Tiny houses and transport containers can help the homeless in Los Angeles?

It's only 8 feet by 8 feet. But for Stephen Smith, the tiny red house in North Hollywood is the place he calls home.

Until early last month, Smith had been living out of his car in various parts of the San Fernando Valley, collecting cans in city parks as a way to earn money. He ended up on the streets not because of a single event, but because of a slippery chain of them: the death of his mother last year, followed by the pandemic, which left him emotionally and financially overwhelmed.

“My mom and I were the best of friends,” he says. "I felt very bad".

After a year on the streets, however, Smith was ready for a change. When a caseworker from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority approached him with an offer of housing for the winter, he accepted it. "I said: 'God helps those who help themselves.'

The caseworker put him in touch with the Chandler Street Tiny Home Village in North Hollywood, a shelter that is the first of its kind in Los Angeles.

Instead of a bed in a dormitory, Smith was given his own tiny but self-contained home. The house does not have a bathroom, which is shared, along with the laundry room and the kitchen. But otherwise, Smith's space is his.

“I wouldn't change a thing,” he says of the structure's design. "I don't see any improvements I could make." Although he does say that the small villa could use more bathrooms.

Chandler Street, run by Hope of the Valley Rescue Mission, is a temporary shelter designed for stays of three to six months, a place that helps clients recover while they search for alternative housing. The center's caseworkers help with the basics, like securing paperwork to recover lost identity documents, connecting people with basic services and providing them with a fixed address while they apply for jobs or benefits.

“It's a stabilizing point,” says Laurie Craft, director of programs at Hope of the Valley. "So that when people move to permanent supportive housing, the outcome is good."

The first thing Smith has to do is turn his cell phone back on before he can work. His dream is to work in car restoration. His specialty: "Anything from GM."

The pandemic has brought with it numerous reflections. Among them, the moral question of how a society as rich as ours gives shelter to the homeless. In this sense, policy and design are critical to creating lasting solutions. The design is a fundamental piece, since the appearance and operation of a reception center can contribute to determine if it is possible for the client to stay.

And in Los Angeles, there couldn't be a more critical time to address these issues than now.

In late March, the eviction of about 200 people from a campground at Echo Park Lake made national headlines. This was followed by a report, commissioned by the US Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, showing that encampment removal is not only extraordinarily expensive, it also doesn't work. As one camp is razed, others spring up elsewhere, turning the already tenuous existence of the evictees into a vicious cycle of relocation.

In addition, the Los Angeles City Council appears poised to settle a federal lawsuit that would force it to provide shelter for thousands of homeless people living around freeways. It is not yet known what shape these shelters will take. But whatever their form, they will have to be built quickly. Very quickly.

For the city and county, this means finding land and cutting red tape so projects can be approved and built more quickly. Modular homes and recycled shipping containers are already being experimented with at some locations in Los Angeles. These systems can save months in the construction process as they can be erected on-site, sometimes on parking lots and other terrain that would otherwise have required extensive preparation.

Chandler Tiny Home Village, which was designed by Los Angeles-based Lehrer Architects and opened in February.

The villa, which cost $4.4 million to build, occupies a teardrop-shaped piece of land along the Orange Line bus line at Chandler Boulevard and Tujunga Avenue. Previously, the parcel was a field full of brush. “It was useless land, made more useless by its shape,” says architect Michael Lehrer, founder of his company.

The site is now home to 39 light-filled homes made by Everett, Washington-based company Pallet. The sloping-roof units look like storybook houses and can accommodate two people. They are arranged around a forked path that also contains a picnic area and a dog run. (A critical component of being more hospitable to the homeless: not forcing them to part with their beloved pets.)

Lehrer Architects is also working on a project in Alexandria Park in North Hollywood (with 103 tiny houses), which will accept clients by the end of the month, and another at Alvarado Street and Scott Avenue in Echo Park (39 units), which should open its doors in May.

In addition, Lehrer has designed community shelters, such as the Aetna Bridge Homes project in Van Nuys, which offers dormitory-style housing within a series of interlocking portable buildings. But the architect is more excited by the possibilities that tiny houses offer.

“Each person has their own house, which has a door and can be locked, and that's very important,” says Lehrer. “It's a safe space.”

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Architects are also experimenting with shipping containers.

On Vignes Street in downtown Los Angeles, construction crews are putting the finishing touches on a county project formally known as Hilda L. Solis Care First Village, a $57 million interim housing project which includes a mix of shipping container apartments and portable buildings (each with a private bathroom) that can house 232 people.

Occupying industrial land that was recently a parking garage for the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, the project was designed by NAC Architecture and the shipping containers were refurbished by Carson-based company Crate Modular. It's been up in record time: County Supervisor Hilda Solís broke ground on the project in late September. In October it was already under construction. This month, Care First Village will accept its first clients.

In South Los Angeles, nonprofit developer Clifford Beers Housing is transforming a triangle of government land on Imperial Highway, near the intersection of the 110 and 105 freeways, into a shipping container development that will contain 54 permanent supportive housing units.

Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects is designing the $12 million project, called Isla Intersections, which is in the early stages of construction and should be completed by the end of the year.

“The critical thing is timing,” says O’Herlihy. “We were able to build the modules while the foundation was being laid. They save about eight months”.

Time is of the essence, as is cost.

But my biggest question has been: What exactly are these living spaces like? Is a tiny house really a glorified tool shed? Is living in a shipping container like... living in a shipping container? And are we asking the underdog to serve as guinea pigs in design experiments that look great on architecture websites, but are perfectly terrible once you get your foot in the door?

With these questions in mind, I went to visit these sites, all of them. My first impression: I'm impressed.

As for the shipping containers, I expected them to be damp and steely. I'm glad to find out I was wrong. Once the containers have been redone with drywall and windows cut out, they look and feel like any other domestic construction. Though the spaces are small—Care First Village's 135-square-foot rooms look like a compact dormitory—the architects took special care to cut large windows into the units to make these modest spaces more light.

The tiny houses, while more ephemeral in nature, are cleverly designed: Each features four sets of windows that allow light in and cross ventilation, as well as individual heating and air conditioning units. Additionally, pitched roofs give structures a good amount of headroom. At Alexandria Park, I lay down inside one of the vacant units expecting a coffin environment. Instead, the dimensions were more like those of a small rustic cabin.

Even with limited time and even more limited resources, the architects have found a way to introduce aesthetic play into this work. As Nerin Kadribegovic, partner at Lehrer Architects, says: "How do you fit all of this into a restricted site and then add a little something to make a place desirable?"

That desire stems from preserving existing trees for makeshift park areas and bright color palettes. Splashes of red, pink, yellow, and blue give the sites an air less of a FEMA shelter and more of a quaint town.

“Asphalt and chain-link fences are hard things to overcome,” says Lehrer. “If there is asphalt and chain links, it is not a place that honors and respects people.”

“Colour is not trivial,” he adds. "It's fundamental".

The architects have also pushed the city and county -- along with private sponsors -- to do more.

Lehrer Architects arranged for a private donor to supply umbrellas to common areas in Chandler, a must in the San Fernando Valley where the summer heat is epic.

When O'Herlihy began work on the 20,000-square-foot Isla Intersections, it soon became apparent that the narrow triangular lot could not accommodate much green space. So his company, along with the management of Clifford Beers Housing, lobbied the city to convert an adjacent lane, the sole purpose of which is to allow cars to turn right on Imperial Highway, into a pedestrian park. Then they got the Annenberg Foundation to finance the construction of the park with 2.5 million dollars.

O’Herlihy then staggered the arrangement of the containers to be able to fill the intervening spaces with vegetation, which will function as a key acoustic damper. “This is a concrete jungle,” he says. "If you can get the road space back, the space will be better."

Creating human outdoor spaces was also central to architect Louise Griffin, who worked as project manager for NAC Architecture on the design and construction of Care First Village in the city centre. “The rooms are small, so it was important to make the patios a place where you could socialize,” she says.

Courtyards will include trees and raised pots with aromatic herbs such as rosemary. As in small house towns, color plays an important role. The architects painted the shipping containers in shades of yellow and orange. “Containers are industrial,” says Griffin. “We wanted to make them less industrial.”

Michael Pinto, principal at NAC Architecture, says it's about creating an environment that feels like home, not a punitive institution. “What options do we have other than jail?” he asks rhetorically. “Can we stop criminalizing the homeless?”

Lehrer says that good design is not accessory to these issues. “Design excellence is critical,” he says. “It's important to the people that [the shelters] serve and it's important to the neighborhoods that they serve and it's important to the culture — that we can honor our sisters and brothers and bring them out into the community.”

After all, it is an architecture that, at some point in our lives, for reasons that may be beyond our control, we can come to inhabit.

Smith, for example, never imagined he would live out of his car. "This can happen to anyone," he said convinced.

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