Bold solutions to end the homelessness crisis

A creative way to provide temporary, safe housing to unhoused people so that they can work toward permanent housing and employment.

Anyone who works in a homeless shelter knows how dangerous they can be: valuables can be stolen in a shared space like that, and it's not like you can't sleep. So this seems like a reasonable solution that does a good job of creating a low-cost, flexible opportunity for unhoused people to improve their lives.

Nonprofit DignityMoves is developing interim supportive housing communities in California on temporarily vacant land with prefabricated, relocatable “tiny home” structures, to give every resident their own room with a door that locks. In these communities, service providers offer critical case management, supporting residents in achieving the stability and security needed to transition out of homelessness.

As a new model, interim supportive housing is proving to be a lynchpin solution to homelessness. Of the 610 formerly unhoused individuals who’ve resided in our first four DignityMoves communities, 307 have transitioned to more permanent housing so far.

Part of DignityMoves’ innovation is that we identify vacant or underutilized land that we can borrow for a few years, rather than purchasing permanent property for the communities. In this way, an unused half acre—such as a parking lot, odd-sized parcel, or future development location awaiting entitlements—can quickly become a community of 70 rooms, complete with ample common areas. Using emergency building codes to cut through red tape and modular materials to build quickly and at scale, our communities are designed to be temporary and transportable; they can be moved to a new neighborhood in need when the time is right.

In my opinion the "red tape" should not exist to begin with. There should just be way more housing than there currently is. But in any market-driven/capitalistic housing system there will inevitably be some unhoused people, so it makes sense for a nonprofit to partner with the local government to implement solutions like this.

The article talks about some of the legislation it needed in order to make this happen:

In California, Senator Josh Becker’s Interim Housing Act (SB 1395), signed into law in September 2024, marks a significant step. Streamlining the approval process for interim housing projects, the law makes it easier and faster to build these units, a critical step in addressing the state’s housing shortage.

Another glimmer of hope is the recent passage of Proposition A in Los Angeles County in the November 2024, election, which provides an additional $1 billion annually to combat homelessness. This significant funding can support multiple initiatives in a county with more than 75,000 unhoused, including the expansion of supportive services and the implementation of innovative programs and solutions like interim supportive housing.

Proposition A was approved in LA County by a large margin, so that's happening. Reading the text on Ballotpedia, it seems like the proposition would provide permanent funding for this problem ("until voters decide to end it [in a future referendum]"), which is good. Hopefully this will help things. More legislation is likely needed though, and more permanent housing is definitely needed. Other reforms, like eliminating or reducing minimum parking requirements, could dramatically increase the housing supply at very little cost to the government.