This L.A. project shows that homeless housing can be done quickly and cheaply
This project discussed in this article shows that it is definitely possible to come up with faster solutions for homeless housing.
The 232-bed Vignes Street development will have shattered the axiom that homeless housing takes years to build and is exorbitantly expensive.
From start to finish in under five months and at a cost of about $200,000 per bed, it has shaved years and hundreds of thousands of dollars off a traditional homeless housing project.
Conceived as an experiment, the project is a hybrid of permanent and temporary structures and will be used flexibly for both housing and shelter.
The bulk of the funding came from the federal CARES Act, allowing the county to sidestep the usual convoluted process of finding money for affordable housing.
“The goal is house people as quickly as you can,” said Sarah Dusseault, a commissioner with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority who advised Solis on the project. “Get people into housing right away, even if it’s going to be operated as temporary.”