I’ve known Brice Maryman for a decade now. Maryman emerged as a leader both in the field of landscape architecture but also as a community leader for parks in Seattle. Sometimes Maryman and I would even have good natured banter about whether a particular parcel ought to be a park or housing. But Maryman gets the bigger issues associated with all of the issues of public space, parks, density, housing, price, and affordability. He was also a leader in the community driven 2008 Parks and Green Spaces Levy which passed overwhelmingly and raised $146 million over 6 years for parks.

Now, Maryman, a senior landscape architect with MIG|SvR in Seattle, is the recipient of a Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership. Maryman’s Fellowship project is called HomeLand.

With compassion, respect and empathy, the HomeLand project intends to present proactive strategies that respect each individual’s “right to housing” and “right to the city,” while also enhancing public spaces that are significantly impacted by our current, haphazard strategies for managing homelessness. The project will explore the spatial manifestations of homelessness on the urban landscape, document current management approaches, and offer comprehensive, community‐based spatial strategies at the region, city and neighborhood scales to create better, more successful public spaces for all.

HomeLand includes a podcast series and Maryman has included me as one of his interviewees. You can listen to the whole podcast but I’ve also pulled out some of my key comments on homelessness that draw from what some might consider incompatible intellectual sources, like Jesus, Fredrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman and many others I didn’t necessarily name. These are some highlights from our discussion and at the 35 minute time mark, we have a lengthy discussion about my experience with Farmworker housing and how that’s influenced some of my views about this issue. I’m appreciative to Maryman for his time, his great contributions to our city so far, and for his efforts to add something thoughtful and useful to a so far mostly contentious discussion of homelessness and public space.

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On the History of Smart Growth Seattle

“We do a lot of pushing back because right now in this environment there are a lot of efforts to attenuate the housing supply by well intentioned people and by people that also just don’t want anymore housing. But, so, our job, a lot of it, is pushing back. We also try to have some more forward looking ideas about, you know, what sorts of things could we do to promote more innovation both on the financing side and on the construction side, you know, just broadly, you know, how do we improve the conversation about growth. We don’t get to do a lot of that. We end up doing a lot of hassling over rules and regulations.”

On Homelessness and the Concept of Home

“I think people have a strong sense of home that is different than shelter, and different than housing, and different than housing units, and I think that those of us who are, who come from a standard issue perspective on housing sometimes think of this as a unit issue, or a construction issue, or this-is-what-its-supposed-to-look-like issue, and I think that that prevents us from seeing innovative solutions and ideas for meeting people where they are at and recognizing that not everybody just wants a unit.”

On the Ways Regulation Makes Homelessness Worse

“There’s a baseline of health and safety that needs to be built into our solutions to housing. But that has become a mechanism by which to exclude innovative solutions. And so, the same arguments that are used against tents, improvised shelters, the encampments were used against microhosuing, against small single-family houses, and it was like, “Well, that’s too small!” or “People shouldn’t have to live like that.”

Because there is an expectation that home and housing is either an apartment or a single-family home or something that looks like where I live, “I” being a hypothetical “I.” And so, what ends up happening is that the building code becomes a kind of a class, a tool for class identification, and it’s no longer just purely a health and safety measure or intervention, it becomes a litmus test for, “Have you earned enough money to live in ‘real housing?’”

On Car Shelter and Encampments as an Example of Hayek’s Spontaneous Order

“Human beings, when kind of left to their own devices, will solve their problems individually and collectively in innovative and unique ways all the time, whether it’s on a desert island, or whether it’s under a bridge, or whether it’s building microhousing, or sending somebody to the moon. Human beings inherently have this kind of spontaneous quality about them that when they see something going wrong they rally around and try to fix it. Or they organize themselves to make money at it. Or they figure out, “Hey, nobody is building things like this, let’s build that.” And I see the use of public space for shelter, for housing, as completely consistent with that whole concept of, look, let’s let people solve the problem.”

On Public and Private Space for Shelter

“The notion that someone is using a part of the park space as shelter is not controversial. Now what is controversial to me, is when the City wants to take private space, and dictate what happens in private space in the same way.”

On Loving Our Neighbors

“Ultimately, we’re all in this together. We’re gonna make mistakes. And what I think you’re going to find, consistently, in all these questions is, there are going to be things that are really going to push your buttons, and it’s going to make you really upset and angry or afraid. Homelessness is a terrifying thing, because it hits at some real core thins that human beings have around family, safety, survival, and when you are confronted with the manifestation of that in your face, in the public realm, it forces, it causes you to make it want to go away. For me, the principle, I think, that I think as a Christian, that forces me to confront is, “Well, that’s probably a place where I need to go.” You know, if I’m disturbed or concerned, I need to go there. And I think that we need to push ourselves to ask these questions of, ‘Is that person a homeless person, or is that my neighbor?’”

On “What Are We Going to Do About It?”

“I think it comes down to a pretty simple question of talking to the people, figuring out what it is they need and want, and then working it out to so we can accommodate them. And I’m not really that concerned about the anxiety that it creates in the surrounding community, except to say that, “I get it. I understand why this is disturbing. But what are we going to do about it?”

On What Jesus, Hayek, and Friedman Would Do

“ We need to stop freaking out about this, wade into that community, ask questions, and support it as a leverage, because I think that’s what Jesus would do, I think that’s what Hayek would say, I think that’s would Milton Friedman would say, is he’s say, “These people have figured out a solution.” The last thing you want to do go in there and crack heads and start tearing it apart. It took them a long time to build this solution up, maybe there’s something there we can build off of.”

This is a really useful explanation by Fredrich Hayek on why the pricing system is so important and why, arguably, it is not a system of individual greed, but rather one of broader benefit that truly combines individuals into collaborative communities.