test their printers and build for us. And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart because normally, new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology. But here's a powerful new technology that's actually be benefiting people who could have never afford that technology, because that technology today is not cheap. They're beating it down, but it's not cheap. So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now. We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase, and there'll be another 50 over on Burleison Road by the airport where we're under construction there.And so you live in one community? Yes. Are you going to have people like you that are living in these other communities? How are you managing them?Well, there's a population of people that live in our community. It's about 10% of our population that we call missionals, just like a missionary would leave the United States and go overseas somewhere to be a missionary. There are people that have chosen and called by the gospel to live in community at Community First Village. There's about 50, 60 people that include 40 adults plus about 15 children that live, and more are coming our way. So that's one of the secret sauces of our community is mixing people in there throughout the community that have never experienced homelessness but are called to serve alongside not in with the formerly chronically homeless.I think another thing to bring up is that you had some resistance from the outside community, the people that were neighboring it. They were worried that you were going to affect property values, that things weren't going to be dangerous. But in fact, the opposite happened. You haven't had any problems. On top of that, the communities near you are now worth more money than ever. Yeah.It's pretty funny because initially, what we tried to do was partner with the city of Austin. So we're actually just outside the city of Austin. We share a property line with the city of Austin. But for several years, from 2006, roughly, 2005, roughly to 2010, I tried to collaborate with the city of Austin, provide us with attractive land anywhere, and we'll raise the money to build. In 2008, April of the city, unanimously, City Council granted us a long term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin. In July of '08, we went on to a neighborhood meeting. Myself, the sponsoring council member, some of our team members, system city manager, my wife, Trisha, that just turned into Armageddon. Police had to be called to escort us out of there. And What happened? Oh, we were assaulted and spit on, and the news media was there, and it was an unbelievably horrible experience. The next morning, the city council member, the sponsoring city council member, by the way, who is still a friend of mine, a hugging friend of mine, called a press conference to suspend finalizing that lease for 12 months, which put a bullet in the head of that deal.We regrouped and we began to look at other property. And one of the other properties that was going to be granted to us was the tract of land that the soccer stadium now sits on, on McCala Lane. And then we got the not my backyard deal from a large group of people in that neighborhood. And finally, in 2010, after complete frustration, I went to the then mayor of Austin, Lee Luffywell, good friend, great guy. And I said, look, I'm thinking about going outside the city of Austin where there's no zoning, getting an attractive land there. But I need the city to help us with transportation and utilities. And And he looked at me and said, Alan, you may be the smartest person I've ever met in my life, which was a funny thing to say, just a drop out. I mean, I'm not that dumb, but I'm not Stephen Hawking either. And that's what we did. We went and bought that site where I live today, and then bought the site next door to it, and then the one across the street with some great support of some of our big donors, and really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning We had the legal right to develop that property.There was no zoning and no body that could approve what we would build on that property. And so the big fear is crime and lower property values. Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010, I could buy any house next door for, call it plus or minus $150,000. Today, it's plus or minus $450,000. The other argument is crime. There hasn't been one reported crime that I'm aware of by anybody from our neighborhood in the neighborhood next door. And there have been 13 crimes by that neighborhood into our community, mostly juveniles, stealing our golf carts, our Polaris, shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, the random juvenile, the stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 years old. I love those guys. And we work with them to help them. But if you're going to put a barbed wire fence, it needs to be on their side of the deal, not our side. Now, look, we We got plenty of bullshit inside of our neighborhood. This is not nirvana. I don't want anybody walking away. We have plenty of stuff going on, but it's not the gunfight at the okay corral.Right. Well, Alan, thank you very much for being here. And thank you for doing what you've done, what you've accomplished. It's very inspirational. I think, as I said in the beginning, you're a guy who really lives that life. And I think it's a beautiful thing to witness. And I I think your story is going to move a lot of people. Tell people if they're interested, how they can get involved, where they can find out more.Well, you could go to our website at mlf. Org, like Mobile Loaves and Fishers, Mike lemafrank. Org. Our hashtag is poundMobilLoves. I published a book. We published a book, Harper College. One's back in 2017 called Welcome Homeless. You could go and get that book. It's a series of stories about encounters that I've had with about 11 or 12 different people over the course of my time working on the Streets. I think it's a fun book that people would really enjoy an emotional deal. So go check that out. If you really want to know more, get it on an airplane, fly to Austin, Texas, and come see what we're doing. We'd love to share this with you. If you're interested in coming to one of our symposium, we'd love to have you there. All right. We're very grateful for this opportunity, Joe. Thank you.I'm grateful for you to be here. Thank you. I really appreciate you. Thank you very much for everything.Yeah. Thank you. All right. All right.Bye, everybody.

streets myself, and you begin to build relationships with people through that process. So many of the early people that came into the village were coming through that network. Today, we're engaged. We have an organization in town called ECHO. They are our Continuum of Care lead in Austin, Texas, and a number of agencies are engaged with ECHO who refer people through ECHO and the HMIS system into the village. And they have a coordinated assessment. They call it something else, I think now, but there's a coordinated assessment tool that people can take that attempts to assess individuals' vulnerability.

So the goal from the Continuum of care folks is to get the highest vulnerable people up off the streets because allegedly, they cost us, the taxpayer, the most money, although there's some questions around that now, legitimate questions. We try to get a balance because we can't become a full-blown assisted living type of a deal. We need people that can live independently. So there's a structure that brings people in. It takes a while. We have a waiting list of about 150 people.

Wow. So you have these 3D printed houses, too. Yeah. How did that come about? Did you design those specifically for your needs? Were these prefabbed? Is it something that was already made?

No. We have The second ever in the history of the world 3D printed house on the property. Where's the first? The second one.

Where's the first?

In East Austin, in the backyard of a piece of property that the icon guys own. It was the one that they built that they launched at South by six, seven, eight years ago. I can't remember the exact years.

They're great little places. They're phenomenal. That's one of the things that I was thinking when I got in there. When I was a young man, when I was single, it was like, Oh, I could live here. This is a sweet little spot. You got a nice little kitchen area. You got a little bedroom area. You got a table. You could put television there. Not bad at all.

They're great entrepreneurs. I know them well. It's an Austin-based company. We're considered a pretty Austin entrepreneurial nonprofit Austin-based, Austin-founded, Austin homegrown. As they were starting to come up on the radar screen, we ended up coming together, and it just made sense that they could come out there and experiment and beta test their printers and build for us. And then these guys also have a phenomenal heart because normally, new technology is reserved for people that can afford that new technology. But here's a powerful new technology that's actually be benefiting people who could have never afford that technology, because that technology today is not cheap. They're beating it down, but it's not cheap. So we've built 17 of them on the two phases that we have right now. We're under construction right now on 50 more across the street on that new phase, and there'll be another 50 over on Burleison Road by the airport where we're under construction there.

And so you live in one community? Yes. Are you going to have people like you that are living in these other communities? How are you managing them?

Well, there's a population of people that live in our community. It's about 10% of our population that we call missionals, just like a missionary would leave the United States and go overseas somewhere to be a missionary. There are people that have chosen and called by the gospel to live in community at Community First Village. There's about 50, 60 people that include 40 adults plus about 15 children that live, and more are coming our way. So that's one of the secret sauces of our community is mixing people in there throughout the community that have never experienced homelessness but are called to serve alongside not in with the formerly chronically homeless.

I think another thing to bring up is that you had some resistance from the outside community, the people that were neighboring it. They were worried that you were going to affect property values, that things weren't going to be dangerous. But in fact, the opposite happened. You haven't had any problems. On top of that, the communities near you are now worth more money than ever. Yeah.

It's pretty funny because initially, what we tried to do was partner with the city of Austin. So we're actually just outside the city of Austin. We share a property line with the city of Austin. But for several years, from 2006, roughly, 2005, roughly to 2010, I tried to collaborate with the city of Austin, provide us with attractive land anywhere, and we'll raise the money to build. In 2008, April of the city, unanimously, City Council granted us a long term ground lease on 17 acres of land in East Austin. In July of '08, we went on to a neighborhood meeting. Myself, the sponsoring council member, some of our team members, system city manager, my wife, Trisha, that just turned into Armageddon. Police had to be called to escort us out of there. And What happened? Oh, we were assaulted and spit on, and the news media was there, and it was an unbelievably horrible experience. The next morning, the city council member, the sponsoring city council member, by the way, who is still a friend of mine, a hugging friend of mine, called a press conference to suspend finalizing that lease for 12 months, which put a bullet in the head of that deal.

We regrouped and we began to look at other property. And one of the other properties that was going to be granted to us was the tract of land that the soccer stadium now sits on, on McCala Lane. And then we got the not my backyard deal from a large group of people in that neighborhood. And finally, in 2010, after complete frustration, I went to the then mayor of Austin, Lee Luffywell, good friend, great guy. And I said, look, I'm thinking about going outside the city of Austin where there's no zoning, getting an attractive land there. But I need the city to help us with transportation and utilities. And And he looked at me and said, Alan, you may be the smartest person I've ever met in my life, which was a funny thing to say, just a drop out. I mean, I'm not that dumb, but I'm not Stephen Hawking either. And that's what we did. We went and bought that site where I live today, and then bought the site next door to it, and then the one across the street with some great support of some of our big donors, and really stripped the adjoining neighborhood because there's no zoning We had the legal right to develop that property.

There was no zoning and no body that could approve what we would build on that property. And so the big fear is crime and lower property values. Well, when I contracted for that property in 2010, I could buy any house next door for, call it plus or minus $150,000. Today, it's plus or minus $450,000. The other argument is crime. There hasn't been one reported crime that I'm aware of by anybody from our neighborhood in the neighborhood next door. And there have been 13 crimes by that neighborhood into our community, mostly juveniles, stealing our golf carts, our Polaris, shoplifting out of our market, stealing bicycles, the random juvenile, the stuff that I would have been doing if I was 14 or 15 years old. I love those guys. And we work with them to help them. But if you're going to put a barbed wire fence, it needs to be on their side of the deal, not our side. Now, look, we We got plenty of bullshit inside of our neighborhood. This is not nirvana. I don't want anybody walking away. We have plenty of stuff going on, but it's not the gunfight at the okay corral.

Right. Well, Alan, thank you very much for being here. And thank you for doing what you've done, what you've accomplished. It's very inspirational. I think, as I said in the beginning, you're a guy who really lives that life. And I think it's a beautiful thing to witness. And I I think your story is going to move a lot of people. Tell people if they're interested, how they can get involved, where they can find out more.

Well, you could go to our website at mlf. Org, like Mobile Loaves and Fishers, Mike lemafrank. Org. Our hashtag is poundMobilLoves. I published a book. We published a book, Harper College. One's back in 2017 called Welcome Homeless. You could go and get that book. It's a series of stories about encounters that I've had with about 11 or 12 different people over the course of my time working on the Streets. I think it's a fun book that people would really enjoy an emotional deal. So go check that out. If you really want to know more, get it on an airplane, fly to Austin, Texas, and come see what we're doing. We'd love to share this with you. If you're interested in coming to one of our symposium, we'd love to have you there. All right. We're very grateful for this opportunity, Joe. Thank you.

I'm grateful for you to be here. Thank you. I really appreciate you. Thank you very much for everything.

Yeah. Thank you. All right. All right.

Bye, everybody.