Earlier this month, Santa Clara, California, played host to the semicentennial installment of the highest-profile sporting event in the world: the Super Bowl. Since the first Super Bowl in 1967, the game has morphed from a leisurely Sunday afternoon affair to a week-long advertisement punctuated by 60 minutes of football.
San Franciscans pointed to things like traffic nightmares and unsightly armed guards that made the city feel like an active warzone as the basis of their discontent. Others point to the $4.8 million bill the city was saddled with following the conclusion of festivities.
In some ways, the facilities of the Super Bowl regularly fall into disrepair and are seldom used after the end of the event.
But Super Bowls can be a shelter for those who need it.
People in the Bay Area are doing something new to ensure the remains of Super Bowl City do not go the way of Sochi’s 2014 Olympic village, now a ghost town.
Artist Greg Kloehn originally started the Homeless Homes Project when he was approached by a homeless woman who was seeking a tarp to use for shelter. He gave her not a tarp, but a mini-shelter that he had built out of repurposed materials.
Kloehn is spearheading an effort to repurpose pieces of Super Bowl City to build small shelters for the Bay Area’s homeless. This comes after huge numbers of San Francisco’s homeless were forcibly hidden from the public eye during the festivities. Repurposing junk to build temporary shelters is an unconventional idea for an area that has become all-too-familiar with poverty and homelessness — but it’s brilliant.
Last year, San Francisco gave more than 11,000 citations to homeless people for being vagrants. Meanwhile, it has no issue spending $180 million to ready an area for a new arena for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, which will likely cost upwards of $1 billion to build.
Last weekend’s Homeless Homes Pop-Up Build was wildly successful. Volunteers were even turned away due to maximum capacity.
The workshop’s success is beautifully ironic. The beneficiaries’ shelters will be made of the very structures that displaced them for the week leading up to Super Bowl 50.
This initiative should serve as a shining example to host cities of future Super Bowls and other large events known to leave behind mountains of waste and useless infrastructure.
Rather than preserving Super Bowl 50 landmarks, one of which was vandalized, communities should employ creative repurposing efforts like Kloehn’s to make a positive impact in areas that need it.
Unfortunately, homes cannot be built with the ruins of Super Bowl 50, only shelters. But thanks to the Homeless Homes Project, some of the Bay Area’s homeless will have access to something that far too few do: a roof over their heads.
dkilcull@indiana.edu
