The Homeless Want More Than Housing

Landscape Architecture Magazine: Speed bumps and curbs that narrow the street to slow traffic. Safety zones for women and LGBTQ residents. Vegetable gardens with citrus trees. Drinking fountains, storage units, and cell phone charging stations. This isn’t a laundry list of community benefits in your local affluent suburb; it’s a wish list for the nation’s most concentrated homeless community in downtown Los Angeles: Skid Row.

A fix for L.A.’s homeless crisis isn’t cheap. Will voters go for $1.2 billion in borrowing?

LA Times: For years, many Los Angeles residents have watched with alarm as homeless encampments spread across the city, from the sidewalks of skid row to alleys in South Los Angeles, behind shopping centers in the Valley and even  on the bluffs above the Pacific Ocean.

Homeless housing crisis aided with $64.6 million loans

Skid Row Housing Trust’s Six Four Nine Lofts development was awarded $5.3 million in California cap-and-trade funding through the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Program (AHSC). Six Four Nine Lofts will create 55 supportive homes for homeless and disabled individuals in Downtown Los Angeles’ Skid Row neighborhood. A ground-floor medical clinic, with dental, optometry, pharmacy and mental healthcare services, will be operated by Los Angeles Christian Health Centers and is expected to serve 7,500 people each year. In addition, a portion the funding will be used for pedestrian and bike infrastructure improvements around the development, including a new Metro Bike Share Hub. “This development will not only provide homes for people experiencing homelessness, but it will also place housing and medical services near improved transit options,” said Ben Rosen, the Trust’s Director of Real Estate Development. “By making the community more sustainable, Six Four Nine Lofts is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 19,182 metric tons.”

Read more on MyNewsLA.com.

The Six Wins AHF Readers’ Choice Award

We are proud to announce that Affordable Housing Finance (AHF) Readers’ Choice Awards named The Six the best Special-Needs housing development completed in 2015-2016! AHF magazine and newsletter subscribers voted on the best affordable housing developments across the nation, selecting winners in nine categories. Located in MacArthur Park, The Six has 52 apartments and studios for formerly homeless and disabled individuals, as well as onsite supportive programs to help residents achieve health and wellness. On top of being the Trust’s first development outside of Downtown Los Angeles, it is our first with permanent supportive housing set aside specifically for veterans. In the military, “got your six” means “I’ve got your back.” Designed by Brooks + Scarpa Architects to foster community and connection, The Six received LEED Platinum Certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
The Six

A bold bet in LA: Using health care funds to find housing for the homeless

STAT News: The job sounds impossible: solve the health care crisis in the massive and desperately sick homeless population of Skid Row, which sprawls across dozens of blocks just south of downtown.

AIA|LA asks “How will design professions respond to the nearly 47,000 homeless people living in L.A. County?”

ArchPaper: A recent count by Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) put the growing visibility and proliferation of homelessness in L.A. County into stark terms. Reporting a 5.7 percent increase in overall homelessness, the report counted 46,874 homeless individuals this year compared with the 44,359 counted in 2015. Within that statistic, LAHSA detailed 34,527 people living on the streets full-time, up from 31,025 doing so one year prior.

Downtowners of Distinction: New Pershing Apartments

Cobbling together financing for and building low-income housing is a Herculean feat. Yet veteran developer Skid Row Housing Trust topped itself in May, when it opened the 69-unit New Pershing Apartments. The $28 million project at Fifth and Main streets transformed the old Pershing Hotel, built in 1889, and the Roma, from 1905, into a single five-story structure. The design from Killefer Flammang Architects managed to make the complex modern while preserving the Victorian façade. It is instantly a model for both low-income housing and any future historic building renovation.

California State Senate supports ‘No Place Like Home’ initiative

Like the much-needed rain that has reached California, the effort to help the homeless has even more significance to it as the impact of El Niño storms has displaced the thousands of homeless living in makeshift camps along the Los Angeles River.

On Jan 4, members of the California State Senate held a press conference to announce the “No Place Like Home” initiative.

 The bipartisan coalition wanted to alert the press that Monday to this first-of-it’s-kind comprehensive collaboration designed to help local communities meet the critical needs of the homeless in California. More than 40 speakers and representatives from State and local agencies voiced their concerns for the homeless at the The Star Apartments on East 6th Street in Los Angeles, an area known as Skid Row.

Mike Alvidrez, president of the Skid Row Housing Trust which owns and manages The Star Apartments, began the press conference by saying “permanent support of housing works and it saves money.” He mentioned that the SRH Trust has been working with the homeless for over 25 years and in its management of The Star Apartments and other properties, their approach has been homelessness is a reversible circumstance and that everyone in a community has a role to play in ending homelessness.

The 25 Best Inventions of 2015: Star Apartments

TIME: For decades, housing for the homeless has too often meant transient shelters or warehouse-­like abodes. L.A.’s Star Apartments aims to buck that trend by design; it functions more like a minivillage than a single building, says Maltzan of his third collaboration with Skid Row Housing Trust, a local nonprofit. In addition to 102 prefabricated studios, which are ingeniously staggered into four terraced stories, Star Apartments offers a ground-floor medical clinic and, above that, a garden, an outdoor running track and space for classrooms. The goal, says Maltzan, is to make the residents of its 300-sq.-ft. units—who are handpicked by the county department of health ­services—feel “like they’re part of a dynamic and intimate community,” a strategy that can help people, especially those struggling with homelessness and substance-­abuse issues, re-­establish stability in their lives.

Is prefab the future for affordable housing in Los Angeles? A case from Michael Maltzan Architecture.

The Architect’s Newspaper: The Star Apartments are Michael Maltzan Architecture’s third project for the Skid Row Housing Trust in downtown Los Angeles. In contrast to the firm’s 2009 New Carver Apartments—a sleek white cylinder with sharply faceted bays—Star is a rough-edged, asymmetrical stack of prefabricated units rising from an existing single-story podium of retail spaces.