Features, LA Story

Designing Hope in Skid Row

Although Los Angeles has the highest homeless population in the U.S, the non-profit organization Skid Row Housing Trust is a major reason why homelessness is on the decline in our city. Skid Row Housing Trust (SRHT) has tirelessly endeavored for twenty years to provide permanent supportive housing to homeless people in downtown Los Angeles by remodeling older hotels and building contemporary apartment buildings. By hiring some of Los Angeles’ most prestigious architecture firms like Koning Eizenberg, Michael Maltzan, Killefer Flammang and Lorcan O’Herlihy, they are transforming the fabric of Skid Row, one life at a time, to a functioning community living in well-designed, visually pleasing housing with access to on-site services like social workers and health care professionals. Fabrik Magazine talked with SRHT and architect Michael Maltzan about their recently completed downtown housing project at the corner of Hope Street and 17th, the six-story 95-unit Carver Apartment building.

SKID ROW TRUST INTERVIEW:

FABRIK: Why did you choose Michael Maltzan as the architect for the Carver Apartments?

Skid Row Housing Trust (SRHT): The Trust chose Michael Maltzan Architecture (MMA) as the architect on the new Carver Apartments as a contemporary solution to a challenging site located in a challenging location. The site was irregularly shaped, on a lonely street, sat next to freeway and lastly, the site was on top of a methane zone. Michael Maltzan was clearly challenged by the site, but achieved success in being able to provide a balance between contemporary design, density and open space, while simultaneously mitigating noise and pollution and connecting the building to the exterior environment. The New Carver Apartments is the second building the Trust commissioned Michael Maltzan Architecture todesign for us.

FABRIK: What were his guidelines and budget?

SRHT: MMA’s first and foremost guideline was to design a building that would provide as many new homes for homeless individuals as possible, while also seamlessly integrating into the neighborhood context. MMA was flexible in their guidelines as the project had to undergo a significantly burdensome entitlement process that also had to integrate design guidelines from the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles. Also, to a great extent, MMA had become familiar with the Trust’s housing model from our previous partnership with MMA, the Rainbow Apartments. MMA built on the lessons learned from the Rainbow, and pushed the envelope of supportive housing further with the New Carver. The design budget for the New Carver was $750k.

FABRIK: How many housing developments has Skid Row done in downtown?

SRHT: The New Carver Apartments are the 22nd apartment building developed by Skid Row Housing Trust. For the past twenty years the Trust has been rehabilitating existing historic residential hotels and building new permanent supportive housing developments for homeless men and women downtown. Since the organization was founded, we have been dedicated to providing stable homes for the most vulnerable men and women in our community. Our model is called permanent supportive housing because we combine affordable residential buildings where our residents can live as long as they need to with on-site supportive services and healthcare to restore our residents’ lives.

FABRIK: How does the application process work for the tenants? How do you chose them and based on what?

SRHT: The Trust screens in, rather than screens out. We target the most vulnerable men and women living on the streets, who are individuals who have often spent years living on the streets and suffer from multiple disabling conditions. We target those individuals because we want our permanent supportive housing to have the greatest positive impact on our community. We know that we have the greatest impact both on our residents’ lives and our community when we reach out to the men and women who would be homeless but for the homes and support we provide. Residents moving into the New Carver will only be able to qualify if they are homeless, extremely low-income, and suffer from a physical disability, chronic disease, and/or mental illness.

FABRIK: Is it rent free or low rent?

SRHT: The apartments at the New Carver include a rental subsidy provided by HUD’s Section 8 program. Residents will be asked to pay between 30 to 40% of their monthly income in rent. For example, many of our residents survive on General Relief benefits provided by the County of Los Angeles of $221 a month, which means they pay approximately $58 a month in rent for their apartment.

FABRIK: When will they be moving in?

SRHT: We began accepting applications on Monday, October 5th. We hope that the first residents will move in by the end of October.

FABRIK: Do you provide furniture/household items too?

SRHT: The apartments come furnished and with very basic household items.

FABRIK: How do you think Skid Row Housing is changing or affecting the fabric of LA?

SRHT: Skid Row Housing Trust is committed to ending chronic homelessness by providing stable homes and support to the most vulnerable men and women on the streets. Our work both benefits our residents, but also the communities we work in. Downtown LA is a better community because there are fewer people on the streets because of our work and because we are improving blighted properties by building beautiful buildings. Additionally, by targeting the most vulnerable men and women on the streets we inspire others in our community to reach out by proving that no one is beyond help.

FABRIK: What new projects do you have in the pipeline?

SRHT: The Trust will open the Charles Cobb Apartments in January 2010. The Cobb is designed by Kivotos Montenegro Partners and will provide 76 apartments for chronically homeless men and women. The Trust is scheduled to break ground on the New Genesis Apartments in November. The New Genesis is designed by Killefer Flammang Architects and will provide 106 apartments in the historic core of downtown. In addition to the New Genesis, we’re in pre-development on the Star Apartments with Michael Maltzan and the New Pershing with Killefer Flammang.

The Trust is now working on a 3rd development with MMA, the Star Apartments, which will contain among other things, “prefab going up”. It will be the first time, in the City of Los Angeles, where prefabricated modular housing units will be stacked, up to 4 levels, and will sit on top of an existing concrete shell. The existing building is a shopping center on the ground floor with parking on the top. The development will reduce the impact to the environment by maintaining the majority of the structure and then utilizing prefab construction for additional stories. The Star is at the end of its design development phase and the Trust expects to begin construction by the end of 2010.

FABRIK: How can an individual help out with Skid Row Housing?

SRHT: People can get involved in our work by visiting www.skidrow.org. There they can watch our residents’ stories, sign up for a tour, and learn about volunteer opportunities. They can also donate! Here are examples of how important donations are to our work:

• $100 enables a formerly homeless person to receive healthcare for a month.
• $300 provides case management for two months.
• $500 brings two months of substance abuse recovery groups to Trust residents.
• $800 delivers six months of mental health care to a formerly homeless person.
• $1,000 allows a chronically homeless person to have daily access to a nurse.
• $5,000 gives a homeless person a home for a year.

FABRIK: Anything else you’d like to highlight about the Carver?

SRHT: One cool fact about the Carver is that it was supported by President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). ARRA funds both supported construction jobs and provided homes for the most vulnerable.

MICHAEL MALTZAN INTERVIEW:

FABRIK: How do you think the Carver Apartment building has changed the landscape of downtown LA?

Michael Maltzan (MM): Once the building is occupied by tenants, we expect that the residential density will dramatically increase the amount of pedestrian traffic and street life in this particular section of downtown Los Angeles. One of the fundamental design concepts for the ground floor, courtyard and public spaces in the building involves weaving urban conditions and street views through the interior spaces – essentially connecting the life of the street and the life of the building. The residents are formerly homeless; experience suggests that when they lived on the streets, they tended to block out the urban experience, leading very private, inner lives out of survival necessity. Once these residents have a home, they have their own truly private spaces and can begin to reshape their public lives and re-enter a collective experience. As such, it’s fundamentally important that the building foster a sense of urban liveliness, and that the design expresses this by connecting visually and perceptually to the local landscape at multiples scales. Conversely, the awakening of 95 new voices in the neighborhood has a tremendous potential to shift the character of life within the local community.

FABRIK: How did designing a building that sits a few feet from the I-10 West freeway influence your design and how do you think it will affect the residents?

MM: We’re fortunate to have a site located directly along the I-10 West. While designing adjacent to the freeway meant that we had to deal with atypical acoustic requirements and undertake a significant amount of noise mitigation, the freeway also made it possible to create urban connections in unexpected ways. Residents engage the street life not only from within the ground floor public spaces. They have a courtyard with a grand stair connected to the street; they have dramatic views of the downtown skyline from the 6th level roof terrace; and they sit eye to eye with the freeway traffic when watching television or doing laundry at the level 3 community room. These connections not only embrace the dramatic urban qualities of the site, they bring a strong individual presence to a block that previously lacked human scale.

FABRIK: One of the goals of Skid Row Trust is to bring a once hidden population into the public by integrating them into the community. How did that play into your design of the building?

MM: Formally, the building has tremendous potential to inflect the landscape of downtown LA. Viewed from the freeway and from afar, the faceted form articulates the scale of individual units within, and expresses a dynamic relationship between an urban fabric composed of individual lives, the texture of our collective experience, and the speed of the freeway. In dealing with such an underserved and often-neglected population, it’s intentional that we provide an architecture which embraces the urban landscape and brings visibility to its population.

FABRIK: It really is a striking building on par with other for-profit condo/apartment projects of downtown LA, how did you stay within the $750k budget and still make it look desirable, modern and artistic?

MM: Budget is always a challenge in any project. As the designers, it’s significant to have a client who understands that their project needs a strong visual presence as well as a strong functional design, and is willing to embark on building a design with unique formal characteristics. Through experience with multiple projects for this developer, we’ve learned the parameters, and continue to refine our sense of how to work within the ambitions of the budget. Understanding the rules of the typology allows us to push the vocabulary of the building in meaningful and ambitious ways. Given the constraints of this type of budget, we do rely substantially on the form of the building and the character of its spatial relationships to distinguish the design.

FABRIK: What challenges did you face designing for the Skid Row Trust rather than for a client of a typical house or hotel?

MM: We always design with the client; in this case, the client is a not-for-profit developer who undertakes construction of multi-million dollar buildings serving a formally homeless population. In many ways, working with this type of developer is similar to working with an institution - we receive a program and work to build an understanding of the needs of the organization. Because the Housing Trust is both the developer of these projects and the long-term property manager, they are a direct conduit to our understanding the evolving needs and hopes of the tenants. We embrace the opportunity to address these specific needs, as well as to formalize the maturing ambitions of the service providers who serve the residents, through development of the common areas.

FABRIK: Despite the challenges, do you feel rewarded as well by doing your part to alter a person’s life through your design?

MM: Our effort is to create a building - to give form and shape, and to organize a coherent sequence of program relationships - that serves the goal of the client. In this type of project, one of the fundamental challenges is to understand the way that the building is operated. In doing so, we have the ability to respond to the client’s needs, and as such, the opportunity to shape the interactions between the building’s different occupants. In many ways, the building serves as a place where residents can reassemble their lives and social relationships. Therefore, in addition to creating individual living spaces - homes - for these tenants, there is real challenge and reward in creating spaces where the residents can interact with each other and the world in meaningful and new ways.

Words Lanee Neil
Images Courtesy of the Skid Row Housing Trust