Los Angeles Will Soon Open Its Newest Facility for Those Lacking Housing

According to the California Senate Housing Committee, on any given night in January 2020, there were more than 161,000 people living without shelter across the state, with 40 percent of them living in Los Angeles County. The number of unhoused people in California would only increase, growing to more than 170,000 today.

In its efforts to curb the spread of Covid among that population, which was especially vulnerable, the state found a new way to provide them with housing. Project Roomkey authorized it to lease individual rooms from underused hotels and motels to prevent the illness’s spread in shelters. Later in 2020, following the success of that program, the state evolved the initiative into Project Homekey, an emergency order which specifically endeavored to provide housing to those lacking shelter: Rather than leasing individual rooms, counties would be able to purchase entire motel and hotel properties and renovate them into living units.

Under phase one of Project Homekey, ten motels in L.A. County were repurposed. Round two, which began in 2021, maintained the program’s initial aims, but included at least one significant change. Rather than asking municipalities to be the property managers, the state would open the applications to nonprofit partners and developers.

"We decided that it makes more sense for the county to partner with developers who have expertise around affordable housing development and can share in the responsibilities, and ultimately be the owners," says Elizabeth Ben-Ishai, L.A. County’s manager of housing and intergovernmental relations. "With round two, we had a competitive process to identify who would be the best partners for us." They selected Hope the Mission—a local nonprofit working to end hunger, poverty, and homelessness—and as their design partner, Kadre Architects, led by its founder, Nerin Kadribegovic.

This year, two Los Angeles projects by Kadre opened as part of Homekey round two: The Alvarado in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park, and more recently, The Woodlands in Woodland Hills, a suburb of L.A. Thinking through the tight budgets and deadlines to renovate the two properties, Kadribegovic tapped into his own lived experience: As a teenager, before immigrating to the United States, his family left their home in Bosnia in the midst of the Bosnian War and lived in Croatia, he says, in a former hotel that had been transformed into temporary housing. "I empathize with the families who live in these," he says.

The projects, each of which only took eight months to complete after being awarded funding, provided a unique set of challenges for Kadribegovic. "The way you’re awarded funds from the programs is they give you a certain amount of money per door," he explains. "And then it’s your discretion as the architect to decide how to spend the funds."

Though both The Alvarado and The Woodlands buildings were underused, the Alvarado’s was in bad shape, says Kadribegovic. Without enough funding to do a full rehab, his firm gave less attention to the outdoors, which didn’t have the space for community areas anyway, and instead focused on the interiors of its 45 units, where he and his team created custom furnishings; colorful graphics are superimposed on the site inside and out.

The Woodlands features 100 units of family-friendly interim housing surrounded by an expansive parking lot. The building was much more expensive to acquire than The Alvarado’s, says Kadribegovic, but the interiors were in much better condition to begin with. Kadre focused its efforts on transforming the parking lot, which Kadribegovic says was an eyesore and a heat island. Kadre decided to build a playspace, knowing that many of the families moving in would have young children. Timeline and funding restrictions meant they’d have to make-do with certain elements: Instead of a garden, for example, they added seating and planters, and brightly-colored paint similar to The Alvarado. The property acquisition also included a former Denny’s diner that the firm is planning to turn into a preschool for children living here.