Tiny's House

In East Oakland, home to what the San Francisco Chronicle calls the “Bay Area’s hottest housing market,” a row of stucco townhomes sprung up along a blighted stretch of MacArthur Boulevard in 2021. Tan-colored and not outwardly remarkable, they were designed, according to their creator, Tiny Gray-Garcia, as an antidote to “gentrifuckation.” Homefulness, as the eight-unit place is known, now provides rent-free homes to recently unhoused individuals—including Tiny and many others who conceived the project, hammered the studs, hung the drywall, and now collectively manage the space. “This is a poor people–led solution to our own problems,” says Gray-Garcia, a pigtailed and sharp-tongued 48-year-old single mother who lived in cars and abandoned buildings as a child and young adult.

California has nearly a million more “extremely low-income” households than units available to house them. When it comes to, her new poetry collection, “Change won’t come from a savior, a pimp, or an institution. Change will only come from a poor people–led revolution.”