From the outside, it’s a colorful five-story puzzle-block structure on stilts, with a jagged roofline and gable passageway that contrast with the single-family homes behind it. Painted patches of green, pink and blue piping sing in the Southern California sun.
Inside, it houses 76 people who were recently sleeping on the streets of Long Beach. The building, called 26 Point 2, is a new permanent housing development along the Pacific Coast Highway. The name is a reminder, not an address. Solving the problem of homelessness is a marathon, not a sprint.
After the Supreme Court gave the green light in June to cities seeking to arrest people sleeping outdoors, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the clearing of thousands of homeless encampments across California. He recently made a pit stop to help state workers clear a particularly infested, rat-infested encampment in an underpass beneath Interstate 10 in Los Angeles.
Many Californians have had enough. Authorities are capitalizing on voter frustration, and Republicans are weaponizing the issue before November. Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, who faces a difficult re-election, ordered police in her long-beleaguered city to cite homeless people who refuse shelter, which could result in jail time. “We need a little tough love on the streets,” the mayor acknowledged.
Where those who do not accept help should go is unclear. Mayor Breed is offering free one-way bus tickets out of town.
California does not guarantee the right to housing or shelter, and both are notoriously scarce. Study after study shows that simply arresting or shooing people away doesn’t work. Nor do progressive legal efforts to defend the right to sleep on the streets. Heather Knight, who covered Mayor Breed’s crackdown for The Times, described the 16th attempt this year to clear an encampment outside a local transportation authority. The encampment was simply moved to another corner.
What works is housing. All the evidence, not to mention common sense, suggests that. But building houses – as opposed to emergency shelters or even tiny house communities, useful but temporary measures that more and more Western states are moving toward – can take forever, cost a fortune, and run into municipal roadblocks and a mountain of legal obstacles.
I visited 26 Point 2 and another new permanent public housing project in the beach community of Venice, California. Together, they represent an opportunity but also a challenge for California as it tries to get out of its problem.
Long Beach welcomed 26 Point 2, a $28 million project designed by LA architect Michael Maltzan. The city provided a bridge loan to the developer, Excelerate Housing Group, when three abandoned oil wells were subsequently discovered beneath the site.
The architectural theorist Charles Jencks liked to refer to the area as a “heteropolis” in his descriptions of Los Angeles: Above an old motel across the street there is an oil refinery, in a run-down shopping center next door there is a second-hand store, behind a used car lot on the highway there are gated condominiums, and behind that there are single-family homes.
Maltzan has chosen this mix, placing 26 Point 2 at its highest point along the highway, where the facade skirts an earthquake fault line. The building decreases in height towards the houses, letting light into an interior courtyard that provides a social space for tenants.
Long Beach plans to densify this stretch of highway and add more public housing and mixed-use buildings. Like much of Southern California, the city is full of such wide avenues of empty lots and low-rise buildings. In 2016, Los Angeles architect Thom Mayne published a thought exercise reimagining the Wilshire Corridor, with its 16-mile boulevard stretching east from the ocean in Santa Monica, as one that could accommodate a million more people—a hypothetical change affecting less than one percent of Los Angeles County.
In other words, there is plenty of room for targeted growth without turning the region into Manhattan and destroying what Los Angeles residents love about it.
But California is grappling with the consequences of decades of empowering NIMBYs, segregating neighborhoods, encouraging sprawl and single-family housing. For years, California has stymied government efforts to get the mentally ill off the streets while enacting countless zoning and environmental regulations to slow housing construction.
More recently, under Governor Newsom and his predecessor, Jerry Brown, the state has attempted to reverse some of these changes by investing hundreds of millions of dollars in initiatives to combat homelessness and developing state workarounds for some of the local barriers to building more housing.
For its part, the city of Los Angeles is pursuing Mayor Karen Bass’ Inside Safe program, which converts motel rooms into emergency shelters. According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the number of homeless people across Los Angeles County has dropped 10 percent from last year. At the same time, the city is encouraging the construction of additional housing units – so-called “backyard granny flats” – and issued over 40,000 permits last year. Whether this will reduce the number of homeless people remains to be seen.
And city voters approved a $1.2 billion bond in 2016 to fund housing for homeless and at-risk Los Angeles residents. That money was used to finance Weingart Tower, a new public housing project in Skid Row. With its 278 apartments, it will concentrate poverty in what is already Los Angeles’ poorest neighborhood. But it also promises to house several hundred of the city’s more than 70,000 homeless people.
The $165 million cost works out to about $600,000 per unit, the current going rate for new construction. Not surprisingly, quite a few local voters have raised concerns about this bond due to the pace of progress and the high price tag.
Rosanne Haggerty, who runs the national homeless service organization Community Solutions, understands the concerns. But, says Haggerty, “people hear how much it costs to house a person and don’t consider the burden that person is already carrying. Think of emergency rooms, police departments, librarians, park and garbage collection workers – the public already pays a hefty fee to step over someone on the street or back away from them on the subway rather than provide them with a place to stay.”
Few places embody these tensions and contradictions as clearly as Venice, where another permanent public housing complex, the Rose Apartments, recently opened. It is a $21 million project by Los Angeles-based architecture firm Brooks + Scarpa – an opportunistic small-scale project that, like 26 Point 2, skilfully fits into a complex streetscape, giving dignity to formerly homeless residents and lending a special touch to the neighborhood.
Only four stories tall, Rose is one of the few subsidized housing developments built in Venice in recent decades. I knocked on the front door and found Becky Dennison, who built the building and runs Venice Community Housing. She told me about a NIMBY saga.
Rose houses 35 young adults and chronically homeless elderly residents on three floors above a retail space across from a Whole Foods parking lot. The building is bright and elegant, with a gently undulating whitewashed facade and a raised courtyard. The architecture takes its cues from Horatio West Court, a 1919 landmark in nearby Santa Monica by Irving Gill, one of a long line of courtyard-style housing developments that once defined Los Angeles—before it was zoned primarily for single-family housing—as a pioneer city of multifamily housing.
But even with just 35 residents, it was a struggle to build Rose, Dennison told me. The process took five years, even though Venice Community Housing had owned the land for years and the project didn’t require rezoning. NIMBYs in Venice fought it tooth and nail, calling it the Cabrini Green of the West Side, Dennison said, a reference to the troubled 15,000-resident public housing project in midcentury Chicago.
Now Venice Community Housing is turning its attention 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 drawn up a design. The city has awarded the property to Venice Community Housing. But eight years after the project began and after more than two dozen public hearings, Venice Dell is still in limbo due to lawsuits and other delaying tactics.
Disagreeing is Venice City Council member Traci Park, who campaigned in 2022 on a promise to rid the neighborhood of encampments. Since she and Mayor Bass took office, several large encampments have been torn down, including one in front of the Rose. Park believes the city should prioritize hospital beds now, since so many of the people still living on the streets have drug and mental health issues.
However, she opposes the construction of more permanent assisted housing units in Venice, which she says bears an unfair burden of the homeless crisis, and believes Los Angeles needs to pass stricter laws against camping before neighboring communities do.
“We need to stop all the pearl-clutching and get to the point where we’re not politely asking people sleeping on the streets or in RVs to accept help,” she told me. “The practical reality is that other cities that enact blanket camping bans after the Supreme Court decision are going to push even more homeless people into Los Angeles, and we just can’t handle that.”
Many of their voters clearly share this view. The streets should not remain de facto shelters, they argue; public spaces should not become private spaces.
But the solution can’t be a choice between clearing encampments and building housing. It has to include both. Annise Parker was mayor of Houston when that city began moving thousands of people off the streets and directly into housing. There was similar resistance from taxpayers there, who rejected the cost and even the idea. Parker had an answer.
“The homeless man on your doorstep who spits at you when you leave the house and babbles on about Revelation may be the most unpleasant person in the world, and that’s why you may not like the idea of paying for his shelter,” she told me a few years ago.
“But you can’t complain about him being on the streets and at the same time complain about getting him off there.”
