Community First! Village expands, adding a ‘downtown’ area

AUSTIN (KXAN) — For over a decade, the Community First! Village just east of Austin has offered a home to hundreds of people who had nowhere to go. The neighborhood is continuing to expand, and its latest addition is a new “downtown” area that offers a community hub for residents.

Community First! Village is a master-planned neighborhood that provides affordable, permanent housing and support for the chronically homeless, according to its website.

The neighborhood has been slowly expanding over the years, and the latest development of the downtown area added a new headquarters building, a neighbor services building, a welcome center, a small market, and Goodness Hall, which is a multipurpose space for events, meetings and volunteer training.

According to Studio8, the architecture firm that worked on this phase of the community’s expansion, the expansion included 51 acres of land and a collection of five buildings, totaling 43,800 square feet.

The firm said the architecture of the new buildings “reinforces a sense of freedom of movement within community life,” as the planning was driven by the site’s topography and by MLF’s “deep understanding of how the campus functions.”

Certain sections of the campus are reserved for the residents, but other areas, like this new downtown, offer more open and welcoming spaces for the public.

Studio8 said in a press release that the new downtown “expresses Mobile Loaves & Fishes’ emphasis on providing generous, dignified spaces that are intentionally neither upscale nor overly polished in their appearance. The mission is to serve residents through simple, unpretentious architecture that springs from a well of compassion, humanity and abundance.”

Read the original article here and read more about this project here