ULI Plan Aims to Reduce Homeless Population by 50%

ULI Los Angeles is tackling the city’s grave homelessness problem. The organization has completed an extensive report on homelessness, focusing on the development of temporary housing for the unsheltered, and has developed a set of key recommendations with the goal of reducing the homeless population by 50%. ULI is currently working with the Mayor’s office to put its recommendations—which include establishing 60 housing sites city-owned land, reclaiming public spaces for general use, investing in scattered site permanent supportive housing, encouraging design and streamlining approvals—into action and create temporary housing options throughout the city. Using this research, ULI has gathered a team to work with the city on a program called A Bridge Home, which will build safe shelters to house homeless people in transition. We sat down with Marty Borko, executive director at ULI, to talk about the organization’s research on homelessness and the path forward to developing more shelters.

GlobeSt.com: Tell me about the homelessness report and research that ULI conducted, and the impetus for the report.

Marty Borko: We brought in expertise from outside of Los Angeles to help us understand the issue of homelessness. We had people from New York, New Orleans, Florida and Pittsburgh. It was important that we were able to bring in national expertise. The report was focused on temporary supportive housing. We made a series of key recommendations based on that research, and a lot of those were recommendations about how to use resources, how to increase the overall housing supply and about the leadership and the accountability of elected officials. The recommendation was that this would have to happen at every council office and it has to be a substantial number to have an impact. That was in December, and we took that report and shared it with the Mayor’s office. The Mayor was very supportive of what we were doing, and I think it is fair to say that our research and recommendations in the report validated the things that the Mayor’s office was thinking about.

GlobeSt.com: Once you presented the report to the Mayor’s office, what was your next step to put some of these recommendations into action?

Borko: We thought, what is next. We talked a lot about the things that we can do as an organization to move this forward. From my perspective, there are four critical components to deal with this issue. The first is the real estate issue: how to you find and select the sites and what kind of sites can we use? The second component is a design component: how do we make temporary supportive housing fit into neighborhoods so that neighborhood groups start to say that this is an asset to get people off the street. The third component is the finance and cost issue: how do we achieve this in the most cost effective way possible. The fourth component is the issue of governance and approvals: How do we get the council office on board?

We looked at these and asked what can we do to get this conversation going. We decided to focus on the design issue, not that it is more important than the others, but it was something that we could do as the next step. We set up a design workshop and we invited ULI members and created three teams with an architect and landscape architect. We didn’t chose a specific site because we didn’t want to focus on the real estate issue, but we wanted to focus on how to design sites that are operational and aesthetically pleasing. We did it at three scales: 50 bed, 100 bed and 150 bed. That is really the metric of how you measure for temporary supportive housing. The Mayor’s office participated, and we reported our findings. There were a lot of interesting commonalities about the proposals that came out at those scales, like how to do deal with front door; how do you face the community; how do you deal with amenities.

We developed some preliminary programs around that, and we made recommendations about the size of the site needed for a certain number of beds. We don’t have a solution and we haven’t solved the problem, but we wanted to start to focus on a piece that is really important. When you don’t have a vision of what it could be, people think the worst. The idea was to move the conversation to a place where people could see an idea and a vision behind. This was our first step, and we are continuing to work with the Mayor’s office and the council offices to move things forward, looking at real estate issues and working with the construction and development community about cost.

GlobeSt.com: The recommendations came out with a goal of reducing the homeless population by 50% by the end of the year. Is that an achievable goal?

Borko: It has to be a big splash. You can’t just do this a little bit. Is that achievable? I don’t know. Things seem to be moving slower than everyone wants them to go, but at least in the recommendation, we said that it has to be a big move and it has to happen in every council district. People are homeless for all different kinds of reasons, and they don’t want to leave their community. So, you have to have a big goal and it needs to happen across the city. That was the recommendation that came out of the homeless report.

GlobeSt.com: While each of the pillars you outlined are important, funding these projects seems to be one of the biggest challenges. Will these projects use public money, private money or public-private partnerships?

Borko: It is all of the above. We have county money with Measure H and HHH. There are groups that are looking at flyaway homes with private financing because they found investors that were willing to take a 5% return. I think you have to creatively use all capital sources, and I think that the private sector is realizing that this is something that they have to be actively involved in. We have been in conversation with CBRE, and they feel they have a social responsibility to help solve the problem. It needs to be all of the above, because one alone isn’t going to solve the problem.

We also have to figure out how to do this in the most cost-effective way to serve the largest amount of people. If the costs start to escalate, we are not going to be able to hit the numbers that we want to hit.

GlobeSt.com: What comes next?

Borko: The next step is to participate on all of those other levels. We are now having conversations with council offices about site selection, and our members are supporting this effort. The design community has also been open to it. I think that the next steps are to move each of those four pillars forward with officials, with the community, with the private sectors and with operators. We have been working with a group that includes CBRE, Gensler, Central City Associations and ULI to start talking about those next steps.