photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Some of the 100-square-foot Pallet cabins installed at New Beginnings NWA, a bridge housing community in Fayetteville, Arkansas, are pictured Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023.

There’s still a long list of questions about how exactly the City of Lawrence’s Pallet Shelter Village might work when it’s finally operational.

Some of the answers might be found a four-hour drive away in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Fayetteville is the closest city to Lawrence that’s operating a community of Pallet structures — rapid-response shelters described as “sleeping cabins” by the Washington-based Pallet company that developed and builds them. As the Journal-World has reported, Lawrence leaders plan for the Pallet Shelter Village to support 50 prefabricated 64-square-foot cabins at 256 N. Michigan St., but the city has struggled to find a social service agency that will operate it. Nevertheless, city staff at recent city meetings has maintained that the city plans to construct the shelters with the Pallet company’s assistance sometime this month and for the community to be operational by the end of the year.

In an effort to learn more about what it might take to run the Pallet Shelter Village, the Journal-World traveled to Fayetteville and visited its Pallet community in person. According to Solomon Burchfield, the man behind the Fayetteville project, it’s required a very intentional approach — and much more work than simply constructing some cabins.

Comparing to Lawrence

Though Pallet refers to communities throughout the country that use its cabins as “Shelter Villages,” the community in Fayetteville goes by the name New Beginnings NWA — coincidentally, almost the same title as the City of Lawrence’s support site for people experiencing homelessness in North Lawrence, Camp New Beginnings. The “NWA” abbreviation refers to the region of northwest Arkansas. Burchfield is the director of a nonprofit that’s also called New Beginnings, and he’s been guiding New Beginnings NWA since it opened two years ago.

The parallels between Fayetteville and Lawrence don’t stop with the “New Beginnings” name, though. New Beginnings NWA is located on a 5-acre property that used to be the site of a large homeless camp, one that for a time was owned by the University of Arkansas and was home to 80 to 100 unhoused people.

“The people that live here now used to camp here, for many, many years,” Burchfield told the Journal-World. “And it was really a humanitarian disaster, a crisis, because unsupported camps all around the country have three big problems — sanitation and hygiene problems, there’s violence and there’s asymmetrical power relationships; those are the three features of unsupported encampments all around the country.”

Burchfield said Fayetteville saw all of those problems firsthand — including multiple deaths that occurred at unsanctioned camps like that one.

There are some key differences between the Lawrence and Fayetteville Pallet communities, though, and one of the biggest is who started the process of establishing them in the first place. In Lawrence, city government leaders were the ones who decided to pursue a Pallet project earlier this year in March. But the New Beginnings NWA project was initiated by Burchfield’s nonprofit years before it began operating in September of 2021, and it has had little to do with the City of Fayetteville.

The locations of the two Pallet communities also look quite different. Lawrence’s Pallet Shelter Village is being built in the Pinkney neighborhood, right across the street from residential housing. But New Beginnings NWA is positioned near the edge of a district that consists mostly of business uses or empty land. It was built off of a no-outlet road, and the community’s immediate neighbor is 7hills Homeless Center, another agency that offers day services to unhoused people on weekdays.

Other differences are more of a numbers game. While the Lawrence community plans to have 50 cabins, New Beginnings NWA has just 20 of them. But those 20 cabins are also a larger size than the 64-square-foot ones that will be used in Lawrence, instead coming in at 100 square feet each.

Both sizes of cabins are outfitted with a bed and shelving, and are also hooked up to electricity to support interior lighting, climate control, and smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. They also feature lockable doors and windows.

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Mark Webster, a resident of New Beginnings NWA in Fayetteville, Arkansas, holds a coin from his coin collection in his hand. Webster is standing at the door to his 100-square-foot Pallet cabin; his friend and 6-year-old son are sitting on a built-in bed to the right.

Lawrence leaders have, to date, approved spending nearly $2.5 million on the Pallet Shelter Village project, including $1.1 million to purchase the shelters and $725,000 to purchase the property on North Michigan Street. For New Beginnings NWA, it was a large donation that helped get the project off the ground: The Hunt family — which founded the largest publicly owned trucking company in the U.S., J.B. Hunt Transport Services, and has a net worth in the billions — contributed $1 million to the project. Burchfield said it takes about $500,000 annually to operate New Beginnings NWA.

As far as the specifics about Lawrence’s future Pallet Shelter Village are concerned, that’s about all of them right now. But there’s a lot more to see in Fayetteville’s Pallet community, which has been up and running for a while.

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Pallet cabins like this one include some built-in shelving.

What makes up New Beginnings NWA?

New Beginnings NWA doesn’t start and end with 20 cabins. It’s also home to a community building, an important resource since Pallet cabins are not equipped with plumbing. The community building is where residents go to use the restroom, shower and do their laundry, and it’s also where they’re served breakfast and dinner each day, Burchfield said.

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The kitchen area in the community building at New Beginnings NWA is where residents are served breakfast and dinner each day.

All of those facilities are maintained not by nonprofit staff but by the community’s residents themselves. They elect a three-member “leadership council” to oversee teams of residents in handling the day-to-day upkeep. Residents sign up for shifts on a kitchen team, bathroom team, and recycling and trash team, and they also take turns running the front desk.

Burchfield said that is probably what sets New Beginnings NWA apart compared to other Pallet villages around the country. New Beginnings NWA prioritizes people who are chronically homeless, meaning they have been unhoused for years at a time, and the self-run community provides an opportunity to “get back into the rhythm” of handling daily responsibilities, being a good neighbor and taking care of a home.

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The community building at New Beginnings NWA is equipped with three individual restrooms.

That isn’t to say the nonprofit’s staff is completely hands-off. There’s a staff member on-site 24/7, and they partner with occupational therapy and social work students at the University of Arkansas for additional support. Burchfield spends plenty of time on-site himself, and even helped to mediate an argument between two residents while the Journal-World was visiting.

“On the street, in the camps, that ends differently,” Burchfield said after de-escalating the argument. “… Having the presence of someone who can intervene and help them calm their emotions, that makes a lot of difference. It’s the difference between someone going to jail or getting hurt, the fact that we can breathe it out and let it go.”

Outside of the community building, the Pallet structures themselves are in an area similar to a courtyard, and there are various seating areas and a community garden that grows herbs and produce for the kitchen. That’s all surrounded by fencing, including a large wooden gate where residents can enter the property at any time by using a personal key fob. Burchfield said the fence is designed “to keep out the wrong people” while simultaneously providing its residents the freedom to come and go.

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

The entrance to New Beginnings NWA is gated, and all residents have a personal key fob granting them access 24 hours a day.

Those key fobs also get residents into what Burchfield calls an “amnesty locker,” a shipping crate positioned near the gate equipped with 20 individual lockers. Each resident can use their locker to securely store items that are prohibited inside the community’s gates — like fuel, drugs and weapons.

“We want control over our own lives,” Burchfield said. “Even if we have some unhealthy habits in our life, we don’t want to give that control over. I’ve talked to many, many people who have said ‘I would rather die in my tent than let someone else have control over me.’ A lot of our service organizations, I think, just fail to really appreciate how deep that runs in the way we work.”

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

Solomon Burchfield, the director of New Beginnings NWA in Fayetteville, Arkansas, shows the community garden on-site.

What it takes to stay

Burchfield said elements like that, along with the support he and his staff provide, are especially important for New Beginnings NWA since it operates as a low-barrier housing community.

“A lot of conventional shelters, even inadvertently, have barriers that screen people out, and it’s especially the chronically homeless that get screened out,” Burchfield said. “We expect to serve people who have mental illness, who are active substance users, who do sex work, who don’t have paperwork or documentation at all. We expect that on the front end and we try to do our best to prepare.”

The community doesn’t have a wait list; instead, Burchfield said New Beginnings NWA finds its residents using the Fayetteville area “by-name list,” a roster of people experiencing homelessness who are actively receiving services from agencies.

In order to keep living at New Beginnings NWA, residents are required to attend a case management session with a staff social worker each week. Burchfield said those appointments are especially important for helping residents meet their health and housing goals, starting with procuring identifying documents like birth certificates or Social Security cards. There’s often a need for emergency health care for new residents, as well. But the goal is that those appointments ultimately focus on an individual’s rehousing plan.

“Because we’re working with chronically homeless people, (they) face a lot of barriers to getting back into housing,” Burchfield said. “Maybe they have no income, maybe they have support needs around their mental health, their behavioral health, just their daily living and life management skills. And then also, sometimes it’s criminal and credit background issues that they’re still working on.”

But perhaps the most important element of rehousing people who spend time at New Beginnings NWA, Burchfield said, is maintaining supportive services that stay with them afterward. He said he often refers to the community as a “supportive shelter,” with residents’ needs most often related to long-term drug use, disabilities or illnesses.

photo by: Austin Hornbostel/Journal-World

There are a number of seating areas located around the grounds of New Beginnings NWA, including this one covered by a gazebo.

What it should look like — in an operating agency’s words

The fence — and many other pieces of the puzzle for New Beginnings NWA — came from one key strategy when New Beginnings NWA was still just a fledgling idea. 

“We spent about four to six months talking with people in the camps and on the street,” Burchfield said. “It comes back to a trauma-informed approach that says ‘If we’re building this, the people who will stay here should be involved in designing it.'”

That meant asking questions like what the cabins should look like, whether there should be a curfew, how the community will be kept clean and safe, and much more. The fence and its large entry gate were a solution to some of those questions.

But Burchfield said he now sees a future where his agency builds a more permanent village with mainstream housing like tiny homes. New Beginnings NWA, he said, is not intended to be that — instead, it’s supposed to be an “on-ramp” to permanent housing, and the agency has been intentional in working with residents to cycle them into permanent housing when they’re ready. Though many of the 20 people who currently live in a cabin have been there since the community opened, 10 people have moved out in the same time period.

“It’s meant to be a temporary supportive shelter village,” Burchfield said. “This will continue to serve that ‘on-ramp’ purpose. It allows us to be really low barrier; it’s come as you are, whatever issues you’ve got going on. That’s really hard in permanent housing.”

How can Lawrence get it right?

Though Lawrence leaders haven’t visited Fayetteville to see New Beginnings NWA firsthand, Burchfield said he did answer some questions for a city staff member over Zoom recently. He had more advice to offer the Journal-World as Lawrence’s Pallet Shelter Village continues to work toward opening.

One of those tidbits had to do with a goal he has for New Beginnings NWA — aiming toward better integration with the broader Fayetteville community. Given the site’s location near the edge of Fayetteville, it doesn’t have a whole lot of exposure to residential neighbors.

“The benefit you get there in Lawrence, I think, is to experiment more with what community integration means,” Burchfield said. “… That’s going to be a big question for you all developing it (at 256 N. Michigan St.), is ‘How do we have that mutual accountability, where (residents in the neighborhood) welcome folks recovering from homelessness and we are good neighbors to people already in that neighborhood?'”

Burchfield also said the choice of what structure to house people in isn’t enough — the program around them “has to be in the driver’s seat,” from the level of staff presence on-site and how they’re trained to whether the community operates like New Beginnings NWA, under a form of supported self-governance.

A successful bridge housing project, in Burchfield’s view, should focus heavily on community values and should be shaped by people who have personal experience with homelessness. In fact, he said if it isn’t happening already, people who are or have been homeless should be brought into the process of bringing the Pallet Shelter Village online as soon as possible. He said there should also be a lot of work done to bring in a group of diverse stakeholders — from area agencies, the surrounding neighborhood and the unhoused population — to be part of managing and holding the project accountable.

“We can’t do it without people that have firsthand experience,” Burchfield said. “If that’s already been happening, then it sounds like by the end of the year is a good timeline for launch. If that hasn’t been happening, that needs to happen. Conversations need to be had with people that would live here to know what should it look like, how should it operate, how do we keep it safe, safety rules. That’s a big thing — that’s not something to pass over.”

— This story is part of a series focused on the nearest city to Lawrence with an operating community of Pallet cabins — New Beginnings NWA in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Future stories in this series will focus on the supports and initiatives that exist in Fayetteville beyond the Pallet village, and how they compare to what supports in Lawrence could work in conjunction with the future Pallet Shelter Village.