Hannah Wallace

When Tackling Homelessness, Prevention is Often the Best Medicine

By intervening early, often with small rent payments, a Portland shelter kept nearly 100 families out of homelessness last year, saving thousands of dollars in future rehousing costs.   

I wrote this for Reasons to be Cheerful on April 20, 2023. 

 

Like many nonprofits that help people experiencing homelessness in the US, Path Home in Portland, Oregon provides temporary shelter and meals to those in need. But five years ago, the organization launched a separate program with hopes of making such services unnecessary someday. The Homelessness Prevention Program helps families about to lose their homes by paying back rent and past due utilities in emergency situations.  

“It really only takes a few days of missed work to start a snowball effect,” says Samuel Freni-Rothschild, Path Home’s prevention specialist. 

The number one reason that Freni-Rothschild hears from clients who need help paying their rent is that an adult missed some work because someone in the family was sick and therefore they lost income.

Evictions have spiked in Oregon. In January alone, the state had 2,244 evictions, according to the Oregon Law Center Eviction Defense Project. Of these, 847 were in the county where Portland is located. At Path Home, which offers 17 emergency shelter units for families experiencing homelessness, there is a massive waitlist for housing with 800 families. 

Portland’s Path Home has a waitlist of 800 families for its emergency shelter units.
Credit: Path Home

But with the prevention program, Path was able to keep 93 families in their homes in 2022 — serving a total of 155 kids and 140 adults. 

The average spent per family? Just $3,180. 

Freni-Rothschild says he often uses the metaphor of preventative health care to explain his job. “The housing program and the shelter program are like acute medical care. It’s like going to the ER when your bone is broken and you need to fix it. What I’m doing is preventative medicine,” he says.

Stress and trauma prevention

Giving rent assistance to a family who is struggling financially and allowing them to remain housed prevents both the stress and trauma of homelessness, which can be challenging to recover from. The approach also costs a fraction of what we now spend to rehouse and shelter houseless individuals. 

According to Brandi Tuck, Path Home’s executive director, rehousing people who have been homeless can cost as much as $50,000 in rent assistance over the course of a few years. Tuck argues that prevention is not only more effective — it’s a better investment.

The prevention program focuses on people who have not been involved with the social services system yet. “We are trying to catch people at the very beginning of what could potentially be a much larger crisis,” explains Freni-Rothschild. Part of the reason for this is that the organization wants to be reasonably sure that a one-time intervention will be sufficient to get people on track to being self-sufficient. 

The application process is quick and straightforward. There must be a child in the household (as with all Path Home services), and once families qualify, Freni-Rothschild will contact their landlord. If the family is in arrears from the previous month, he’ll pay the bill or hammer out a payment plan that’s both agreeable to the landlord and reasonable for the family. Sometimes he will provide some light-touch case management: help with budgeting, connecting the family to other resources — like food pantries or childcare — that they don’t know how to look for. 

Path Home’s focus on homelessness prevention also accords with the brain science that Tuck has studied and cites extensively. 

“We are literally preventing the crisis and trauma of homelessness for people, so the children don’t have adverse childhood experiences, so the parents can stay in the logical/critical thinking part of their brain and not have to go through that trauma,” Tuck says. 

 

Most of the government resources that are dedicated to prevention, Tuck explains, are for families or individuals who have already experienced homelessness at least one. As a result of being houseless, these people may have complex trauma, acute mental health issues, and/or substance abuse issues. 

“They have been rehoused using rapid rehousing dollars, which are very short-term resources but the complications that have arisen in their life that led to the homelessness or the trauma that came from the episode of homelessness makes it so that one year is not enough time to get stable on their feet,” Tuck says.

‘Nimble and adaptive’

Path Home’s prevention program is currently funded via grants and individual donations. There are benefits to that. Government funding often comes with strings attached, and Freni-Rothschild said they have had independence to experiment and “be very nimble and adaptive.” 

That said, Path has reached a point where it could use a larger injection of funds, he says. Freni-Rothschild is the sole staffer focused on prevention, and he can only do so much. 

“Last month, I picked up 10 new families in the county where 800 were evicted,” Freni-Rothschild says, his voice trailing off. “The ratios I’m working with are a little daunting.”

Usually he has about 20 families at a time. Sometimes he works with clients for a few months. He says that he typically reaches capacity by the middle of each month. 

Meanwhile, Path Home continues addressing homelessness from many angles. They are currently running a basic guaranteed income pilot with six families receiving $575 a month for two years. The results of this trial, which is nearing its end, are telling, says Tuck. “People are going back to school, getting higher paying jobs. They are spending more time together as a family, they are participating in kids’ activities and cooking dinner and all those kinds of things,” she says. Path Home also provides life skills and parenting classes as well as budgeting support. And they’re creating more affordable housing with support services adjacent to their offices in southeast Portland. 

A Path Home shelter play room. Credit: Aaron Leitz

According to Housing Oregon, someone in the state making minimum wage needs to work 82 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom apartment. Tuck notes that many of the single moms who end up in Path Home apartments have lost their housekeeping jobs when — during spring or summer break — the kids are out of school and the mom has no choice but to bring them to work with her. “She takes the kids to work until her manager finds out, and then she gets fired. And she can’t even look for another job until the kids go back to school,” Tuck says.  

This is one of the reasons that Path Home’s new capital campaign — which includes the construction of a new four-story building containing 25 affordable two- and three-bedroom apartments — will include on-site childcare as well as employment services and mental health counseling. Tuck expects to break ground in 2025. For now, the organization’s offices and nine of the emergency shelter units are located in a former Russian Orthodox church that’s been beautifully renovated by architect Jessica Helgerson using concepts of trauma-informed design. The high-ceilinged space — which has a library, a computer lab, and a shared living room with Netflix and VR games — contains lots of circles and curves, plants, and natural light, all of which combine to create a safe and calming atmosphere for families. 

Doing What Comes Naturally

At Hiyu Wine Farm in Hood River, Oregon, a commitment to permaculture yields wild and complex field blends and a well-set winemaker's table. 

My piece on Hiyu is in the April issue of Food & Wine, with absolutely stunning photographs by Eva Kolenko. 

 

The farmhouse and hilly vineyards at Hiyu Wine Farm in Hood River, Oregon. 
PHOTO: EVA KOLENKO

The first time I met winemaker Nate Ready, he was pouring his wines at Pairings wine bar in Portland, Oregon. With his long salt-and-pepper beard and intense yet humble manner, Ready reminded me of a cross between Rasputin and a young Dumbledore — if Dumbledore were a wizard of wine. I’d tasted natural wines before (that is, wines made from organic grapes using native yeast and minimal intervention), but these, from Hiyu Wine Farm in the Columbia River Gorge, were remarkable. One was a field blend of red varietals, another was a pét-nat, and yet another was an orange wine that had had skin contact for 100 days. They had one thing in common: They all tasted alive.

“You taste his wines, and they are unlike anything on the West Coast,” says Brian McClintic, founder and owner of Viticole, a wine club that creates custom blends with organic producers here and abroad. “You can’t really compare them to anything; they’re so distinctive.”

Whereas some winemakers see a division between winemaking and farming, for Ready, the two are inseparable. When you visit Hiyu, high above the Hood River, you get the impression right away that Ready and his co-founder, China Tresemer, work using the principles of biodynamic farming. Plump pigs joyfully stampede down the slope of the vineyard, and ducks, speckled guinea fowl, and Dexter cows keep the grasses down and fertilize the vines. Their guiding philosophy, however, is permaculture, an even more holistic way of farming that uses a diversity of plants and animals to create resiliency. The farm, a former pear orchard with a view of Mount Hood, evokes an English smallholding farm. McClintic, with a nod to J.R.R. Tolkien, calls it “Shire-y.”

Tresemer and Ready grow 112 varietals of grapes on the property. (Most vineyards grow only a handful.) And most of Hiyu’s vineyard is planted with field blends. An Old World practice of planting varieties together in the same plot and then co-fermenting the grapes together to make a wine, field blends are rare in U.S. viticulture today. But this wasn’t always the case. Pre-Prohibition, Ready says, most vineyards were planted this way. After drinking wine from old California vineyards that were planted with field blends and also seeing Marcel Deiss in Alsace successfully convert his sites from monovarietals to field blends, Ready was convinced it made sense here. He and his winemaking team also forage other fruits from the property and co-ferment them with grapes to make beverages that blur the distinction between cider and wine. One, called Espina, used a wine base that Tresemer made in 2017 with Pinot Gris grapes from vines that had been trained so they climbed up the trunks of fruit trees. She co-fermented the grapes with the fruits that grew in the hedgerows beneath: pears, elderberries, blackberries, plums, and rose hips. The second component of Espina was a wine made in 2018 — pears fermented on the skins of Gewürztraminer and barrel-aged for two years. Finally, whole blackberries and plums were added to a vat of fermenting pears, and the fruit was macerated on the skins for two weeks before pressing. In 2020, Hiyu’s two farm fellows, Kathline Chery and Yakira Batres, blended these three components together to make the resulting wine. The Hiyu team made a second version of Espina last spring.

To experience Hiyu to its fullest, you need to visit the farm, as I did, for a tour of the 30-acre property and a wine-tavern lunch. Ready or Tresemer will lead you through the farm — from the “forest garden” to the pear orchard, which provides fruit for an eau-de-vie and various other concoctions like Espina. You’ll wander the vineyards, which are populated by the aforementioned speckled guinea fowl, Dexter cows, and pigs — the latter a cross, I learned, between Kunekune and American Guinea Hogs.

Ready’s field blends, like Corvus and Falcon Box, are wild and complex. But even his more affordable Smockshop Band wines are creatively ambitious and delicious. The Smockshop Band Columbia Valley Red is a blend of more than 50 varieties from four different vineyards, and it was fermented in a myriad of ways, with most of the grapes in barrels for three to five years. It’s a multidimensional wine that has the fruit-forwardness of a Pinot yet a deeper, spicier, more tannic side as well. And it’s a mere $44 a bottle; not inexpensive, but given the labor involved in making it, a bargain.

A springtime glass at Hiyu Wine Farm. EVA KOLENKO

Such wines must be enjoyed with food. The meal my friend and I had — snap peas with pancetta over maltagliati pasta with porcini; luscious pork belly and black garlic; and lettuces with charred garlic scapes and a green goddess dressing — was unfussy and delicious. In-house chef Jason Barwikowski has been with Hiyu since the very beginning, and he’s as inventive in the kitchen as Ready is in the vineyard and cellar. Almost all of the ingredients for his dishes come from the farm. Periodically, Ready came outside to pour us another taste of wine in our elegant handblown Zalto glasses. Before dessert, he arrived with a plate of Adarre cheese with a lush persimmon from the very tree Tresemer had pointed out earlier. As we tucked into our last course, a financier with apple butter, a crew of big jolly pigs ran down the vineyard’s slope. We raised our glasses to the pigs, who, like us, were living life to its fullest here at Hiyu.

The Snack Bag of the Future Won’t Be Made from Plastic

Companies from Frito-Lay to Kettle Chips are experimenting with corn starch, calcium carbonate and other materials that eschew plastic but preserve taste.

I wrote this story for Bloomberg Green. 

Florencio Cuétara is the kind of person who crosses the street to tell people to pick up their litter. One day, Cuétara, an avid diver, was swimming in the Mediterranean when he came across a plastic cookie bag. “This bag hits me in the face as I’m swimming. And I’m cursing whoever put it in there, as if it’s somebody else’s fault,” Cuétara says. “Then I realized that the bag was one of my bags — with my last name on it.” 

Cuétara’s family business is Switzerland-based snack company Cuétara Foods, which makes 25 brands of cookies, biscuits and crackers sold all over the world. For Florencio, who was CEO for the Americas at the time, that moment was a turning point. “I was like, ‘I want to blame everybody else for this,” he says. “But I’m not an innocent party here. I’m part of the problem.’” 

Most bags for potato chips and other crispy snacks are made with three layers of polymer materials: a moisture barrier on the inside (usually biaxially oriented polypropylene), low-density polyethylene in the middle and an outer layer of thermoplastic resin. From an environmental standpoint, polymers — like all plastics — have two marks against them: They’re made from petroleum, and they’ll never decompose.

 

Today, according to the UN Environment Programme, humans produce about 400 million tons of plastic waste every year. Half of that is single-use plastic, like potato chip bags, that ends up in landfills or in waterways, where it breaks down into microplastics that are consumed by aquatic life, and eventually by people. At the behest of consumers and under the shadow of potential regulation, snack companies big and small are now looking for a way to break that cycle with alternative packaging materials. The only question is who will succeed. 

The great repackaging

Florencio Cuétara swam into his cookie bag in 2015, setting off a four-year quest to find a different packaging material that didn’t rely on fossil fuels. In 2019, Cuétara and Dr. Russ Petrie, an orthopedic surgeon in California, founded Okeanos, which uses calcium carbonate to create bags for snacks, rice, coffee and salt, as well as wraps for flowers. 

Calcium carbonate (CaCO3), a mineral naturally found in stone or rocks, has been used as a filler in packaging before, but only in small percentages. Cuétara and Petrie developed a technology they called “Made from Stone” that is up to 70% calcium carbonate; the rest is made of resin. The company’s bags are both flexible and light — they float on water — and the technology is now used by manufacturers in 15 countries including Brazil, India, Canada, the Philippines and the US. “We were called crazy a number of times,” Cuétara says. 

A flower wrap using Made from Stone packaging.

Courtesy of Okeanos

For Sean Mason and Mark Green, co-founders of British crisps company Two Farmers, it took five years to find a packaging material that would both biodegrade and keep their chips crunchy. “Obviously the single-use plastic that’s in crisp packets is blighting the landscape and the seas,” Mason says. 

Mason also saw a need for consistency. Two Farmers sources all of its potatoes from Green’s farm in Herefordshire, where cover-cropping (planting a crop like clovers or alfalfa after the cash crop) is used to nourish the soil. The farm also has an anaerobic digester that converts farm waste into bio-methane — which in turn produces more than enough electricity to run the entire operation. “Our difference was sustainable farming, so we thought we should see that through to the crisp bag,” Mason says.  

When it came to identifying an alternative material, though, Mason and Green were stumped. First, they considered cardboard boxes. “We suddenly realized that we would still have to put a plastic bag inside to keep it fresh,” Mason says. “So we were effectively just over-packaging; packaging for packaging’s sake.” Next they looked at tins — “too expensive and probably too much waste for a small 40-gram packet.” Finally, at a packaging trade show they came across eucalyptus cellulose films in their raw state, and started talking to the producers about their potential for crisps bags. 

What on Earth?

The duo found a laminator, which helped them figure out how to add plant-based glues and inks for printing. After producing the film, they sent it off to TŪV Austria — a third-party certifier that verifies whether packaging is compostable — to have it tested for compostability and eco-toxicity. Following some trial and error, their material passed muster, and in 2019 Two Farmers officially launched its gourmet potato chips in 100% compostable packaging made from eucalyptus cellulose. Mason, who credits David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II with helping put single-use plastics on Brits’ radar, says his company’s bags take 30 to 36 weeks to decompose in home composting systems, or 11 weeks in an industrial composter. 

The eucalyptus film is much more expensive than plastic — over 10 times the cost, to be exact — and each packet retails for £1.20 ($1.40). But quality hasn’t been an issue: Last year, Two Farmers’ Woodland Mushroom & Wild Garlic and Herefordshire Sausage & Mustard flavors won the Great British Food award in the Savoury Snacks category. 

Big Chip

There are thousands of companies making snacks all over the world, but any progress on plastic packaging will have to involve a few big ones. In the world of US potato chips, for example, Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo Inc., has a whopping 60% of the market share, according to data analytics firm IRI Worldwide.  

Frito-Lay North America began its own foray into alternative packaging over a decade ago, with the 2009 debut of a 100% compostable bag for SunChips. Made from 90% polylactic acid, the bag was notoriously noisy when opened or handled — up to 95 decibels, by some accounts — and Frito-Lay discontinued it in 2010. 

Frito-Lay has made quieter headway since, and the company has a goal of making all of its packaging 100% recyclable, compostable, biodegradable or re-usable by 2025. In 2021, it debuted a bag made of 85% polylactic acid — typically composed of corn starch — for two of its Off the Eaten Path veggie chips. (The rest is made of aluminum coatings, inks and adhesives.) 

The Off the Eaten Path bag is industrially compostable, which means it can be put into city compost systems. The bags can also be sent back via a free shipping label to New Jersey-based TerraCycle, which partners with Frito-Lay on the venture. (Though questions have been raised about the effectiveness of TerraCycle’s plastics recycling program, which involves third-party facilities.)

“We’re going through a test and learn phase [with Off the Eaten Path] as we work towards our ultimate goal of designing 100% of our packaging to be either recyclable, compostable, biodegradable or re-usable,” says David Allen, vice president and chief sustainability officer for Pepsi-Co Foods North America. 

Also in the US, Salem, Oregon-based Kettle Foods Inc., which makes the popular Kettle Chips brand, will debut a Made from Stone bag this spring, starting with its sea salt flavor. 

The Off the Eaten Path bag can be put into a city compost system.

Off the Eaten Path

Looming regulations

Companies that aren’t moving towards plastic-free packaging yet may be forced to in the future, as regulators start to step in. Last year, the European Union proposed new rules that would require companies selling products in EU countries to make their packaging easier to reuse, recycle or compost. The rules would also limit unnecessary empty space in packaging, part of an overall goal to to reduce packaging waste by 5% by 2030, compared to 2018 levels. If effective, the EU could set a standard for other nations to follow.

But the hurdles remain enormous, and snack bags are just one piece of a much bigger problem. Most developing countries don’t have recycling or composting facilities, and in the nations that do, those systems are often broken or dysfunctional. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates a US plastic recycling rate of just below 9%, while Beyond Plastics, a project out of Bennington College, pegs it at an even bleaker 5% to 6%. In the EU, almost 38% of plastic was recycled in 2020, and regulations imposed in 2021 halted the sale of the 10 most common plastics to wash up on European beaches, including bottle caps and straws. But addressing plastic packaging writ large will require changes at every part of its life cycle: from raw materials to duration of use to the nature of disposal. “Even with recycling, you increase emissions,” says Cuétara at Okeanos. “And remember: You can only recycle a number of times.” 

Those hurdles are part of why Cuétara says Made from Stone bags are catching on: Packaging manufacturers can keep using their existing equipment, and calcium carbonate is naturally abundant with relatively stable pricing. 

“If somebody came to my potato chip company and said, ‘I want you to change everything and get rid of your suppliers and it’s going to cost you more,’ the answer would be, ‘Thank you, but we have no interest,’” he says. “I have to tell you, there’s been almost no calls of, ‘We don’t want to do it.’ It’s an impossible thing to say no to.’”