Misunderstood word of the day: Yardy.

I was reading a Guardian article titled "Can Oregon's tiny houses be part of the solution to homelessness?"

The 30 dwellings at Opportunity Village[, in Eugene, are] made of prefab donated materials, cost �around $3,300 a unit.� The savings come from the fact that they are basically detached bedrooms, with no utilities or running water....

[And] Dignity Village, two hours� drive north, on the outskirts of Portland... began in 2001 as a �tent city�, and a protest against the city�s harassment of homeless people... From 2003, the tents were replaced with tiny homes. Since then, the village has successfully offered housing on the communalist model that Opportunity Village is patterned on.

A commenter named RoughSleeper:

They look like sheds on allotments. In which case, can we have chickens and grow our own food? Will there be some kind of community policing to stop a yardy culture growing?

Chickens and growing your own food? I assumed "yardies" were something like "foodies" and filed away the new slang to use the next time Meade fantasizes about putting a chicken tractor and greenhouse in our backyard.

But that's not what RoughSleeper was talking about. Urban Dictionary says � I'll quote the more polite definition � "Yardy is another word for a Jamaican, specifically one from a difficult socio-economic area. The term stems from the slang name given to occupants of government yards in Trenchtown, a neighborhood in West Kingston, Jamaica. Trenchtown was originally built as a housing project following devastation caused by Hurricane Charlie. Each development was built around a central courtyard with communal cooking facilities. Due to the poverty endemic in the neighborhood, crime and gang violence became rife, leading the occupants of Trenchtown to be in part stigmatized by the term 'Yardie.'"