Transcription of Amy & Allie Smith for the show Cleaner Homes & Beds for All #290
Lisa Belisle: It is my great pleasure that have in the studio with me today Amy and Allie Smith. Amy Smith is the founder and executive director of Healthy Homeworks. Her daughter, Allie Smith, is the organization’s director of development. Healthy Homeworks works with landlords and tenants in downtown Lewiston to improve the quality of living conditions. Volunteers can also learn to build beds at the organization’s factory and receive beds of their own after completing the program. Thanks so much for coming in.
Allie Smith: We are so happy to be here
Amy Smith: Thank you for having us.
Lisa Belisle: I think you are officially our first bed related guests, so that’s kind of cool. But I knew you both first from Yarmouth where you no longer, either of you, live. Somehow you took an interesting left turn when you left Yarmouth. Amy, tell me about that?
Amy Smith: A left turn, yeah, or right depending on direction.
Lisa Belisle: Sure, of course.
Amy Smith: This whole turn started in 2014. Our kids had all grown and flown the coop, and our middle daughter was working Portland and struggling to find housing. She was looking at lots of different departments, they were all either very expensive or really not that nice. She really had trouble finding a middle ground for housing. She exposed us to the housing crunch that was going on in town, because we’re up in Yarmouth, what do we know about this?
We had this confluence of learning a little bit about the housing market, being ready to sell our home and downsize, and started thinking, “Well, you know, maybe we’d be okay landlords, so maybe we should buy a multi-family and try that out. Live there, try city living and see how that all would work for us.” That’s what we did. We found a pretty rough triple-decker right downtown. I went half time at my consulting job and managed the rehab of the property over the course of 2015. That was my trial by fire and boy did I learn a lot, but I think the most important thing I learned was, number one, how much I loved that project, loved doing the work, and also how amazing it is to actually revive one of these grand old buildings and create really nice living space.
Lisa Belisle: Talk to me about the housing crunch and how it impacted…. You talked about your middle child, so she was I’m guessing in her twenties, somewhere.
Amy Smith: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Talk to me a little bit about what you found out.
Amy Smith: What we found out is that the rental rates were rising precipitously. I think Portland had the largest, fastest rise in rents a couple years ago in the country, something like 17%. At the same time a lot of people were getting… The rents were going up, people were getting squeezed out of the affordable spaces, and a lot of people, because the prices were going up, there weren’t a lot of people who could afford to renovate the places that needed renovation.
There was a lot of movement in the area and we thought, “Well, maybe we could be helpful.” The piece that we didn’t understand at the time was the impact on the lower income population and what was happening with affordable housing and housing projects in town. That’s another thing that we started to learn about once we started renovating the property.
I don’t know how tuned in you are to affordable housing and how all that works, but I had absolutely no clue what the need was, had no idea how it actually worked, so when somebody came to me and said, “So, are you going to be accepting section 8 vouchers?” I was like, “What the heck is that? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Over time, I started to learn a little bit more about it and understand what a complicated system it is, again how acute the need is.
Lisa Belisle: Allie what’s your intersection with this? I know you’re now the director of development, but from what I understand you graduated from college in 2011, you worked abroad, you were in DC. You were living a very different life. Why did you decide to come back here?
Allie Smith: I was very fortunate early in my career to have the experience of exchanging my labor and work directly for only housing and food. That was in another country, and what I learned through that experience was what that reward felt like to get, to have my personal motivations be so aligned with the motivations of an organization, that all I really needed in return was basic living security. When I returned to the United States and started working in corporate and creative spaces in DC, which are always spaces that I have really enjoyed and that, really, the image of my life that I had projected to myself, that was based a lot in creative success and material success.
Over time I came to realize how deeply missing that other element of true alignment between my motivations and top priorities, and what the top priorities of an organization were. I came to realize that working somewhere that had a bottom line that was based at the end of the day, really, in profit didn’t sit right with me. It was hard to recognize that gap. I think it’s always hard to recognize gaps between the things that we think are going to fulfill us and the things that actually do.
When my mother started doing this work and we started talking about it and brainstorming on the phone, I came to realize that this was such a unique opportunity to not only support my family and the people that I love, but to do so in a way that positively impacts the lives of other people and to move back to Maine, a place that I love and a place where my family is. I think people wait their whole lives for an opportunity like that, and to me it was so clearly the right choice that the decision made itself.
Lisa Belisle: It seems like it would have been easy, Amy, for you and your husband to just find a house, make it nice, live there, keep doing the consulting work. Not everybody gets drawn to deal with these bigger issues that you were faced with and really wanted to find more about.
Amy Smith: Well, I guess you’re right, but it was not altruistic to start, I have to be very honest about that. Again, I discovered this passion for doing this work and I wanted to figure out how to make that my job, rehabbing these old properties and bringing them back. Initially I wasn’t really thinking about affordable housing, but when I started to look into, “Well, what would that take?” I realized that I had obviously very limited experience, which was, I rehabbed one triple decker, right? And very limited money, because I had just rehabbed one triple decker.
So I tried to figure out where I could afford to do the work, where there was a lower cost of entry in Portland, and also where could I find the best leverage, where could I make the least amount of resources go the furthest. Started looking into affordable housing and realized, “Boy, if you bought a big old building and rehabbed it, you could house families and per unit you could give more people better living conditions.” It was this progression, and then I thought, “Well, and can you make money at that?” Because now this was going to be my new job.
It was quite a journey, trying to wrap my head around that, but at the end of the day it was like, “Yeah, I like this combination. I can do what I love. I can have a nice social bottom line and hopefully just make a modest return on that.” Then the question is, so where are you going to do this? There were two other places that had triple deckers that were close enough, and that was Biddeford and Lewiston. I was talking to friends about this and again this weird confluence of, “Gee, I’m thinking about doing this work in Lewiston,” and my friend said, “Gee, have you read Catherine Besteman’s novel about all the Somali immigrants in Lewiston and how they’ve changed the fabric up there and all the wonderful things that are happening in Lewiston, the challenges?”
I said, “No, I didn’t know about that.” I read this book, which is a great book. It’s by Catherine Besteman, who’s an anthropology professor at Colby. I can go into more detail on that if you’re interested, but it convinced me to look really hard at Lewiston, to meet the people, to understand the market and the challenges. That community is remarkable. The people of Lewiston, and I mean the entire community, immigrants, everybody, let’s call them New Mainers, I don’t know what to call the other people who’ve been there forever, Old Mainers, are fabulous. The city council, the city officials, the housing authority, all these people are so dedicated to trying to elevate the quality of living, and it does need elevating in Lewiston’s downtown core, that I was convinced that this was a community that I really wanted to become part of and really help with that ongoing effort.
Lisa Belisle: Allie, growing up in Yarmouth how much did you know of Lewiston?
Allie Smith: I knew nothing. I had never set foot in Lewiston prior to June of this year. I did read the same book by Catherine Besteman, which she purchased and sent to me as part of her efforts to convince me to come her, and it worked spectacularly, as most things that you put your mind to do. But really I had very little context outside of school competitions and hearing the name referenced, but I will freely admit that living in Yarmouth growing up I didn’t see much else of Maine, let alone the world.
Our family, and my mother in particular, did make a very strong effort to expose us to other cultures and other spaces, but at the end of the day when you live in a town like Yarmouth you don’t, or at least I didn’t, tend to venture too far outside of my immediate concerns as a middle schooler and high schooler, which tend to be pretty self-directed concerns, or at least they were for me. Really it’s been my first exposure, and I have to agree and amplify everything that my mother has said. I have never been part of community like the community in Lewiston, and I feel so grateful to have found a sort of home there, and so thankful to the community for being so welcoming to us.
Lisa Belisle: Where did you live when you were abroad?
Allie Smith: I lived in Thailand for two years.
Lisa Belisle: Did you find any differences, similarities between those communities and the communities, the community you’re working with now?
Allie Smith: I think that it’s always a productive challenge to work across cultures because it really challenges your assumptions. One of the assumptions that comes top of mind to me is our understanding of time. Here we are always on a schedule and we always have the next block in our calendar, and if you’re late that’s almost a strike against your own personal value and it also implicates something to another person that you’re late to, that you don’t care enough about them to be there on time, you don’t value their time.
In Thailand at least that relationship is incredibly different. I had the opportunity to not only work with but also manage individuals who came from a very different cultural background than I did and had a very different understanding. I think being put in a position where you need to expand your own sense of what empathy means and really question the assumptions you use to navigate your life is so productive, not just in terms of having more positive and effective relationships with those people, but in terms of coming back into your own culture and really examining, “What are the assumptions that I allow to go unchecked in my life?” I will say that experience I feel has greatly aided me in being able to gain a peak into what it’s like to assimilate to a new culture and all of the moving goal posts and all of the confusion that is inherent in that.
Lisa Belisle: Amy, where did the bed come in as sort of this…
Amy Smith: It’s sort of this orthogonal… Wait a minute, what’s with the beds?
Lisa Belisle: Yes, exactly.
Amy Smith: In fact, that was our first marketing flyer, it was like, “What’s up with the beds?” In the course of looking at properties in Lewiston we went through dozens and dozens of the downtown housing stack, because again I knew how to do one kind of building, so those were the building I was looking at. It was so striking to us how many people didn’t have a bed. Almost two a person, people were sleeping on the floor, on mats, on deflated air mattresses. Large families, 10, 12 member families with two beds.
It was this weird thing that we kept noticing. As we tried to figure out, “How could we really have sort of a maximum impact with, again, our limited resources?” It became pretty clear that the tensions that existed in the low-income housing had a lot to do with people not understanding their roles in the equation. Landlords and tenants maybe not having the same level of understanding of what it meant to live in and care for a building. There were issues that came up with that, and the bed is a great example because people were sleeping on the floors, they were dragging mattresses in off the street when they could find them. This was causing bedbug infestations, and then it’s the landlord’s responsibility to get rid of the infestation, but the tenant needs to play a role in that.
The combination of the living conditions, the tensions that had existed that to my mind really was a lack of information and shared resources, we thought, “You know what, we need to come up with a non-profit that can help with this relationship between the landlords and tenants, and that’s a big lofty goal. So then again, what about the beds? We thought, “Okay, we’re going to try to create this network of positive engagement with this community in particular. What could we do that would have immediate impact on the quality of people’s daily lives who were living in this housing?” The first thought was, “Okay, well let’s create this network, let’s get some buying power going for the landlords and tenants so that they can purchase beds. Let’s just start there.”
I started looking into that, and beds are expensive. At one point I looked at my math and my figures and I said, “You know what, we should just build beds. We can do it cheaper. We can set up shop right there in Lewiston maybe. Maybe we could even create a job training, job opportunity there,” and we decided to just go for it. That’s where the beds come in. What we’ve been astonished by is the level of interest. The minute we decided to do this, we put out a little flyer, we setup up shop at Build Maine, which was a trade show in Lewiston.
There was so much interest and our waiting list started to grow because what we said was, “For 16 hours of labor you can come work in a shop, build a bed for yourself plus one or two extras, and then you can go home with your bed frame plus a mattress with a bedbug encasement.” That was our operating assumption, 16 hours for a twin, 20 for a full. Call us and we’ll put you on the list. That’s kind of what happened. We set up shop right in downtown, the paper mill is walking distance to all this housing stock, because the housing stocks exists because of the mill.
All these houses that we talk about and that we work in, a lot of them were built by the businesses that were in the mills to house their workers, many of whom anecdotally were also large immigrant families. It’s been this whole progression for us, but now we’ve got this toehold to positive engagement space, and we’ve been so fortunate to work with an amazing array of folks to make it a success and help promote the fact that that opportunity exists. I’d love to have Allie talk a little bit about the experience that people have when they volunteer.
Allie Smith: Yeah. The core premise of this program if you look at outcomes, the most tangible outcome is that a person who did not have a bed to sleep in, did not have a healthy place to sleep, now has a bed to sleep in. I think that, anecdotally, if we all take a minute to imagine what it might feel like to wake up every day on the floor or on a couch, as opposed to in our bed, that we can kind of emotionally feel what the gap is between those two experiences.
I want to highlight here too that if you are sleeping on the floor, if you are sleeping on a couch, that is fundamentally intended to be a temporary state of being, nobody really plans to be under those conditions indefinitely. As time wears on and you wake up each day and you’re immediately reminded of this gap between your expectation for yourself and the reality that you’re living, that is a hard emotional and mental place to start your day, to be reminded of something that you’ve yet to accomplish. I think the gap between being on the floor and being in a bed, that’s fairly self-evident.
The bigger gap and what we’re trying to give people the experience of is between sleeping on the floor and waking up in a bed that is a testament to your ability to learn something new, to gain a new skill, to succeed in a new environment, to build new relationships. In addition to this work with Healthy Home Works I also work part time at a youth shelter in Lewiston where I provide educational support to youth who are homeless or at risk of homelessness or are otherwise alienated from their families. What I see time and again in these relationships and in having these conversations with youth is that the biggest gap is not between their abilities and the opportunities they’re seeking, it is between their sense of self and their self esteem and the ability and the motivation and the confidence to pursue those opportunities.
In that context as well as in this context what we are really aiming to do is to provide people with an opportunity to succeed in a new environment, to gain that confidence and to really feel like, “Wow, I do have the capacity to improve my own life if I’m given a chance.” Our program is oriented entirely towards that. Folks don’t need any level of woodworking experience to do the program. We’ve had people with ranges of experiences, qualifications, disabilities. You name it, we are open to everyone. From the minute someone walks in the door it is an environment that is based in positive reinforcement and the value of growth first and foremost.
The first activity that people complete is they built what’s called a laminate, which is the primary piece in the headboard. That serves as a diagnostic for us, we can really understand based on that process what someone’s manual dexterity is like, what their understanding of spatial relations is like, how active their listening skills are. We can extrapolate all these things about their learning style and really meet them where they’re at, and then intentionally structure their time with us so that they feel a very real sense of progression.
The folks that we interact with, they get this message from society repeatedly, whether it’s because they’re recovering from substance addiction, whether it’s because they’ve been unemployed for a long time, whether they’re new to the country and struggling and working hard to overcome cultural difference, to adapt to new working environments. Whatever the case may be, they get this message that their labor isn’t valued and that they’re not really expected to learn new things and to grow and to contribute in a fundamental way to their own well being. We really want to counter that narrative and give them the opportunity to really feel like they’ve succeeded, and then to go back to that gap that we were talking about before, the difference of being on the floor and being in a bed, to wake up not only rested and with the physical and mental obvious benefits that come from sleeping well.
But to wake up and be immediately confronted not with things that you haven’t accomplished yet but with such a tangible reminder of the creative power of your hands and your own ability to not only improve your own life, but also to improve the lives of others, because we’re very clear with people who are working with us, yes we’re building this bed for you and we’re also building this bed for your neighborhood who’s across the table from you, who you’re getting to know. The third bed is going to an organization that provides housing first services for people who are immediately homeless, and that’s the other person who’s going to benefit from this. To give them that sense of community engagement and to show them their ability to positively impact the lives of others as well.
Lisa Belisle: Amy what types of numbers are we talking about? How many beds have you built to date?
Allie Smith: To date last year we gave away 17 beds and we sold 51 beds. That’s between June and December of last year. Our goal for this year is give away 90 beds and sell 180, because the way this works right is it’s the money that comes in from the sale of the wholesale or retail beds that can fund the program so that we can afford to giveaway the beds. Costs us about $250 to give a bed to an earn-a-bed volunteer, between the frame, the mattress and the bedbug encasement.
The math kind of surprised us because we, of course, knew that we would need money in order to give the package, but we didn’t think about the other end which was we need orders for beds, so there’s something for the volunteers to work on. Towards the end of the year we said, “Oh okay, so now what we really need to focus on is selling beds so that we have the work and the money needed to continue the program.” Last year was like a pilot for us. We really just wanted to prove the concept, that we could have anybody come in, they could succeed at building a bed, we would deliver and set up the bed and everybody would be happy and it would be a very positive experience. That’s what we’ve proven so far. We also have developed our wholesale market a little bit.
We got an order at the end of last year from Avesta Housing here in Portland. They’re building a new housing first facility for veterans, a 30-bed facility out on Bishop Street. They purchased their beds from us, which is very exciting. Preble Street is another big customer. The way we work with non-profits like that is we sell them the beds at wholesale so that they can maximize their dollars and get the maximum number of beds to folks. Then currently FX Marcotte up in Lewiston is carrying our beds and Hub is going to start carrying them in the next month or so.
Our goal is to get to the point where we can take 10 volunteers a month, 10 builders, 10 earn-a-bed a month, so give away 120 beds a year and then be producing and selling 360, 380 beds. Once we get to that point then we really feel like we can start creating paid jobs, again for this very same population, because now we’ve got a list. I think we’ve got 24 people through the program so far. Delightful, come on back. They want to come back and volunteer without the promise of a bed, just to help. It’s fun.
Amy Smith: It is.
Allie Smith: It’s a really fun environment. We would love that because that’s a lot of beds, 120 people, 120 households to be getting beds. We’d also like to get to the point where we can take repeat builders, because right now we have to limit to one bed per household, but then once a builder completes our program they also can buy beds wholesale from us. We’re trying to get as many families and people into safe sleeping arrangements. The numbers, I don’t know if those numbers seem big or small to you, but we feel really good about the impact that it’s had so far.
Lisa Belisle: I encourage people who are listening, if you’re a listener and you’re interested in this program, we’ll put a link to Healthy Homeworks on our Show Notes page. This is a great program. I appreciate you both coming and you both spending the time to do this. We’ve speaking with Amy Smith and also with Allie Smith. Amy is the founder and executive director of Healthy Homeworks, and her daughter, Allie Smith, is the organization’s director of development. I really wish you all the best. I’m sure you will reach your goals because I can tell that you’re both extremely passionate and motivated in this project. Thank you.
Allie Smith: Thank you
Amy Smith: Thank you.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio show number 290, Cleaner Homes and Beds For All. Our guests have included Joe Walsh, and Amy and Allie Smith. For more information on our guests and extended interviews visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page, follow me on Twitter as @drlisabelisle and see my running travel food and wellness photos as @bountiful1 on Instagram.
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