LOST AND FOUND: Recovering Sites, Youth

Housing and Homelessness

East LA

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative

Our proposal simultaneously addresses 3 urgent but interrelated problems facing LA. First is the burgeoning homeless population--more specifically those needing emergency housing (high acuity individuals), and those lower acuity individuals in need of transitional housing (1-3 years). The latter group includes college-age students who are housing insecure, who comprise twenty percent of those at community colleges and ten percent of those in the Cal State Univ system. These "hidden homeless" often live in cars or sleep on classmates' couches, unable to afford or even find dorm housing. This lack of availability/affordability--the second problem our proposal addresses--has proven the prime obstacle to a college education (more than tuition). Lastly, our proposal and pilot addresses the severe shortage of available land to locate supportive housing of any type, and whose resultant cost and acquisition time negatively impacts the affordability of units as much as that of construction.

Over 46 acres of publicly-owned, vacant parking structure rooftops in LA County lie hidden in plain sight, including many on community college and Cal State campuses. At a time when land is escalating in cost and in short supply, the opportunity exists to utilize these "found" sites for emergency or transitional supportive housing. Removed from public view, they possess structural concrete decks capable of carrying one or two stories of additional construction. Besides "free" real estate, such rooftops offer existing infrastructure (water and power), reducing the need for costly foundations and underground utilities. We propose to develop a pilot project as proof of this concept, so that once shown to be successful, it will (like the ADU) be adopted by others and brought to scale County-wide. Located on a parking rooftop on the East LA College campus, the site would be developed to provide transitional housing for between 100-200 of the "hidden" homeless students who currently make up twenty percent of ELAC's enrollment. If populated with prefabricated modular housing, the speed and cost of such a "plug-in" approach would, we estimate, be well below half the current price of $6-700,000 for the same unit if newly built on private land. And because the project is open air, in SoCal's temperate climate, it invites the provision of PV-powered, sheltered outdoor open space for exercise, dining, classes--even lightweight hydroponic agriculture.

The ambition and potential impact of our proposal extends beyond the 100-200 students whose lives and career trajectories the pilot will affect. Our immediate vision of success can be summarized as: a) getting the project built; b) achieving a total (soft and hard) cost of $250K/unit (less than one-third that of current ground-up construction on non-public land); and c) achieving a design-thru-construction schedule of 2 years or less (completion by Dec 2025), versus 5-6 years for most publicly-subsidized supportive housing (DignityMoves uses only private investment capital). Longer term, we expect that if successful on these terms, the pilot will breed a powerful echo effect, instigating others (both developers and public officials) to adopt the same strategy on the roughly 40 other publicly-owned parking rooftops around the County, which hold the potential to accommodate as many as 3,500 beds (@ +/- 600 SF of rooftop per bed) as either emergency, transitional or student housing.

Realization is the most effective means of truly gauging the success of our larger proposal: to address the supportive housing deficit by utilizing the two million SF of publicly-owned parking rooftops County-wide. A pilot project is the truest and best way to actually identify and work through problems--a necessary process that forges the efficacy of the idea--in terms of constructability: speed to market; cost; and the logistics of use and operation. In this respect, success will be defined by how the metrics of each of the above compare against those of comparable housing: i.e. stick-built, ground-up construction on private land, using public subsidies. Measuring the actual impact of the pilot, while equally important, can only be assessed over time, in terms of how quickly and effectively the model we create is adopted by others (public agencies) on similar sites (parking rooftops)--to move the needle from housing 200 (the pilot) to 3,000+ countywide.

_DignityMoves (Developer) shall serve as team lead, overseeing the progress of the work as well as developing the project pro-forma, obtaining funding, and value engineering (if necessary). _East LA College (Owner) shall provide a program brief outlining the needs of the students, and long-term maintenance and operations-related goals/concerns of the College. _Gensler (Architect) shall incorporate into the overall design logistical and programming requirements; performance specs for the housing modulars; and loading criteria from the structural engineer. _Jovenes (Service Provider) shall work with ELAC to develop a program brief, including operations requirements. _ConnectHomes (Prefab builder) shall provide drawings, specs and pricing for its multi-bed "Connect Shelters" modulars.