Inside the community of ‘tiny homes’ sheltering unhoused Austinites

Austin’s only sanctioned homeless encampment sits on a seven-acre plot of asphalt. It’s tucked away off of Highway 183 near the airport. The State Department of Transportation had been using the space.

“This basically was just a giant TxDOT parking lot where they service vehicles out of,” said Emily Ballard, a social worker at the site, now called the Esperanza Community.

In 2019, the parking lot became Austin’s first and only sanctioned homeless encampment. In the early days people pitched tents and built makeshift shelters. Ballard would end up crawling through these spaces in pants, long sleeves and Doc Martin boots to speak with residents.

“It was a time of survival, but it was also a time where you got to see some really unique skills and survival methods and some really creative architecture,” Ballard said.

Ballard remembers people putting stained glass windows in their shelters and installing electricity using a nearby powerline. Others banded together for security.

“There was this whole group that had created sort of like a mini neighborhood. And they watched out for each other. They had one tent that they kept in the middle of all of all their tents. That was for storage for all of them. So it was harder to get to. They would hang fishing line and objects that make noise in between all the tents like a web, so that if someone was coming around at night, they could hear them,” Ballard said.