Community First! Village, the East Austin community that has offered a home to hundreds of people who had nowhere to go, has expanded with a new downtown area designed to serve as a hub for residents. The addition includes a headquarters building, a small market, a neighbor services building, a welcome center, and Goodness Hall, a multipurpose space for events, meetings, and volunteer training.
The new downtown totals 43,800 square feet spread across five buildings, according to KXAN Austin, which first reported on the expansion. The project covered 51 acres of the site, per Studio8, the Austin-based architecture firm that led design work for this phase of the village's growth. The firm designed the space to offer more open and welcoming areas for the public while still reserving certain sections of campus exclusively for Community First! Village residents.
Architecture Built Around How Residents Actually Live
Studio8 says the layout was shaped by the site's topography and by Mobile Loaves & Fishes' own understanding of how the campus functions day to day. The firm led visioning sessions with residents and staff to keep the new spaces at a welcoming, residential scale, according to Studio8 Architects. The five buildings — Corporate Headquarters, Neighbor Services, Market/Kitchen, Welcome Center, and Assembly Hall — wrap around a central, shaded community courtyard designed with an agrarian-inspired look, as detailed by AIA Austin.
Per Studio8, the new buildings are meant to reinforce a sense of freedom of movement within community life, and the downtown area expresses Mobile Loaves & Fishes' emphasis on generous, dignified spaces that are neither upscale nor overly polished. The architecture is meant to serve residents through simple, unpretentious design grounded in compassion, humanity, and abundance, the firm says. Photos of the new hub were credited to Mobile Loaves and Fishes and to Andrea Calo/Studio8.
Part of a Much Larger Expansion Across Two Sites
The downtown hub is just one piece of a far bigger build-out. Mobile Loaves & Fishes' total multi-phase expansion adds 127 acres across two sites — Phase 3 on Hog Eye Road and Phase 4 on Burleson Road — to construct roughly 1,400 new homes, according to Mobile Loaves & Fishes. Once complete around 2028, the project will grow the overall village to 178 acres with capacity for nearly 1,900 residents, up from the 51-acre site that originally opened to serve chronically homeless adults in East Austin.
Phase 4 alone covers 76 acres in Southeast Austin along Burleson Road and includes Burleson Studios, a 104-unit supportive housing community built in partnership with Foundation Communities. Some of the new units are also going up with the help of robotics: Austin company ICON partnered with Mobile Loaves & Fishes to 3D-print 100 homes at the village, a project Hoodline previously reported integrates robotic construction into permanent supportive housing.
Funding, Scale, and a Decade of Outcomes
The expansion has drawn public money as well as private philanthropy. In 2023, the Williamson County Commissioners Court voted to award $1.4 million in federal American Rescue Plan Act funds to Mobile Loaves & Fishes to help build infrastructure and 500 homes for Phase 3, according to Community Impact.
As of June, Community First! Village houses more than 500 total residents, including over 455 formerly chronically homeless individuals and nearly 50 “intentional neighbors” — volunteers and staff who live on-site to help build a supportive community, per Mobile Loaves & Fishes. The organization traces back to 1998, when CEO Alan Graham co-founded the ministry with a single minivan delivering meals; it has since grown into a volunteer fleet that has served nearly 7 million prepared meals across Central Texas.
The village's growth comes as homelessness in Austin and Travis County remains elevated. The Ending Community Homelessness Coalition's 2025 Point-in-Time count recorded 3,238 unhoused individuals on a single night in January 2025, an increase of nearly 900 people compared to the 2023 count, according to FOX 7 Austin. Still, the city has made gains elsewhere: local emergency shelter beds increased 70% and permanent housing beds grew 35% since 2022, contributing to the first decline in newly unhoused individuals in five years, according to ECHO's 2025 State of the System report released by the City of Austin.
Mobile Loaves & Fishes has pointed to a decade of outcome data to make the case that its model works. In October, the organization presented figures showing resident life expectancy at the village improved to 61 years, compared to 48 years for people living on the street, along with an 80% resident retention rate and reductions in alcohol use of 42% and drug use of 47%, as reported by KVUE.
