The BLOCK Project

Apr 22nd, 2019 - Jun 7th, 2019

University of Washington - B IMD 353

What’s The BLOCK Project?

The BLOCK project is a recent push for families in Seattle to build sustainable BLOCK homes in their backyard, where they can host a homeless individual. Their goal is to have one of their BLOCK homes in every residential block of Seattle. Rex Hohlbein and Jenn LaFreniere designed the BLOCK Home with the goal of setting a new precedent in housing solutions for people experiencing homelessness. BLOCK Architects designs, permits, and manages construction of BLOCK Homes. So for our B IMD 353 class, my group and I were assigned the task of helping The BLOCK Project create a video that communicated a better understand about how their project worked.

Why The BLOCK Project?

The BLOCK project caught my eye because of their unique and different approach to the current housing issue. It was originally founded as a Facebook page and after many communities reached out to the organization, it slowly grew into the project it is today. The BLOCK project was able to find an avenue to the house crisis that both provided shelter to the homeless as well as break the stigma of homelessness. By placing homeless individuals in the backyards of families, they have shown that homeless individuals are apart of the local community. The BLOCK project was also able to address another problem, which was the issue that there is lack of direction for people looking to help combat against the housing crisis. However, The BLOCK Project felt like they were struggling to covey this innovative solution for homelessness to homeowners. So our job was to create a video that could help explain their process.

The BLOCK Project, how?

Before this project, I had a very generalized idea of the homelessness issues in Seattle, so to begin the project we had to do some research. This research included reading articles about the cost of living in Seattle, the Amazon headquarter, and the current solutions for homelessness. We then had a better grasp about what made The BLOCK Project an innovative and unique idea. This is when we were able to create a storyboard about what our video must show in order to make homeowners feel more comfortable with The BLOCK Project’s idea. The direction we decided to take for this video was a collection of interviews of the people directly involved with the current process. The people we wanted to interview were homeowners, residents, social workers, contractors, attorneys, and architects. We then were able to start to think of interview questions we were going to ask our interviewees.

The Block Project Results?

How was the Project?

Overall the project went great and I had an amazing experience working with Facing Homelessness and The BLOCK Project. This was my first time working on a community-based learning and research project and I was pleasantly surprised. It was nice getting out of the classroom and working with people in the industry. Throughout the project I found myself taking the role as a researcher as well as the person in charge of interview questions, this is most likely due to my lack of filming experience. However, I really enjoyed this dialogue I was able to have with the people involved within The BLOCK Project, and I feel that I’ve moved past some of my previous fears I had in an interview/research environment.