While L.A. County grapples with homelessness, elegant new housing projects in Long Beach and Venice signal the solutions — and challenges — ahead.
By Michael Kimmelman
Outside, it is a colorful five-story mix of puzzle-block shapes, raised on stilts, with a jagged roofline and gabled breezeway playing off the single-family houses behind it. Painted patches of green, rose and blue piping sing in the Southern California sun.
Inside, it’s home to 76 people who were recently sleeping on the streets of Long Beach. The building, called 26 Point 2, is a new permanent supportive housing development along the Pacific Coast Highway. The name is an exhortation, not an address. Solving homelessness is a marathon, not a sprint.
After the Supreme Court gave the green light in June to cities that elect to arrest people for sleeping outdoors, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that thousands of homeless encampments across California be dismantled. He made a pit stop the other day to help state workers clear an especially troubled, rat-infested one from an underpass below Interstate 10 in Los Angeles.
Many Californians have had enough. Officials are registering voters’ frustration and Republicans are weaponizing the issue before November. Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, facing a tough re-election, instructed police officers in her long-besieged city to cite homeless campers who refuse shelter, with the threat of jail on the table. “We need some tough love on the streets,” the mayor allowed.
Where those who do not accept help should go isn’t clear. Mayor Breed is offering free one-way bus tickets out of town.
California doesn’t guarantee a right to housing or shelters, both of which are in notoriously short supply. Study after study shows that just arresting people or shooing them along doesn’t work. Neither have progressive legal efforts championing the right to sleep in the streets. Heather Knight, reporting for The Times on Mayor Breed’s crackdown, described the 16th attempt this year to clear an encampment outside a local Department of Motor Vehicles office. The encampment simply shifted to a different corner.
What works is housing. That’s what all the evidence, not to mention common sense, suggests. But building homes — as opposed to shelters or even tiny-house villages, useful but temporary measures, which more Western states now lean into — can take ages, cost a fortune and run headlong into community road blocks and a mountain of legal obstacles.
I visited 26 Point 2 and another new permanent supportive housing development in the beachfront community of Venice, Calif. Together they suggest the promise but also the challenge for California in trying to build its way out of the problem.
With 26 Point 2, Long Beach welcomed the project, which is designed by the L.A. architect Michael Maltzan and cost $28 million. The city extended a bridge loan to the developer, Excelerate Housing Group, when three abandoned oil wells were belatedly discovered under the site.
The area is what the architectural theorist Charles Jencks, describing Los Angeles, liked to call a “heteropolis”: There’s an oil refinery above an old motel across the street, a vintage clothing store in a run-down strip mall next door, gated condos past a used car lot up the highway and single-family houses out back.
Maltzan embraced the mash-up, configuring 26 Point 2 at its tallest along the highway, where its facade skirts an earthquake fault line. The building steps down in height as it turns toward the houses, allowing light into a courtyard that provides social space for tenants.
Long Beach plans to densify this stretch of the highway, adding more subsidized housing and mixed-use development. Like much of Southern California, the city is full of these wide avenues with empty lots and low-rise buildings. In 2016, the Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne published a thought exercise, reimagining the Wilshire corridor, with its 16-mile boulevard extending east from the oceanfront in Santa Monica, as being built up to accommodate one million more people, a hypothetical change affecting less than one percent of Los Angeles County.
There is plenty of room for targeted growth, in other words, without spoiling what Angelenos love about the region and turning it into Manhattan.
But California is dealing with the legacy of decades spent empowering NIMBYs, redlining districts, promoting sprawl and zoning for single-family housing. For years it constrained authorities trying to move mentally ill people off the streets while at the same time passing reams of land use and environmental regulations to slow-walk housing development.
More recently, under Governor Newsom and his predecessor, Jerry Brown, the state has been attempting to undo some of that, directing hundreds of millions of dollars toward homelessness initiatives and creating state workarounds to some of the local impediments to more housing.
For its part, the city of Los Angeles has been pursuing Mayor Karen Bass’s Inside Safe agenda, which converts motel rooms into temporary shelters. The unsheltered number is down across Los Angeles County, 10 percent from a year ago, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. At the same time, the city has been encouraging the construction of more accessory dwelling units — backyard granny flats, as they’re called — issuing more than 40,000 permits last year, although whether that makes a dent in the homeless count remains to be seen.
And city voters approved a $1.2 billion bond measure back in 2016 to fund housing for homeless and at-risk Angelenos that helped pay for Weingart Tower, a new subsidized housing project on Skid Row. With its 278 apartments, it will concentrate poverty in what’s already L.A.’s poorest neighborhood. But it also promises to house several hundred of the city’s more than 70,000 homeless residents.
Its cost, $165 million, pencils out to roughly $600,000 per unit, the going rate for new construction now. Not surprisingly, more than a few local voters have been expressing second thoughts about that bond because of the pace of progress and its price tag.
Rosanne Haggerty, who runs Community Solutions, a national homeless aid organization, understands the concerns. But, Haggerty says, “people hear the price of housing a person and don’t account for the burden they are already bearing. Think of emergency rooms, police departments, librarians, park and sanitation workers — the public is already paying a steep tax to step over someone on the street or shrink away from them in a subway rather than house them.”
Few places encapsulate these tensions and contradictions more clearly than Venice, where the other permanent supportive housing development, Rose Apartments, opened not long ago. It’s a $21 million project by the L.A. architecture firm Brooks + Scarpa — the sort of opportunistic, small-scale project that, like 26 Point 2, weaves thoughtfully into a complex streetscape, lending dignity to formerly homeless residents and distinction to the neighborhood.
Only four stories tall, Rose is among the few ground-up subsidized housing developments constructed in Venice in decades. I knocked on the front door and found Becky Dennison, who runs Venice Community Housing, which built it. She filled me in on a NIMBY saga.
Rose houses 35 young adults and chronically homeless older residents on three floors above a storefront, across from a Whole Foods parking lot. The building is light, refined, with a delicately scalloped, whitewashed facade and an elevated courtyard. The architecture takes its cues from Horatio West Court, a 1919 landmark in nearby Santa Monica by Irving Gill, which belongs to a long line of courtyard apartment complexes that once defined Los Angeles — before it was mostly zoned for single-family houses — as a multifamily housing pioneer.
But even with only 35 residents, Rose was a struggle getting built, Dennison told me. The process took five years, notwithstanding that Venice Community Housing had owned the land for years and the project didn’t require any rezoning. NIMBYs in Venice fought it tooth and nail, calling it the Cabrini-Green of the West Side, according to Dennison, a reference to the troubled midcentury Chicago public housing project for 15,000 residents.
Now Venice Community Housing is turning to Venice Dell, a proposed 140-unit project for low-income and formerly homeless tenants on a city-owned parking lot. Eric Owen Moss has done a design. The city awarded the site to Venice Community Housing. But eight years into the project, and after more than two dozen public hearings, Venice Dell is still in limbo because of lawsuits and other delaying tactics.
It is opposed by the City Council member representing Venice, Traci Park, who campaigned in 2022 on a vow to rid the neighborhood of encampments. Some large ones have been dismantled since she and Mayor Bass took office, including one outside the Rose. Park believes the city should now prioritize hospital beds because so many of those remaining on the streets have drug and mental health issues.
But she is against more new permanent supportive housing in Venice, which she contends has borne an unfair burden in the homeless crisis; and she believes Los Angeles needs to pass stiffer ordinances against camping before neighboring municipalities do.
“We need to do away with all the pearl clutching and get to the point where we are no longer asking nicely for people sleeping in the streets and in RVs to accept help,” she told me. “The practical reality is that other cities passing blanket camping bans after the Supreme Court decision will push even more homeless people into Los Angeles, and we just can’t absorb that.”
Many of her constituents clearly agree. The streets can’t remain de facto shelters, they argue; public spaces can’t become private ones.
But the solution also can’t be a choice between clearing encampments and building housing. It needs to include both. Annise Parker was mayor in Houston when that city started to move thousands of people off the streets straight into apartments. There was similar pushback from taxpayers there who objected to the costs and even the idea. Parker had a response.
“The homeless guy on your doorstep who spits on you when you leave your house and is always spouting from Revelations may be the least sympathetic character in the world, so you may not like the idea of paying to house him,” as she put it to me a couple of years ago.
“But you can’t complain about him being on the street and also complain about getting him off it.”
